“So, where’s Chris s’posed to meet us?”
Ouija points. “At the park.” Three blocks ahead, an emerald square shines in the waning sunlight. Thick, plastic tubes heave out of the park’s grass like the backs of giant night crawlers. Each tube is a different color--red, blue, yellow--and large enough for a middle-sized child to crawl through. As the kids approach the park, they make out the figure of a tall, thin boy leaning against one of the plastic tubes. The boy is dressed in loose, ragged levis and an oversized black t-shirt. He cups a cigarette in his right hand and teases a battered skateboard under his left foot, rolling it away from him with an urgent toe, then arresting it roughly with the heel of his dusty sneaker and dragging it backward.
“I didn’t know Chris smoked,” says Curtis, touching the crown of his helmet.
“Yeah, well, he’s fourteen, ya know,” Ouija says.
“He going into ninth grade?”
“Eighth. He got held back. Missed too many days. He’s okay, though. Said he’d watch out for me next year.”
“You scared about seventh grade?” Curtis asks.
“Some.” Ouija pedals harder and pulls ahead of Curtis.
As the foursome comes to a stop in front of him, Chris, the older boy, gives his skateboard a particularly vicious push, tilting it upward and grasping the end of it with his left hand. Taking a last, flourishing drag from his cigarette, he flicks it into the soft dirt at his feet and grinds it out.
“You guys are late. Thought you’d chickened out.”
“Sorry, man,” says Ouija. He gets off his bicycle, holding his palm out, up-turned, and Chris slaps it lightly in greeting. He nods at Ashley and Jesse. “Hi, Jess. How’s your dad?”
“He’s okay. How’s your mom?”
“Okay.”
“Our parents went out a couple of times,” Jesse explains to the others.
Chris eyes Curtis’s helmet. “You gonna wear that?”
Ashley answers for Curtis. “He has to.” She rolls the front tire of her bike against the base of the plastic tube, bumping it hard and letting it bounce back. “So, where’s these tunnels you’re gonna show us?”
“In a minute,” says Chris. He turns to Ouija. “You bring a flashlight?”
Ouija taps his backpack.
“Me, too. Okay. Let’s get going.” Chris mounts his skateboard and leads the way up the street toward the University, a cluster of orange-ish brick buildings set around quadrangles of lawn and shrubbery. The group passes the Presbyterian church whose marquee announces that Reverend Bleat will preach Sunday on “Idols of the Beast Among Us.” They cross over a block to Eighth Street, passing the College Market. An old man watering his lawn from his front porch watches them go by. He raises the nozzle of his garden hose in salute. The water sprays upward, then falls with a heavy patter on the broad-leafed flowers that border the sidewalk.
The four younger kids follow Chris up the street and around the corner onto Martin Luther King Drive. They pass the four-story University library, and the street rises sharply, mounting the first level of hills that border the city’s east side. The sidewalk on the north side of the street ends in an imposing set of concrete steps that lead up the steep slope to the front entrance of undistinguished tan brick building set into the hillside. “Trade and Technology” reads a sign mounted on the building’s wall. “Me, too. Okay. Let’s get going.” Chris mounts his skateboard and leads the way up the street toward the University, a cluster of orange-ish brick buildings set around quadrangles of lawn and shrubbery. The group passes the Presbyterian church whose marquee announces that Reverend Bleat will preach Sunday on “Idols of the Beast Among Us.” They cross over a block to Eighth Street, passing the College Market. An old man watering his lawn from his front porch watches them go by. He raises the nozzle of his garden hose in salute. The water sprays upward, then falls with a heavy patter on the broad-leafed flowers that border the sidewalk.
The group follows Chris as he cuts around the side and through a black-topped area behind the building. “We can get in around the back. There’s a window,” he says. He props his skateboard against a wall near a row of dented garbage cans. The others hurriedly dismount and conceal their bicycles behind a large yellow trash dumpster. “Do Not Play On or Near,” read stenciled letters on the side of the dumpster. Chris kneels before a narrow basement window, and the others queue up behind him, as if waiting in line to buy movie tickets.
Chris wrenches the screen from the window frame and pushes. With a metal-on-metal screech, the window opens just enough to admit the passage of a slender body. He beckons Curtis with a forefinger. “You. Shorty. Crawl through and open the door.”
Curtis touches the top of his helmet. “But . . . I thought you were going to get us in.”
“I have, you moron. But you have to open the door. Just go around that way”--Chris points--“and push on the crash bars.” Curtis starts to protest a little more, but Chris thrusts him toward the window, bumping his helmeted head against the frame. Curtis wiggles through, and moments later, all five of them stand inside the building.
