I bought the flashlight and then packed a large sandwich bag with granola and peanuts. The dream was settling in my mind, like petrochemicals along a lake bed.

It was as close to fact as historical verity could provide, that there was no hidden stone cathedral under the city. The tunnel had simply been abandoned after the funding dried up. I scanned my smartphone and even made a trip to the library to consult a prehistoric microfiche. All confirmed the official record.

I had been dipping into the nihilist aphorisms of an Austrian philosopher and some pantheistic weird tales recently after work. The mingling words must have conjured the unusually lucid pagan vision that had visited me the night before. It was three in the afternoon before I was leaving my apartment complex, my small car threading into traffic from the university neighborhood where I lived.

As I descended a hill, the houses grew shabbier until it was impossible to decide whether they were inhabited or not.

I drove through the iron bones of the train yard, onto a small, forgotten road abutting a hill. Skeletal brambles twined down the retaining wall, brushing the top of my car.

Pulling to the side of the road, I nudged my car as close to Alex's as possible. As I walked past it, I peered through its smudged glass. The unopened film rolls, the empty styrofoam coffee cups, the battered paperback lying on the passenger seat, everything formed a neglected wunderkammern, without the connective thread of Alex to give the objects meaning. Why had the police not sequestered the car? Why weren't they reading the tea leaves of dusting powder left on friction ridges, under fluorescent garage lights? All of this reinforced the unreality of Alex's disappearance. She was here, she was gone.

I stared at the tunnel entrance. The retaining wall beside it was a palimpsest of graffiti. Rusty metal doors sealed the opening. I hadn't found a way to retrieve my keys from the administrative manager. Above the metal door, a grate hung sideways, leaving a sizable opening into the darkness. I rechecked my backpack and slung it over my shoulders.

After some amateur parkours on the retaining wall, my foot found some space in the opening above the metal door. With both feet on the top of the door, I slid down the other side.  A spark of pain shot up my ankles.

In the penumbra of sun floating in from the opening, I flicked my flashlight on, and shot the cone of light down the shaft.

Stone walls were buried under esoteric graffiti, splayed across every usable inch. The ground was powdered in fine, sandy dust, atop trackless railroad ties. I began walking, my feet crunching as if under newly fallen snow.

I walked for about twenty minutes. The light from the aperture was eventually gulped down by the tunnel's darkness. I thought of the smashed drilling jumbo, of the five men clinging to it in the sea of black, like castaways on a splintering raft.  I thought of them hoarse, emaciated, pawing each other in some vestigial form of communication. Then I imagined the Master opening their new eyes, caressing them with his soft hands. I started shaking in the tunnel's stale air, as cold as the comfort that the lighted world was so close. How incongruous that now seemed.

I passed the first station platform. The subterranean stillness and pockmarked colonnade brought to mind one of Alex's favorite ruins, Herculaneum. One night over tapas and too many glasses of bourbon, she had described the summer trip she had taken to the port town. She had made the point that the ruins of antiquity collapse the barrier of time. This, she said, was the largest part of their attraction on viewers. Almost beside the point was architectural style.  In the villas' walls, she said that it was as if the stone had just been touched by the masons' hands. While I searched the raised platform, I wondered if the opposite wasn't true. Maybe once something human stopped participating in humanity, it's history flattened into a void. These ruins seemed to me indistinguishable from any other ruins. This subway was a stone edifice that operated outside of the movement of the planet, of the sun rising and falling.

Few artists had ventured much deeper, to leave their coded messages. I kept padding down the tunnel's indistinguishable segments of
gray gullet.

Crunch crunch crunch. My feet grinding down on the powder. I paused to fish some granola out of my backpack. Crunch. I stopped chewing mid-bite to walk a few more feet. Then I stopped again. Farther into the tunnel, outside of the mag light's faded moon of illumination, I heard another footfall. The sound was spaced too distantly from my own to be an echo. An icy parasite hugged my spine. I forced my legs to keep moving. I tried some secular meditation. But I could only recall that Austrian nihilist's admonishments on existence.  He probably wasn't looking after my best interests right now.

