Seize the Night

to crawl. In the walls of these cylindrical causeways were uncounted smaller openings, some were two or three inches in diameter, others two feet, probing them with the infrared flashlight revealed nothing more than could have been seen by peering into a drainpipe or a gun barrel.
    We might have been inside an enormous, incomprehensibly elaborate set of refrigeration coils, or exploring the plumbing that served all the palaces of all the gods of ancient myths.
    Unquestionably, something had once surged through this colossal maze, liquids or gases. We passed numerous tributaries, in which were anchored turbines with blades that must have been driven by whatever had been pumped through this system. At many junctions, various types of gigantic electrically controlled valves stood ready to cut off, restrict, or redirect the flow through these Stygian channels.
    All the valves were in open or half-open positions, but as we passed each block point, I worried that if they snapped shut, we would be imprisoned down here.
    These tubes had not been stripped to the concrete, as had all the rooms and corridors in the first three floors under the hangar.
    Consequently, as there were no apparent lighting sources, I assumed that workmen servicing the system had always carried lamps.
    Intermittently, a draft stirred along these strange highways, but for the most part the atmosphere was as still as that under a bell jar.
    Twice, I caught a whiff of smoldering charcoal, but otherwise the air carried only a faint astringent scent similar to iodine, though not iodine, which eventually left a bitter taste and caused a mild burning sensation in my nasal membranes.
    The trainlike rumble came and went, lasting longer with each occurrence, and the silences between these assaults of sound grew shorter.
    With every eruption, I expected the ceiling to collapse, burying us as irrevocably as coal miners are occasionally entombed in veins of anthracite. Another and utterly chilling sound spiraled along the tunnel walls from time to time, a shrill keening that must have had its source in some machinery spinning itself to destruction, or else crawling these byways was a creature that I had never heard before and that I hoped never to encounter.
    I fought off attacks of claustrophobia, then induced new bouts by wondering if I were in the sixth circle of Hell or the seventh. But wasn't the seventh the Lake of Boiling Blood? Or did that come after the Fiery Desert? Neither the blood lake nor the great burning sands would be green, and everything here was relentlessly green. Anyway, Lower Hell couldn't be far away, just past the luncheonette that serves only spiders and scorpions, around the corner from the men's shop that offers bramble shirts and shoes with razor-blade in-cushions. Or maybe this wasn't Hell at all, maybe it was just the belly of the whale.
    I think I went a little nuts—and then recovered—before we reached our destination.
    For sure, I lost all track of time, and I was convinced that we were ruled by the clock of Purgatory, on which the minute and hour hands turn without ever advancing. Days later, Sasha would claim we had spent less than fifteen minutes in those tunnels. She never lies.
    Yet, when eventually we prepared to return the way we had come, if she had tried to convince me that retracing our route would require only a quarter of an hour, I would have assumed we were in whatever circle of Hell was reserved for pathological liars.
    The final passage—which would lead us to the kidnappers and their hostages—was one of the larger tunnels, and when we entered it, we discovered that the abbs we were seeking or at least one of them, anyway—had posted a neatly arranged gallery of perverse achievement. Newspaper articles and a few other items were taped to the curved metal wall, the text was not easily readable by the infrared flashlights, but the headlines, subheads, and some of the pictures were clear enough.
    We played our lights over the various items, quickly absorbing the exhibition, trying to understand why it was here.
    The first clipping was from the Moonlight Bay Gazette , dated July 18, forty-four years earlier. Bobby's grandfather had been the publisher in those days, before the paper had passed to Bobby's mother and father. The headline screamed, BOY ADMITS TO KILLING PARENTS, and the subhead read, 12-YEAR-OLD CAN'T BE TRIED FOR MURDER.
    The headlines on several additional clippings from the Gazette , dating to