Benjamin Weiss and the Divine Prophecy, page 21
What Ben wanted more than anything was for someone to tell him everything was going to be all right. He wanted someone like his dad or Rabbi Greenblatt to come and get him and Becky out of there. What a farce it was to think a little ceremony could make a boy into a man. He felt like an idiot for having thought so.
Strong Voice was nothing like his dad or the rabbi, but Ben wanted him to be. He wanted badly to believe he could surrender to the man and have all the responsibility safely lifted from his narrow shoulders. Every adult he had known in his whole life had been there to help him, and he found it hard to believe that when it came down to it this man would be any different.
Then Ben remembered the rough hand smothering his face with the damp, sweet-smelling cloth. He thought of all the children—including Becky!—who had gone missing and never been seen again. And he visualized a young Franz Gunther towering above it all in his crisp, black uniform as he sent thousands and thousands of families to the gas chambers.
As if he had suddenly awakened, Ben jerked into motion and scrambled out of the chair and down the ladder. He had lulled himself into believing these people were like any others, while the truth was they were as different as possible. They were evil. He could never let himself forget that.
He darted down the steep tunnel, and as the darkness engulfed him, he began once again using his left shoulder and elbow to guide himself along the concrete wall. He had to get away fast. They were coming.
Shuffling forward as quickly as he dared, he thought of something else. Strong Voice had said he would get him home to his mother. Rabbi Greenblatt had been right. These people knew exactly who he was, otherwise he would have said he’d get him home to his parents.
It had all been orchestrated. Shane and his goons had guided him through every turn and delivered him right into Strong Voice’s hairy arms. They had to have been working for the Gunthers. Ben’s opinion of Shane’s crowd had never been high, but the realization that they, his classmates, were vicious enough to help him get murdered shocked him. He wondered how those kids, who had grown up in the same neighborhood, could have turned out so different. What had he done to make them hate him so much?
As he made his way down the steady slope, he felt the air thicken with moisture. His dehydrated body welcomed it when he breathed. This was new. He hadn’t smelled this water on the way up.
He heard a faint voice say something too low to hear, and then he heard, “Don’t worry, kid. We’re almost there!”
It was Strong Voice and Wheedling Voice coming to get him. Their voices got louder, and he panicked for a moment. But then he realized they were behind him. How did they get behind him?
It all clicked for him then. He had used the left wall as his guide both on the way up and on the way down, which meant that when he started back down, he used the wall that had been on his right on the way up. And that meant that during his descent he could have, without even noticing, turned into a different tunnel, one diverging from the one in which he had ascended. That must have been what happened. That would explain the smell of water.
The men’s voices grew louder, and Ben froze, not wanting to give himself away. He looked back, and far behind him he saw the flicker of a flashlight beam. Then the voices slowly diminished. They must have passed the point where the tunnels diverged. He wasn’t safe, though. As soon as they made it to the extraction point and saw he wasn’t there, they would know where he had gone. They probably knew these tunnels as well as he knew the streets of the neighborhood. He had to hurry.
He broke into a slow jog, once again keeping his left hand to the wall to guide himself. When it started to hurt again, he put both hands in front of him and staggered over to the wall to his right, resuming his flight.
The rataplan of his shoes as he loped down the tunnel betrayed him, but he had no other option. He had to keep moving.
He heard a noise up ahead and froze. Had they somehow looped around and gotten ahead of him? He heard it again: a squeak. Then he heard more of them. Rats. It was rats. He was sure of it.
Ben’s innards curdled in fear and disgust, but he couldn’t stay where he was. He set off again, grateful now for the noise he was making, hoping it would frighten the rats away from him, and it must have worked. Though he could hear the horrible rodents around him now (and sometimes feel them), he never stepped on one of them. Of course, it could have meant they could see him.
Lifting his feet high with every step, he forged ahead, willing himself to think of them as cute, fluffy gerbils as he galloped among them into the blackness. In his mind, he was diving through a river of thousands of them. The squeaks and squeals seemed to come from all around him. And then, as he was congratulating himself for his bravery, he slammed headlong into a concrete wall.
The impact knocked him onto his back, and in the haze of semi-consciousness, he felt the rats swarm over him with hundreds of scurrying little feet. He fought his way through the murk in his stunned brain and forced himself to stand, and as he stood, he could feel at least a dozen of the repulsive beasts clinging to him. One was inside his shirt, slithering with its sleek belly across the bare skin of his lower back. Another clutched his hair and swung from it with its tail dangling over his forehead.
In an instant panic, Ben batted the bodies off him. He ripped the one out of his hair, flinging it against a wall, and he untucked his shirt and danced spastically till the other one fell to the ground. He wanted to run away but didn’t know which way to go. He didn’t even know which way he had come.
Groping blindly, Ben found two ways he could go, each at a ninety-degree angle from the other. The trouble was one of them led straight back to the two men trying to kill him, and he didn’t know which one. To keep the rats off him, he thrashed around while he was trying to decide what to do, and as he did, his right foot splashed into a puddle.
He stopped. He had smelled water earlier, but there hadn’t actually been any. It had to have come from the new direction. He followed the tunnel ahead and found, along its left side, a shallow stream.
