The Academy Read online

  Penny was trying to talk to him, but with the metal of the pipes and density of the stone stairway leading lower, the radio went to static. Steel pulled the earphone out but kept the radio in hand, its tiny screen illuminating the way in an eerie, haunting, green light. Down, down, down. It smelled of mold and metal and left a bitter taste in his throat. He grew cooler with every step. The nape of his neck tingled. It seemed that just beneath the chapel, he was heading into hell, and he wondered at the irony of that.

  This was, after all, what he’d wanted so desperately to find. But now that he’d found it, he had to wonder what had driven him to look for it in the first place. He thought of Kaileigh sitting in the movie with the empty chair beside her, and wished she were here with him. He considered turning around, but the farther he got from that organ music, the better; it was loud enough to turn his brain to tapioca.

  The stairway curved right. Suddenly the air grew warmer and dryer. Holding the radio out as a lantern, Steel stepped onto a level concrete floor.

  There was a light switch to his right.

  Did he dare?

  He switched it on and gasped.

  He stood in a narrow five-foot-high tunnel with lights every thirty feet. From the ceiling hung dozens of pipes from iron supports. A hundred wires of all thicknesses and colors ran like sagging bunting along the near wall. He recognized some: the grays were phone lines, the blues, Ethernet. The tunnel stretched out impossibly long before him—a hundred yards or more.

  Toward the administration building.

  The dorms.

  It suddenly made sense to him: the campus didn’t have a single power or phone pole. All the utilities ran underground, including water, gas, and sewer.

  He’d entered a network of underground utility tunnels.

  He glanced behind him, up the narrow stone staircase he’d descended from, where the music continued to blare. Then he looked ahead. Would there be another light switch—some way to turn them off at the other end? Where did the tunnel lead?

  He had no choice but to find out.

  He ducked his head, stuffed the radio away, and made off down the longest tunnel he’d ever seen.

  Nearly a hundred yards into the tunnel, Steel encountered a metal ladder mounted to the concrete wall. He looked up and saw a hatch door. He was tempted to climb the ladder, tempted to try to open the hatch, but he’d taken precisely forty-three paces—he’d been counting—and if his sense of direction and mental math were correct, it all combined to place him somewhere under the common room.

  Just past the ladder, the tunnel reached an intersection. The continuation of the tunnel he now occupied led in the general direction of the administration building; the tunnel to the right probably aimed more toward the school library.

  At the base of the ladder he saw a triple light switch. He tried each switch and ended up toggling the lights in the three sections of tunnel. He turned off the lights behind him and left on those that lit the way to the administration building and the school auditorium.

  He began to feel the vibrations from the Harry Potter sound track as he continued. He reached yet another ladder and climbed it out of curiosity. It led to a hole in a floor with a low metal handrail. Pipes and wires ran from the tunnel into the space. He pulled himself up and shined the radio’s green light. It was a utility room, most likely in the basement of the administration building, quite large and containing tanks and vented metal boxes, electric panels and telephone punchboards. Seeing the wires reminded him of Penny, and he stuffed the earpiece back in.

  “Penny?” he whispered, pushing TALK.

  “Sweet Jesus! I thought you’d died! Whoever that teacher is, he’s still playing the organ. You can’t go back out. Hey…why am I not hearing the music?”

  “Because I’m in the basement of the admin building. There are tunnels connecting all the buildings on campus. It’s how the boys from my dorm made it over here after hours without being seen. It’s wickedly cool. I’ve come all the way from the chapel to here underground.”

  Static.

  “Tunnels?” Penny said, incredulous.

  “I’ll bet the video cables run down here. Everything else does. Ethernet, phone, all kinds of pipes.”

  “I gotta see this.”

  “Not now. I’m going upstairs, to the movie. Meet me afterward.”

  “No way. It’s got to be now. The whole school’s at the movie. I’ve got the track camera. I could plant it down there in the tunnels.”

