Chapter Nine: Running in the Tunnel
“So, what do we do now?” Carla asked Cecil. “I think we should
explain --”
“No,” he replied. “There’s too much to explain.” He looked
at Julia. “Listen, we can’t tell you the whole story right now.
But I think we – Carla and I – have had something like this
happen to us before, last summer, at our house.”
“At your house?”
“Yeah. So we know a little about it.”
“Okay.”
Carla interrupted. “What’s the other house like, the one that
looks like your house?”
“Um, it’s set up the same, but it’s really old and in horrible
shape. There’s a tree growing through the roof.”
“Is it scary?” Cecil asked.
Julia thought a moment. “Not exactly scary. Nothing bad has
happened.” Then she squirmed. She hated to admit this next secret.
“But, well, I did meet somebody there, and he seems a little
scared.”
Cecil grasped her by the arm. “Someone? Who?”
“A boy. Only a little older than me. He’s edgy, like he’s
afraid of something. He’s not always there.”
“Is there anybody else in the house?” Cecil asked.
“No,” Julia replied, and Cecil breathed a sigh of relief. “No,
but I think there are people wherever he comes from. He doesn’t
live in the house either. I think he hides there.”
“He hides? From what?” Carla asked her.
“From people he’s scared of,” Julia answered. “And I think
he’s really poor. He looks dirty and his clothes are too small.”
She paused. “And he has a funny name.”
“Like, foreign?”
“No, not really a name at all. He says his name is Tin. Or Ten. Or
something like that.”
Cecil and Carla looked at each other. Carla’s stomach lurched and
her heart thumped hard in her chest. It was all beginning again.
“Oooo—kay,” Cecil said slowly. He took both girls by an arm and
gently moved them all into a seated position on the floor of the
tunnel. “Let’s take a minute to calm down and think.”
“Calm down about what?” Julia asked. “I’m not upset.”
“You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into,” Cecil
retorted. He sighed. “We can’t talk long here. We need to get
back into your bedroom and have a good talk where it’s safe.”
“Why isn’t it safe here?” She rolled her eyes. “Y’all are
over-reacting.”
“If we’re anywhere that connects to that house, then we’re not
safe,” Carla said. “That’s something you have to remember from
now on. That other house is not safe.”
Julia’s voice raised slightly. “But why not? What’s
gonna happen there? The boy is nice. It’s just an empty house.”
Cecil had been thinking. “First, let’s see if we can go back
home.” The children stood again. Cecil looked around. “Which way
is home?” he said to Julia.
“I think,” she hesitated. “I think it’s that way.”
Julia’s flashlight was quite dim, and the tunnel, after the
children had moved and turned many times, looked the same both ways.
Julia led the way. She brushed through the curtain, breathing a sigh
of relief. “I think it worked this time!” she said. A strange
feeling glossed over each child, as the curtain was brushed through,
like cobwebs, but finer, filmier. It was the gentlest of portals.
Julia strode confidently forward until at last she reached a ladder.
“It’s not my bedroom, I can tell,” she groaned quietly.
“How can you tell?” Carla asked.
“The walls. The boards are looser here. The ground is bumpier and
the ladder is not as good. This is the ladder to the other house.”
The three children stood there for a few moments until Cecil spoke.
“Let’s go back the other way. I want to experience the whole
tunnel – I want to walk the whole thing several times – before I
climb up a ladder into that house.”
“I want to make sure we can get back home,” Carla added. She
could feel anxious tears welling in her eyes.
“It won’t work,” Julia said.
“How do you know?” Cecil asked.
“Because … because I’ve done this over and over. We went the
right way to find my house, but it didn’t work.” Julia put a hand
on the ladder rung. “We might as well go up. I promise you,
there’s nothing scary up there.”
Carla sighed. She felt like crying. She couldn’t face the fear
again of that other world. Julia’s descriptions of the house, of
the boy, they felt so familiar and so terrifying.
