The door is locked. I push on the window and it opens up, just like the other day. I wait for a while, trying not to breathe too loudly. The house is dark and quiet. I wait, on the porch, in the snow, under the white moon. Then I pull my backpack off and push it through the window. Let it drop down onto the floor, to thump in the empty house. But the light doesn’t come on and he doesn’t come out into the kitchen. So I pull myself up, over the window sill, and drop down inside.

The kitchen is just the way we left it the other day, me and Stullus and the accountant. The same overflowing garbage bags, the same muddy footprints all over the floor. I unzip my backpack. Pull out my heavy black flashlight. I don’t turn it on, though. I wait until my eyes have adjusted to the dark, hitch up my backback, head inside, careful about the sound of my boots.

The light is on, down in the cellar. I stand at the top of the stairs and crouch down to try and get a look down there. Hey, Deke, I say. Not too loudly. I lean in a bit and cup a hand around my mouth. Hey, Deke. Are you down there? Don’t shoot me, okay? I crouch at the top of the stairs and wait. If he’s down there, he doesn’t say anything. I head down the stairs, careful not to creak too much.

I can’t tell if the heaps of dirt and gravel have gotten bigger, down in the cellar, around the dark mouth of the tunnel. I walk up to the entrance. The dark swims around in front of my face. The dark swirls like a snowstorm. I reach my hand out into the opening, stretching out fingers, pushing into the black. I feel dizzy. My throat catches and I have to lean back and take a few deep breaths. The dark swimming around my face.

I think about Vaslav’s mustard. Lucky mustard, I say to myself. We made lucky mustard, first–snow mustard, so everything will be fine. I flick on the flashlight. The dark hisses and pushes back, spinning and swirling, back into the cracks and rough patches in the dirt tunnel walls, the craggy sides, the wooden supports. I wave the beam down the tunnel and step in.

You can see the shovel marks in the dirt walls, the flat cuts into the earth. Sometimes rocks and hairy tree roots stick out of the hard dirt. Up ahead there’s a pipe jutted out from the side, the iron flaking off in red metal scabs. The crooked ground runs up and down, covered in loose gravel and clumps of dirt – it gets really steep in places. My boots catch in little nicks and cuts. Sometimes I need to heave myself up over ridges, rocky steps that he couldn’t dig through. Sometimes I need both hands and have to set the flashlight down. The tunnel twists around, leaning in different directions to go around chunks of concrete, roots, boulders – anything that couldn’t be dug through or cut out.

The tunnel gets wider. The floor evens out. More wooden braces hold up the roof, different than the four–by–eights behind me. These are old and thick, soaked in green wood preservative. Rusty nails poking out here and there, rusty bolts. Wooden beams frame a black doorway that leads down another tunnel.

I stop and think really hard about how far I’ve walked already. I try to remember all the turns. I think about the alley up there, about walking down the alley and how many different backyards and garages there are, how many garbage cans and latched gates. I shine the flashlight around. I keep walking. Sometimes the ceiling comes down, and I have to duck my head. If I were a grown–up I’d have a hard time fitting down here. I try to imagine stabbing into the walls with a shovel, or trying to swing a pick, down here in the tight space. I walk past more side openings – they look rough, a few of them just cutting a few feet into the tunnel wall and then stopping. I have to hold my breath and run a little every time I go by one.

It’s so quiet. There isn’t anything at all to listen to. Up there you hear stuff all the time: classroom fluorescent lights, cars idling, furnaces, TVS, ringing telephones, and sometimes, way off in the distance, train whistles, going wherever it is they go. Down here it’s just quiet. Nothing to listen to. Nothing you can even try and listen to. Like up above me the whole town just blew away in a stiff wind.

The tunnel opens up again, and the floor gets flat enough that I can walk pretty quickly. I walk quite a ways, underground, in the dark. I see an old dusty lantern hanging off one of the braces, like you see in antique shops. The dirty glass all cracked and full inside with spiderwebs.

Then I hear the sound: heavy clanking, metal hammering into something, echoing down the tunnel.

I run, stumbling on the rough floor, the flashlight beam skipping back and forth in front of me, throwing dirt corners and shadows into a jumble. I can feel that damp, wet dark breathing on the back of my neck. I run and run with the old wooden braces whipping past, all sickly green and bent.

There’s a split in the tunnel and I run up the other way, through a round passage. The tunnel gets tight and heads up. I’m sure it’s going up. I pant and creep forward, following the flashlight.

A mouldy, tattered old blanket stretches across the front of the tunnel. I stop. I can hear the dark, hissing and rushing behind me. I hold my breath and push on the blanket. Push it aside and step through, wincing when the dusty, oily cloth touches me.

Red coils glow down on a concrete floor. Hot red elements glowing and lighting up the shapes in the room. An old hot– water tank stands on a square of plywood. Pink insulation peels down from wall studs. Pipes hang from the ceiling, thick with tinfoil, pinched in bands with masking tape.

And there in the middle, a metal box. Pipes coiling down around it. A pale blue pilot light flickers underneath it.

Somewhere behind me I hear the clanking sound. I let go of the old blanket and creep across the room. I creep through an open doorway.

The room is full. I run my flashlight around and everywhere shapes jump out in the light: jagged, rough things, horns and springs, antlers, yellow smudges, metal fingers. I turn around and shine the flashlight around and stinging light stabs out into my eyes. I see hooks and claws and iron bars, jagged bones and spines, wires, beaks. There’s no way out. I’m surrounded, boxed in by spikes and saws, tearing, chewing. I put my hand over the flashlight. The light squeezes out, just a red glow that spills out from between my fingers. The shapes all push back into the dark. I try to make my breathing slow down. Lucky mustard. I wait, wait for all those hooks and fingers and teeth to jump out of the dark. But they don’t. I wait, shoulder tight, eyes squeezed shut. I don’t get torn to pieces, alone in the dark.

I sit down on the concrete. I hear the clanking – I think it’s getting further away. The dark pushes in and out at the corners of the room.

I have to stay somewhere. I’m not going back into the tunnel, and I’m not going back up, so this is it, I guess. I try not to look up at the walls. If I’d waited till later to come down here, the sun would be up soon. But I didn’t, so it won’t. I take my backpack off and set it down. I turn the flashlight off. Everything turns off. I wait in the dark.