It was a formidably tight squeeze. It must have taken real courage and determination for the Resistance fighters to make this final approach to the Schloss, and do it repeatedly, Ben thought. No wonder they had made use of a boy like the young Fritz Neumann, who could slip through this space easily.
Ben had wriggled through crawl holes like this before, in the caves of White Sulphur Springs, but never for more than a few feet before they broadened out. This, however, appeared to be hundreds of yards long.
Only now did he fully understand what veteran cavers meant when they insisted that their subterranean pursuit allowed them to face down primordial terrors—the fear of darkness, of falling into the void, of being trapped in a maze, of being buried alive.
But there was no choice, certainly not now. He thought only of Anna and summoned up the will.
He entered the hole, headfirst, feeling a cold rush of air. At its opening, the passage was about two feet high, which meant that the only way to move through it was to slither on his stomach like an earthworm.
He removed his pack and pushed off with his feet, pulling with his arms, nudging his pack ahead of him. There was an inch or two of frigid water on the tunnel floor. Quickly his pants became soaked through. The tunnel angled sharply one way, then another, forcing him to contort his body.
Then, at last, the passageway began to widen, its ceiling rising to four feet, enabling him to lift his numbed belly out of the ice water, get to his feet, and stoop-walk.
It was not long, though, before his back began to ache, and rather than continue he stopped for a moment and set down the pack, resting his hands on his thighs.
When he was able to go farther, he noticed that the ceiling was lowering
again, back to two, maybe three feet high. He got onto his hands and knees and began scuttling along like a crab.
But not for long. The rocky floor bruised his kneecaps. He attempted to ease the stress by putting his weight on his elbows and toes instead. When he wearied of that, he continued crawling. The ceiling became lower still, and he turned onto his side, pushing with his feet and pulling with his arms along the winding tunnel.
Now the ceiling height had diminished to no more than eighteen inches, scraping against his back, and he had to stop for a moment to suppress a wave of panic. He was back to belly-crawling again, only this time there was no end in sight. His headlamp shone a beam for twenty feet or so, but the coffin-sized, even coffin-shaped tunnel seemed to go on and on. The walls seemed to narrow.
Through the scrim of his fear, he observed that the passage appeared to be winding slowly uphill, that water no longer pooled on the floor, though it was still damp, and that, horribly, rock was now scraping against both his stomach and his back.
He continued pushing his pack ahead of him. The tunnel was now barely twelve inches high.
Ben was trapped.
No, not trapped, not yet, exactly, but it certainly felt that way. Terror overwhelmed him. He had to squeeze himself through. His heart raced, his body flooded with fear, and he had to stop.
The worst thing, he knew, was to panic. Panic caused you to freeze up, lose flexibility. He breathed slowly in and out a few times, then exhaled completely to reduce his chest diameter so he could fit through the passage.
Sweating and clammy, he forced himself to squirm ahead, trying to focus on where he was going and why, how crucial it was. He thought ahead, to what he would do once he got into the Schloss.
The uphill slope was becoming steeper. He inhaled and felt the walls press in on his chest, keeping him from filling his lungs with air. This prompted a surge of adrenaline, which made his breathing fast and shallow, made him feel as if he were about to suffocate, and he had to stop once again.
Don’t think.
Relax.
No one else knew he was down here. He would be buried alive here in this pitch-black hell where there was no day or night.
Ben found himself listening to this voice with skepticism, as his braver, better self now assumed command of his brain. He began to feel his heart slow, felt the delicious cold air hit the bottom of his lungs, felt calm spread through his body like ink on a blotter.
Steadily now, with an inner serenity, he urged his body along, earth-wormed, wriggled, ignoring the chafing of his back.
Suddenly the ceiling soared upward and the walls widened, and he got to his aching hands and knees and crawled up the incline. He had arrived at a sort of twilit grotto, where he was able to stand fully, blessedly, upright.
He was aware of the faintest glimmering of light.
It was a very dim and distant light, but to him it seemed almost as bright as day, as joy-inspiring as sunrise.
Directly ahead of him was the cave exit, and it was indeed shaped a little like a keyhole. He scrambled up a scree pile, then sort of half-mantled himself into the lip of the opening, pushing down with both hands until he could support his body on rigid arms.
There he saw the close-set rusted iron bars of an ancient gate that was fitted into the irregular cave mouth as tightly as a manhole cover. He could not make out what lay behind the gate but he could see an oblong shaft of light, as if from under a door.
He drew out the skeleton key Neumann had given him, inserted it into the lock, and turned it.
Tried to turn it.
But it would not turn. The key would not move.
The lock was rusted shut. That had to be it; the old lock hadn’t been replaced, at least not for decades. The entire thing, he saw, was one solid mass of rust. He wriggled the key back and forth again, but it would not turn.
“Oh, my God,” Ben said out loud.
He was done for.
This was the one thing neither he nor Neumann had anticipated.
He could see no other way in. Even if he had the tools, there was no way to dig around the gate; it was embedded in solid rock. Would he now have to somehow climb back out?
Or maybe … Maybe one of the bars was so rusted through that he could push it out. He tried that, banging his gloved fist against the iron bars until the pain was too great, but no: the gate was solid. The rust was only on the surface.
In desperation, he grabbed the bars and rattled them, like an enraged lifer in San Quentin, and suddenly there was a metallic clatter.
One of the hinges had broken off.
He rattled again, harder, until another hinge popped off.
He kept rattling, exuberantly, and finally the third and last hinge fell to the ground.
He grabbed the gate with both hands, lifted it up and pushed it forward, and gently lowered it to the ground.
He was inside.