This time Joe can distinctly tell that the passage is graded, slightly, upward. He begins to feel relief as he shuffles to keep from catching his shoes on the slope. The passageway moves upward and then levels off, then upward again for a space, then flat again. It gradually worms it way upward likes this for another half an hour until it ends in a chamber that Joe is all too glad to see. The passageway opens up into a room, perhaps twelve to fifteen feet square. But what Joe is truly glad to see, sits in the center of the far wall of the room: a portal opening to a staircase. Joe walks to the base of the stairs and hold his torch aloft, looking up. The stairs disappear into black. “Well, I guess we go up.”

“No.”

“What?”

“Let me see that map.”

“What?”

Walt holds his hand out impatiently, “You said I gave you a map. Lemme’ see it.”

Joe begins to unbuckle his belt to get at his lunchbox where he’s placed his wallet and the map and the letter. “There’s no where else to go, Walt.”

Setting the lamp on the stairs, Walt reaches out and grabs the torch from Joe’s hand. He throws it on the ground and stomps out the flame.

“What’re you doing!?”

Walt picks up the rod and walks over to one wall of the small room. Holding the rod in both hands he jams the rod into the wall. Like wet sandstone, the wall gives way. After several hits, he’s made a sizable hole in the wall. “See? There’s plenty of places to go. Now let me see the map.”

Joe, growing impatient, slides the lunch box off his belt and opens it, pulling out the map. He slaps it into Walt’s waiting hand. “Suit yourself. I’m out of here.” Joe cinches his belt and with the lunch box in hand, he begins to make his way up the stairs. Twelve stairs up he turns and looks down to where Walt is on the floor of the chamber, carefully lining the “map” up with other unwadded pieces of paper. With a blunt pencil he is tracing lines from holes in one page to holes in another, tracing out some kind of shape. “C’mon,” Joe says.

“I’ll catch up.”

“Fine.”

Joe heads up the stairs, gradually ascending into the dark, and after a moment he pauses to get the zippo out of his lunchbox. He lights it and holds it up. The stairs are carved out of the rock as well but are also lined with old planks of rotting wood. Some steps are secured with rusty iron stakes that split the wood. The small flame throws wild shaking shadows out onto the walls of the stairwell.

Come.

Joe slams the lighter shut. He turns and looks back down the stairs, maybe three flights to where he can still make out Walt’s lamp, and some movement of his companion still on the floor.

Come, Joseph. Come see something I am making.

Joe is in a room that he has never been in before, but he recognizes it’s purpose right away, from diagrams and plans he has examined before. It is an anchor room for a suspension bridge. It is the room where all the cables from the bridge are wound together and wrapped around massive steel guide wheels to hold them taut and in place. The room is a chalky white color and there are hundreds of cables coming in to the room through holds in the walls, where they twist together and wrap themselves around each other and the massive wheels. Joe is overcome with a feeling of silence and loneliness as though no one had stood in this room for ages. He looks around for exits but can see none.

Yes, Joseph. It is lonely. So lonely. So firm and necessary and trustworthy, but so lonely.

Joe closes his eyes hard and opens them again to the darkness of the stairwell. He leans over the railing again to spy on Walt, still whiling away with his notes.

Come, Joseph. You don’t need him.

Joe looks up. “I think I might.”

Walt calls up to him, “Go on, man. I’ll catch up.”

Come see what I am making, Joseph.

Joe reluctantly lights the zippo again and begins to make his way up the stairs. Another flight up the stairs abruptly turn in the opposite direction. He follows still, and perhaps four more flights up, he comes to a iron platform. He closes the lid to the zippo, extinguishing the flame with an unnerving, reverberating click, lets his eyes adjust to the darkness. He waits and listens and again can hear something like the rush of water, and then his eyes reveal to him something else: it is not completely dark on the platform. twenty paces from the end of the stairs, there is a rectangular line of low light along the floor and up and around, light tracing out another doorway. He steps towards the light and flicks the zippo to life again, only to reveal a wall.

He sets his lunchbox down, puts the zippo in his mouth, and begins feeling along the wall where the light—he thought–was coming from. Just as he is coming to the conclusion that the light was some figment of his imagination, his fingertips feel the slightest of air coming from an indistinguishable crack in the wall. He puts his ear to it and can the faint sound of rushing water again; different from the river he and Walt had crossed. This sound had a metallic component; like pipes. He pushes on the wall in several places, to no avail and finally he puts out the zippo again and waits for eyes to adjust to the darkness, revealing the eerie glowing green rectangle. Again he pushes near the seam and this time, the outlined section of the wall gives a little, turning on something like an axis in its middle. Now Joe leans into the rectangle on one side and the whole section of the wall turns, the stone scraping along the iron on the floor.

He impotently looks back to the stairs one last time but Walt’s light is, of course, gone, and though he knows there is nothing to see and nowhere else to go, he contemplates going back, telling Walt about the secret door. But after a moment he picks up his lunchbox and enters the room.

Read the whole thread: The Hunger Engine

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