In the tiniest of voices, she said, “I can’t go.”
Cecil looked at her. “I know. It’s okay. I’ll go up. Maybe
that’s what has to happen. One of us has to go there and see it.”
It seemed they both had grown up again, in a few moments. He leaned
down from the ladder and looked into her eyes. “I’ll be back as
soon as I can.”
As their feet disappeared overhead, Carla pressed against the tunnel
wall clutching the flashlight. When she turned it off, the filtered
sunlight from the top of the tunnel barely illumined the space. She
didn’t want to waste the batteries. Cecil’s and Julia’s voices,
whispering at first, died away quickly and she was left alone. Fear
clutched at her throat and her stomach hurt. All was quiet in the
tunnel, but her mind was flooded with terrors – the memories of the
year before assaulted her. They couldn’t get back home! In the
house above her the evil people waited to capture her! No one knew
where they were! Carla felt like an animal trapped in a cage.
Above ground, Cecil followed Julia through the tangle of azalea
bushes.
“It’s dark here,” he whispered to her.
“It’s always darker,” she whispered back. “I don’t know
why. It’s never bright and sunny.”
They crept to the window and looked in. A figure lay in the corner,
curled in sleep under the blanket, and his dark head was on the
pillow.
“There he is,” Julia whispered to Cecil. “He stays here as much
as he can. He said this time he has run away for good. But they
usually find him somehow. I told him they’ll find him if he stays
in the house, but he doesn’t want to sleep outside.” Then she
added, “I think he’s afraid of rain.”
“Rain?”
“Yeah.”
“But what about the tunnel? Why don’t you tell him to sleep in
there?”
There was no answer, but then very quietly Julia said, “I didn’t
tell him about the tunnel. Yet. I will later, I guess.” She looked
at her cousin. “I wasn’t sure if I should. I didn’t know if I
wanted him to ….”
“To follow you back home?”
“Yeah.”
Julia and Cecil continued to stare silently through the window.
Overhead, from a window above them, another face peered out, a small,
wizened face. As soon as they left the bushes and approached the
house, the face disappeared, but a few moments later a stooped figure
crawled out of a window on the far side of the house onto a shed roof
and shimmied down a vine to the ground. Soundlessly, the person
skirted around through the thick woods toward the well in the azalea
shrubs.
Carla huddled in the dark, clutching her flashlight. She closed her
eyes against the blackness and tried to remember all the brave things
she’d done before, how she’d gone to Lucie’s house and eaten
with her. How she’d rescued children from the workhouse, and gone
back to save Cecil. But now her fearlessness had left her. She was
terrified that more might be required of her again, here, in a
strange house without her parents. Instead of slowly investigating
the danger, feeling her way, finding Lucie to guide and help her,
this time they faced the evil alone. If they did rescue any children,
where would they take them? How could Lucie help them here? And this
tunnel – this horrid place that felt like a grave – an open
gateway for all the evils of the workhouse to come straight into her
cousins’ bedroom!
Carla slid her back down the brick wall and sat on the ground. She
felt anxiety and sorrow welling up in her chest. Her hands began to
sweat and she wiped them on her shorts. Sobs erupted in her throat
till she suppressed them and put her hands over her mouth. She hated
being there, hated waiting on Cecil, hated her cousins’ house. She
wanted to go home and forget about the tunnel and all that Julia had
found.
And then she heard a noise above. A footfall. A hand on the ladder.
“Cecil?”
The sound stopped.
“Julia? Is that you?”
Carla held her breath. She gripped the flashlight. She wanted to
stand, to run, but only if she could do it silently. She stood
slowly, took a step. The ladder creaked. Carla turned, clicked on the
flashlight, and began to run down the tunnel. She heard the body on
the ladder coming faster, thudding onto the ground.
“Cecil!” she yelled. “Help!” And she ran.
