Ana found herself an awning that was still somewhat intact and took shelter from the rain. It had only gotten worse since last night and her coat could only hold up against so much. For all that there was a musical quality to the din, it was one best enjoyed through a window or beneath a thick canopy of trees. Not when soaked and making one’s way through broken, debris-littered streets.

She moved her toes in their soggy prison of cloth and cheap leather, remembering her conversation with that man Kennis. There were enough semi-skilled craftspeople at Sanctuary to keep her shoes in decent condition, but with the Jungle being in the state that it was quite a lot of the water coming down simply got trapped. Some of it was hard to spot before stepping into it, and sometimes one had to either walk through it willingly or take a long detour. And there was precious little time to waste.

Ana reached into the depths of her coat and took out the much-crumpled and now slightly damp book jacket that Sam had given her. The one from the book Kylis had apparently held so dear to his heart.

The City That Was.

The title hadn’t changed, and the markings still held no special meaning to her, so she wasn’t entirely sure why she even bothered to shine her flashlight on it. She switched to shining it at the nearest street sign.

Grocer Street... near the old tunnel. Somewhere around here Sam had found this jacket on the ground. Ana had to ask herself why Kylis had done this to something he read and cherished like holy writ. Was it some random quirk of his madness, or was the implication darker than that? Sam was a practical kind of thief, and she’d never known him to take anything that wasn’t of some actual use to him. He had no reason to take this book, and certainly not one to implicate himself by bringing up the jacket.

She sighed, and felt a shiver go through her as the night chill bit. None of the street people had seen any sign of Kylis for days now, and if he was still in the Jungle at all that meant he was staying somewhere no one went. Not even the druggies, the hopelessly mad, the vicious, or the despised. And she’d never known anyone to stay in the tunnel.

“This is stupid,” she heard herself say, her words lost to the world in the din of rain. But of course it was generally stupid to give one’s life up as she had done, so technically this was nothing new.

She folded the book jacket up as neatly as its condition allowed for and stuck it back in the coat pocket. Then she stepped back out into the rain.

The fresh pressure would hit Sanctuary any day now. If not tomorrow then certainly the day after. If she was to do this it was tonight. And so she walked around and over debris, mindful of cutting her legs on sharp edges and protruding rebar. Her light wasn’t strong enough to give much warning before the tunnel entrance yawned before her. However much she tried she couldn’t help but think of it as a mouth, like some horrible beast of legend preparing to swallow her whole. One could probably find some fable about a fool who walked into the jaws of a dragon.

Her feeble light revealed nothing inside; most of it caught on the water dripping down from the top of the entrance like strands of saliva. She stood there for a few breaths, cold, doubtful and miserable. Then she walked through the waterfall, because how could she not at this stage?

There were no rails on the ground; things had never gotten that far before the tunnel was abandoned. Instead her feet found a blanket of blown-in leaves and junk, marinated in rainwater. It didn’t seem substantial enough to hide a body, but for the sake of being thorough she still kicked it apart until all doubt was erased.

As Ana walked on she mostly kept the light pointed downwards, staying alert for obstacles. She took the occasional peek around, letting the little circle of visibility flutter about like an erratic fly. She saw brickwork, mould, more old leaves and remains of bags. The ceiling was in a poor state, drooping ominously in places and even leaking in others. In some spots the water seeped down the walls, following old smears. In others it simply dripped down, forming puddles Ana occasionally stepped in.

The chorus of rain took on a hollow quality, with a certain ghostliness added as she descended further into this underworld. With each step it gradually turned into background, as the drips and leaks and her own echoing footsteps began overshadowing it.

It was certainly all very unpleasant, but while attempting to view her situation from a distance Ana couldn’t help but wonder WHY exactly the tunnel was one of the Jungle’s truly abandoned places. It was certainly cold, and the drooping ceiling was far from reassuring, but some people slept in worse locations. As far as she knew there were no particular stories associated with it; no unsolved murders or man-eating rats or a toxic leakage.

Somehow this place simply held some barely-mentioned aura of menace, even to people with terrible lives. And perhaps that was it right there: Perhaps folks needed to be able to think of some place as worse than the one they called home.

