Chapter One
Sadness in Common
Thousands of people were gathered in a brightly lit auditorium. The buzz of conversation filled the air. At the head of the auditorium stood a podium and a lonely microphone. At the left of the auditorium a heavy door creaked open and an old woman slowly made her way through the door and up to the podium. She held the microphone in her hand. “Hello,” she said, “I’m very happy you all came here to hear me speak. I’m here to tell you about my and my family’s story, the story of the underground city.”
A young woman sat in the audience. Her eyes glowed happily as she glued them on the old woman at the podium. Her mind floated back to the old story of the underground city as the woman at the podium began to tell the tale. It was a wonderful story. The young woman in the crowd remembered it well.
It started with a girl about the age of eleven. Far, far underground in a dark cave she and her siblings slept. There, her, a boy about her age, two little twin girls, and a girl who looked like the oldest, snoozed in the pitch black of their little cave. They had their own little world underground. There was work and school. There was also a government. They made sure there was water, food, and that people were safe from harm. The girl and her siblings lived in an orderly society.
The girl, who’s name was Janel, was, at the moment, being shaken awake by her brother, Jared, who was wide awake. Her bare foot twitched and she groaned sleepily. “Stop it,” she complained grumpily.
“You have to wake up now,” he said harshly.
“Why?” Janel groaned stupidly.
“What do you mean? Studies, of course (which is like school),” he rasped, still trying to whisper.
“Fine,” she whispered, sleepy and stiff. Janel stood up slowly and her waist length hair fell in front of her face. “O.K. Now I can’t see,” she said grumpily. Janel parted her hair and shoved it behind her ears.
Jared was crawling around the cave making shuffling and scraping noises, waking up the other children. “Janel,” he said, “Where is my bag?” he asked, still shuffling around in the dark.
“I don’t know,” said Janel.
The oldest girl, Amelia, was now awake and said to Jared, after a short yawn, “I think it’s over here.” Amelia held up a brown, scruffy looking bag, full of rocks, a few ruffled collections of papers that looked like books, and a couple tid bits of food that were sweets, or candies. “Is this it?” she asked.
“Thanks,” said Jared. He grabbed the bag. “My bag,” he said, still shuffling around, seeming a little annoyed. He said something about girls going through his things. The two little twin girls, Bella and Alex, giggled.
The little cave the children slept in was one of the many caves found in the high walls of a large tunnel system, full of people, with their unique underground lives. Along the dark tunnel walls ran two metal bars. These two bars ran all through the twisting tunnels. No one stared up at them, wondering what they were, or climbed up the wall (which would be very hard to do because it was so high) to get a better look. This was because everyone knew exactly what they were for. Somewhere in the winding tunnel system someone would take a big rock and tap out an important message on the large bar, which all the people understood. It was horribly loud whenever this happened and so no one ever forgot it. When the small bar was hit it was a little less loud. Usually the little one was used to notify a time or something like: Studies in five minutes! Run to class! Right now, as the children slept in their dark little cave, the small bar was hit in a familiar pattern that they recognized as the announcement to show it was eight o’ clock, which also meant it was time to light up the tunnels.
In the tunnel walls, apart from the caves people slept in, there were smaller caves that were filled with tidy piles of twisted, gnarled, wood. When the shrill noise sounded for eight o’ clock, people came walking down the halls in groups, all wearing light blue, dusty, clothing. They heaved themselves over a low ledge that prevented little children from wandering inside. Next they took two small rocks and thrashed them against each other until sparks shot out and floated into the gnarled wood. The wood began to smolder and little flames popped up. Soon the gnarled wood was hidden in the blaze of a bonfire. The bonfire caves running all along the walls of the tunnels slowly filled the tunnel with a dim, flickering, light. Little bugs could be seen scurrying along the dusty walls of the tunnels and hiding from the sudden light. The fire lighters, in their bright blue uniforms, jumped down from the bonfire caves and kept along the tunnel towards the next section of bonfires that needed lighting. This was one of the many strange jobs in this underground city.
