Every city in America gives graveyard to decaying giants. Abandoned stadiums, hotels, subway stops, factories, and dried waterways: they wait in hiding, empty and quiet, from Seattle to Boston. They call these places the undercity. Though visible to birds and distinct to dogs by its lead-rusted scent, humans too often fail to see it. Yet any of these built structures, from the tallest needles to the deepest tunnels, can always return to humankind’s fingertips, prove the traces they’ve left.
◊ ◊ ◊
Julia Obradovic first discovered the undercity at 16. Her family had moved from the Wisconsin Northwoods—where all the earth seemed handmade by a whittler’s knife—to the suburbs of Milwaukee. There, cities were erected as if by assembly line: walls and streets with smooth surfaces, colors sickeningly uniform. Her family bought life’s necessities at superstores that duplicated across the Midwest like mirror-image bacterial cells. These new towns gave Julia the impression that the American professional class could only obtain their peace from convincing themselves that humans do not, in fact, produce footprints, scratch marks, or smells.
This disguise—that all material debris of human life grew spontaneously from superstore shelves to be harvested at discount prices—led Julia to the undercity. She didn’t need to know how humanity had produced every object and structure around her. Julia simply needed, every now and again, to see graffiti on the side of a wall or a plant growing in between concrete slabs. She reveled in reminders that, eventually, all human structures become marked by human stories.
Those who plunge into the once-touched corners of built society are called Urban Explorers, shortened to Urbex. On one such Urbex online forum, Mason and Julia met.
◊ ◊ ◊
The undercity first called to Mason Novak when his older brother Scott came out to his Catholic family as an atheist. Thirteen at the time, Mason became convinced that if he could provide Scott with iron-clad evidence of supernatural forces on earth, he could dissuade him from his spiritual disillusionment. As a result, Mason would no longer attend youth group on Sundays alone. Having grown up on both ghost hunting shows and gospel recitations, Mason concluded that ghosts were more amiable than divine beings to the idea of appearing on camera. Although a message from God would have been ideal, an encounter with a spirit would be more than sufficient. If ghosts are real, then the afterlife is as well, and thus Scott’s atheism would become unfounded.
The search began at the charred remains of a barn fire on the banks of Minooka Park near Mason’s suburban house. Eventually, his hunts took him into the city of Milwaukee, then below it. There the spirit of a mafia boss’s daughter is said to appear between the smoke clouds of a cigar bar. Further underground he went, until he found himself regularly sneaking away from his family and venturing into those always-visible, unexplored places: empty, jungle-like, and hidden behind No Trespassing signs, manhole covers, and iron barbs. By age seventeen, Mason hesitated to call himself a Catholic, but his motive never wavered. Somewhere in these empty places, Mason still searched for the artifacts of a divine being.
◊ ◊ ◊
Julia says that any given exploration is an improv game. She says bring an Olight Baton flashlight, a Yeti waterproof backpack, a fully-charged phone with backup battery, a GoPro and handheld camera (no phone cameras), pepper spray and a taser, a first aid kit, water, a dust mask, a baseball bat, a good luck charm or a token of religious devotion, an air purifier, and one $100 Uline Gas Mask—just in case.
She says remember the community’s mantra: “take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints.” Good sites are hard to find, so don’t share them. Never forget: we are not invisible, and we do get hurt. It’s normal to get sick. You will be disappointed. Paranoia is constant. Nine out of ten times, you’re alone.
She says never run.
◊ ◊ ◊
When these two explorers discovered an abandoned lightbulb factory off the coast of Lake Michigan flooded with trout-infested water, Mason wrote this in his field notes:
Self-sustaining urban aquarium: but rainbow trout lose their rainbow within city limits.
When they found $400 in the cash register of an abandoned mall:
I’m telling myself dollar bills have expiration dates. Trying to remember: take nothing but photos.
And when they snuck onto the roof of the tallest building in the city, the white-metal U.S. bank building:
Resist the urge. Remember what Julia says: it’s never worth it to try parkour.
◊ ◊ ◊
For Julia’s seventeenth birthday, Mason shared with her a city secret he had unraveled through gossip streams and atlas catalogs. Near Milwaukee’s festival grounds there is a manhole cover that does not lead to a sewer. It leads instead to something that was once a church.