  Although he had no idea what a track camera was, Steel liked the idea. A hidden camera could prove that the upperclassmen were sneaking out and using the tunnels.

  “Okay. Bring the camera. And bring a flashlight. But we’ve got to be quick. I’ve got to make it to at least half the movie.”

  For the five minutes it took Penny to reach the door on the basement level of the theater, Steel took a look around at all the equipment, committing it to memory. It was not only a central distribution point for hot water—the size of the boilers suggested it supplied the dorms and/or perhaps the steam heat to the school buildings—but it also housed two large gray panel boxes into which dozens of phone wires disappeared—one white, one gray—and another black box on the wall with blue Ethernet wires coming out in fat bundles held together with white plastic ties. If the administration building was the brains of the campus, this room was the heart.

  Two light knocks on the door signaled Steel to open it, and Penny was inside. It was hard for Steel to believe Penny was a grade above him, given how short he was. The boy set down a tote bag and dug around inside.

  “This camera is used at track meets. A laser is bounced off a reflector,” he said, removing the first of several parts involved, “and when the beam is broken, it stops the official clock and signals the camera”—he held out a photo—“allowing for the proverbial photo finish. For us…if I set up the laser in one of these tunnels, the camera will capture their faces, and you’ll have proof.”

  “But even with the lights on, it’s not exactly blinding down here.”

  Steel moved to the hole in the wall, turned around, and backed through it into the dark, the toes of his shoes finding the top rung of the ladder. A moment later he popped on the lights, and Penny, his head through the opening, gasped at the sight.

  “Oh, man…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Steel said.

  “This is freakin’ incredible.”

  “The way it looks, the tunnels connect all the buildings. This one Ts down there at the dining hall, with a tunnel that runs between the chapel and the library. We don’t know which of these leads to the dorms, so the best place for the camera is after the T.”

  “But it’s gotta be this tunnel,” Penny said, complaining. He pointed up the tunnel, which did, in fact, point toward the dorms.

  “I still think the chapel tunnel is where to put the camera. What if there are guys entering from the common room?”

  “Good point,” Penny said.

  Steel saw on Penny’s face what was really going on: he was afraid. His realm of existence was the lab; the idea of “field work” terrified him. Steel’s father had told him how the FBI and CIA divided their ranks between two equally important groups: the analysts and the operatives. He figured Penny for more of an analyst. It made him miss Kaileigh all the more. Like Steel, she possessed the qualities of both.

  “You want me to do this alone?” Steel asked.

  “Yeah, kind of.” Penny had brought a penlight along with him. He handed it to Steel.

  “Okay. I’ll take the tunnel. But you’ve got to show me how to set it up, and you’ve got to stand guard. If anyone comes into the tunnels, they’ll expect them to be dark. They’ll turn on the lights, and I’ll see that—hopefully before they see me. But if they don’t turn on the lights, if they come down the tunnel with flashlights, or in the dark or something, I won’t see them coming. So you’re going to hide over there in the corner. You’ll have a view of the tunnel. If someone comes th
rough this room or down the tunnel, then you’ve got to go down the ladder and flash the lights. Flash them just once so you won’t be seen, and then go back up the ladder and straight out the door, quiet as a mouse. Without that warning from you, I’m toast.”

  “But no one’s going to come. Right?”

  “Of course no one’s going to come. Everyone’s watching the movie.”

  “Which is the perfect time to use the tunnels,” Penny said. “You’re not saying it, but that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “It crossed my mind. We’re down here, after all, aren’t we?”

  “Why don’t I like the sound of that?”

  Steel switched on the flashlight. “Get into your corner, and don’t mess this up, Penny. You got that?”

  Penny nodded sheepishly.

  Heading off down the tunnel, Steel did not have a good feeling about this.