The dim light flooded into the little cave where Janel, Jared, Amelia, Bella, and Alex were now wide awake. Amelia grabbed Alex’s and Bella’s bags from a corner and threw them their bags. She turned to Janel and Jared and spoke in a responsible (and slightly controlling) voice. “Are you two ready? I think it would be very bad if we were late for studies,” she said.
Janel sped past Amelia and out of the cave. “Yes. Yes,” she groaned, annoyed. Jared, Bella, Alex, and a slightly angry Amelia stepped out of the cave.
“Well. I hope you’re happy. We don’t have enough time to walk. We’ll have to take the railcart,” said Amelia, folding her arms.
Bella and Alex turned to each other, beaming. “Yay!” They shouted in unison.
Amelia grumbled. They walked over to a wooden staircase. It climbed up to nearly the ceiling and then just stopped with nothing in front of it. A low rumbling sound came out of nowhere, echoing off the dusty, black, tunnel walls. Janel looked to her right like she expected something to explode. She had her feet firmly planted on the wooden surface at the top of the stairs and she narrowed her eyes.
What looked like a huge, shallow, wooden bucket with people inside rocketed towards the staircase and screeched to a stop in just the right way that the small group of children could step into it and take a seat with other people who were sitting inside. Some people in the cart were hurling into old wooden buckets and looked rather dizzy.
A man in a dusty red uniform at the head of the railcart looked over his shoulder to make sure everyone was seated. Then he made his way towards the middle of the cart where there was a long, thick, wooden, stick. He stood it upward so that it looked like a pole sticking out of the railcart. He picked it up slowly, panting. He lifted it up so that the top touched the ceiling of the tunnel. Finally, he pushed the stick with all his might so that they were sort of pushing off from the ceiling. It rocketed the railcart foreword and the man fell flat on his face. It seemed like he was used to this because he stood up and brushed dust off of his faded red uniform with a friendly smile.
As the cart accelerated and gained speed, wind whipped at Janel’s face. She turned to a boy beside her who had long black hair to give him a friendly smile. Instead, she blushed, and turned her head back foreword. The boy was staring absently at the tunnel walls rushing past him. His green eyes glinted with the reflection of passing bonfires. Just as Janel had almost worked up the courage to turn her head towards him, the cart came to an abrupt stop.
The man in the red uniform, without turning from the head of the railcart, bellowed, “Welcome to tunnel sector three’s studies’ cavern! All students off to class!” There was a momentary clatter of bare feet slapping against wood as multiple children in dusty brown clothes got to their feet and stepped off the cart, chatting with their friends.
At the foot of the wooden stairs a girl with shoulder length blonde hair shot towards her. “Hi Janel,” she said.
Janel was smiling and gazing blankly out to nowhere as if in a happy daydream. The girl looked at her, puzzled. Suddenly she smiled mischievously. “I know that look,” she said.
“What, Don?” Janel said, blushing and scratching her head.
“Goddie was on that railcart wasn’t he?” she said, still looking like she was going to burst out in giggles.
“Well….yes, but what does that have to do with it?” said Janel awkwardly.
“Well……you like him!” she said, trying to keep her voice down, but just barely succeeding.
“O.K…..I do,” Janel said, blushing, “I do,” she said again, spotting him walking into the studies’ cabin and following him with her eyes dreamily. Don shook her head, filled with laughter.
As the hundreds of students took seats in long rows on the dusty floor, a smiling woman, her brown hair in a frazzled pony tail that seemed limp and floppy. “O.K. I’m going to call roll,” she said happily. “Jenesse Cresenta,” she bellowed. A thin, tiny girl with frizzy hair raised her hand. The woman nodded. “Donatella Bouleve,” she bellowed next. Don raised her hand but looked a little annoyed.
“Don, Mrs. Torren. Call me Don,” she said.
“Janel Evontel.” Janel raised her hand dreamily. She was staring at Goddie out of the corner of her eye. “Godrick Beneview,” said Mrs. Torren. Goddie raised his hand. Next came Alex and Bella Evontel (who were always called together because they were identical twins), Jared Evontel (Janel’s fraternal twin), Amelia Evontel (Janel’s older sister), Kathrina Mackera, Julianne Frey, Norrey Tollatta, Goerge Oline, Freddie Teddin, Julon Mandri, and Aleck Stew. Hand after hand shot up in the air until finally Mrs. Torren stopped to take a breath and said, “Time for class.”