It started as a monastery built by missionaries of Marquette’s order, constructed beside the beaver dams of Bradford Beach. It became a storage facility for the Miller Corporation to transport beer barrels across the Great Lakes region. When semi-trucks replaced steam-engine ferries, Miller built an airport on the unused lot. The church became a garage for small airport vehicles. Then, the military purchased the airport, in case the Soviets set their red gaze on Green Bay, and amassed a collection of nuclear-capable Nike Hercules missiles. They stored them near that retired, drunken monastery. In 1968, Milwaukee’s newly formed Juli Spaß Festival became a hit, and the city bought the barracks. The fairgrounds grew upwards and out. They buried the monastery. Marketing changed Juli Spaß to Summer Fest.
But the manhole remembers, if you know which one to ask.
◊ ◊ ◊
With a crowbar and a vigilant eye for security, Julia and Mason lifted the manhole cover and descended.
Julia felt sick when they finally settled on the spongy wood floor. Things had lived and died in this trapped air. Their Olight Baton flashlights revealed a room in the shape of a box, ten meters by ten meters, filled with wooden crates, wheels, scrap metal, and piles of utterly forgettable documents from the Maitland Airport, left by accident.
“Nothing radioactive,” Mason said as he checked the Geiger counter they had bought for this trip, sizzling. “Nothing nuclear has ever touched this place.”
He found a wooden box filled with more forgettable papers, and gently scoured their moist pages like they were made of gemstones. He was thrilled.
“Look,” Julia said. “They never covered it up.”
On the wall Christ gazed forever into this pitch-black box—an old French mural. She touched the painting.
Mason said, “These are aviation maps. I don’t understand them.”
“Sure,” Julia said, bewitched by the old stones that formed the four still-perfect walls around them. Her fingers trailed the bricks. They might have been granite, maybe slate.
Flipping through pages, Mason said, “This one’s just a color by number picture. Poor guy. Must have been so bored. Or maybe it belonged to a kid.”
“Look,” Julia said. “Wait, Mason, look.”
Her finger was now touching a different kind of paint—not French, but American.
“Bring your light over here,” she said.
“What?” He finally looked up at her.
“Graffiti,” she said.
“No way.”
“Look.” She ran her finger across the words gently, as if they might retreat upon being found.
“That’s graffiti,” Mason agreed. “How old do you think it is?”
“It isn’t spray paint,” Julia said.
“So?” he asked.
“If it was recent it would be spray paint.”
“Oh. I can’t read it. The letters look weird.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s English?”
“Oh gross.”
“What? What does it say?”
One by one, Julia pointed out the words she read with her index finger: “You’ll. Die. Too.”
“Woah,” said Mason.
“That’s horrible,” Julia said. “Oh, I don’t like that.”
“Wait—” Mason said.
“—I really don’t like that.”
“Wait! Julia, that’s a wire.”
Suddenly, there was no noise on all the earth besides their breath. Then, they heard it: that high-pitched, electrical hum. Sailors fear storms, believers fear omens from the devil, and urban explorers fear the stray, cut livewire. They appear randomly, often deadly. If you mistakenly touch or step on one, there’s no telling the voltage.
Every one of Julia’s cells screamed with adrenaline. They both stilled.
“Where?” Julia said, frozen in her position with her finger on the word Too.
“Stay still, but—”
“Of course I’ll stay still.”
“—it’s maybe six inches to the right of your pointer finger.”
“Holy fuck.”
“See it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll follow it with my flashlight to see where it goes.”
“How did it get down here?”
“It’s stapled to the ceiling. See?”
“I want to leave.”
“We will. We will. Move your finger slowly back.”
Julia followed his instructions until she could put her hand in her pocket.
“I’m guessing the wire runs under the street,” said Mason, following the line.
“It’s attached to the electrical grid, then.” Mason stared at the wire—a silver cobra baring its teeth at the two explorers from its ceiling-bound perch. The room invisibly crackled with thousands of volts.
Julia said, “Let’s go. C’mon. Slowly. But let’s leave.”
It took longer than Julia would have liked for Mason to respond, the boy mesmerized by the short distance between him and the afterlife, but he said, “Yeah. Let’s go.”
◊ ◊ ◊
After that day in the monastery, Julia had waking nightmares that bled from dark spaces and empty rooms. She saw the words on the wall. All ringing in her ears now sounded electric. She avoided loud music, and its subsequent high-pitched footprint, for fear it would sound the same. People called Julia sensitive. Julia had thought being sensitive meant choosing to be pensive, sentimental, and careful with life’s many feelings. She was now discovering how little of a choice she had: she did not want to feel so strongly—about graffiti, plants, now livewires—but she couldn’t stop.
After the monastery, she saw the hairline, made of involuntary heartbeats and uncontrollable neural processes, that separated her from the afterlife. She discovered that she had no conception of what forces might wait for her on the other side of the line. As it happened, she did not know Mason’s brother’s story. But she came to Mason one afternoon, certain that she too could find something divine in the undercity.
