An ominous sound arose that I had not heard before, a rough rumbling, as if an enormous slab of granite was being dragged across another slab. It seemed to be coming from between me and the catch basin.
Usually this meant that a secret door in a solid-stone wall would roll open, allowing the evil emperor to make a grand entrance in knee-high boots and a cape.
Hesitantly, I moved back toward the Y, cocking my head one way, then the other, trying to determine the source of the sound.
The rumble grew louder. Now I perceived it as less like stone sliding over stone than like friction between iron and rock.
When I pressed a hand to the wall of the tunnel, I could feel vibrations passing through the concrete.
I ruled out an earthquake, which would have produced jolts and lurches instead of this prolonged grinding sound and consistent level of shaking.
The rumbling stopped.
Under my hand, vibrations were no longer coursing through the concrete.
A rushing sound. A sudden draft as something pushed air out of the nearby ascending branch, stirring my hair.
Somewhere a sluice gate had opened.
The air had been displaced by a surge of water. A torrent exploded out of the ascending branch, knocked me off my feet, and swept me down into the dark bowels of the flood-control system.
FIFTY-SEVEN
TOSSED, TURNED, TUMBLED, SPUN, I SPIRALED ALONG the tunnel like a bullet along a rifle barrel.
At first the flashlight, strapped to my left arm, revealed the undulant gray tide, lent glitter to the spray, brightened the dirty foam. But the spelunker's cuff failed, peeled away from my arm, and took the light with it.
Down through the blackness, bulleting, I wrapped my arms around myself, tried to keep my legs together. With limbs flailing, I'd be more likely to break a wrist, an ankle, an elbow, by knocking against the wall.
I tried to stay on my back, face up, rocketing along with the fatalism of an Olympic bobsledder whistling down a luge chute, but the torrent repeatedly, insistently rolled me, pushing my face under the flow. I fought for breath, jackknifing my body to reorient it, gasping when I got my head above the flux.
I swallowed water, broke through the surface, gagged and coughed and desperately inhaled the wet air. Considering my helplessness in its embrace, this modest flow might as well have been Niagara sweeping me toward its killing cataracts.
How long the aquatic torture continued, I can't say, but having been physically taxed before entering this flume ride, I grew tired. Very tired. My limbs became heavy, and my neck stiffened from the strain of the constant struggle to keep my head above water. My back ached, I seemed to have wrenched my left shoulder, and with each effort to find air, my reserves of strength diminished until I was perilously close to complete exhaustion. Light.
The surging sluice spat me out of the four-foot drain into one of the immense flood-control tunnels that I had speculated might double, in the Last War, as an underground highway for the transport of intercontinental ballistic missiles out of Fort Kraken to farther points of the Maravilla Valley.
I wondered if the tunnel had remained lighted ever since I'd thrown the switch after coming down from the service shed near the Blue Moon Cafe. I felt as if weeks had passed since then, not mere hours.
Here, the velocity of the flood was not as breakneck as it had been in the smaller and far more steeply sloped drain. I could tread the moving water and stay afloat as I was flushed into the middle of the passage and borne along.
A little experimentation quickly proved, however, that I could not swim crosswise to the swift current. I wouldn't be able to reach the elevated walkway that I had followed eastward in pursuit of Danny and his captors.
Then I realized that the walkway had vanished below the water when the previous stream had swelled into this mighty Mississippi. Were I able to reach the side of the tunnel by heroic effort and the grace of a miracle, I would not be able to escape the river.
If ultimately the flood-control system delivered the storm runoff to a vast subterranean lake, I would be washed onto those shores. Robinson Crusoe without sunshine and coconuts.
Such a lake might lack shores. It might be embraced instead by sheer stone walls so smoothed by eons of trickling condensation that they could not be climbed.
And if a shore existed, it would not be hospitable. With no possible source of light, I would be a blind man in a barren Hades, spared death by starvation only if I died instead by stumbling into an abyss and breaking my neck in the fall.
At that bleak moment, I thought I would die underground. And within the hour, I did.
Treading water, keeping my head above even this less turbulent flow, was a cruel test of my stamina. I wasn't certain that I would last the miles that lay ahead before the lake. Drowning would spare me from starvation.
Meager hope unexpectedly came in the form of a depth marker situated in the center of the watercourse. I was swept straight toward the six-inch-square white post, which rose nearly to the twelve-foot-high ceiling.
As in the power of the current I began to slide past this slender refuge, I hooked one arm around the post. I snared it with one leg, as well. If I stayed on the upstream side, with the post between my legs, the insistent current at my back would help to keep me in place.
Earlier in the day, when I had towed the snaky man's corpse away from this post or another like it, to the elevated walkway, the depth of the flow had been inches shy of two feet. Now it lapped north of the five-foot mark.
Thus safely anchored, I leaned my forehead against the post for a while, catching my breath. I listened to my heart and marveled that I was alive.
After several minutes, when I closed my eyes, that mental turning, that slow dizzy sweep signifying a pending swoon into sleep, alarmed me, and my lids snapped open. If I fell asleep, I would lose my grip and be swept away once more.
I would be in this fix for a while. With the service walkway underwater, no maintenance crew would venture here. No one would see me clinging to the pole and mount a rescue.
If I held fast, however, the water level would fall when the storm passed. Eventually the service walkway would reappear out of the tide. The stream would become shallow enough to ford, as it had been before.
Perseverance.
To keep my mind occupied, I maintained a mental inventory of the flotsam that bobbed past. A palm frond. A blue tennis ball. A bicycle tire.
For a little while I thought about working at Tire World, about being part of the tire life, working around the fine smell of rubber, and that made me happy.
A yellow lawn-chair cushion. The green lid of a picnic cooler. A length of two-by-six with a rusty spike bristling from it. A dead rattlesnake.
The dead snake alerted me to the possibility of a live snake in the flood. For that matter, if a sizable chunk of lumber, like that two-by-six, propelled by the brisk current, knocked hard against my spine, it might do some damage.
I began glancing over my shoulder from time to time, surveying the oncoming debris. Maybe the snake had been a warning sign. Because of it, I spotted Andre upstream, before he was on top of me.
FIFTY-EIGHT
EVIL NEVER DIES. IT JUST CHANGES FACES.
Of this face, I'd seen enough, too much, and when I spotted the giant, I thought for an instant-and fondly hoped-that only a corpse pursued me.