She reached a certain turning point. The rain had become a barely audible whisper, and in the dim illumination of the flashlight her world consisted mostly of echoes; the drips and her own footsteps bouncing off the walls in either direction. Somewhere behind her was the entrance, but it was lost both to the darkness and the gentle curve of the tunnel. She had truly entered this underworld now, and felt foolish enough to stop. And that was when her light caught on the graffiti. It was written with chalk, in very large letters, and consisted of a simple question.

Where is the dawn?

Ana stood still for a while, not moving save to slowly shine her light about in search of something more. Finding nothing, she focused on the words before her. This was one of the phrases Kylis had written on the walls of his lair in the theatre, and this seemed like his handwriting.

“What does this mean to you, Kylis?” she whispered, softly enough that it didn’t echo. “What is going on in your head?”

This confirmed it, at least: He had been here. And with no other leads to go on Ana continued. It wasn’t long before she did find more chalk. It was simply a straight, vertical line, seemingly drawn with an outstretched arm as Kylis walked on deeper into this underworld. It went on and on, unbroken, and Ana followed. The tunnel split into two around the time the rain went fully silent. Both openings looked rougher than what she’d been surrounded with so far; less finished, and more decayed from neglect. The chalk continued on down the tunnel on her right, and still she followed.

She felt wary of speaking, of bringing her voice out into this utter darkness, but she couldn’t miss a chance to find him simply due to timidity.

“Hello?” she said. “Kylis?”

Her words echoed out, somehow muffled and enhanced at the same time, unrecognisable and distorted, and faded away way too slowly. She decided to let it appease her conscience and spoke no more.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The chalk line became disjointed and uneven as the rough-hewn wall made neatness simply impossible. At one spot he seemed to have made another attempt to communicate something to the world, or possibly just to himself, but his efforts had been in vain.

Ana inhaled deeply through her nose. The air was damp and earthy in an unpleasant way. If there was carrion up ahead she couldn’t detect it. She thought of the kind man she knew. A man who tried to find what joy the world would allow him in spite of illness, who helped out at the shelter when he could, and who was always one of the first to stand by her side during disagreements or blow-ups. It wasn’t even that long ago that someone had taken a swing at her, and it had been Kylis who intercepted it. She really hoped this path ended in something other than his body.

The light caught the hole an instant before she could fall into it. Ana fell back with an unpleasant start and spent a few breaths simply getting her heart to calm down. The opening in the floor was clearly man-made and easily big enough to allow a person. And right by it was where the sputtering chalk line finally came to an end.

“Kylis?”

The name, spoken in a worried tone, hopped out of her mouth seemingly on its own. Ana knelt down by the edge and shone her light down. There were hewn stairs leading down in a circular pattern.

What the hell was this? There was no sign of plumbing or wiring, or any intention of installing either. If anything, those steps looked older than the train tunnel.

So, should I visit the underworld of an underworld? Ana asked herself. But it was a meaningless question, and she knew it before even finishing the thought. She’d followed Kylis’s mark this far, and in the absence of clear, actual danger she simply couldn’t allow herself to turn back at this point. So she carefully stretched a foot down and landed it softly on the steps. She maintained that pace as she took the next step, and the third, and the fourth, suddenly even more wary of echoes.

What is this?

Ana shined the light around wildly, desperately searching for answers and finding only more questions. By the time it occurred to her to count the circles she was going in it was too late; she was simply descending into an unknowable abyss, one soft step at a time.

Her breath caught again at a sound down below. After a moment of shock rational thought asserted itself enough to identify it as a gust of wind.

Wind??

It seemed absurd. But perhaps whatever lay below connected to a cave system or some such. The thought of an exit closer than the tunnel entrance made her bolder, and Ana picked up her steps a little, trying to fight her growing bewilderment with action.

She finally reached the bottom, and the very first thing she noticed was the chalk scribble on the ground. The second was that once she aimed her beam straight out it faded into nothing before reaching a wall. Her footsteps still echoed but there was a different quality to it. The sounds had more space to move around.

Ana racked her dazed mind for some context for all of this. Surely she had forgotten some publicly-known fact about what lay beneath the city. Obviously there were sewers and cellars, but this was very different. Her light did catch on the wall into which the stairs had been hewn, but what she stood in was no cellar or cave. The floor was finely cut into the rock itself, and her beam next hit some sort of pillar, then another one like it as she continued the sweep.