When Carla heard the running footsteps behind her, chasing her, the
terror of her situation hit her, and her courage returned. She would
not be pursued by some unknown enemy! She turned, pressing one hand
against the tunnel wall, and shone the light full into the tunnel to
see her pursuer’s face. The steps were not heavy. Carla heard
gasping breath.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
The figure that appeared in her beam was short, hardly taller than
Carla herself, with a wrinkled face, bulging gray eyes, and a head
wrapped tightly in a filthy cloth. The knees were bowed, and the legs
and arms bent, and the woman – for it might have once looked like a
woman – hobbled and stumbled into the light. The face was mottled
with red splotches, the mouth gaping and toothless. The hazy gray
eyes squinted at Carla.
“Eh?” and she cackled an insane-sounding laugh.
Carla screamed as she’d never screamed before. Along the tunnel, up
the well shaft, across to the house, Cecil heard her. He and Julia
looked in alarm at each other, and he yelled into the silent
landscape, “Carla!” Both children turned and instantly ran
pellmell through thicket. When Cecil shouted, the boy sleeping in the
house rose in a panic and saw the children running away. So Ten,
quickly as he could, tore through the house after them, desperate to
discover who Julia had brought with her, and why they were running
away.
After Carla screamed, she turned and ran faster than before. The
flashlight beam bumped and careened along the tunnel walls. Carla did
not notice when she passed under the trap door beneath the garden
statue, nor did she feel it when she caught her foot on the pile of
bricks next to the small tunnel leading to the Clerk’s Office. She
stumbled, and then fled until she reached a ladder, and not thinking
which ladder it might be, she grasped her way up until she emerged
into Julia’s bed. She closed the windowsill shut, shaking and
trembling, and piled all the books and toys on top of it. Finally,
she sat on the sill herself with her back against one wall and her
legs braced against the other. She was crying quietly, whimpering,
her hands quivering, her legs like jelly. She felt only a frightful
dread, waiting for her attacker to bang her fist on the underside of
the trap door. She gripped the edge of the windowsill, forcing her
weight against it, willing the evil to stay in the tunnel. She had
forgotten about Cecil and Julia.
Then she heard the clamor on the ladder and a thudding and banging
under her legs. Carla’s crying turned to wailing. “No!!! No!!!”
she cried. “Ahhhh!!” And she cried again.
“Carla!” Cecil yelled over the din. “Carla, let us out!”
It took several minutes for Carla to recover, to realize what was
happening, to move herself and the piles of Julia’s possessions
from the windowsill and let the children into the room. She was a
mess of tears, dirt, and fear. Cecil looked at her sternly as they
sat on Julia’s bed. The books and paraphernalia had been thrown to
the floor. Julia perched in the windowsill, looking at her cousins.
“What in the world, Carla?” Cecil hissed at her. “You’re
a lunatic! What made you scream like that? You scared me to death!”
Carla burst into tears and held her face in her hands.
“She was after me!” she gasped between sobs.
“Who? Who was after you?” he asked, and Julia rubbed Carla’s
arm to comfort her.
Carla looked up. “A woman … or something like it … a really
old woman, with horrible eyes and a crazy laugh. She … she … came
down the ladder while you were gone and chased me in the tunnel!”
Cecil replied, “There was no one in the tunnel, Carla. We ran right
after you. I don’t know who you think you saw --”
“I did see her!”
“Okay, whatever. Was it Madame Fen, or Critch?” he asked.
“Who?” Julia interjected.
In his frustration, Cecil brushed her off. “Nobody. None of your
business.” He turned back to Carla. “Well?”
“No, not them. Somebody else. I’ve never seen her before. But
she’s not one of the children.”
At that point, Julia jumped and yelled. Someone was tapping on the
sill beneath her.
“It’s her!” Carla cried.
The tapping turned to knocking.
“What do we do?” Julia asked. Panic rose in Cecil’s
face.
Then a boy’s voice sounded softly from below. “Open up. It’s
me, Ten.”
(To read the next chapter and find out what they do with Ten, click here!)
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