“It’th fine,” Daffy told himself, staring at the closed door to his office and gripping his tape recorder like a talisman. “It’th completely fine. You’ve done thith…how many timeth before? Dozenth. Hundredth. How ith it any different than trying to get to Pithmo Beach and winding up in Arabia?”
Because that was a cartoon, a voice in the back of his mind helpfully pointed out. Because you were with Bugs and he could tunnel you out. Because that was an ordinary part of nature and not Too Close I Cannot Breathe. Because you’re less of a Toon than you were back then. Because the script said you would get out eventually.
“And I altho didn’t have you, you mitherable cretin, tho am-thcray,” Daffy muttered at the voice.
The Ceaseless Watcher, living up to its name, did not am-scray, but continued to leer at him. Daffy sighed. At least he wasn’t going down alone. Technically. He snapped on the shoebox recorder and spoke into it.
“Tweety, if you’re lithtening to thith…well, I’ll be really darned thurprithed, actually, but if you are, I’m thorry,” he said. “I should have told you what I wath doing before I dethided to do it, but…well, I don’t think you’d thtop me, actually. I’m not sure you care what happenth to me anymore. But I should have at leatht warned you. Tho, if you’re lithtening to thith, I’ve gone into the coffin. I’m going to find Porky, and I’m going to bring him back. I—I don’t know if I can find my way out, actually. I know if I tie a rope around mythelf it’ll get cut off, or untie itthelf at the top, or come loothe from my waitht, and I’ll drop out of reach and that’th that. Tho I’m not even going to bother. But I am the Archivitht. I have the Theathelethth Watcher at my back. I Know how to uthe it, tho I can jutht…Know my way back out. Thimple. And if I’m gone too long, hopefully Bugth will come after me. I didn’t tell him where I’m going, either, but I’m sure he’th paying attention.”
He turned the recorder off, set it carefully on the ground next to the coffin, and took a deep breath. “Right. Here goeth nothing. Duck Dodgerth to the rethcue.”
It didn’t sound very convincing when he said it, probably because he wasn’t in costume, so he decided to try again. He flipped open the lid, seized the handheld recorder he’d got from Jonny, and held it triumphantly over his head as he declaimed, “Duck Dodgerrrrrth…to the rethcue!”
When he didn’t immediately explode, he dove head first into the coffin.
He, of course, landed face first on a set of stone steps, and before he could stop himself was tumbling headlong down them. As he fell, barely managing to keep his grip on the tape recorder, he found himself using a lot of words he’d learned from Donald Duck that had definitely not made it into a cartoon. There were no handrails, no landings, nothing to grab hold of, so he had to just keep tumbling until he eventually managed to get his feet under him and skid to a stop. He lay for a second, panting, then gingerly got to his feet—battered and bruised, but still relatively intact. The flashlight he’d brought with him was still safely in his hand; he switched it on, pushing back the darkness, or at least some of it.
The Eye snickered in the back of his mind. Or maybe that was just his imagination.
Grumbling, Daffy switched on his tape recorder and spoke as calmly as he could. “There are…thtairth. I should have antithipated that. The thtatementth talked about thtairth, but…I didn’t exthpect them. Thtill, I’m on the thtairth. No idea how long they go down for. I’ve probably gone down at leatht three thtorieth, though, via the exthpeditiouth route. Jay Sherman would have apprethiated that dethcent.” He sighed. “Nowhere to go but down. There’th only one path, tho far anyway, and…I have to keep going. I can’t thtop now or I’ll never find him. Right. On we go.”
He snapped off the recorder to save the battery and kept going down.
Eventually, the stairs bottomed out, and he found himself on a twisting dirt path. Daffy tried to keep the flashlight steady as he walked. Eventually, he came to the first crossroad on his journey and paused, shining the light down all three possible directions. They looked the same.
He turned the recorder back on, almost without thinking. “The thtairth thtopped, eventually. There are a couple of turnth ahead of me. I’m a little worried, but…well, thith ith the Buried, not the Thpiral, tho I’m lethth likely to get lotht. Jutht pick a direction and go. Hmm…the Latin word for ‘left’ ith ‘thinithter’, and ‘thinithter’ ith currently defined ath ‘prethaging ill fortune or trouble’, tho I think the betht thing to do ith to take left turnth whenever poththible. That should altho give me the advantage that I’ll know which way to go when I turn back, becauthe it’ll alwayth be a right turn.” Lowering the recorder, he added under his breath. “Yeah. That never hath the potential to go wrong.”
With a suspicious glance at the wall next to him, he cleared his throat and added, “I altho need to keep moving, becauthe I thwear the wallth are getting clother when I try to thtop. Tho I’m jutht going to keep…going forward. Hopefully I’ll find Porky before it’th too thmall for both of uth to get out.” Shutting off the recorder again, he kept going.
It gradually became clear that it didn’t matter if he was moving or not; the walls continued to close in. Daffy drew on the stubbornness that had always characterized him and pushed forward, muttering under his breath. “Not gonna thtop me from getting through. No, thir-ree. He’th mine, you hear? Mine! Mine! Alllll mine!”
