TUNNEL - Steven Nedelton (open ebook .txt) 📗

This novel is available in all formats on Amazon, B&N, etc. The book details and other info are available on author's web site www.snedelton.com.
The recent Press Release by Apex Reviews is available at: http://www.prlog.org/11795839-author-steven-nedelton-presents-tunnelthe-lost-diary.html


From Tunnel / The Lost Diary
By Steven Nedelton
Chapter 1.

Young Ben Kalninsh’s recollections


It all happened in the last year of the war, when the tanks arrived growling and rumbling over the small hill. The land was shaking so hard some thought a volcano had just erupted, or an earthquake fissure got started. But that's when everything went to hell.
First the tunnel at the mine’s mouth just plain caved in, then the entrance to the coal mine crumbled, trapping all the miners in for good. The whole episode was one disaster, a tragedy to be remembered.
And that’s how the mound got christened the ‘Death Trap Hill,’ though much, much later.
Yet, as far back as he could recall, the village women had called the tunnel names—that ‘black hole,’ that ‘damned hell hole,’ the worst of the worst names one could imagine. They cursed it in the mornings, while their men were leaving their homes. They cursed it in the evenings, watching them return, hobbling along the road as if on crutches, yet seemingly in possession of all their limbs.
They cursed their blackened shirts, blotchy skin and muddy saliva spotted with frothy scarlet drops—misery a man wasn’t born for.
They cursed their hard and raspy incessant cough, as though their lungs had been raked out, a warning that Black Betty had already breathed down their lungs, licked their insides and got them before alcohol burned out their guts and shriveled their brains. If indeed they had any to begin with. For, of course, who in his right mind would be a coal miner?
In the end, they were just stalling for time, because when the Man in Black with a sickle arrived, even a thousand devotions and oaths proved futile.
That was life back then—you got married for love and for better or worse. And one had to be on their side, for isn’t that what wives and mothers were for? After all, this was not the America where you got a lawyer and a quick divorce just ‘cause your love chose a tough luck job. “It just wasn’t done,” his mom used to explain to his dad while smiling oddly and mischievously—when in a good mood. As if saying something altogether different only his dad could fathom out.
The day after the mine collapsed and became the death trap, women called it even coarser names only the purest of hate and desperation could concoct. And although they were crying and cursing the mine and not the tunnel, one did lead into the other, and the two became somehow synonymous and were hated equally.
That was the tunnel he knew he would always remember for its gloom, for its choking, dusty, moldy air, as if it were the entrance to Hell. His always hasty exits from it reminded him of hiking through a dense, dark forest after a summer storm, welcoming the return to sunshine.

