Chapter 14

It is amazing how much difference ten feet can make.

I could hear the whispers of the group, their nervous, excited breaths, and their footsteps muted against the dusty floor. I could see the shadows cast by their flickering torches where I blocked the light. Yet despite being only a few study paces from them, the dank, oppressive darkness that filled that distance and surrounded me on all other sides suddenly made me feel very, very alone.

The corridor was no larger or smaller than the one I had walked through a hundred times during the past few days getting in and out of the bunker, but the darkness made it feel like the walls were closing in on me. I didn’t have Lizzy’s natural aptitude for direction, yet even I could feel that we were traveling farther under the mountain. I could almost feel its weight above me. I was not, nor have I ever been, claustrophobic. Confined spaces and darkness had never bothered me in the slightest, but there was something about this that was different.

The last people to walk these halls were dead, killed by a force, or an entity, that still stalked the darkness. Katie, usually so sensible and level-headed when it came to every other subject, had seemed unnaturally hostile to the extremely simple logic of my instructions. Me going first into an uncharted and unchecked part of the bunker to make sure it was safe was no different a request than Amy insisting that she treat a wound before anyone else had a go at it. She was a medical professional. Of course, she would go first, in the same vein that I was an engineer and the only person able to judge if the tunnels we were exploring were safe. If it had been the giddy, youthful excitement of one of the group’s younger members, I could have understood, but Katie?

She hadn’t pressed the matter, but it had taken Liz to stop her entirely. As small and innocuous as it may have been, to my knowledge, the whole thing had constituted the first argument that had occurred between members of our group. Considering what Dr. Walker said about “Mother” fostering conflict, I was feeling nervous.

Still, I had a job to do.

For those of you who enjoy the CSI-style shows on TV, you might have wondered why they use flashlights, even in broad daylight. The simple answer is that things can be missed quite easily. The movement of their shadows is usually much easier to spot. The same logic applied here. The light given off by my torch flickered over the walls, the ceiling, and the ground in a way that perfectly highlighted the slight imperfections of the construction process. The walls, for example, were not completely smooth and level. Over the course of a few dozen meters, they could bulge or dip in an endless wave. Deep cracks where the concrete had given way under a force being applied from the other side of the wall would indicate a weak point, but a lack of cracks, or at least a lack of deep cracks, told me that the men who had built these tunnels had understandably not been worried about the aesthetics of their walls, and had simply been in too much of a rush to finish their surfaces perfectly.

The floor and ceiling were pretty much the same, but as I had noted to Ray when he ventured into the first tunnel, the two upright and load-bearing walls so close to each would be enough to hold up against all but the most catastrophic of structural failures. If those failures were going to happen, the chances are they would have happened by now, and us simply walking through the tunnel was highly unlikely to cause enough movement to set one off today. The rooms were a much greater risk, and the bigger the room was, the more dangerous it could be.

I hadn’t been entirely honest about my logic with the group, however. Contrary to what common sense would tell you, the tunnel was much less likely to collapse the deeper into the mountain it went. The millions upon millions of cubic tonnes pressing down onto the roof of the tunnel - or so you would assume - were not actually pressed down onto the tunnel at all. Or at least not as much of it as you would think. The weight of the mountain was more spread out the deeper it went. It was much more likely to collapse closer to the surface because not only was there a greater chance of water getting in - due to the fact it mostly ran down the side of the mountain either on or just below the surface - but there was also significantly less space for the weight to be spread around. If the builders of this tunnel had angled the upper side of the roof into a point, which they almost certainly had, then this tunnel could survive indefinitely.

The real reason I wanted to be ahead in the tunnels had very little to do with cave-ins. Yes, obviously, there was a chance, and I was still checking to be sure, but I wasn’t expecting to find anything. The real reason was that I wanted to check every open room to see if the group reacted to it. Any room they reacted to, according to Dr. Walker’s tale and my own observations, could safely be ruled out as a place that would need careful examination. On the other hand, if there was another room like the comms room, which the entire group just walked straight past, it must hold something that the influences didn’t want them to see. Those were the rooms I would need to check later. On top of that, I didn’t want them right behind me and looking over my shoulder when we found the hospital, and I went hunting for the key that unlocked the desks.