Upon finishing it she aimed the light down again, reading Kylis’s message.

It is loose. The deceiver has broken the bonds. The bell must ring.

“Kylis,” she whispered to herself, but didn’t know what to follow it up with. Instead she walked unsteadily to the first pillar she’d seen. There was no particular damage to it, but somehow the thing bore an aura of great age, in the slight but universal wear to its carvings. She searched for recognisable patterns or a meaning of some sort but found only artistry

She was not in a state of mind to appreciate beauty, but there was no denying that all of this had been done with great skill. And when she rounded the pillar she found a sconce fastened to it at the level of her face. She couldn’t identify the metal, but it had been made with the same level of craftsmanship as the pillar carvings; instead of breaking the patterns up it fit seamlessly in with them.

Fitted inside of it was not a lightbulb or a large candle or a torch like in some illustrated pulp magazine, but instead a stone of some sort, or perhaps a crystal. Ana gazed at it for a little while, searching for a switch or something and finding no such thing. All she could do was turn back around to face the darkness and slowly shake her head.

Nothing made sense. She had been bracing herself for finding a dead body, not confusion.

Ana carefully measured her steps away from the pillar, somehow deeply fearful of losing her sense of direction in this place. Ana alternated her light between the floor ahead and the wall that she kept on her left, regularly making sure that she was indeed going in a straight line. The shifts became regular enough that she looked away from the wall before her mind could tell her that something had changed. And then her light went out.

She didn’t know how long she stood there in a state of frozen terror. She could neither think nor move. The darkness felt like a physical force crushing her from all directions, numbing her blood with its chill.

Then her fingers felt for the flashlight battery holder and opened it. Next they went through a familiar routine of adjusting the bit of folded-up paper inside that kept the battery in place. She closed the holder and turned it on again.

The light illuminated a big, metal wall panel, standing floor-to-ceiling. It was framed by images carved in exquisite detail, but the thing was dominated by one central image. It was of a stylised eagle, crowned by flames. The artist had captured a true air of majesty and importance around whatever that image was meant to represent. What it was doing in this cold, dark, abandoned place Ana had no idea. But it felt like she ought to. Something about the image worked away at her mind, like a maddening itch she couldn’t reach.

She shone the light about, and an arm’s length from the panel there was an opening. It was just barely wider than the reach of her arms, and bent all about it were the remains of thick metal bars. Much like the sconce she couldn’t immediately identify the metal, but the sheer girth of each bar left her feeling that surely it would take a sturdy chain and a heavy tractor to bend even one of them out like that. And yet all twelve of them had been bent out vertically by some unstoppable force.

Ana approached hesitantly, focusing on something that dangled from one of the bars. It was about the size of a small-ish dinner plate and vaguely diamond-shaped. It seemed to have gotten snagged during whatever titanic effort had been applied here, and she took it in her hand. It was a flat plate of some sort, and she couldn’t tell if it was an exotic type of glass or metal or what.

Then that gust of wind she’d heard in the stairs blew again. It came out of the blackness of the tunnel, ruffling her clothes and blasting her face with an odd stench. Except it wasn’t a wind. After the long, droning blast and its echoes off the confining tunnel walls there came its opposite. The sound repeated in reverse, and Ana felt air being sucked back in, ruffling her clothes the other way.

Something was breathing.

The flashlight fell from Ana’s suddenly slack fingers. As it clattered on the ground she let out a reflexive little yelp at the sudden noise. The light went out, and as she knelt down to feel blindly around for it with wide, panicky sweeps there was a new tone to the sounds from the tunnel. Suddenly there was awareness.

She found the flashlight and her trembling fingers went through the motions again, fiddling with the bit of paper again. The breathing was replaced with a strange grinding noise that drowned everything else out; everything save for Ana’s hammering heart as her every animal instinct told her to run.

The light went back on and she held onto rationality just long enough to remember which direction the stairs were, and then she sprinted. Behind her the grinding noise grew in intensity. Something was moving an impossibly large body, picking up momentum, and scraping up against the tunnel wall as it went. And it was coming her way.

At speed it really was a short distance to the stairs and she ran over Kylis’s chalk writings and ascended the steps three at a time. Down below her the wide open room filled with that terrible echo, and a growl so deep that it seemed to rattle her teeth.

She ran and ran and ran.