The Four Stages of Cruelty by Keith Hollihan Page B

never been down there. The welding had taken place a few years before my time. The warden declared that sealing off the City was a gesture symbolizing the beginning of a new era. The old-timers were not happy about losing the best threat they’d ever possessed. The new dissociation range was like a stay at a Holiday Inn by comparison.
    I felt gravity itself pulling me down. I would merely look, duck down quickly, and make sure the door to the City was still sealed shut. I gripped Cutler’s damp shoulder until he blinked.
    “Sorry,” I said, guilty for stirring him. “I’m going down below. Something’s not right.”
    He reached for his baton and rubbed his eyes to wake himself up.
    “What do you mean?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” I said. “I’ll be right back. I just want you to know where I’ve gone.”
    Before I descended the stairs of the hatch, I wanted someone to know where I was going.
    The armaments room felt completely cut off from the world above, the bricked-up alcoves like four blinded eyes.The staircase to the City below was behind a heavy wooden door in the west wall, which was blocked by crates. A good sign, I thought as I heaved them to one side. There was a key hanging on a hook on the wall above it. Not so long ago, jailers had carried rings of such keys. The old padlock was as heavy as a cannonball. The lock opened, and I pulled the doors back.
    “Everything okay?” Cutler called down. I could still see his shape in the entrance above me.
    “Yes,” I said. “I think it’s all fine.” Hoping it so.
    The air that lifted up to me was mildewy and cold. I shone my flashlight on the wet walls and the narrow rounded steps. It was a steep walk down, and I had to lean back to avoid hitting my head. When I reached the bottom and came to the second door, I saw the propane canister on the ground.
They just left the goddamn blowtorch right there
. I felt my anxiety soar. A bar had been fitted back into place to keep the door locked from the outside.
    The worst feeling in the world came over me.
    “The lock’s been cut,” I shouted.
    “What?” I heard.
    Cutler did not come down. I should have turned back. This was all the evidence I needed to get the Keeper down here. But I felt laden with obligation and amped by the need to know, a desire to see what I had discovered. The door was thick and sodden. I could smell a thin odor of piss in the cold air behind it. The sounds changed and became less muffled as the world opened up into an expansive darkness. I heard something move, probably a rat, and stamped my foot and shouted to scare it off. The silence returned, but I could no longer believeit was an empty silence. “Crowley?” I called. My voice was deadened by the thickness of the stone. Before me was a pitch-black hallway. Shining my flashlight along the floor, I saw angled shapes like craggy rocks and realized that the entire hallway was cluttered with garbage. I made out broken computer terminals, upturned boxes of files, a weight-lifting bench, a metal bookshelf on its side. It was as though I’d stumbled on an abandoned warehouse or a flood-decimated building. The jutting rock created more shadows along the walls. The right wall was rough-hewn, while on the left I saw a row of doors with little space between them. My breath came rapidly, and I tried not to imagine larger shapes in the darkness flitting off whenever I moved my flashlight beam away. Some of the doors were shut; others were angled out of their rooms in disordered fashion like a series of unmade beds. I moved an inch forward and stopped. Anything could be down there. It would be better if I checked each cell in turn.
    Opening the first door and looking in, I saw that the cell inside was barely long enough for a cot. Again, the room was filled with scattered garbage—a broken riot shield, an old cafeteria table. In the corner of the floor I saw a small, irregular hole with two raised stone rectangles straddling it. Rats came up