Considering the frequency with which doors and doorways had punctuated the walls of both tunnels leading out of the bunker, I was surprised that I hadn’t come across a single one yet. Yes, we were moving slowly, but we had still covered about eighty feet since the central room. There would have been about four or five rooms on each side of the corridor by now in the other tunnels.

Finally, though, after what must have been more than a hundred feet of tunnel, the first doors appeared through the darkness, one on each side of the tunnel. Scratched in what looked to be charcoal on the side of each door was the word “Holding.” Holding One on the left, Holding Two on the right. Again, my mind wandered back to Dr. Walker’s recording. These may have been the rooms in which they held the women who had been on the Island before they had arrived. A part of me wondered if these words had been written by that heroic doctor’s hand. But a bigger part of me wondered if this was exactly the sort of test I was looking for.

I held my hand up and called back to the rest of the group to stay where they were. A simple check of the walls above the door showed no obvious cracks or bulges, so I took a deep breath, rested my hand on the handle, pressed it down, and slowly pushed against the door.

With a loud creak, it opened.

I didn’t step into the room straight away, instead holding my torch in at arm’s length and letting the light of its fire spread to fill the space. The room may have held the treasures of King Solomon for all I cared; I was only interested in seeing if the ceiling was going to try and bury me. Once again, the room seemed to be in remarkably good condition. A row of metal cots, six of them in all, were lined up against the far wall, there seemed to be some footlockers at the end of each one, and each of them still appeared to be holding something. But that was something for the others to check out.

I left the door open, about turned, and carefully tried the handle of the room on the right of the corridor, Holding Two. Once again, I very carefully pushed the door into the room and extended my arm in after it.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Like rotting meat mixed with old leather, the stench hit me harder than any cave-in would have. I coughed against it but managed to somehow keep to my task of checking the ceilings. They, too, seemed in perfectly good condition. It was then that I allowed my eyes to scan the rest of the room.

For the most part, it looked like an exact mirror image of Holding one with six beds along the far wall with footlockers at their bases. The only real difference between it and its counterpart was the large - very large - dark stains covering the walls behind the beds.

And the four mostly decomposed bodies lying about the room.

Two of the skeletons were lying on the ground a few feet in front of the door, another was sprawled over one of the beds, and the last was propped up against the far wall, beside the third, slumped to one side.

I found myself immediately wondering who these people were. Dr. Walker had mentioned a few of his cohabitors in his recording; there were even a few names. Some of them were friendly, others not so much. I remembered that Doug’s body had been tossed into the sea and that Richard and Susan had been killed outside, in the crater, by a tree. Grace was also listed as one of the dead, but the fates of everyone else, including the body of Dr. Walker himself, were a mystery. Not to mention the possibility that these could have been some of the men killed by Col. Williams or even some of the Japanese garrison who came before them. One thing was certain, though.

If there was ever going to be a test, this was going to be it.

“It’s safe this far. Come and have a look,” I called back to the impatiently waiting group.

They all moved forward, albeit lacking the pace their excited whispers had me expecting. All of them except Ray plowed straight into Holding One, each of them cooing over the metal framed beds that could be dragged back to the central room or even kept here as more private bedrooms. Only Ray stopped outside.

“What is this writing?” He asked, holding his torch to the wall and peering at it. “Holding One?”

“Hmm?” Came the voice of one of his girls, the brunette stepping back out of the room and looking in confusion at the wall. “I don’t see anything, baby. Come look at this.”

“What?” He blinked after her. “What do you mean you don’t...”

I cleared my throat loudly. He looked up at me in confusion. I shook my head slowly and put a finger to my lips. Ray squinted harder.