In the dark, the texture of light makes one doubt that they are alone. For Julia, all the universe became a room at night, filled with flexing air that seemed to suggest the presence of an immaterial force. She remembered what she always said: nine out of ten times, she was alone. If that is true, by what name would she call her one-tenths visitor, if visitors do indeed cross the hairline? A single, genuine visitor among a billion false ones seemed capable of justifying every religion on earth.
From this mindset, she questioned Mason.
“What do you think happens when we die? What if it’s nothing? Would that be better? Do you want there to be an afterlife? Do you believe in near-death experiences? You don’t, like, believe in Jesus, right? You’re not a Christian? Are you anything? Does that scare you? I can’t imagine becoming nothing. That scares me. I can’t stop thinking about it. Do you think about it? Does everyone just think about this all the time? Are we crazy? I can’t stop thinking about it. What if it’s nothing? As long as it’s something, I really don’t care what, then there’s nothing to worry about. But what if it’s nothing?”
Mason heard all this after school, in an empty high school hallway with squeaky waxed floors. It was winter, so the sun had already set. He felt guilty—all of this had happened on her birthday—but more than guilt, he felt awe. Each question seemed to scaffold and reinforce the foundation of the years-long theory which called him to the undercity in the beginning: there is something down there. Traces of things from outside this material cosmos nuzzle between the atoms of the undercity. Under the right stars at the right hour, mysterious things would emerge.
Mason shared with Julia an idea, a fantasy he’d ritualistically revisited during his own moments of dread—a place to test the veracity of that undercity air which they both sensed might be sacred.
◊ ◊ ◊
The Chicago River has a twin. Where flowers bloom along the banks of the terrestrial sister, the underland twin has cold, sulfuric rapids that are inhospitable to breathing life. It sleeps nearly 400 feet below the surface in bronze tubes, with a mouth that could swallow towers. Three billion gallons of sewer water rush like a bloodstream inside this behemoth’s veins, whose constant gnashing is inaudible to the millions above. They call it the Deep Tunnel. Of all the man-made structures of the Midwest, the Deep Tunnel is the closest to the lakes of the mantle. Resting on its back, in an act of resistance to this infernal tide, sits an infinitesimally small patch of open air—an opening laced on all sides with artwork, so Mason has heard. Historians have few records of its existence, yet a dedicated young person can find the location by tracing his finger across obscure correspondences between the 1928 Mayor of Chicago and a consortium of construction companies.
In 1928, when Chicago promised with every World’s Fair that “tomorrow is more magical than today,” an urban developer named B. J. Hietzman saw the blueprints of Soviet engineers planning metro stations deep within the earth. He thought America, too, could astound in the depths. To showcase at the Chicago World’s fair of 1933, he built a prototype subway stop in absolute secrecy underneath the city. He intended a stairwell to one day stretch all the way to the surface. But the team went roughly five million dollars over budget halfway through the project. The mayor could not send visitors from Germany, Costa Rica, Great Britain, Haiti, and Norway into unfinished tunnels to arrive dusty and damp at an unserviceable station. He canceled the project.
◊ ◊ ◊
For the trip to Chicago, they packed additions to the regular explorers’ gear: a candle, a prayer book, limestone chalk, incense, fragrant oil, honey, a drum, cedar, lavender, myrrh, a quartz crystal, a Ouija board, and various religious symbols one purchases from non-denominational shops in the corners of malls. They hopped on the train in Milwaukee with over-sized backpacks, a pair of devout turtles.
The snow outside the train windows glittered, and an attendant brought the two hot chocolate.
“Maybe we should have just made our own ritual,” Julia said.
“I think it’s a good idea to use the ones we found online,” Mason replied.
“I know, but what if we made our own?”
“Why?” Mason sipped his cocoa.
“What if Catholicism is wrong, and it’s offended by the fact we brought holy water?”
“People aren’t as strict about that sort of thing these days. I think we’re fine.”
“Maybe it would have been cool to make our own ritual.”
“I think this stuff is cool.”
“No, it is.” Julia gazed out the window, ruminating.
“Besides, there are few places in all the Midwest as holy as where we’re going. We might not even need help,” he said. They transferred at the next station.
◊ ◊ ◊
Mason led Julia to the deepest subway stop along the Chicago L line.
“Avoid the third rail,” he said. “Don’t stand in between tracks because they’ll pinch you when they switch the path. We have to watch out for motion detectors and be careful with our lights, because people work on the rails down here on the ground. We’re looking for a ladder. It’s blocked off. We can jump over the warning sign.”
