The Academy (11 page)

With Penny panicking in his ear, Steel headed toward the altar, hoping he could make it to the choir room door alongside the organ. But as the hinges of the main doors cried out, echoing off the hallowed walls, Steel leaped to his right and crawled up into the choir pews. He was on the wrong side, the opposite side of the chancel from the organ—and the door to freedom. If he tried to cross the chancel there was no question he’d be spotted. He backed up on hands and knees, deciding to hide. But with his attention ahead of him, not behind, he miscalculated and bumped into the paneled wall. And as he did, he heard a click.

He glanced over his shoulder to see that one of the dark wood panels had popped open on a spring lock.

As the chapel’s heavy door clapped shut, warning him that he was about to be discovered, he pulled the mysterious panel toward him and saw inside to lines of shining metal flashing from within. It all made sense: the organ pipes occupied a large chamber facing the organ, and this door led inside to the pipes. This door had been how the upperclassmen mysteriously appeared or disappeared. This door not only accessed the pipes for maintenance and cleaning—
it led somewhere
. The discovery made him want to cheer, but instead he hurried inside and quietly pulled the door closed behind him.

There were rows and rows of silver colored pipes staggered in an ascending array and growing longer and wider with each level. Halfway up they changed to a darker color: wood, or a different metal, some as thick as his arms, and, behind them, more rows of pipes as wide as his legs. Beginning at eye height, and facing the organ, the wood panels had been replaced by screening that allowed the sound to escape. He’d never noticed the screening from inside the chapel, but the result was that he could see into the chapel; he was certain that standing in the dark pipe chamber, he would not be seen. This explained how the upperclassmen could arrive, scope out the situation, and wait for the right moment to cross the chancel and escape through the church.

Immediately in front of him, a wooden ladder leaned into the darkness. There was a narrow passageway between the wall and the first row of pipes. The pipe room stretched twenty to thirty feet overhead, and was ten to fifteen feet deep.

He heard footsteps coming toward the chancel, past Sir David and into the choir. He peered out through the screen: it was a grown-up. A man. He sat down at the organ.

Steel glanced behind him as clicks and pops filled his ear, followed by a whooshing sound: the organ mechanics had been switched on.

The man lit a small light above sheet music that blocked Steel’s view of him. Steel made the connection, then, between the man at the organ and the huge pipes behind him.

At once, it was like a bomb going off as all the pipes came alive with sound. A deafening blast of Bach exploded all around him.

He covered his ears and made his way along the narrow passageway. It turned at the end and descended through a series of steps alongside the rows of wind boxes that powered the pipes. It led to a small dark room that clattered and hissed behind the equipment that drove the pipes.

He pulled the radio from his pocket and touched a button, causing a small green screen to light up dimly. It provided just enough light for him to see that he’d guessed right: he was in a small room cluttered with dusty equipment. He stuffed the radio back into his pocket, not wanting to risk revealing himself, though he’d descended at least eight feet. No light would escape into the chapel from here.

The pipe organ was booming, leaving Steel deaf. He covered his ears again, hoping that whoever it was would stop playing. The movie would run for two hours. What if he wound up trapped here…this man used the school movie time for his practice?

He searched his memory for a possible exit. The passageway had widened briefly. In a hurry, he hadn’t paid it any attention, but he returned there now.

He discovered a wooden panel. He pushed against it. In the cacophony of the organ music he did not hear it click, but he felt it vibrate through his fingers, and the panel popped open. He aimed the radio’s green light inside.

He faced an extremely narrow stone stairway leading straight down. The steps had been hand chiseled out of the stone, and were very old. He recognized this for what it was the moment he saw it: the route the boys had taken. And he knew where it led: somehow this connected to the lavatory in Lower Three. This explained how the four boys reached the chapel unseen each night.

With the organ music screaming in his ears, Steel stepped into the stairwell and pulled the trick door shut behind him. It locked into place. He tested it once: it popped back open. Again, he pulled it shut. He could return this way if necessary—that was good to know.

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 through 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.