“Later,” I mouthed silently at him.

He squinted into the room after the rest of the group, shook his head, and followed them in.

It must have taken them twenty minutes to come back out again.

“The other door is blocked, is it?” Liz said cheerfully as the group stepped out. I just nodded. “That’s a shame; it would have been good for the bedroom situation.”

Ray looked like he was about to lose his mind. He was frowning almost hard enough to completely obstruct his eye-line. “What are you talking about? And what the hell is that smell? The door is wide ... Ow, What the hell, man?”

I had kicked his ankle, hard!

“Alright, people, if you don’t mind heading back down the hall a little. I just need to borrow Ray for a second.”

“No problem, sweetie,” Hayley called as the girls and Tom started making their way back a few feet the way we had come. “What are you two talking about?”

“Sleeping arrangements,” I called back.

There was a snort before Amy’s voice echoed into the room. “As if they have any say in that matter.”

Ray spun on me as soon as I had dragged him far enough into the room. “Seriously, Dan, what the fuck is going on?”

“Listen carefully; I don’t know how much time we have,” I barked at him. “I know you are ‘here,’ I know you are lucid. I promise that I will explain everything when I can, but we don’t have time to do it now. Next time you are lucid, come to me and say...” I thought for a second. I needed a phrase that would be totally out of context in any situation on the island but could be dismissed as a joke just as easily. “ ... say ‘Hey, did you catch the game last night?’”

“What? What game?”

“Exactly. If I answer with something like “Yeah, ‘fucking Patriots’ or something like that, you know I am lucid too. If I say anything else, keep your fucking mouth shut, and don’t say whatever it is you want to say. I’m being serious, man; I’m saving your life here. There is something fucked up on the Island, and it’s dangerous.”

“Dan, you’re scaring me, man. I can see that door is wide open ... and are those fucking bodies?”

“Jesus, Ray! Keep your voice down!” I hissed at him. “What did I just say?”

“How can they possibly not see them?” He whispered back after a few moments.

“You don’t see them either when you are under the influence of whatever is going on here.”

“Shit, and you don’t want the... influence ... to know that we know.”

I blinked at him. Well, that was easier than I was expecting... “Yes. And anyone who is influenced can’t know that you are having a lucid moment.”

“What happens if they do?”

I rolled my eyes at him and gestured frustratedly at the bodies in the other room.

“Oh ... right... Really?”

“Yeah, exactly. Look, just follow everyone else’s lead. If they are acting like they are not seeing something, you do the same. I will explain everything when I can, I promise.”

“If you are talking about swapping us, that is a conversation we should be involved with,” Robyn’s voice came teasingly through the doorway.

“Alright, alright,” Ray held his hands up. “I’m trusting you here, man. But I don’t like this one damned bit.”

“You and me, both,” I sighed. “C’mon, they are going to get suspicious if we don’t get back soon.”

He nodded with another nervous glance into holding two and then stepped out of the room and back toward the others. “Of course, we are not talking about swapping you. The lot of you are stuck with us now.” He put on his best, surprisingly convincing smile.

“So what were you really talking about?” One of his girls pressed into the side of him.

“Dan was being a gentleman and offering us first dibs on christening the room after he got to the other one first.” Ray lied - again, worryingly convincingly.

“Awww, he’s a sweetie,” his other girl smiled. “You’d better have said yes!”

I tuned out the rest of the conversation as I pulled closed the door to holding two and carried on up the hallway.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of walking and miles of darkness, but was probably only another hundred and fifty yards and four sealed doorways, the tunnel ended at a set of large double doors. Square windows, the glass broken long ago, were cut into it at head height on each door, and I peered through. Eleven beds were lined up against the walls. Six on the left, five and a desk against the right. Large kit bags had been piled up next to the desk, steel lockers lined the far wall on either side of another door, and a large, white, metallic-looking box with a big red cross was on top of the surprisingly intact-looking desk.