What choice did I have?

They knew it was me. They knew.

That portal, that vision of family, the bliss of a normal life, suddenly collapsed like a dead star. I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“I’m trying to help you,” the old man said.

I followed him to the library. He was stumbling and muttering, taking swigs from his bottle, making less and less sense as we went. I tried to stop him from drinking, but he knocked my hand away. After a while, I had to help him walk. I held him by his thin arm, and the skin moved loosely under my hand, like a cocoon about to give birth to a skeleton.

We reached the front entrance of the library, with its grand columns, but he took us around back to a door I’d never seen before. He selected a key from a crowded ring, and we entered a loading bay and went down a spiral staircase two floors below ground level.

He looked at me.

“Turn around,” he said.

I heard him perform a complicated set of maneuvers: things being pulled and replaced, something large dragging across the floor. When I turned around, I found a door where a wall had been. He used another key, and we went through the door.

So these were the steam tunnels! They weren’t at all what I’d expected: no dirt floor, no cobwebs, no blue phantoms passing in and out of the air vents. Just a long white hallway, covered in a complex angiography of pipes, wires, gauges, and dials.

“Don’t touch,” he muttered. He clinked his bottle on a pipe. “Hot.”

Humpty barreled forward with that head-down walk, swaying a bit, no noise but the occasional mumbled curse. We went several minutes in silence until he blurted out Fuck! and barreled on again.

We turned into a narrow side hall and stopped.

There were several metal panels on the wall. Humpty scrutinized them and finally tapped his finger on one.

Written on the panel, in neat print, were the small letters dm.

He grinned. His smile looked like a garage-sale xylophone.

He told me to pull off the panel. It led into a tunnel, much smaller than the one we were in. I’d have to crawl, he explained. He handed me a small penlight. The tunnel was dark, and the penlight cast a faint sphere of light that reached about a foot ahead of me. Just follow the signs and I would get there, he told me. Stay quiet. Don’t divert.

“Understand?” he snapped.

“I do.”

I started to climb in, but he stopped me. Something in his face broke a little, came into focus. For the first time, he actually looked like more than a bitter, addled old loon.

“What if I told you I was better than the things I’ve done?” he asked me. “Would you believe that?”

I thought, that’s impossible. But he looked so desperate, I just nodded.

“I saw you in the library. The night you helped your friend. I was watching.” He was trying very hard to communicate something. “I am not a bad man.”

His eyes were almost lucid.

“What have you done?” I asked him.

Humpty shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t ready to go that far.

“Just let me help you,” he said.

He urged me into the tunnel.

Humpty Dumpty watched me start the crawl. Then he replaced the panel behind me, killing the last of the light.

I crawled on my hands and knees. Every so often I would come to a branch point, and one route would have another sign like before: dm. I felt like I was moving deeper into the belly of a beast; it grew warmer and moister. Eventually I came to a split in the tunnels. To my left, I saw the familiar notation dm, this time by a seam in the brickwork. To my right, I was struck by something I hadn’t noticed anywhere else: the faintest hint of light and the softest thrum of noise, almost a pulse, coming from around the corner at the end of the tunnel. I wasn’t supposed to deviate, of course, but then again, that was the advice of a drunk lunatic. I looked back at the small letters on the brick. I could always explore here, then come back and follow my original path. I’d just have to be careful, keep track. I had my keys in my pocket. I took them out and tried scratching a brick. It left a faint mark. Fine. I made up my mind and turned away from dm toward the light.

When I came to the corner, it was another fork. I left a small mark with my key pointing me back to where I started, and I took the turn toward the light.

It was stronger at the end of the tunnel, a flickering salmon glow. The sound was slightly louder now. It was a beat, a thumping. I went toward it.

Another turn, another fork. I paused and listened. I looked back toward the other tunnels. Silence. No one. I scratched the wall. I turned and the light was brighter, a pinkish tone, the color of clouds in the last seconds of a sunset. The pulse took on an organic feel now, not exact, slightly wild, even erotic, like a beat that should come now but-wait-wait-boom-wait-boom-boom…

A strange smoke was drifting down the tunnel around me. I smelled a mix of aromas from my childhood: cinnamon, pepper, gunpowder, peach, and some others I couldn’t place-musky smells like having your nose in a warm pocket of someone’s body.

I stopped for a moment and let the smoke pass over me. I breathed it in, tried to isolate the different memories it evoked.

There was a square of light ahead of me now, a glowing box of pink-orange light through slits of a vent. I felt lighter now, as if that smoke were working its magic on the networks in my mind, slowing me down, lifting me up, placing me in a smooth, rocking pool, letting my vision shine and spread like a fan of cards. If I went all the way to the light, I would be at the end of a length of tunnel. Nowhere else to go. If someone came from behind, I would be cornered. But I hadn’t come this far for nothing. I crawled forward to the light. I pushed my face against the vent, let my eyes line up with a slit.

I was high above, looking down on a scene of odd beauty. The salmon light flickered, lit the room then poof, darkness-then a flare and sunrise again. I let my eyes roam across the scene. There was a man with a long beard moving a metal canister around, plumes of salmon smoke pouring from its holes as he traced patterns in the air. I saw people I recognized: Bernini in a high chair, his chest exposed, white hairs curling out around a yellow silk gown that was luxurious and oriental. Nigel standing rigidly in front of onlookers, naked, the musculature of his thin body defined and illuminated by the strange light. The smoke was burning my nostrils. Everything was an electric version of itself, the colors unnatural, neon, strident and explosive like the energies between people you feel but never see. The pulsing came from drums around them, men pounding and letting their bodies collapse and rise over the tuned skins. The beating grew faster. The man in the center threw his head back. There were dancers, moving naked and loose, letting their breasts swing, and behind them a device that mirrored their movements that pulsed and churned as they moved faster and looser, their heads whipping around, hair flying and sticking in clumps to their sweaty, flushed skin. The man in the center was calling out now. His beard was electric, neon green, his stare lost behind round eyeless yellow light. He held up his hands and his palms glowed red with wet electric blood. He opened his mouth and tossed his head completely back and let out a terrible noise in a merciless voice that sounded animal, made a sound like a ca ca and everyone was moving.

I tore myself away. The smoke was burning my eyes. I heard a noise down the tunnel. Fuck, I thought, fuck I should’ve paid attention. Someone was coming. I turned away from the salmon square, slid back as fast as I could on my elbows and stomach toward the end of the tunnel, back to the branch point. Whoever was coming was coming fast, getting closer, louder. The echoing of the tunnels, those drums still pounding, faster and faster, building toward some unnatural orgasm. I reached the branch point. I looked down both tunnels. Where was the person coming from? Which branch was mine? I waved the penlight around the bricks. My key mark seemed lost in the scratches and nicks on the hundred bricks around me. There it was! I heard the crawler, coming from the other tunnel. I took off on my elbows down my original path, following the key marks, turning again, the sound of the crawler advancing, but I tore forward, fueled by pure fear, following the branches until the sounds grew softer, more distant. I worked my way back until at last I found the very first key mark and across from it the letters dm written on the brick. I started back toward my original goal, the one Humpty set out for me, the end point that might save me from whatever hell those people had in store for me.