Maybe an hour later, I thought I had to be nearing the end of the track, although it stretched far past the light's thin gruel. I finished searching the last station platform. As I slipped back onto the track, my light settled on something slightly farther ahead, painted  on the tunnel's right wall.

As I approached, I stopped to puzzle over it. Two horizontal lines were connected on either side by two parallel ones. In the middle, a
crucifix pointing upward was mirrored by a crucifix pointing downward. I hadn't seen any other graffiti for a long while. This didn't share the loopy carelessness of the writing I'd seen near the opening, either. It was scrawled with a primitive formalism, each line carefully drawn in deep, glistening smudges.

I touched one of the lines. It was wet, and warm. There was an unsettling freshness to it. I smelled my finger and grimaced. My finger carried the offal reek of whatever it was. It smelled most similar to animal excrement, but somehow deeper, like it had been on the inside of something until very recently. Just then, unmistakable in the darkness ahead, a cloying
giggle. I stepped away from the symbol. I turned my head and was sure my light had caught on a lock of black hair, bouncing further into the darkness.

"Alex!" My voice refracted down the tube. By breaking the silence, I felt through my fear, that I had just sinned. This was a species of shame that hadn't surfaced since childhood church confessions.

I twisted the light back to the symbol, and it struck me what I was looking at. It was like the entire edifice was a speared pig, and right in front of me, focusing on me, was its angry, squinting, bloodshot eye.

Another giggle from the darkness, and this time trailed by, what could only be Alex's voice. This wasn't the Alex that eagerly explained her next project, or the Alex that gave me a perfunctory kiss in the morning, before padding across my living room to the kitchenette for coffee. This was the cloying dream-Alex.

"Greg, follow me. It's so warm down here, it's like I'm floating in a seeeeaaaa of milk."

"Ok, o-ok. Please don't move, I'm coming bbaby". There was that overprotective warble,
forcing its way out, even now. I wanted so badly to see her again.

Now her voice was sober, alert, hurting. She was crying.

"Greg, please help me. My ankle's trapped. God, how long have I been here? I'm so hungry. I need to call my parents. "

I ran through the last stretch of darkness, to where the tunnel ended.

"Oh God, Jesus Christ what is this now? Where are you baby?"

The track ended in a convex nub of
rubble. No Alex, but I could still hear her.

"Pleeasse Greg. I'm in here. It's so dark and I'm freezing. I missed you so much." Hearing her sobs from behind the wall was drawing tears from my own eyes.

"Greg, I've been so stupid. I know you want to marry me. I want it too. I want us to hold our baby in the hospital."

Her muffled, racking cries met mine in the stone.

My flashlight's beam danced madly along the surface of rock. While I rasped I gave up all pretense of dignity and started moaning. I couldn't cry anymore. I had to keep a level head. Alex was counting on that, we both were. I felt hot anger boiling up in me, stoppered by my impotence.

My hands clambered along the rough stone, searching for any kind of give. Behind me, I heard the pad of heavy boots in the powder. An ambient hum filled the air, like an ancient turbine creaking to life. I redoubled my efforts with the stone. Finally, down on the far right, I loosened and pulled at some of the rubble until it gave way. Behind me, the sounds of crunching boots and creaking wheels were
getting closer.

oh god ohgod ogodogodogod.....

I pulled a small pocket of rock apart, an area only marginally larger than the circumference of my body. To my surprise warm air came flooding out.

The buzz  behind me was deafening now. I flung off my backpack. Like frightened game I dove into the burrow and scrabbled forward. In my haste I lost my flashlight. I was an animal now and didn't care. Behind me I heard fingers scraping into the entrance of the burrow.

My arms were all but pinned to my side, and I was without enough latitude to reach the smartphone in my pocket. I wormed forward blindly, further into the earth. Small cuts and abrasions formed on my face, and I could already feel through my coat,
the bruises that I would have on my chest and shoulders. The entire time the oddly pleasant current of warm air ruffled my sweaty, matted hair.