The lights in the tunnel were a low, cosmic blue. Garbage lined the walls.
People have been here, thought Julia. It smells the same as a subway stop, inorganic and somehow also rotting.
A stretch of tunnel descended further still. Julia and Mason walked down it. The lower they went, the more the air seemed vulnerable to the electric zaps of the third rail—air heated but never cooled. Ice had not touched this ground in a century. They heard mice. Their passion for the forgotten city was a dangerous, reckless, and illegal one, but it never ceased to amaze Julia how easy the undercity was to find. They climbed down a ladder at the lip of a subway stop, as easily as children climbing a playground.
They walked, until Mason said, “That’s it. That’s it there.”
They stood before the entrance. Here in the heat, their sweat was the first water this land had seen in lifetimes. A circle of smooth-to-the-touch slate bricks guarded a hole in the ground, almost like a well, set inconspicuously beside the subway tracks. A plywood circle rested on the adjacent wall—just the right size to cover the opening. On the plywood was written No Entry. They peered down into the well. Cool air brushed against their faces like a greeting.
A ladder, which dropped down into the shadows, seemed to trace a pathway on the wall, calling: This way.
While descending, they heard the noise of the beast for the first time: the gnashing of billions of gallons of water. Eventually, they could make out an impossible glow—warm and nostalgic at the bottom of the ladderway tunnel. When Julia reached the bottom, she landed on familiar cement, smooth and barely eroded, 400 feet beneath the surface.
Julia felt as if she were seeing every star at once. Somehow, down here, there were chandeliers. The walls were gilded by porcelain plating, stained with gold and blue. Arches, carved as if borrowed from a Roman palace, lined the walls. Embedded above the never-used railway was a metal-plate mural depicting the advancements promised by the fair—a Ferris wheel, a lightbulb, a Tesla coil. Water into wine, wounds on the beach—lightbulbs in this tunnel, shining dimly and glittering their crystalline holders. The refracted light dotted the tunnel with rainbows.
“How?” Julia spun.
“They finished it. They connected it to the electrical grid. They never touched it after that.”
“But the light bulbs?”
“When they were first invented, they were less safe, but they could last almost forever. Does the bulb say Shelby on it?”
Julia gazed at it like an eclipse. “Yeah.”
“Some have burned non-stop since the 1890s. That’s the company—Shelby Electric.”
Mason referred to his notes. As expected, he found the lever that could turn them off nestled away on the wall in a wooden box. They took their time appreciating the rare sight: few eyes had seen these lights, ever glowing beneath our feet.
◊ ◊ ◊
The ritual required dark. Mason pulled the lever. An utter darkness, to which human eyes could never adjust, fell. Only then did Julia notice that here, in the deepest circle, the air felt bitter cold. They held one another’s hands. If the writing on the monastery wall had given Julia premonitions of the hairline at the edge of the universe—the nothingness to which she might soon make a homecoming—the shadows around her seemed to place her squarely on the blurred line between this world and the next.
It remained impossible for Julia to conceptualize the nothingness: the lack of existence, the terrible void larger than all things in her universe, the place where she had spent the billions of years prior to her birth, the heavenlessness, the real, and tangible, and imminent possibility of being utterly gone. Mason and she were right. It wouldn’t be in scientific articles, ancient texts, the stories of people she trusted, or any of the brilliant arguments along the spectrum of belief. In those very seconds, as the universe expanded, a border—beyond which spacetime, matter, and physics were foreign—grew. Any divine visitors to the land of atom and light sat here, near the center of the earth, in a secret place once built then undiscovered for decades, seen and visited only by non-human minds. It horrified Julia.
“You okay?” Mason asked.
“I’m not,” she said.
“I’m not either.”
“No one has ever been okay when something like this happens.”
“So, keep going?”
She squeezed his hand.
They said prayers. The smell of incense mixed with the concrete rot. They waited, hearing now and again the infernal twin river but fifty feet below spitting out oceans. They sometimes sang. They sometimes sat and listened to the quiet.
“It’s here,” Julia said.
“You think so?” Mason said, shivering.
Frightened but peaceful, Julia responded, “Just don’t let go of my hands.”
Blindly, they drew a circle on the ground and wrote ancient words along its edge.
“Then we read this,” Mason said. “Use a match.”
He held up the prayer, which he had printed out on letter-sized paper.
“Some people feel the presence of God when looking at trees.”
Mason groaned. “I know.”
“Why do we have to be here?”
