My eyes and brain gradually focused on the scene in front of me. One girl was wearing a hat with a headlamp attached to it- the source of the blinding light that had given me the couple of seconds after finding the girls to understand the situation. Realizing that neither one of us had spoken yet I rifled through my head for the appropriate greeting for when you find two girls in an underground tunnel system..."Uh, hi" was the most that I could come up with. The girl with the headlamp continued glaring at me like I was intruding on something while the dark haired girl returned an equally brisk greeting. Something about her bright eyes sparked my memory. Had she volunteered at the orphanage? I can never keep track of volunteers since so many people will come to get service hours for school then, after I validate their hours, won't cross the threshold of the orphanage until the next school year. But this girl I had at least seen recently. We hadn't hard any new arrivals to e orphanage so she couldn't be a new orphan. In a whoosh, the missing girl poster came to the front of my memory. Xiu Li.
"You're Xiu Li!"
"yeah. I am. And you're the guy from the orphanage."
So she was a volunteer. What was she doing down here?
"I'm Annalisa" offered the other girl as silence threatened to settle in again.
Before I could figure out what the girls were doing down here, Annalisa cut me off and led Xiu Li past me and into the darkness of the tunnel behind me. I heard the click of her turning her headlamp and the sound of their footsteps on the packed dirt ground fading into the distance. Realizing that I didn't know my way out of the tunnels, I turned around and started in the direction that I heard the girls hurrying while i'd idly evaluated my next move. As I came upon an intersection, I listened intently to try and discern which tunnel the girls had taken. All I could hear was a quiet trickle of water somewhere behind me..or was it to my right? The hard walls of the tunnel created an echo effect that made it impossible to rely on my sense of hearing for any directions. One sound that I was sure of, though, was the grumblings of my stomach as it tried to alert me of the fact that I hadn't eaten anything since six this morning.
Checking the glowing clock on my iPod, I learned that it was already 3 in the afternoon. Having expected my dream to just be nonsense, I hadn't thought to prepare for the excursion that my exploration of the world underneath the city had become. Walking a little further, I came upon an intersection of at least 6 tunnels that created a small open area. Afraid of wasting any more of my iPod battery, I turned the screen off and folded my legs up underneath me to think about my next move.
I was positive that I had never seen Annalisa before which only meant that there was another opening to the tunnel system. Too bad that I had no idea about how to even retrace my steps to the place that i had crossed paths with the two girls. How did the girls learn how to navigate the tunnel system anyways? So far I'd seen no marks or patterns in the arrangement of the tunnels would allow anyone to keep track of which tunnels led where.
At some point, I fell asleep on the cavern floor. I dreamed of Harry in his usual spot but ringing a bell and standing neck to a red salvation army tripod instead of the usual metal bowl. The cheerful melodies of Christmas tunes are playing from the cd player sitting next to him. Suddenly, his red bucket seems to be filled with hamburgers instead of cash. Food is coming out of all of Harry's pockets and his hand lifted a mug of hot chocolate up instead of the bell. I awake with a pang from my stomach. Upon tapping on my iPod screen I found that the battery had finally run out. Realizing that almost half a day must have passed for my iPod to have died, my search for a way out reached a new level of urgency. Counting the night that I slept before entering the tunnels, I reached the conclusion that if I didn't eat in the next six hours or so I might breath fresh air again. As I trailed my left hand along the wall of the tunnel to avoid walking into a wall in the dark, I kept recounting the hours that had passed. Having awoken with the iPod already dead, I had no idea how much time had passed after the iPod died. Either way, I there had to be an exit and I had to find it- soon.
In the dark, all of my other senses seemed to become magnified. I found myself humming some of the tunes at I had heard in my dream in order to fill the deafening silence of the tunnels. My voice seemed to bounce back from the walls. As I started into rudolf the red nosed reindeer, realized that although I was still just humming, I could distinctly hear someone singing the lyrics. I was going crazy. So this is what dying from hunger feels like. At least I would die listening to one of my favorite childhood christmas songs. I lay down on the floor of the tunnel. Staring into the darkness my eyes searched for something to focus on. It'd been several hours since my retinas had received any form of stimulation at all. Now I knew why those fish at the bottom of the sea evolved to create their own light- in the darkness, everything seems disconnected. Every couple of minutes I satisfied the urge to slam my feet down or reach down to touch my toes just to make sure that I was still there. Whenever I have nightmares they always involve some part of me disappearing. Waking up and seeing myself whole would always bring me out of the nightmare but now I couldn't even do that. For all I knew, I could be slowly turning invisible. Even now I could feel myself giving in to the darkness. Closing my eyes from habit since it didn't change what I saw, I wished for just one last speck of light. Just something to lift the darkness for even a second.
There. Although tiny and faint, I could see a light when I opened my eyes. Remembering the dream that brought me to the grate in the first place, I began to drag my hand across the walls surrounding me. Careful to not go down any passages and lose sight of the light, my hand finally hit something colder than the dirt walls. Upon further examination by touch, i confirmed it. A ladder.
Before beginning my climb up, I promised myself that after I got food, I would make the phone call that I had been dreading ever since I left that place. If there was one thing that my time in the tunnels had brought to light, it was that nothing can be worse than hiding from the truth.
