The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [122]
What a terrible amount of salt was already everywhere, even down below. The first layer of it was burnt. It stuck to your hands.
The books I found remained sealed by glue. Loose pages, scattered like parade scraps, had their text blackened. The broken parts of writing codes were everywhere, handicapped scripts, decipher sheets, etchings in the walls, the local efforts of people to say something to someone, to get a message across.
If people had lived down here in the tunnels, they hadn’t done it well, and they hadn’t done it for long.
As I burrowed south in the next months I took many trips to the top, whenever ladders appeared in the tunnel or some knotted rope hung down or light wriggled in from above, or, most of all, when the orange cabling, my true mapping device, detoured vertically, usually at a bulging splice in the line. I always followed it. I burst out into fields, butted against concrete slabs, emerged at the bottom of shallow ponds, punching through muck into the air.
Sometimes I even pierced into huts covering the apparent Jew holes of strangers.
Once I came up under a trapdoor that wouldn’t fully spring. When I stopped to listen, I heard footsteps, the awful pressure that fills the air when people mute their fear. Someone had rolled a bed over the door I crouched beneath, and when I finally squeezed through, no one was there. It was a damp house that people had left in a hurry. They were outside cowering, probably, petrified by the man who’d broken through their floor. The orange cable I’d followed into this hut divided into a network of the finest little wires, so delicate I could hardly see them. If it weren’t for the miniature cups of liquid the wires landed in—brass thimbles scattered over the floor, tendrils of wire dangling into them—I might not have known they were there. Their strategy of conduction was curious to me, but I dropped away and left that place in peace.
Sometimes the orange cable frayed into nothing in my hands. At its pinched-off stump were teeth marks, a black calligraphy of blood where someone had chewed it through. Around me would be nothing familiar. Even the trees had an animal smoothness to their limbs, or there’d be no trees, not even the barest spasms of grass, just pebbled terrain as far as I could see, stones covered by a fine misting of salt.
More and more often, when I climbed through the earth to take a reading, it was night.
I am no reader of the nighttime sky, as I have said. I find its layout obscene. If it was nighttime aboveground, if I was in some kind of featureless lowland and could not safely find shelter, I dropped into the tunnel again, made camp, and waited in the safety of the tunnel for daylight.
Camp was a woolen wall I raised from blankets. With my knife I slashed a vent, then laced a stitching of twine in the seam, so that my window was a scar in the cloth. In daylight I crept out and disguised my hole, performing the obligatory landmark checks that would allow me to find my way back without a problem.
I did surface walks in towns that may have been Dushore or Laporte, the part of New York that seems to absorb so much sunlight it’s forever shadowless wherever you look. When I walked through the grass, I’d sometimes step on something hard, panes of glass dusted with dirt, windows to shelters below, installed flush to the soil, easily hidden.
I stopped once to sweep away the grass and dirt of one such window, only to see a small, dark room, where an old man’s face looked up at me. This man did not seem afraid. He beckoned. Aren’t you lonely, too, he didn’t need to ask. But I walked on.
In Wilbert, or maybe it was North Sea, smashed radios littered the road. From their severed antennas someone had built a figure of a person, gleaming in chrome, rendered in a posture