Wooden student desks in various states of disrepair clamber, one on top of the other, toward the low ceiling. Refrigerator-sized cardboard boxes tip crazily against each other, disemboweled, their contents overflowing. Multicolored electrical wires protrude from the boxes like the mylar-coated feelers of blind insects.
Ashley kicks at a ruptured box of capacitors. It contents--tiny metal canisters--glint and spill across the floor. “What is all this stuff?”
“Old electronics parts,” says Chris. “My mom works upstairs in the lab. I helped her clean all this out of the stockroom last summer. Some of it’s cool.” He turns his flashlight on a box of old circuit boards bristling with tiny, striped resistors and 8-pin connectors. He passes a circuit board to Ouija. “She taught me to solder, too. Look.” He runs his finger across the bright, smooth droplets on the board. “Real silver.”
Jesse stands in the middle of the room, one hand on a flat hip. “We didn’t come here to play with old junk,” she says. “You were supposed to show us the tunnels.”
“Which way do we go?”
“That one”--Chris indicates the left passage--“goes up the hill to the gym. That one goes down to the chemistry building.”
“Let’s go down.”
They move gingerly into the tunnel on the right. Chris puts a chock of wood in the door that swings shut behind them. Ouija leads the group, training his flashlight just ahead of them on the floor of the tunnel. Walking slightly behind the others, Chris plays the beam of his flashlight across the ceiling and walls. Large ducts run overhead, and vertical rows of pipes, dripping with condensation, protrude from the walls every few feet. The group huddles closely together, shuffling along as one awkward creature with too many arms and legs. The beam of Ouija‘s flashlight--Cyclops’s eye--leads them haltingly forward. They shamble a hundred yards or so, and then the tunnel bends to the left and slopes gently downward. A metal door is set into one wall of the tunnel at the point of the bend.
Ouija tries the door knob. “Locked.”
“Most of them are,” says Chris. “But not all.”
They proceed cautiously down the slope, gaining a little speed as they descend and relaxing out of their tight cluster.
Curtis puts one hand on the nearest wall, lightly dragging his fingertips along it as he walks. He holds his fingers to his nose, then offers them to Ashley. “Phew! Smell this.”
Ashley slaps his hand away from her face. “Get that away from me. You’re disgusting.”
Curtis holds his fingers out toward Ouija. “Look. Green slime.”
“Yeah, Curt. Cool.”
At the bottom of the slope they stop at the intersection of three tunnels.
“Which way now?”
Chris gestures with his flashlight. “That one goes to the Administration Building. Offices and stuff. That one goes to Chemistry, and that one goes to Maintenance.”
“What’s the Maintenance one like?"
“Pretty cool. Big storage room full of junk, a tool room, the woodshop. If it’s unlocked. Sometimes it’s not.”
“Let’s go that way,” Ouija and Curtis say together.
“No,” says Jesse. “Boring. I thought we were going to Chemistry.” She looks at Ashley.
Ashley shrugs. “I don’t care.”
“Maintenance.”
“Chemistry.”
“Look,” says Chris. “I’ll take Jesse to Chemistry. You guys go on to Maintenance. You can’t miss it. It’s a blue door at the end that says ‘Shops’ on it. We’ll meet you there later.” He looks at Ashley. “You go with those guys.”
“No, you’d better come with us,” says Jesse.
Curtis and Ouija move off down the left tunnel. Chris takes Jesse’s arm and leads her to the right. Ashley hesitates a second, then follows Chris and Jesse, hurrying a little to stay within range of their flashlight.
“Girls,” huffs Curtis. “Why’d he have to go off with them?”
Ouija flashes his light across a pile of metal cans and paint rollers. “We’re okay. They’ll catch up.”
The two boys hurry along the tunnel. They pass several doors set into the walls at irregular intervals, stopping to turn and yank on the handles. All are locked, some so encrusted with rust and grime that it’s evident they haven’t been opened in years. The tunnel makes a sharp right turn into another downward slope. Curtis and Ouija round the corner and follow the gentle grade to the bottom, stopping in front of three doors set at right angles to one another. The door facing them is blue, and the word “Shops” is stenciled on it neatly at eye level.
The door on their left is ajar; a short set of concrete steps leads upward into darkness. Ouija thrusts his head and shoulders through the opening and flashes his light up the steps, revealing a wooden hatch at the top. Curtis tries the knob of the door on their right; it’s locked. He turns the knob on the door marked “Shops,” and it scrapes open. Light floods into the tunnel, and the boys mount a flight of steps into a pine-scented room lined with cluttered workbenches and racks of tools.
