l once knew a man who was afraid of nothing. No monstrosity man made nor fictitious could subdue his spirits, and the mere mention of the word 'supernatural' would elicit a most cynical example of laughter. This bravery was both his greatest strength and his most profound weakness, for ignorance and heedlessness can often be mistaken for a deep and foolhardy sense of courage. He was to learn the limits of his bravery down in those oppressive tunnels, deep below the streets of Amsterdam.
His name was Henke, due mainly to his Finnish ancestry on his father's side, and although his parents had passed away at an early age, it was clear that he believed his courageous convictions could be attributed to his father's character.
I had met Henke four years earlier while travelling with some friends on a rather common rites of passage: Backpacking through Europe during a university break. He and a few of his friends were on a similar trip and happened to be staying at the same youth hostel as myself and my companions in Rome. We all got on well, but both Henke and I struck up an immediate rapport with one another as he was a keen musician and I was at the time still filled with the self promise, or should I say delusion, of stardom through my own musical pursuits.
This friendship continued onwards and we maintained it via email; swapping musical discoveries, talking about politics, and generally getting to know one another as best two people can through simple correspondence. I grew to enjoy our friendly debates over the years and on a few occasions we even visited one another. Henke moved around a lot and as such it gave me a good excuse to visit a number of mainland European countries, not to mention that he always knew which local pubs served the best beer and which restaurants were to be best avoided.
Last year I visited Henke in Amsterdam. The Dutch city seemed to be a good fit for him as he always liked to live in the liveliest of places, and with countless meandering canals, bridges, and walkways swamped with millions of tourists every year, Amsterdam, for Henke, felt like the very embodiment of life and vibrancy. At the time he had been recently hired to carry out some important maintenance work on the Rijksmuseum, which is one of Amsterdam's most impressive buildings, and this seemed to have rooted him to the one place for longer than was usual.
When I met him in a small darkened corner of a local pub, well away from the burgeoning tourist trade, I was shocked at his appearance. Here was a friend I had grown to know as being larger than life, exuding bravado, and yet I was presented with a shell of a man, slight in stature and racked with self doubt.
He proceeded to impart on me the circumstances which resulted in his precarious condition, of which I will relay to you now.
Henke had been working as a civil engineer for some time and relished the challenge of renovating and maintaining the Rijksmuseum, a building with such a long and compelling history. The museum houses Amsterdam's finest collection of historical relics, and being given access to some of its more hidden places which are inaccessible to the general public, piqued Henke's fascination for the obscured and unique.
He had been hired most specifically to lead a maintenance crew which had been assigned to assess and repair the building's foundations. This oldest part of the structure dated back centuries and had a most bizarre and, it must be said, quite horrific history. The Rijksmuseum itself had been constructed in 1885, but what it had been built upon possessed a much older and interesting history.
In the bowels of the building under its marble floors and deep red brickwork, lay a labyrinth of abandoned tunnels which at one time served as part of the old city's sewer network. They had long been disused and fallen into disrepair but they were nonetheless an essential part of the building's foundations and had to be assessed and repaired, otherwise the entire structure would be in danger of subsiding.