In front of each student who was sitting on the floor there sat a shallow wooden box filled with soft earth. Mrs. Torren passed around a clay jug of water. Everyone poured a tiny bit of water into their box so that it was like thick mud. Amelia got up and helped Mrs. Torren prop huge, heavy, wooden slabs filled with different kinds of writing against the wall.
“Suck up,” came a faint whisper from the class. No one noticed it but there were a few faint giggles that had followed it.
Amelia took her seat again with a hearty thanks from Mrs. Torren. Mrs. Torren pointed to the first of the three wooden slabs which were as tall as her, up against the dusty cavern wall. “Please copy down the forty-two conjugations of the verb, to be, in crystalline.” Janel took a thin wooden stick that looked like a rectangular popsicle stick and started pressing little symbols into the mud.
“I forgot the use of to be in first person, in speech, with a question mark,” whispered Don. “Stupid crystalline writing. Why does it have to have its own set of grammar rules?”
“I think it’s Merra Todinet,” Janel whispered back.
“I thought it was Merra Todinarre,” Don said.
“Wait…….you’re right,” she said, “Stupid crystalline.”
Smudging up a little, boxy, letter, Janel muttered under her breath. The crystalline writing was horribly complicated. The letters were boxy and precise. It was like drawing diamonds. Crystalline also had its own crazy grammar rules, which probably had a version of a word for every writing scenario ever…..written. Janel and Don loathed it, and when Mrs. Torren excused them for midlight (midday) break they were relieved.
All the students rushed out of the cavern, laughing with their friends. Low clouds of dust filled the air as people kicked up dirt and some unlucky bugs. Janel took, out of her bag, a sandwich made with two slices of a giant peanut (about the size of a loaf of bread or someone’s head) for bread. Inside, there was an array of all sorts of spices, mixed into mashed potato.
“Posh (underground name for potatoes) sandwich?” said Don with a sigh.
“Every day,” said Janel.
“Me too,” answered Don. A low rumbling echoed off the tunnel walls. A railcart was coming. “Mr. Peter!” Don shouted.
Janel beamed. “Yeah. Lets buy some sweets,” she said, looking down the tunnel. The rumbling was growing louder. The railcart must have been going really fast. As Janel let out a mumble, saying, “Sweets are a whole lot better than posh sandwiches,” a brown blur shot up to the wooden stairs and came to a very loud, screeching stop, swinging violently.
A chipper looking man popped his head out of the railcart. He looked a little dizzy. It was that or he was crazy. He had a disillusioned look in his eyes and he was a bit hyper and spontaneous. The man ruffled his black hair and adjusted his red hat. The rest of his clothes were brown.
Someone in the group of students now gathered around the swinging railcart bellowed, “Hey Mr. Peter!”
Mr. Peter shook his head, smiling a little bit too sweetly. Maybe it was just because he worked with sweets all day. “Quite a stop huh?” he bellowed out into his little crowd.
“Yes!” everyone screamed as if they had been itching to comment on his insane ride.
“Well, lets not delay. Who wants sweets?” he said, raising his arms into the air as if to tell them to applause, which everyone did.
Students clambered around the railcart, passing Mr. Peter coins and receiving a number of strange sweets. One boy bought three tiny jars of some strange mush. He gave two to his friends, who thanked him gratefully. A girl with long frizzy hair took a bag of colorful chewing sap pieces.
Don and Janel combined their money and counted up the coins. The little coins were wooden, one side covered in a shiny metal. “We have enough to share a poproot stick!” said Don excitedly. They handed the money to very busy looking Mr. Peter. In return, he handed them a flimsy looking wooden stick. Janel broke the stick in half and a bit of sugary dust fell to the floor. Poproot was the main underground source of sugar and it was delicious.
When They went back to class, their fingers sticky, they were relieved to see that the wooden boards filled with crystalline writing were gone. In their place was some kind of passage in a writing that was much easier than crystalline, mole. Mole was one step up from the easiest and first learned writing underground, scratch.
