Forever Odd

the outflow drains. This route would never entirely fill with water and would always offer at least a partially unobstructed exit.
        If I’d been asked to estimate the size of their community as they passed over me, I would have said “thousands.” To the same question an hour later, I would have replied “hundreds.” In truth, they numbered fewer than one hundred, perhaps only fifty or sixty.
        Reflected off the curved concrete walls, the rustle of their wings sounded like crackling cellophane, the way movie sound-effects specialists used to rumple the stuff to imitate all-devouring fire. They didn’t stir up much of a breeze, hardly an eddy, but brought an ammonial odor, which they carried away with them.
        A few fluttered against my arms, with which I protected my head and face, brushed like feathers across the backs of my hands, which should have made it easy to imagine that they were only birds, but which instead brought to mind swarming insects-cockroaches, centipedes, locusts-so I had bats for real and bugs in the mind. Locusts had been the eighth of Egypt’s ten plagues.
         Rabies .
        Having read somewhere that a quarter of any colony of bats is infected with the virus, I waited to be bitten viciously, repeatedly. I didn’t sustain a single nip.
        Although none of them bit me, a couple crapped on me in passing, sort of like a casual insult. The universe had heard and accepted my challenge: I was now filthier and more miserable than I had been ten minutes previously.
        I rose into a stoop again and followed the descending drain away from the catch basin. Somewhere ahead, and not too far, I would find a manhole or another kind of exit from the system. Two hundred yards, I assured myself, three hundred at most.
        Between here and there, of course, would be the Minotaur. The Minotaur fed on human flesh. “Yeah,” I muttered aloud, “but only the flesh of virgins.” Then I remembered that I was a virgin.
        The flashlight revealed a Y in the tunnel, immediately ahead. The branch to the left continued to descend. The passage to the right fed the one I’d been following from the catch basin, and because it rose, I figured it would lead me closer to the surface and to a way out.
        I had gone only twenty or thirty yards when, of course, I heard the bats returning. They had soared out into the night, discovered a tempest raging, and had fled at once back to their cozy subterranean haven.
        Because I doubted that I would escape a second confrontation unbitten, I reversed directions with an agility born of panic and ran, hunched like a troll. Returning to the down-bound tunnel, I went to the right, away from the catch basin, and hoped the bats would remember their address.
        When their frenzied flapping crescendoed and then diminished behind me, I came to a halt and, gasping, leaned against the wall.
        Maybe Andre would be on the ledge, crossing from the lowest drain to the highest, when the bats returned. Maybe they would frighten him, and he would fall into the catch basin, skewering himself on those samurai swords.
        That fantasy brought a brief glow to my heart, but only brief because I couldn’t believe that Andre would be afraid of bats. Or afraid of anything.
        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