Best New Horror #26

Dale Bailey THE CULVERT

MY BROTHER NEVER had a grave. No funeral service. Not even a real obituary. Just a handful of articles I scissored from the front page of the city’s newspaper when I was thirteen years old. I have them still. I can fan them out like a hand of poker, yellow as old ivory, fragile as pressed flowers: LOCAL BOY GOES MISSING, STILL NO SIGN OF MISSING CHILD, PARENTS CLEARED IN MISSING CHILD CASE.

Soon after the authorities gave up on finding Danny, we moved to a town three hundred miles away. My father retired from a lucrative profession to take a job at a fencing company, wrestling coils of wire. I spent my adolescence there, friendless as a leper. So I learned the shape of loss, its scope and its dimensions.

Danny was exactly two minutes and thirty-two seconds older than I was. Even our mother could not tell us apart.

Grizzled men that smelled of cologne and cigarettes interviewed me in the days after Danny disappeared. Over ice cream. In the park. They seemed impossibly old to me, though I suppose they couldn’t have been much older than I am now. As the years slip by, old age perpetually recedes before you. In our hearts we never change.

Sometimes I dream of the tunnels.

We lay each alike in our twin beds, watching the closet door, ajar like a fissure into the night, our hands crossed atop our chests like dead men, and drew in the same breath and blew it out into the blackness in accidental harmony and whispered to one another almost below the threshold of sound. Sometimes now I wonder if we really spoke at all, if we didn’t have access to one another’s thoughts themselves, if we didn’t share the same geographies of boyish desire.

I’ve drifted from job to job all my life. I suppose it was inevitable that I’d drift back to the city sooner or later. But this barren apartment over an empty storefront doesn’t feel like home.

Did you see your brother get into a stranger’s car? they would ask. Did he have an accident? What happened, Douglas? How was it that I could not recall?

That was the worst thing of all, losing my best friend and my brother in a single blow.

I used to ride my bike to Deet’s Grocery, on the corner of Main and Hickory, to exchange a handful of grubby coins for a hoard of green-apple Jolly Ranchers or Double-Bubble bubble gum, with the riddle inside the wrapper—but it wasn’t the same without Danny. After that I’d hike up to the highway and stare at the cars zipping by, aching to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

We’d stolen flashlights from our father’s toolbox. They felt heavy and reassuring in our hands.

Everything is dead here.

I remember the day we discovered the culvert. Icy rain needled our slickers. Mountains shouldered up around the highway, dun-hued mud squelched underfoot, dank trees turned their leaves to clouds the colour of soured milk. Yellow headlights smeared the mist, the blur of cars rocketing past. The culvert beckoned like a dark eye, cloacal and alluring.

When we were seven years old, we stood naked in front of our bedroom mirror and gazed at the mystery of ourselves, twins twinned. I occasionally find myself before one of those three-panelled department-store mirrors and stare at myself replicated to infinity, wondering which, if any of them, is me.

We fascinated our classmates. Sometimes they ran cool fingers across our face.

Inside the culvert, a flood gushed around our feet, sweeping before it a wrack of clotted leaves and sticks. At the near end, rain hammered the culvert’s concrete apron; at the far, an ashen circle of light disclosed an arm of deeply forested mountain. As our eyes adjusted to the silky darkness in between, a rift of more tenebrous gloom summoned itself into being: a cleft just wide enough to slide through sidewise. We felt its clammy breath upon our face. The dark seemed suddenly ominous and strange.

I haven’t thought of them in years, those bikes. After Danny disappeared, his leaned untouched on its kickstand in the garage for months. Then we moved, and I never saw it again.

I remember the sky, a soulless arc bleached the colour of bone by the heat.

In the glare of the flashlights, the culvert unveiled itself: moss grown and functional, without beauty. Half an inch of coffee-black water stood in its leaf-choked channel, emitting a rich, peaty stench. Shadows fled before us like flights of bats. Traffic thundered overhead. The dread of underground places, the burden of the planet bearing down upon us.

That was the summer of our thirteenth birthday.