  Steel soon reached the T. He turned left toward the chapel. A few yards beyond the ladder rungs that led up to the common room he set about installing the camera and the reflector that triggered it. Fixing the reflector to something solid, and adjusting its surface to bounce the invisible laser light back perfectly, took far longer than Penny had suggested. Steel was approaching a full sweat when the lights flashed on and off in the connecting hallway.

  “What was that?” a low voice said, speaking in a harsh, nervous tone.

  “Something’s up with the electricity down here,” a second voice answered. “Keep moving.”

  Steel had just, that very moment, managed to get the reflector into place, and so took an extra few seconds to stick it firmly where it belonged rather than start the whole process over again. With the camera now placed and ready, Steel judged that he no longer had enough time to make it to the common room ladder.

  He could turn and run toward the chapel, but it was a long hallway—he would likely be both heard and seen. Reversing direction was out of the question as well: he would run into them. He spun once in a full circle, feeling as if the walls were moving in on him.

  And then he looked up.

  The four boys, all of them big, turned left, following the network of tunnels toward the chapel. The overhead lights flashing on and off had made them uneasy, and they moved quickly, their way lit by the pale beam of a flashlight held by the boy in the lead. He had a thick body and surprisingly big hands. His watchband was shiny metal. All four wore leather boat shoes, blue jeans, and school blazers.

  They walked with their heads bent to avoid striking the tangle of pipes and wires suspended both from the tunnel ceiling and along the walls. They were almost certainly upperclassmen.

  Had any one of them looked up a few yards past the iron-rung ladder to the common room, they would have seen a boy lying prone, tucked between the pipes and the ceiling, his face mushed down by two pipes, his mouth spread open, making his nose look something like a beak. His mouth being forced open in this way, he’d begun to drool; his tongue licked constantly at his lips, trying to catch a big glob of spit from falling. At last, the task proved impossible. A blob of clear saliva, roughly the size of a nickel, fell from the boy’s lip like a bomb, catching the last of the four boys below, squarely in the hair.

  The boy made it several paces past the location where Steel was suspended before the spit slipped from his hair, sliding down onto the back of his neck. He slapped at it and then groaned, disgusted as he pulled his hand away.

  “Gross! The pipes are leaking.” He flashed a look over his left shoulder and up toward the pipes. In the shifting shadows that resulted from the dim flashlight in the lead, the trailing boy failed to distinguish the soles of two shoes bent and wedged amid the pipes.

  “Wait up,” he said, scrambling nervously to catch his buddies.

  * * *

  Steel exhaled for the first time in what felt like minutes. He didn’t dare move—not until the upperclassmen were long gone. He would lie atop the hot pipes as long as necessary, because getting down was not going to be easy or quiet.

  He had the confirmation he’d come for. He hoped the camera had caught what he’d just seen. There was no way the headmaster wouldn’t believe him now. He felt sure one of the boys was Victor DesConte—he was up to something, roaming the school tunnels at all hours, avoiding being seen, using the chapel to—

  Why? Steel wondered. He had no idea what it was he was accusing the older boys of, beyond sneaking around—a crime for which he was now guilty.

  When it sounded safe, he lowered his head down through the pipes and saw that he was alone in an empty tunnel. He swung a leg down and dropped. Rather than head in the direction of safety—either up the ladder into the common room, or down the adjoining tunnel toward the administration building—he started creeping toward the chapel, his back against the cool concrete wall. He told himself that if he heard anything he’d climb back up onto the top of the pipes, though an inner voice wondered if he’d have time for that. In all likelihood he’d be caught, a possibility that slowed him down.

  He reached the rebar ladder leading up into the chapel, and hesitated. Up ahead he could make out a square hole in the roof of the tunnel. He checked it out: a rock wall shaft, like he was standing at the bottom of an old well, leading fifteen feet straight up. And now it made sense: this was the marble base of Sir David! At some point, years before, there must have been a secret access into the tunnels or a crypt by moving Sir David. The more modern concrete tunnels had been built around it, the statue cemented into place.