Dogs were howling all the previous evening and late into the night, and began again well before daybreak. “Must be for someone’s funeral!” his grandma would have said had she been alive. They woke him up early, but his mother kept him busy with chores, and he got on his bike late. Still he made it to the tunnel well before the sun was up on its noon perch.
Ben had seen soldiers at the old tunnel many times. This early summer noon was not the first time, but that’s why he was coming back anyway. Usually a half a dozen of them would arrive in a dusty banged up army truck with food, wine bottles and blankets. And they’d make themselves all comfy and fine in the old shade of the tunnel’s mouth, on a few cool concrete patches on the floor.
After they ate and drank and became soundly soaked, they’d start singing dumb soldiers’ songs, in perfect discord, which the tunnel, seemingly for kicks, echoed even more rowdily.
Occasionally city girls would accompany them (street women, they called them, he found out later), and they would all get boozed up well and good and would sing those same daft soldier songs, sounding even coarser than men singing alone. And the old tunnel would be just echoing and echoing, as if delighting in its favorite tunes. As if it were in that special mood the Turks call ‘sevdah.’
Once they got bored and tired of all that dumb yelling, they’d lie down and play—the women laughing and giggling raucously, as if being humped by a drunken soldier was such great fun. And most often they weren’t pretty either, though the soldiers appeared ignorant of the fact.
Girls giggled for no particular reason at all, Tom had told him once. “Women are like that…laugh, laugh, laugh, all the time,” his older brother had explained. “Might remember it, Ben, it’d be useful for life,” he had added as a philosophical afterthought. But Ben hadn’t been trusting old Tomcat in everything and wasn’t there to watch the soldiers and their women hump each other either. His mother was the only girl that mattered to him right now and besides there was no old Tom around 'cause old Tom was already dead. Only Ben and his two younger brothers were left now.
This time only an officer and a couple of soldiers had showed up in yet another one of their dusty, banged up army trucks. After unloading it into one of the small, rusted coal wagons idling along the rails of the abandoned loading dock, they threw a tarp over it. He couldn’t tell what was unloaded from his hiding place, but it didn’t seem heavy or bulky. And then the three of them pushed the wagon along the rails into the tunnel.
He’d never seen an officer at work before. Father used to say that officers commanded while soldiers worked, fought, and died, and it made all the sense in the world to him after seeing soldiers acting mostly dumb. Hell, they could use all orders they could get. Anyway, he’d never be a soldier, he had already decided. He’d be at least a general when he joined the army.
A half hour later, the two soldiers reappeared with the small wagon in front but without their head man. The tarp was gone and the wagon was uncovered and appeared empty. The two men stopped at the tunnel entrance and began talking in low voices.
He couldn’t hear them well and even if he did, he doubted he’d understand them. Then the shorter one dug a pack of cigarettes out of his uniform’s breast pocket, and they lit up and smoked for a good ten minutes, he estimated. As they talked, they got quite excited. The matter discussed was seemingly very important to them because they gesticulated a lot, as if disagreeing.
A good while later, at least a half hour, the officer reemerged from the darkness. He was carrying a large flashlight in his hand which he handed over to one of the soldiers.
After he barked out a few commands at them, the two men grabbed the handle of the wagon and pushed it back into the loading dock area. Moments after, all three jumped back into the truck they arrived in and drove off into the distance toward the main road, leaving a cloud of dust and smoke behind them.
The long wait felt like eternity, yet he wanted one of their pistols so badly, he’d pay a million just to hold one. Stalking them for the past two months, hiding in the bushes for hours, day after day and all other sacrifices he had made, seemed well worth the pain.
When he couldn’t hear the groan of the truck’s engine any longer, he stood his bike up on its wheels and untangled himself from the bushes he was hiding in. While holding hard on the bike's handles and carefully side stepping down the slippery grassy slope, he slowly descended onto the level ground. Once on the gravel, he proceeded toward the tunnel entrance.
Today was a humid summer day, and the slippery crushed stones made little noise as he trudged into the smelly, damp tunnel’s semi-dark entrance. All tunnels always stank of rot and mildew, he supposed. On some occasions, he had seen mice and rats scurrying around. He had also seen bats suspended off the wires up in the roof though he never ventured too far into the darkness.
Somewhere, deeper in, the tunnel led to the coal mine entrance disrupted by the most recent roof collapse, to the home for many dead, unlucky trapped miners. The village people blamed the frequent enemy tanks crossing over the hill for the roof's cave-in but, since the State stopped the mining, no one bothered to repair the damage done to it. Once he heard his father say that after the enemy took over, miners didn’t want to work in there unless forced to. Who would risk getting buried alive? The mine wasn’t safe anymore and everybody knew it.
He felt stiff from the long wait in the brush, and his father’s steel bike weighed like lead. As he walked, he tried keeping it tight against himself, afraid that if it fell on the other side, it would get scratched and his father would be angry. As he got deeper into the tunnel, it quickly got darker and darker, and after a while, even the long abandoned wagons couldn’t be seen anymore.
He stopped, turned around, and trudged back toward the entrance where he leaned the bike against the nearest wall, hidden in the shadow. He still felt afraid to leave it there, someone could pass by and take it, but the bike was slowing him down. Besides, he’d need both hands if he had to search around.
He didn’t know how long he’d stay in the tunnel, he figured he had six hours before dusk, and the ride back home would take a whole hour, maybe longer. He had to move now.
He pulled the torch from under his belt, flicked it on and proceeded quickly back into the darkness. He used to be afraid of it years back, when he was still young. He didn’t mind it anymore. A boy of twelve was a young man according to Mother and his uncle. With a flashlight in his hand, darkness was only a small bother now.
At first, he saw a few picks thrown here and there, as if left by workers in too big a hurry to worry about them. He saw no wagons on either rail, incoming or outgoing; both were empty. The place looked truly desolate for a once very busy mine. Not finding anything of interest along the floor but the rails, he began to examine the walls closer.
As he walked he played the flashlight beam across the floor and the sides of the tunnel. He noted numbers in smudged, darkened red at the hanging dead bulbs stations, midway up on the walls. They seemed to be increasing as he proceeded deeper into the tunnel.
The emptiness continued on, the air now a lot clammier than back at the entrance. After another five minutes of walking and searching, he came across the first coal wagon abandoned on the outgoing rail.
He walked over and clambered up the side reinforcement railings to look down into it but saw only a rusty shovel thrown on top of some concrete blocks on the