(34)

Down in the stink, the big man moved swiftly and I followed his bobbing flashlight, assuming now that the person who had saved and was leading me was none other than Flashlight Boy, though there was nothing boyish about him. He was no longer the strange young man who had leaned over the old bridge looking down on me and Ronnie and Mr. Candles. He was part of the forest and the lake and the drowned world.

The tunnel was long and we splashed through a trickle of water and then went up some steps and into a wider tunnel that turned off to the left. As we went, I saw there were other tunnels now and again. Many had been bricked over and a few of them leaked water, but the flashlight only touched on them and then moved on, so my evaluation of them wasn’t the best. The flashlight swung back and forth, but it was clear to me that he could have found his way around down there without that light.

We came to another tunnel that opened wide enough for a train to have gone through. Flashlight Boy began to move swiftly about, and then there was illumination. The light came from flashlights hanging from metal spikes in the wall and from sagging metal racks and some were tied on strings that were fastened to exposed rebars in the ceiling. He went from flashlight to flashlight, and soon the room was bright enough to perform heart surgery.

There was an old panel truck sitting in the middle of the big room, and the slats that had made up the panels in the back had collapsed. What little remained of them appeared to be held together by nothing more than the stink of the tunnel. The truck was mostly rust, and the tires were gone. It rested on corroding wheel rims.

There wasn’t a trickle of water running through the raised center of this section, but it still had a dampness to it, and the walls were coated in a velvety-green moss. Rats squeaked by us as Flashlight Boy moved about. In some of the old racks were the remains of large barrels. What was left of them were rotting staves and the rusting metal bands that had held them together.

In the light, I could see Flashlight Boy clearly. His face was dirty white with a nose that appeared to have been broken at some point and healed crooked. His cheeks, chin, and forehead had lots of scars and some fresh scratches from going through the brush. I was pretty cut up myself.

He was wearing under that black suit coat a blousy, pull-over blue shirt stuffed into too-short black pants with cloth so thin at the knees you could see his flesh. The zipper was sprung on the pants, and I could see the blue shirt through the gap there. He had on big shoes that were stuffed with cloth and paper that poked out of the sides. His teeth were not in good shape and appeared to have the same moss on them that covered the walls. He was built like a block of concrete on legs, with a head that sat almost neckless on shoulders wide as a beer truck. His hands were the size of lunch boxes with fingers. When he looked at me, he smiled his greenery, and the light from the flashlights made his eyes appear unearthly, like he was by birth an underground denizen.

Now the rats were gathering and moving toward him. They climbed on him and made a coat of themselves from shoulders to ankles. They clung and squeaked; some went into the pockets of his coat or under it to who knows where. He took one in his hand and petted it. It was an unnerving and beautiful sight simultaneously.

I prowled around in my memory for the name Mr. Candles had called him that night, and I found it.

“Winston,” I said.

He leaned forward and looked at me. It was as if he were processing and translating the word from English to some other unknown language and back to English. A noise came out of his mouth, but it wasn’t a word. It was loud. His rat coat abandoned him with an explosion of squeaks, hit the floor, and ran off into the darkness beyond our well-lit section. Winston may not have been able to speak or maybe he was out of practice, but he nodded his head. My saying his name seemed to energize him.

There were concrete shelves built out from the walls between the racks. On the shelves were hundreds of what we used to call tins. Containers for things like fruitcakes and assorted nuts. He had found them over the years, I suspected. He took one and opened it. What was in it was a foul-smelling odor and chunk of something brown. He scooped it out and poked it into his mouth and chomped it. It was food he had scavenged, and I was glad I didn’t know what it was. He held the tin toward me. I looked inside. More of the same. He grunted, and I shook my head.

Pushing the lid onto the tin, he studied me with suspicion, then leaned in close to me as if to examine my face for some sort of message. He was so close I could smell his breath, could damn near see it. It smelled like sour milk, moldy leather, and damp newspapers with just a hint of dead animal. But that was all right; the rest of him still smelled like donkey business.

He set the tin aside and opened others, showing me his treasures, which included more food, lots of flashlight batteries, pins and rubber bands, screws and marbles and all manner of gewgaws, even a scratched-up I LIKE IKE badge and some baseball cards, including a Mickey Mantle that looked as if it had at one time been pinned to bicycle spokes to make an engine sound when the wheels rolled.

Once again, he grabbed me and pulled me along and flicked on more flashlights and gave the tunnel even more light. He showed me treasures hanging from sticks and string that had been made into hangers of a sort. These were dirty, rat-chewed suits and shoes and white shirts turned yellow, men’s dress ties, all black. There was a blue robe hanging on a wire rack that was fastened into the wall. I recognized it immediately and a hot chill, like dry ice, shot through me. It was a burial robe and it had been there for a while. And now where the suits and shirts and shoes and ties came from became obvious.

Even as I put it together, Winston grabbed me again and dragged me along through a dark gap in the wall, eased in ahead of me, and turned on the flashlights there. The room was smaller than the one we had been in, and there were a lot of barrel remains and neat stacks of bones and some skeletons that were mostly held together by leathery strings of viscera and sheets of darkened flesh that looked like ancient beef jerky. One of the skeletons was wearing a rat-chewed fedora and a shirt that had become part of his flesh. A black tie with a silver tie clip was pinned to the shirt.

All those bones we had found, the fragments of burial shrouds, what he was wearing—it was clear now who had dug them up and taken them away to use for himself on some future day. And he had been at it for a long time, and most likely all these had come from a variety of cemeteries when the one up the hill was played out.

One piece of the mystery explained.