“Trees haven’t worked. And something has to work.”
She squeezed his hand, again.
They read.
Grant me growth, transforming me in all your goodwill by which you formed and saved me. Hear, O Lord, the prayer I have cried out to you, and hear me. Reveal and illumine my eyes, my mind, and my flesh, that I may subside and understand your miracles. Enliven me in your justice, that I may prevail in gazing upon my enemies and upon the Devil.
The prayer ended with the two explorers’ deep, frightened breaths. They blew out their matches.
◊ ◊ ◊
In the dark, all rituals remain secret. Julia, with her free hand not held by Mason, tapped the frigid concrete rhythmically with her index finger, then her middle finger, one finger after the next as she repeated a phrase in her mind:
If I get the rhythm just right, then it will come.
She played the instrument of the forgotten earth, as they sat for nearly an hour in the dark.
“I think we should call it,” Mason said.
Julia’s voice choked. “Okay.” She played the beat.
“Julia?”
“I know.”
“I think we should call it.”
“Give me a second.”
“You okay?”
“Shh…” She played.
Beautiful thoughts and profound feelings, even if abundant during their ritual, were no substitute for a visitor. Julia didn’t know what she had wanted to see. Maybe a hallucination—a bright or colorful light in some impossible place. Or a voice—even if one word—speaking to them from far away. She could have seen Jesus. She could have seen her grandma. She could have simply felt whatever it is a believer feels.
“Julia, c’mon. Julia, this is silly,” said Mason, agitated.
She played. When Mason flipped on the lights, he saw Julia, eyes closed, hand on the concrete, tapping a rhythm as if listening to a sound very, very far away.
“Julia,” he said from across the now-visible tunnel, “I don’t know what you’re doing and it’s making me feel really scared.”
She opened her eyes. She became the Julia from this world once again.
“I feel like crying,” she said.
He sat across from her on the ground. They hugged.
Mason and Julia packed up their burnt matches, washed away the chalk circle, wiped up the ash with a towel, and scrubbed away the sticky residue of the rituals. As they prepared to leave, Julia felt disappointment, confusion, and self-blame—as if the universe would have sung to her its inaudible divine frequencies if she had been more clever, respectful, or kind. As they zipped up their bags, Julia couldn’t stop herself from fantasizing about new tests which might give her certainty, or proofs she could seek on the surface. When she looked back at the tunnel, a graveyard of now-foolish-seeming hope, she wondered whether the tests would prove more painful than her uncertainty.
“Graffiti,” Mason said. He pointed at the wall by the ladder.
“That’s sad,” Julia said.
“You like graffiti.”
“Not here, though.”
“It’s weird we didn’t notice it before.”
“It is.”
“Do you think… it was here before, right?” asked Mason as he shined his light on it. “I think we would have seen it. It’s next to the ladder.” He touched the paint, pulling up a picture on his phone: white letters, thick brushstrokes, a dryness cracking the text—similar handwriting. Julia saw the photo in Mason’s hand: the graffiti from the Marquette Monastery.
Julia felt sick. “Don’t do that, Mason. It’s just dark down here. You can hardly make it out. You can’t see it.”
“I can see it, Julia.”
“Stop, Mason. I want to leave. Mason, c’mon.”
“But it’s the same. It’s the same handwriting.”
“Mason, I don’t… let’s leave.”
“Am I wrong? Look.”
She tugged his arm. “Just c’mon.”
“It’s a confession.”
“So what? I want to go.”
“It’s the same exact handwriting. Isn’t it?”
“I’m going up. We’re going up.”
He looked at the paint with suspicion. It occurred to him that to stay another moment might forever wound their friendship. He took her hand, squeezed it, snapped a photo of the letters, and put his foot on the first rung of the ladder.
Julia followed behind him, kept her thoughts to herself. Maybe it had been there when they arrived. Maybe it was written by a human. Maybe it was all in their heads. Maybe angels know English. Maybe it would be another of her poltergeists.
She stopped. She descended the ladder. And with every bravery, she told herself that she knew what she was seeing. Below the handwriting—perhaps the same handwriting that had promised her she, too, would die—Julia wrote, and wrote, and left every trace possible that she was there that night, too.
Hailing from Wisconsin, John Lyons holds an Ed.M. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he studied Creative Writing education. He was chosen as a finalist for the Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize and is published or forthcoming in The Headlight Review, Creation Magazine, The Miracle Monocle, and elsewhere. Inspired by his own experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder and his close study of OCD, his writing attempts to relish in the liminal space between fear-inducing uncertainties and beautiful mysteries.