“Students, settle down,” she said. “In a couple of years you will all be picking your jobs here in our tunnels. Some of them, you see going on every day like fire lighting, or driving railcarts. Others, you don’t. The ones that you don’t see going on before you are some of the jobs I would like you all to have one day, good jobs. You might start out with a……small job, but I’m confident you will all be a help to our tunnels one day!”
Janel started thinking. What did she want to become? She didn’t really know. She moved her mind from it and heard Mrs. Torren say, “Today we are going to learn about root scouts.” Janel’s spirit’s dropped.
“Root scouts are those who climb in the root forests, looking for large areas of dead roots used for wood. This is a job in high demand for workers because of our high demand for wood,” said Mrs. Torren
That night Jared was snoring loudly in the right hand corner of their little cave. Janel was having a strange dream. Tangled tree roots hung down from the ceiling. Then it started getting cold, very cold. There was a silhouetted figure clinging onto one of the tree roots. There was a cracking, snapping sound and a low scream came from the silhouetted figure as it fell to the floor.
Janel sat bolt upright, cold sweat covering her forehead and palms. She was panting heavily. Suddenly she started screaming. “Where’s dad? Tell me where dad is!”
Amelia woke up and ran over to her clapping a hand over Janel’s mouth. “Dad is dead,” she whispered. “He has been dead. It was just a dream. Calm down.”
Janel was starting to calm down. Tears dripped down her cheeks.
“Was it the same dream?” she asked Janel.
“Yes.”
Janel was very quiet at studies the next day. Don didn’t bug her because this had happened before. In fact, the first time it had happened Janel had blown up at Don and hadn’t spoken to her the rest of the day. Don had let Janel wallow on days like these since then.
Janel was eating her daily posh sandwich in silence during midlight break. She was staring at the floor and watching an ant crawling towards a peanut bread crumb when she spied a pare of bare feet. She looked up and saw Goddie smiling down at her.
“You seem sad today. What’s up?” he asked.
“I….I don’t really want to talk about it,” Janel answered shakily.
“Come on,” Goddie said, sitting down. “You can tell me.”
“It’s about my dad,” she said. “He died a couple years back.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“He died climbing in the root forest looking for dense wood. I keep having……..having these dreams,” she said, shaking her head.
“Well…..Try and keep your mind off it,” he said, turning his head towards her, smiling. Goddie got up and walked away, waving over his shoulder.
Janel smiled and stood up. She weaved her way through the students and found Don. “Don….I hate…..I hate that I was so horrible to you about this stuff that you avoided me. I really need to have you to talk to,” she said, embracing Don.
“It’s really sad. I don’t blame you. I wonder if your mom feels the same way.”
“I actually haven’t seen her in person for two weeks. She’s sent me notes telling me she was O.K. on her tunnel exploring trips but……you never know.”
“It’s crazy that this place is so old that we don’t even know if we’ve discovered the whole tunnel system.”
“I know,” said Janel, staring absently out into the crowd of people.
“I’m glad you feel like you can talk to me about the dreams, Janel,” said Don, smiling at her.
“I really hope they don’t come often,” said Janel. “They drive me crazy. I’m so tired that I don’t think I could handle any more studies. I had nearly fallen asleep before we were called for midlight break.”
Don laughed and they both headed back into the cavern. Mrs. Torren turned from inspecting students’ mud boxes and threw them a bright smile. “Is Mr. Peter gone?” she said loudly, as if she was deaf and couldn’t tell how loud she was speaking. Don and Janel both nodded. Mrs. Torren took some soft bits of material out of her ears and her voice resumed a normal tone. “He causes such a ruckus,” she said, staring out into the main tunnel as if she expected the railcart to come rushing back, “though I’m rather fond of his sweets. Did you get the chance to have any today?” she asked cheerily.
“Uh………no,” said Janel. The truth is she had been sitting, depressed, in a corner, wallowing in misery and thinking about the dream she had had last night. “I wasn’t feeling to well,” she lied.
“Well. Take your seats. I’m just about to call the other students in,” she said. Mrs. Torren wandered into the crowd of bustling students, gathering them together and herding them into the cavern.
