Starfall

Chapter 5 - Shanghai Tunnels

Pacifica's eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness that seemed to weigh heavily on this place. The only light now in the tunnels was Dipper's LED phone light that cut a cone of white light into the deep darkness. Even the air felt unnatural in its encumbered stillness. Pacifica followed suit pulling her phone out. Dipper tried to place a call to Ford. After a few moments, he muttered something in frustration. Pacifica already feeling uneasy asked, "What's wrong?" Dipper shrugged, "I can't place a call through." Dipper sighed, "Given the signal-mitigating effects of the lead-laced bricks that hid the anomaly from us, I can't say I'm surprised."

Every so often a train would go by somewhere above and the walls would rattle shaking the dust from the masonry and woodwork above them. Pacifica took a calming breath. Just because they couldn't contact Ford, and she didn't like it down here, didn't mean they were trapped. They could leave anytime they wanted to...at least that's what she was trying to tell herself. Doubt prickled at her skin much in the same way the skin on the back of her neck had begun to tingle.

Dipper trekked on ahead, with Pacifica behind him. She made sure he was no more than an arm's reach in front of her at all times. She didn't want to get lost down here. Dipper shone his flashlight ahead as he walked down the rugged cobblestone corridor angling the light from one doorway to another. The cobblestone floor and walls reminded Pacifica of the old-style sewers in London she had seen in old films. Their footsteps echoed off the floor and down the hall, only negligibly muted by the layers of dust. From time to time Pacifica would swing her phone light behind her. She knew it was her imagination, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching her. She shook her head clearing it. She was an adult, adults should not succumb to such childish and base fears she told herself. She sighed quietly wishing to be back above ground.

Dipper stopped to reference a schematic on his phone. "The shunted access pipe should be roughly sixty feet ahead after we take an immediate left at the t-junction up ahead." Pacifica nodded. Sure enough, the rooms seemed to fall off as the hallway stretched for the last fifty feet. The rooms now fell behind them. These rooms had small brick doorway arches which Dipper shone his light into one by one. As the cone of his bright LED light swept from one side of the room to the other, it cast the room and artifacts within in a light bleached of color that cast strangely long shadows that waxed and waned as the light passed by. These artifacts widely consisted of stored junk, broken barrels, and dusty defunct machinery littered with dust and debris, long since made obsolete by the passage of time and decay.

As they reached the T-junction Dipper turned left. And right, where he had claimed, was a large bored-out hole in the wall that had been filled with a PVC pipe just under one meter, about three feet in diameter...or at least it would have been without the power and fiber optic cables occupying it. Instead, it was now just under two feet of clearance. There were warning labels in three languages on the wall above the pipeline saying something about proper grounding. The cables looked black and heavy. A larger pipe ran parallel to the black fiber optic cables. This must have been the housing pipe for the power cables she presumed.

Pacifica heard a chirping sound behind her almost like a sparrow but a long way off. She turned her flashlight around the way they came. The hallway was empty with the exception of the heavy dust floating in the air reflecting the light back at her here and there. She turned the light the other way down the other side of the T-junction. The junction extended for another twenty-five feet into what appeared to be an old derelict elevator shaft. The entrance to the elevator was filled with debris and rubble, and as she followed the elevator shaft up with the cone of her light she could even see into the shaft itself through the old rusted grating. The elevator cab itself was an old cage-style design that almost resembled a bird cage. It had been smashed in at some point as the geared traction elevator motor had broken free of its mounts and crushed most of the top of the elevator. The counterweight sat next to it near the wall while the coil of elevator cable lay spooled on top of the caved-in elevator. Pacifica wondered what would have caused the elevator to collapse. Most likely time and decay.