He could feel the water as it hit his shoe. It was coming from up ahead somewhere. He wondered where. A broken pipe? A spring?
He froze when he saw a brief flash of weak light play across the corner he had just turned. It came again, this time stronger. They were coming.
Ben slipped over to the right side of the tunnel to avoid splashing the water and started to jog again. From behind him, he heard Strong Voice yell, “We can hear you, Benjamin! Wait for us so we can help you!”
He sped up.
There weren’t any rats here, but with every stride he was afraid he was going to splatter into another wall, so he kept his left arm extended in front of him while his right hand slid along the wall to his side to help him keep his bearings. As he panted, he felt a tear running down the side of his cheek and wiped it away.
The tunnel took a long, slow turn to the left, gradually ascending all the way. Light flashed behind him again, and this time it was closer. Only the curve of the tunnel kept him safely in darkness. He sped up, and soon he heard a strange rushing sound coming from up ahead.
Behind him, he heard pattering feet and the fragments of words. Soon they were going to catch him. He had to find some place to hide.
Bright lights came on all around him, and he stopped. He was in another one of those junction chambers where several tunnels met. This time there were nine, but that wasn’t what got Ben’s attention.
To his left he found the source of the water streaming down the tunnel. Roaring from fifteen feet above his head all the way to a floor of loose stones was a waterfall at least ten feet wide. The water came down in a burbling cascade that obscured whatever lay behind it, and most of the water seemed to crash through the spaces between the stones back into the earth.
Ben heard a scrape and turned to look. Behind him, on the left wall of the tunnel, a bobbing, elongating circle of light lurched toward him—the flashlight. Any second now they would come around the corner and see him.
His right cheek throbbed from hitting the wall. He was tired and weak from hunger and thirst and knew he couldn’t outrun them. They were grown men who had a flashlight and knew where they were going. What could he do?
He turned back, his eyes darting around the room for a hiding place, and he quickly spotted a sliver of space between the waterfall and the wall behind it. For the first time in his life, he was thankful for being skinny.
He put his back to the wall and shimmied behind the torrent of falling water, managing to avoid getting anything wet except for his shoes and the bottom few inches of his jeans. Then, suddenly, the wall wasn’t there anymore, and he fell backward.
Tumbling onto his back, he looked around. The light coming through the waterfall flickered and danced, and he could see he was in a small cave, probably created by erosion. He stood, and as he began to brush the damp earth off his backside, Wheedling Voice, very close, shouted, “Benjamin! Let us help you! Please! We just want to get you back to your family! The police found your sister last night! Don’t you want to go back home now?”
The claim that Becky had been found had Ben wanting to leap through the waterfall and give himself up. He wanted so badly for it to be true, for her to be safe at home with Mom, that he could feel himself accepting it despite what he knew. He opened his mouth to announce his presence, but just before he made a sound, Strong Voice spoke up, saying, “Don’t bother, Ty. This kid’s too smart to fall for it. We’ll find him eventually. The only question now is whether we find him dead or alive.” He laughed. “But I guess that doesn’t matter too much, does it? Even if he is alive, he won’t be for too long.”
Through an acoustical quirk, their words arrived clearly to Ben despite the roar of the water. The two men argued for a minute about the quickest way to find him, and he stood trembling only a few feet away.
Even through the waterfall, he could make out their shapes fairly well. Strong Voice was tall and very thin, with a long, thin face, all of which was in keeping with what Ben had seen of him on the monitor at the extraction point. Wheedling Voice, on the other hand, looked like a human tank, with wide shoulders, a big gut, and a large, blocky head.
Ben was grateful for the darkness that kept him hidden, and he stayed still with all his might. They seemed not to know about the cave, and he wanted to keep it that way.
He found himself focusing on the big man, Wheedling Voice. There was something familiar about him, both about his voice and about the way he stood with his weight shifted onto his right hip. Ben wanted a closer look at him but didn’t dare risk it, so he waited. At long last, the men decided which tunnel to search and vanished from view. A few seconds later the lights went out, and the only sound was of crashing water.
Then, in the pitch-black darkness of the cave, Ben felt a rat crawl onto his shoe and start up his leg. He leaped in surprise and shouted, “Ahh!” before he could stop himself. The rat scurried away, and Ben held his breath as he waited for the men to come rushing back to find him.
Their feet thundered back into the junction room and the light came on once again, but before they could look for him or even say anything to each other, the whisper of other voices reached them from deep within another tunnel. Ben couldn’t hear them, but the two men did. They looked at each other, and Strong Voice hissed, “Who is that?”
“How should I know?” Wheedling Voice answered.
The new voices grew louder to the point that even Ben could hear them, and excitement welled up within him. It was Grady! He was sure of it. He must be bringing help!
Ben’s hopes soon sank, however. The next voice he heard was Miriam’s, and she demanded of someone, “Let me go!”
“Not yet,” a man said, laughing. “Not yet.”
Strong Voice said, “That’s Jimmy.”
“Yeah,” Wheedling Voice agreed, “but who’s he got?”
