Catacombs of Terror! by Stanley Donwood Page A

doing. It wasn’t smart, and it wasn’t clever.
    We stopped at the edges of the tarpaulin. I told Kafka where the CCTV cameras were. I didn’t tell him about my inkling that there were maybe infrared cameras down in the hole. I guessed that he knew enough already. I told him to be very, very quiet. We made our way, zigzag fashion, to the hole. Kafka was impressed. But not favourably.
    â€œThat’s a . . . that is a very deep hole. We’re going down—there?” he said quietly.
    I murmured a yes. He turned to look at me, to give me some kind of hard stare or something, but it was too dark for anything like that to work. So I just made a gesture. My gesture said
let’s go
.
    I went first. I climbed down about ten rungs and waited for Kafka. He was a couple of minutes getting his courage together, or deciding whether or not to run away. I waited some more. Then I saw his legs coming down. I carried on. When I thought we were about fifteen feet down I clicked my flashlight on. The light was blinding at first. Then I could see. But I couldn’t see much. The sides of the hole were wet. I could see pebbles lodged in the clay. I aimed the light downwards. The air in the hole was misty. I thought that I could just about see the bottom, but it was pretty much lost in the mist, which glowed yellowish in the glare. And I could smell that strange sulphurous odour again. Colin whispered down to me, “What’s that horrible smell?”
    â€œDon’t know. It was the same last night though. It’s sulphur or something. Come on. We’re only about a quarter of the way down.” I turned the light off.
    The descent seemed to take an eternity. I got that feeling again, that there was nothing else in the universe than this hole, an endless tube through empty space. With two cold, wet humans in it. Both of them wishing they were somewhere—anywhere—else. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that the hole got narrower as we went down. It was about eight feet in diameter at the top, but if it got too narrow there wouldn’t be enough room for both of us to stand at the bottom. It was going to be pretty damn cosy as it was. The smell was getting stronger, but then it seemed to fade. It was maybe coming up from the bottom of the hole in waves. The climb went on and on. My mind began to wander. Not surprising, I guess. I started to think about death. Death. You start to die the moment you’re born. The whole of life is a series of close calls with death. Yeah, well. Whatever.
    Finally I reached the bottom. There was more room than I expected. Kafka was just behind me. I stepped away from the ladder. I tried to speak as quietly as I possibly could.
    â€œI’m going to turn the flashlight on. Close your eyes.” I pushed the switch. The light was searing, but I forced my eyes to get used to it. Fuck. Where in hell were we? I had been right about the flagstones and the three tunnels. They stretched off into impenetrable darkness like three hungry mouths. But I’d been way wrong about there not being much space down here. We were in a kind of dome. Like we were in a bell jar with an impossibly long neck, which was the hole we’d climbed down. Or a gigantic chimney. I was sure it hadn’t been like this the night before. I was certain. I remembered how I’d traced my hands around the walls, just by turning around pretty much on the spot. Now we were standing in a circular chamber maybe twenty feet in diameter. It was as if the beam from my flashlight had made the walls shrink away, or . . . it was crazy. Maybe we’d come down a different hole? Perhaps there were more than one, and I’d not noticed the night before? Or maybe KHS had dug out the base of the hole since last night?
    Even as I was thinking up these increasingly desperate explanations I knew they were bullshit. Something weird was going on. Possibly it needed a better word than