Tunnel
The tunnel narrowed the further down he went, and he went down anyway, away from the ladder, away from the street, moving in the direction none of the other men who used this stretch ever bothered going because there was nothing down there worth the trip. His hand dragged along the wet brick as he walked, his body staggering with each tired step less for balance than because his legs had stopped being entirely trustworthy on their own, and more than once his shoulder caught the tunnel wall hard enough to jar him, and he kept walking anyway, staggering. The whole of him moving like something only half convinced it still knew how.
The smell got worse the deeper he went like an abhorrent pit of hades. The repugnant stench wafted around the darkness like an evil spirit as he kept walking deeper and deeper into that pitch darkness that seemed devoid of any light. Down here it thickened into something with weight to it, something that sat on the tongue and stayed there, and he breathed through his mouth without really registering he'd started doing it, an old habit from years of walking through worse, corpses, mines all that had led to this abhorrent tolerance to the stench that pervaded the darkness.
The tunnel opened out eventually into a wider chamber, brick arching overhead in a dome gone black with age and damp, and here several channels met and merged, dark water sliding in from four directions at once and pooling together into something too wide to call a stream anymore, sludge and runoff and God knew what else moving past in a slow, endless churn that never once stopped to rest, the way he badly wanted to.
He found a stretch of dry stone against the far wall, mostly dry, dry enough, and lowered himself down into it, his back scraping rough brick as he slid, legs folding under him without much say in the matter. The dark here was total. No grate above, no gap in the stone letting even a thread of streetlight through, just black, thick and complete, pressing in close enough that he couldn't have said with any certainty whether his eyes were open or shut.
He'd come down here for rats.
There were always rats where the water pooled this wide, fat ones, careless ones, easy enough to catch if a person had steady hands and the patience to wait still enough for one to wander close. He'd done it more times than he could count, going back years, going back to a basement with a man who'd taught him the exact angle a wrist needed to snap to make the catch clean. His hands remembered the motion even now. His body, tonight, did not remember how to hold itself upright long enough to use it.
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He sat with his back against the brick and waited anyway, because waiting was the only part of the plan his legs still had in them, his stomach cramping tight and hollow, a hunger gone past hunger into something closer to a low, steady ache that had stopped being about food specifically and started being about everything at once — the cold coming up off the stone, the weight behind his eyes, the way his own heartbeat sounded too loud and too close, like it had moved from his chest into his skull sometime in the last hour without asking him first.
A rat came, eventually. He heard it before he saw it, small wet feet against stone, and he went still, or stiller, willing his hand into position the way he'd done a thousand times before. His arm didn't obey the way it used to. It moved late, clumsy, missing the timing by a fraction that would never have mattered on any other night and mattered enormously on this one, and the rat startled and vanished back into whatever crack it had come from, and he was left there, hand still half-raised, gripping nothing.
He didn't try again. He didn't have another attempt left in him to spend.
His head had started pounding somewhere in the last few minutes, a slow deep throb behind both eyes that made the absolute darkness around him feel, somehow, even heavier than it already was, and his limbs had gone distant the way they'd gone distant once before, present only as memory rather than feeling, and he slid slowly sideways along the wall until his cheek met the cold, wet stone, and he didn't have it in him to lift himself back up.
The water kept moving past him, patient, indifferent, four rivers of filth converging into one and flowing on toward wherever the city sent the things it no longer wanted to look at.
He went under a moment after that — not into the water, only into himself, the last of his strength giving out all at once the way a rope gives out after fraying too long unnoticed — and in the total dark of that tunnel, alone, unfed, his malnourished body finally past the point of asking permission, he stopped fighting to stay upright at all, and the dark took the rest of him easily, the way it always eventually did.