Tunnels
Philip Haldeman
Philip Haldeman has written for a wide variety of publications. His fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Silver Web, Weirdbook, and others. His novel
The inside of our 1920s apartment building was intersected with Oriental-carpeted hallways that might have been those of a luxurious mausoleum; except that these particular passages were haunted not by dead souls, but by living ones. I lived there, at the age of six, with my two grandparents and an aunt, but it wasn't the building's faded elegance or its aging tenants that was the focus of my childhood imagination. For some reason, in that peculiar four-story structure, I began to have disturbing, surrealistic dreams. The images were vague at first, then became more distinct, vivid, and aggressive. Over several nights of quiet terror, I came to believe, without any previous associations, that huge white worms were tunneling up from far under the ground beneath the apartment building.
My grandparents, who had recently moved from Billings, Montana, explained how common such nightmares were in the mind of an imaginative six-year-old. My aunt Evelyn was some what more blunt and disapproving: 'Well, you mustn't worry. They can't tunnel up into your room if we're on the fourth floor.' My grandmother merely said, 'Now go back to bed and don't let such nonsense bother you.'
Grandfather sat in his velvet-flocked overstuffed chair, his head resting against the embroidered antimacassar, listening to Amos 'n' Andy. It was 1950. He had recently been a lumberman in Montana and Minnesota, and it was reputed that he could tell on sight how many board feet of lumber were on a given railroad flat car. But in the late '40s, he decided to come to Seattle, partly to work at another lumber mill, and because he was in the habit of moving from one place to another. His greatest desire was to visit Sogndal, Norway, his birthplace. Grandfather was the sort of person you could depend on for advice.
'They're real,' I said, shifting toward a whine. 'If I let my hand out over the edge of the bed they'll bite onto it and pull me under the ground.'
'Don't let your hand dangle over the edge of the bed,' said Grandfather.
In the winter, Grandmother and I had built a snowman in the open courtyard at the front of the gabled apartment building. Mrs. Murphy peered down disapprovingly from her window because we were destroying the coat of virgin snow with our galoshes, rolling snowballs, and acting as if the courtyard were our own private domain. Perhaps because the building was in an old section of the city, it contained no children other than myself, at least none I can recall.
I remember that the hallway on the fourth floor was carpeted with an intricately patterned, wine-red runner, and it led down the hall to the corner I did not travel beyond. Near the end of the hall was Mr. Worklan's apartment. Mr. Worklan was a journeyman fur worker who spent much of his time in the cool storage vault of Weisman's Clothing on Third Avenue. One day he stared at me for a long time as I went up the main staircase (a dark forest of polished mahogany posts and railings). On the landing between floors, I saw him finally walk down toward his door like a drunken man lost in the depths of a sinking ocean liner, certain that only women and children would be saved.
Grandmother put her hand gently on my forehead. 'Goodnight, David.'
'When will Mother be back?' I asked, as I had asked every night. And Grandmother answered, as she had answered every night, that she didn't know.
'Where is she?'
'We're not really sure, dear, but we love you and you'll stay with us. Go to sleep now and I'll leave your door open a crack.'
With the narrow column of light coming from the short hall outside my room, I put my cheek on the cool pillow and began to sleep, and to dream about Mother.
When Mother and I had moved in, Mother shared a bedroom with my aunt. Father had moved 'across town,' I was told. We had left him, actually. Since I'd only a nursery-schooler's experience with Father, no one felt obligated to explain our flight and the subsequent divorce. As for my mother, one day she'd been in the apartment helping Grandmother with the ironing; the next day she was gone. Her disappearance was a shock, but after several days of confusion I decided to just wait for her to come back. Each night I would ask about her, and each night I perceived in my grandmother's answer a lingering doubt.
Mr. Worklan knocked on our door one night that summer. Grandfather let him in, and from my room I could hear their agitated voices. Worklan spoke in low, worried tones, his voice rising in fearful expressions, then subsiding into barely audible whispers. Grandfather spoke calmly; then I heard something like'. happened so fast' when the door of my room was closed, blacking out the secure crack of light from the hall. For several minutes I lay awake in the dark. I fell asleep listening to muffled voices.
Again, I dreamed of the big white worms tunneling up from under the ground. Their thick, blind, segmented bodies, unused to light, smelled like water in a limestone cave. Nothing in my humble experience prepared me for their existence, and my repeated nightmare became more terrifying and vivid with each occurrence. To ease my mind, Grandfather described the Orson Welles radio broadcast of
The creatures in my dreams were only as real as those Martians, I told myself, and they couldn't find their way into my room.
The next week, Grandmother, in her brown plaid overcoat, walked with me to Caroline's Bakery on 15th Avenue, where I stared into the long glass cases that contained fresh-baked birthday cakes. The baker often decorated these cakes with small plastic cowboys and Indians. We came for the homemade cinnamon rolls, however, and left quickly, passing Fire Station No. 7 on the way home. The back of our apartment house bordered an alley directly behind the fire station, and the gridded metal fire escape, whose uppermost platform was outside our kitchen window, could be seen winding downward to the alley where the garbage cans were grouped like big aluminum mushrooms near a brick wall. A fireman named John often threw a tennis ball back and forth to me in the alley. He had become a father figure, encouraging me to catch the ball and throw straight.
'He's learning to be a real ball player,' John had told my grandmother.
At the front of the apartment building, I opened the tall, woodframed glass door to the entry hall. Grandmother took a key out of her purse to check the mailbox.
That day, as we reached the second floor, Mrs. Schulte came running down the hall. She held my grandmother not so gently by the arm.
'Mr. Worklan in 8 is moving out!' Her face, not as aged as my grandmother's, nevertheless looked older right then. She might well have been announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
'Oh?' said Grandmother, looking significantly down at me for a brief moment.
'Yes. he. told us this morning. I thought you'd like to know.' She backed away. 'It's too bad when people want to leave,' she said emphatically, and walked back down the hallway.
The next day, movers began to take furniture out of Mr. Worklan's apartment. Some of the tenants, including my grandfather, gathered on the hot summer sidewalk near the moving van to talk to him. I sneaked into the alley to listen to them from around the corner of the building.
'No, I won't stay. I won't stay now,' said Mr. Worklan angrily.
'They couldn't have found us so soon,' said Mr. Sorensen, an older tenant on the second floor.
'We've got to
'Look, I know we've kept from meeting each other — since