“Now that your break is over and you’re all filled up with Mr. Peter’s sweets, we must move back to our studies.” Mrs. Torren pointed to a very old slab of wood, leaned against the dirt wall. “We are going to study a bit of advanced scratch, which is the most simple writing we learn, because we only have light work at this time of the year,” she said as a student on the floor (unidentified, or else they’d be getting a very loud scolding) let out a whisper that sounded like a sarcastic remark.
Amelia raised her hand, her eyebrows scrunched together like she was confused. Mrs. Torren pointed at her. “I thought we were studying different fields of work. Are we?” questioned Amelia. Janel’s stomach dropped. She prayed they would be moving onto a different job.
“We are,” Mrs. Torren said, as if this was a silly question.
“Then why did you say we were studying advanced scratch?” Amelia said, getting even more confused.
“Because we’re studying both!” Mrs. Torren said cheerily. “These slabs describe ten different jobs that I think will spark the interest of a couple of you. These descriptions contain ten different new words,” she said, the class staring, almost mad at her, “each.” A couple students’ mouths actually dropped open. “Please identify them all.” Mrs. Torren swept over to a corner and took a seat on a pile of ruble and rocks, knowing this would take a while.
At the end of the class Janel and Don were quite close to falling asleep and letting their faces fall into their mud boxes which would have been very embarrassing. It was probably a good thing that Mrs. Torren clapped her hands and excused the students right before they did.
That night Janel went to sleep anxiously, the idea of jobs, her dad’s job, her dad’s death, and the falling silhouette, still fresh in her mind. She didn’t want to have the dream again. Well, it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory, but a sad, nightmarish one, if anything. It was a memory of death, the saddest kind. The same thing always happened. She would watch the silhouette die, but she could never see its face and cry for it even though she knew who it was.
Finally, Janel grew so anxious she couldn’t bare to close her eyes. She decided to go for a walk. She sat up, trying not to make noise, but still producing soft scraping sounds. She flopped out of the cave and stared around the darkness. It didn’t look like there was anyone awake but her. She kept close to the wall as she walked along in the calming silence.
The shuffling of a pair of feet caught her attention. She wasn’t supposed to be out of her cave until fire light, which wasn’t until morning. She was going to get in horrible trouble. A figure was approaching from the other end of the tunnel. Should she run for it? No. They would hear her.
Then she saw something that made her mouth drop open. “Goddie?” she whispered.
“The one and only,” Goddie whispered back.
“What are you doing here?”
“I heard you leaving because I couldn’t sleep and I came to join you.”
“Goddie, you live a fifteen minute walk away from here.”
“Okay, so I didn’t hear you leaving. I knew how you were feeling and I wanted to come help take your mind off it. You want to come for a walk?” he asked.
“Uh…..sure,” Janel said shyly. She stepped up and walked over to Goddie. “So how do you know how I’m feeling?”
“I lost my mom a couple years back. She died in a mil attack.” Janel gasped. Mils (or scientifically, extramilapedions) were giant centipedes. The tunnel sector’s Insect Control Unit, which was one of the few organizations in close alliance with the government, publicly informed the underground community that mils were extremely poisonous three years ago. They then set out to kill them all, but there were some………some that got out of control a while back. It was a horrible catastrophe. Janel thought it was deathly sad that Goddie’s mother had to die like that.
A tear dropped from Goddie’s eye and fell to the floor. An identical tear dropped from Janel’s eye. Sadness can be in common, though it brings tears to your eyes to see it. They turned to each other, smiling with sadness for themselves and the other. “I’m very sorry,” they said at the same time. “Thank you,” they said, again at the same time. Janel and Goddie started to laugh, tears of both sadness and happiness still falling from their eyes, but as shuffling came from a nearby cave they stifled their laughter and headed back to their sleeping caves.
Janel crept past Amelia, Bella, Alex, Jared, and……..her mother. Why was her mother here? She hadn’t said anything about coming back any time soon in her last letter.
Enjoy the first chapter. Please comment. It's a bit short for a chapter, but its my story, so rolleyes . Behold the begginning of the story, The Upper City, by D. L. dG.
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