As I crawled deeper, inch by pained inch, I realized that the stone floor was now touching the tip my nose. My burrow was getting smaller. The surrounding stone had all but tied my hands to my body when I started to scream.

"Staywhereyouare Alex I'M COOMMINGG!"

I heard one more of her cries, but it sounded more distant now. Then there was just my choked, dusty breath. Tears dripped down my nose onto the rough floor. I gagged on the thick ropes of spittle that I was coughing out of my mouth. The only way I could move was to dig my toes into the dusty rock, and push my whole body forward by my calves.

I was going to die here, and if I was found at all, I wouldn't be found until I was a skeleton stuffed into a basket of earth. Maybe when they dug me up, this city would be a new Herculaneum, and the archaeologists  that examined what was left of me would check my teeth for dents. They could try to guess what my diet primarily consisted of.

The rope of muscle that ran up my calves into my back gave one last push, the burrow squeezing my face a little tighter. I was birthed into an open space, just far enough to free my hands and drag my body forward. I tumbled out like a calf, and as I stood on aching legs to reach my smart phone, my other hand rested
on something......metal.

Before I shined the watery light of my smartphone onto it, I already knew what it was.

The drilling jumbo's abdomen was crushed under the wall of stone. Its proboscises pointed blindly into the void. Festooned around it like Christmas decorations were crumbling bones. Some retained the shape of their owners, others were crumpled into dirty piles.

I instinctively recoiled. The thin light couldn't find the walls, but I could sense the immense space surrounding me. Then I heard the giggling again.

"I'll get us out of here Alex, there's an opening!" I shined the light into the space I'd emerged from. Where was it?

"Wh-wh-what? It was right here. Alex, it was right heeeere! Hold on baby. It-it's right here. I know it is. Just give, give me a second. Ok?Alex?"

Just my voice bouncing off of invisible walls. The burrow was gone, and my mind refused to accept this. The sealed stone seemed like a refutation of sanity.

I checked my phone's screen, fully expecting the "No signal" that met me. I wasn't expecting it to start buzzing in the darkness.

The number listed was "000-000-0000". I raised the phone to my ear.

"H-h-helllllo?" The voices hissed in a deaf tongue. The voices from my dream. Like a loaded spring my arm shot the phone to the ground. I heard a sharp crack, and it's light was doused by total darkness.

A tiny speck against a backdrop of black pinged across the dark field of my vision. It was a camera flash. Alex. Dust plugged my throat. Why couldn't I bring myself to scream for her?

Part of me wanted to hold her again, but I wanted the Alex I had last seen at the campus bar, the Alex that had functional, impersonal sex, but found subtle ways to make you feel it was tailored just for you. I didn't want this Alex, the Alex that was slowly making her way in camera flashes across the darkness, not speaking, moving forward as patiently as a bride up the church aisle. I didn't want to feel those two points of soft red ruin for eyes. I didn't want to kiss her sucker fish mouth.

I  scrabbled back to find the jumbo and dove under its wheels. The camera flash pinged her approach. Her voice was calling out.

"Play downshhhtairsh eyesh with me. He promished meee you'd play downstairsh eyesh with meeee."

I bit my fist as I heard feet wander by the jumbo's wheels.

The flashes stopped shortly after she walked by. She kept calling for me until her voice faded away. How long ago was that? I'm still pressed here like a beetle to the earth. Are my teeth getting loose? Do you hear flies?
Who am I talking to? It doesn't matter. I laugh all day sometimes. Here I am, in Herculaneum's bathhouse. Hee hehehehe hee. Can you hear me laughing down here? I give the Master new names every day. I hope he'll ride me soon. I don't want to play downstairs eyes, but sometimes I do. I want to know what day it is. I'm tired of talking to nobody, hehehehheheee, goodnight friends. I'll see you soon my friends. We'll all

sing with grateful hearts soon.