The cleft was choking, claustrophobic. Four or five feet of sliding sideways, sucking in your belly, your head wrenched to one side. It narrowed until we thought we could neither pass nor return. Panicked, we strained forward. Abruptly, the walls fell back. Darkness cradled and embraced us.

My parents fell silent in the months after Danny disappeared. I think his loss broke something inside them. They had a way of looking past me, like they were looking for the part of me that wasn’t there.

The sweep of our flashlight beams revealed a perfectly arched atrium a dozen feet in circumference. A dry, level floor. Twin archways that opened into intersecting corridors. We shone our flashlight into each of them. Black and unrelenting, they gave nothing to the light.

I’ve been divorced three times.

I remember my father’s work-thickened knuckles, nicked and scarred with the dozens of tiny wounds inflicted by coils of wire.

We chose the left-hand way.

The tunnel spiralled deep into the earth. Cold pimpled our skin and frosted our breath. The air smelled of stone and time. Our sneakers scuffed the floor, unleashing choruses of whispers. The gravity of the tunnels drew us inexorably downward. The enchantment of the secret and the subterranean.

Deet’s Grocery is gone. There is little commerce here anymore, just blocks of abandoned storefronts, windows soaped over, sun-faded FOR LEASE signs taped up outside. Traffic swishes by in the mountains above the valley. Few cars renounce the highway to descend into these empty streets. I will leave this city soon. There is nothing for me here.

Still the passage spiralled down, deeper, deeper, until at last, impossibly, it deposited us through the neighbouring tunnel into the arched atrium where we had begun.

We celebrated our thirteenth birthday at a restaurant that catered to children. I can’t remember how many of our schoolmates attended, but I still recall the red bunting our parents draped around the room where dinner was to be served. A clown ushered us screaming into a towering maze of plastic ducts where we chased one another breathless. Afterward, our father distributed tokens for skee-ball and video games. We measured our winnings in tongues of extruded tickets, and traded them for plastic trinkets at a counter manned by bored teenagers. We ate two slices of pizza at dinner and shared a single chocolate-glazed cake with thirteen candles. We blew them out together, as though we had not lived twenty-six full years between us.

We chose the right-hand path. It spiralled ever upward. Surely it must soon pass beyond the asphalt surface of the highway into the daylit world beyond. Yet it did not. It spilled us into the atrium instead. This time we emerged from the left-hand tunnel. We turned back to follow it a hundred yards or so, and found that it descended as far as we could see.

Like all children, we had our secret lives. We orbited a star of our own, as isolate and self-sufficient. Secrets were our watchword, lies our sigil of conspiracy.

We rarely spoke of the tunnels. But at night in our dark bedroom, with the closet door ajar like a portal into a labyrinth, we shared the same uneasy dreams.

The tunnels were utterly silent.

At the party, my mother knelt to hug me. Tears glinted in her eyes. When she drew me close to whisper in my ear, her voice broke. It’s so hard to see you grow up, Danny, she said. Her embrace was suffocating.

Time did not pass there. No matter how long we spent exploring the maze of corridors, when we emerged once again from that fissure in the concrete, the world was unchanged. The sun shot its rays at the same angle into the culvert’s mouth. Stepping out into the air, we saw the same clouds hanging unmoved in the same blue and depthless sky.

We used to test our mother. I’m Danny, I would say, and Danny would respond, No, I’m Danny, you’re Doug, and You’re Danny and I’m Doug, and so on, until finally we could not be certain even ourselves which of us was who.

One morning we squeezed through the cleft to discover an even dozen arch-ways radiating from the atrium. By then we’d procured supplies for exploring the corridors: sweatshirts against the cold, knapsacks to carry spare batteries, a snack, a thermos of our mother’s tea. And though we’d grown confident that all paths circled back to the atrium by some mechanism we could not understand, we did not that day care to venture the dark.

After that, we used red spray paint to blaze the walls with arrows, like Hansel and Gretel scattering breadcrumbs to mark their way.