A few moments later, two men in their thirties emerged from a tunnel to Ben’s left with two smaller figures Ben recognized as Miriam and Grady. He was wondering how they had ended up there when one of the men explained, “We found these two trying to break into the cellar, Dad.” He laughed. “We figured if they wanted to come in, we’d let ‘em!”
Ben saw Miriam whirl and kick the man, who yelped but tightened his hold on her, saying, “We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. She knows some of that karate stuff.”
“It’s called Krav Maga, you jerk,” Miriam corrected him.
Strong Voice was angry, but not at Miriam. He said, to the man who was apparently his son, “Why didn’t you just call the police or their parents or just send them home? Can’t you see what you’ve done? Don’t you know how much more attention this is going to bring, having so many brats go missing at the same time? They’re going to be crawling all over us. And what if one of them told someone where they were going? Did you think of that?”
“I’ve got their phones, and I checked ‘em. There ain’t any texts about us, and they ain’t made no calls, neither.”
“Well, you better hope they didn’t say anything to anyone. Now, put them with the others. Tell One to start training them right away. At least we can make some use of them. We’ll bring the Weiss boy down as soon as we find him. We’ve got plans for him.”
“All right, Dad.”
The two men pulled Grady and Miriam away, and Ben thought he saw Grady limping. He must have put up a fight.
Strong Voice and Wheedling Voice turned to search another tunnel, and as he walked away, Wheedling Voice said, “I’m glad they didn’t recognize me. It must be this beard.”
That was when it hit Ben. This large, stocky, broad-shouldered man with the wheedling voice was the same behemoth who stalked the hallways of his school with a whistle hanging from his neck. He was Coach Peralt.
Chapter Twelve
A Clue to Find the Way
How was Coach Peralt involved in this? Ben felt betrayed yet again. First it was Shane and his friends, and now, Coach Peralt. Who would be next? Shane and his gang were all athletes on Coach Peralt’s football team, so Ben was sure the humongous man had pulled them all into this. But why was he involved to begin with?
Several minutes passed, and when he was sure they had all gone, Ben cupped his hands and drank greedily from the waterfall. He could feel the cold water spread through his parched flesh and return his strength. When he’d had his fill, he emerged from behind the falls, and the lights came on again. His feet squished in his wet shoes, but there was no one there to hear it. No one could have heard it anyway over the roar of the crashing water.
He stepped forward into the junction chamber and looked at all the tunnels, all nine of them, dark holes leading to who-knew-where. He wanted to follow Grady and Miriam but only had a wavering impression, seen through the cascade, of their figures moving off to the left, which only narrowed his options down to four.
Peering down the first of the cold, dark corridors, he saw no reason to favor it, so he moved on. Likewise, the second offered no hints, just cold, bare concrete. The third was no better, and Ben moved on to the fourth and last possible tunnel when something he had barely seen registered in his mind.
He returned to the third tunnel and again peered into it as far as the light from the junction chamber would allow. There, near the edge of the darkness, he spotted it. On the floor, along the wall to his right, were several small objects leading in a trail into the tunnel.
Ben hurried ahead and knelt to pick one up. In the murk he couldn’t see what it was, so he carried it back into the light. It was a piece of bread crust. Disappointed, he threw it back to the floor and was wondering how he was ever going to find his friends or his sister when the first verse of Dr. Grimgory’s prophecy leaped once again into his mind:
The crumbs are here to find the way,
But will you find the trail today?
Through tunnels I lead you,
Through tunnels I lead you,
But will it be enough to feed you?
So, the crumbs weren’t just metaphorical (Mr. Schiffman would be proud of him for remembering that term.); they were also literal crumbs of bread meant to lead him through the tunnels!
He darted forward to follow the trail.
Even as excited as he was, Ben soon realized the weakness in his plan. As soon as he had left the light from the junction chamber behind him, he was once again fumbling through darkness. If he couldn’t see the crumbs, how could he follow them?
He did the only thing he knew to do. He went deeper and deeper into the tunnel, trusting it would lead him where he needed to go.
By the fall of his feet, he knew the tunnel was descending. At first the slope was slight, but then it steepened, eventually falling so precipitously that he had the sensation that with every step his foot would find no floor and send him plummeting into a black abyss.
He slowed and made each step tentatively, always waiting to be sure it found a solid surface before he put his full weight on it and always grazing the fingers of his right hand along the rough wall as a guide. Then, suddenly, his right foot slapped jarringly onto a level floor and bright lights shone all around him. He had found another junction chamber.
This one was small and only had entrances to two other tunnels, and it was easy to choose which one to take; the trail of breadcrumbs led straight to it.
As soon as Ben had left the light behind him once again, he began to hear a faint but familiar sound from far ahead: the squeals of rats. Of course, they had come for the bread. He steeled himself and continued forward.
Like the other one, this tunnel led deeper and deeper underground, but this one wasn’t straight; it curved left and right and sometimes seemed to loop all the way around. Soon he had no idea which way he was headed. He only knew he was still going down.
After ten or fifteen minutes of careful descent, he felt the tunnel level off. That was when he found the rats. Most of them scurried past or over his feet, but one tried to climb his left leg, and he frantically shook it off.