  He returned and climbed the rebar ladder slowly, his ears pricked for the slightest of sounds.

  Voices. Muffled and at a distance, but clearly conversational. Several people were talking.

  He stepped through to the tightly packed space housing the towering organ pipes and walked carefully toward the fabric screening. He peered into the chancel.

  The four upperclassmen stood alongside the organ. DesConte was speaking, addressing whoever was sitting behind the organ, the player’s face still blocked by sheet music. Steel, eager to identify the player, moved slightly to his right, leading the way in the dark by carefully sliding his feet ahead. By doing so, he accidentally triggered a valve box that delivered forced air into one of the tall pipes. The resulting note, the lowest E-flat, erupted like a foghorn, shaking the floor beneath him.

  He got his wish: Mr. Randolph’s head shot out from behind the sheet music.

  “That wasn’t my doing,” Randolph said.

  The four boys all looked over toward the pipe room.

  Steel froze.

  But with the pipe room dark, and the screen acting as a one-way window, he could see them, but they could not see him.

  “Well? Have a look!” Randolph said.

  Steel turned. He knew the way out of the small room, remembering the route. But he could also calculate DesConte’s speed. The upperclassman was going to come through the door to the pipe room at the same moment Steel would make the turn toward the ladder leading down into the tunnel. He was certain to be spotted.

  Instead of running away, he stepped deeper into the dark room and felt his way around a row of towering pipes. The pipes ascended in rows mounted to small wooden platforms. Between each row of pipes was a narrow gap, but wide enough to allow a man to reach inside to make repairs. Wide enough for Steel to crawl inside. He pulled himself into the space, turned sideways, and, carefully avoiding the valve boxes, lay down. It was pitch dark in the space; a person would have to shine a flashlight to see him.

  He heard DesConte burst through the hidden door, and caught a faint glimpse of the boy’s head as he made straight for the tunnels. The other three were fast on his heels. They rumbled down the ladder and flicked on the lights. Strange shadows, like tall black candles, filled the room. It looked alternately like a shark’s mouth and prison bars. With the boys off searching the tunnel, the only way to explain the sound of feet approaching was that Randolph had entered the pipe room himself. Then, through the narrow slits between pipes, Steel saw Randolph�
��s profile silhouetted against the screen. The man bent over. The E-flat sounded again, sounded loudly, Steel’s ear nearly pressing against the giant pipe. Steel thought his teeth might rattle out of his head. Randolph stood and patrolled down the line of pipes, heading for the end of the row. Was he going to check between the rows? Had he figured out where Steel was hiding? Steel had felt so confident that it would be nearly impossible to see him where he was, but suddenly he had no desire to test his theory.

  He flattened himself further—stretched his arms over his head to make himself long and narrow. And he watched as Randolph did exactly as Steel had feared: came around the first row of pipes and glanced down through the space that separated one pipe from the next. For a brief second or two, Randolph and Steel were looking directly at each other. Randolph manually tripped a valve, and a low pipe sounded.

  “Was that you?” It was DesConte speaking, having returned from the tunnel.

  “Yes,” Randolph said, turning away from the end of the row. He had not given his eyes time to adjust. “Testing the box. Seems fine.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Someone was in here.”

  “You think?”

  “I know,” Randolph said. “Someone followed you.”

  “Not possible.”

  “At this school? Anything is possible. Okay…we’re going to cancel tonight. Get back down those tunnels and return to the movie before it ends. Who knows who that might have been?”

  “Maybe your foot hit a pedal,” DesConte proposed. “I mean, it could have happened.”

  “They are my feet, Mr. DesConte. I think I know where they were and what they were doing, and what is and is not possible.”

  Steel heard the other three join DesConte. None spoke. Only DesConte.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Into the tunnels. Keep an eye out for anyone hiding, though I would bet we’ve lost whoever it was. Exit at the common room. Head to the auditorium for the end of the movie. I want you seen by other kids when the movie lets out. You understand?”