I parked in the gravel turnout where Danny and I had once stashed our bikes and climbed toward the highway. I heard it before I saw it: the rumble of behemoth trucks downshifting on the long grade out of the mountains, the tyre-hiss of cars darting among them, nimble as pilot fish. I scrambled up the final slope, digging for purchase, and stood at the guard-rail, watching the traffic slip eternally past.

Our mother insisted that we dress identically. Even afterward, she shopped in duplicates.

We were too old for that kind of party.

I had trouble finding the culvert. I had to work my way through dense brush before I stumbled upon the drainage ditch that paralleled the highway. I walked alongside it for fifteen minutes, studying the embankment. Even then I almost missed it. A thicket of weeds and junk trees had sprung up in the stony breakwater below its concrete apron, obscuring the culvert’s black and abiding eye.

The last time we pushed through the crevice, there was but a single archway in the atrium. The tunnel beyond was broader than any we’d yet taken. As we walked, it broadened still, so that we could no longer touch the walls with our outstretched hands. After a long time, it steered us into an immense square. An elaborate fountain—angels with trumpets, long dry—stood in the centre, Italianate buildings and arcades to either side. Winding streets branched off here and there, lined with vacant shops. If there was a ceiling, our flashlight beams could not reach it.

That was the day after our thirteenth birthday.

We crossed the square and took a narrow street. At each intersection we marked our way. Meandering alleys delivered us into lavish piazzas, endless colonnades, stately domes and galleries: the city of our dreams.

I stood at the mouth of the culvert, knuckles nicked and scarred from the climb. Ducking my head, I stepped inside. Nothing had changed. The same half-inch of stagnant water, the ruin of rotting leaves.

Danny! I called. Danny! The culvert shouted back at me in diminishing echo, until it no longer sounded like a name at all.

We walked the cobbled streets and after a time they became the same streets, crowded and narrow, with the same turnings of the way and the same buildings leaning over them and the same fathomless sky between. Time and again we found ourselves in the same square with the same ornate fountain at the centre. No matter how many forking paths we took away from that place, they always led us back.

When I took my first college girlfriend home to meet my parents, she studied the photos of my brother and me that my mother had propped in their dozens around the house. I didn’t know you had a brother, she said. I didn’t know you were a twin. We broke up six months later.

How long we wandered that labyrinthine city, I cannot say. We ate the last of our snacks on a balcony overlooking that central plaza, we drank the last of our tea. Exhaustion took us. We slept curled together in the anteroom of an opulent palace, and woke unrested, to terror and despair.

I remember a time my father took my mother in his arms. I want to know what happened to him, she wept.

I must have slipped ahead of Danny—a few steps, half-a-dozen yards or so, no more, that is all I can know or surmise. But when I turned to find him, a maze of branching streets intersected where before there had been but a single way. My brother was gone. The red arrows had evaporated. Jackdaws had eaten our crumbs.

I have studied the blueprints for the city’s drainage system. The highway sweeps out of the mountains far above. There are no tunnels there.

They are there. They are.

No photos of me without Danny adorn my parents’ house.

How long I sought my brother among those shifting streets, I do not know. I called for him until I grew hoarse. But the city’s acoustics betrayed me: my voice boomed back at me down empty avenues and across abandoned courtyards. His name sounded like any other name.

Sometimes I think of all the things Danny never got to do.

She was a pretty girl, lithe and blonde. I can’t remember her name.

The way narrowed, the city fell behind me. I descended a cramped defile, the arched ceiling close above me. It wound finally back to the atrium. Twin tunnels converged there. The fissure cleaved the stone on the other side. Danny! I called, Danny! The corridors threw my voice back at me, the name indistinct; it could have been any name. It could have been mine.

Perhaps he was waiting for me on the other side, I recall thinking as I squeezed through the crevice, but he was not there. When I turned to look behind me, the fissure was gone.

Three times I walked the culvert end to end. Two dozen times I have walked it since. The walls are smooth and uninterrupted. If there is a crevice in its concrete length, I cannot find or see it.

I will never leave this city.

I wish I’d never had a brother. Sometimes I think I never did.

Two of us went in. Only one of us came out. And dear God, I don’t know if it was me.