The Terror in the Tunnels

I have two very unusual keepsakes on one of my bookshelves. One is an empty glass vial, the contents of which dried up long ago. The other is a striking nugget of metal. When I have visitors, and they inevitably begin to peruse my bookshelves, I am most often asked about the piece of metal. In answering, I begin with the glass vial. I do this because they both came from the same experience, and I cannot tell of one without telling of the other.

In my senior year of college, I had an encounter that I will never forget. My college campus had a series of underground maintenance tunnels. Once a year, it was my job to enter the tunnels and clean them as part of my on-campus workstation. In most places, they were quite cramped, save for a few more open areas. Spending a few hours in claustrophobic darkness with only roaches, rats, and abnormally large toads for company was not ideal. In hindsight, it wasn't so bad at all.

I realized something was off when an hour passed and I hadn't spotted a single rat. Normally, I would have spotted at least seven of them in the first half hour. I counted my blessings and continued to scrub the floor, sending a small horde of roaches scurrying up the walls. There were still plenty of disgusting critters keeping me company down here, so I decided not to let the absence of rodents concern me.

As I crawled forward in the tunnel, my fingertips touched something that went skittering ahead in the darkness. Curious, I scanned the tunnel ahead with my flashlight beam, hoping to catch a glimpse of what I had hit. My eye caught a flicker of movement to my left just as the object rolled into the wall. I reached out and plucked it up, turning it over in my hand. 

It was a small glass vial. The surface was badly scuffed. A few patches of dry glue and yellowed paper were all that remained of what had once been a label. The vial's stopper was missing, probably hiding in some other dark corner of the tunnel system. What interested me the most about the vial was the fact that it wasn't empty. There was a thin glaze of liquid inside, clinging to the glass. The liquid was a bright purple color, and it reflected the light from my flashlight with a faint glow. I had seen plenty of strange things down here in the tunnels, but never anything this unique. I wrapped the vial up tight in a spare rubber glove and slipped it in my pocket.

I cleaned the tunnels for another hour before I heard the sound. Someone was moving in the tunnel above me; I could hear the shuffling of hands and knees against concrete. Assuming it was my coworker, and realizing that I was running low on cleaning fluid, I called him on the radio.

“Twenty-one to Six,” I said, using our radio call-signs. The shuffling over my head stopped abruptly, and a moment later he responded.  

“Go for Six.”

“Could I borrow some of your cleaner? I’m in the tunnel below you.”

Several seconds passed before my coworker replied.

“I’m not in the tunnels, Twenty-one. I’m up in the shop.”

I furrowed my brow, instantly confused. If he was in the shop, then who was in the tunnel above me?

“Twenty-one to Base,” I said, hailing the maintenance office.

“Go for Base,” came the reply.

“Is anyone else working the tunnels today?”

There was silence for a brief moment. It felt much longer.

“Negative. It’s just you in there, Twenty-one.”

My throat dried up. “Copy,” I managed to croak back.

The shuffling above me had stopped. The tunnel was eerily quiet: no chirping of roaches, no croaking of toads, no scurrying of rats. I still hadn’t seen a single rat down here. Remembering this, I calmed down. I figured that maybe there had been a cat or something in the tunnel above me. There were plenty of cats on campus, and sometimes they went into the tunnels to hunt. It was easy to let one’s imagination run wild in these dark, damp tunnels, but I steadied myself with the certainty that the shuffling was from a perfectly mundane source.