It didn’t help as much as he had hoped it would.
The walls squeezed together almost casually, pressing against the objects in his hands. Daffy instinctively pressed the recorder close, burying it in the feathers of his chest, and started to draw the flashlight in, too. Before he could, though, the wall to his left pushed just a little harder and it shattered. Disgusted, he dropped the fragments and kept pushing ahead.
“The wallth are really clothe, now,” he said into the recorder, held just below his chin to keep it protected. “The flashlight broke. I didn’t even drop it or thmash it againtht the wall or anything like that. It jutht…the wallth preththed in and that wath it. It’th—getting—hard—to—thqueethe—through—thethe—gapth—”
He strained, twisting himself sideways and wriggling as he forced himself through a narrow gap. He managed it, barely, but the space on the other side wasn’t significantly bigger. He panted for a moment as he caught his breath. “I’m having to crouch now, but that’th not going to thtop me. I’m going in.”
He had long ago lost track of time, so it could have been only seconds later or it could have been hours before he realized he was creeping on all fours, then crawling, clawing his way forward through a narrow tunnel. He kept telling himself it wasn’t the first time, that he’d done this countless times before, that he could do this. He had to believe that, or he was never going to get out.
He was just going to turn on the recorder and repeat that, speak it into existence, when he heard something for the first time—something other than shifting rock and falling dirt and his own heartbeat and breathing. A voice, muffled and hoarse and panicked. “H-hello? Hello—is someone there? Help me!”
Daffy paused and angled his head towards the voice, ever so briefly—but, no, he realized, it wasn’t Porky. Apart from the accent (Welsh, the back of his mind supplied, and he wasn’t sure if it was his own realization or the Ceaseless Watcher giving him the information), the voice was definitely that of a woman. He’d hoped from the initial stammer…but it was just fear, not a speech impediment.
“Someone—please!” the voice choked out, sounding almost on the verge of tears, childish despite its obvious maturity. “I can’t—I can’t breathe. Save me. Please.”
For just a moment, Daffy hovered with indecision. He couldn’t see anything—just the complete and utter darkness of a cave or a tunnel. He didn’t know this woman, whoever she was. And every deviation he made from his initial path would make it that much harder for him to find Porky in the end, never mind his way out. Besides, he’d always been a selfish, greedy coward—why should he change that now?
“Keep talking!” he rasped out, twisting his body around as he tried to find the source of the voice. “I’m—I’m coming!”
The cries grew ever more feeble, but Daffy at least had a vague idea of where they were coming from. He clawed his way through the squeezing, choking mud, following the pleas for help and stifled sobs. It was the same person—it had to be—he could faintly sense other people somewhere, but they were too distant to be helped and none of them seemed to know he was there, let alone call out to him.
This was stupid—asinine—moronic—he had no reason for this—it was the worst thing he could do. He didn’t even know this person. He was here to save Porky, and what if this made it so he couldn’t? Yet nothing in him said to do anything other than what he was currently doing. He had to try. Porky would forgive the delay while he did…and he’d never forgive if he didn’t.
Without even thinking, he pulled out the tape recorder and spoke into it, teeth grinding together as he inched painfully forward. “I’m—there’th thomeone calling out to me. Athking me to—oof—thave them. It’th not Porky. I don’t—know—her—and I’m not sure—why it’th tho important—that I do thith. But I—have—to—thave—her…AHA!!!”
A hand suddenly appeared in front of him, caked in dirt and blood, the fingernails ragged and torn, grasping helplessly, and how he could see those details was beyond him, but here he was. Daffy shot out a hand of his own and grabbed it. There was a muffled cry from the other side, which made him instantly regret his haste. “It’th me! I’m here to rethcue you!”
“It—it won’t let me go,” the voice said, frail and despondent. “It wants to keep me forever. I can’t get out.”
“Sure you can,” Daffy said with a confidence he didn’t entirely feel. “Jutht thtay with me. We need to find my pal and then we can get out of here. What’th your name?”
There was a long pause before the voice on the other side of the wall managed, “Daisy.”
“Daithy, huh?” Daffy wriggled himself forward, shoving his beak and shoulders through the gap where Daisy’s hand had emerged, and found himself staring at a pair of eyes glowing cartoonishly in the dark. Something told him they had once been yellow, but were now a pale and stark white. “I’m Daffy. I’ll get you out of here.”
He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t. He meant every word of it, and he absolutely planned to get both Daisy and Porky out of there. But she was trapped, good and proper, and while they kept talking for a while, both of them desperate to keep the connection, Daffy realized with a sinking feeling that he couldn’t sense up anymore, let alone Porky.
“Maybe there isn’t one,” Daisy suggested, her voice thin and fragile, when he voiced that aloud. “There’s…there’s no more up.”
“Don’t let’th be thilly!” Daffy said with a confidence and anger he didn’t really feel. “Of courthe there’th thtill an up. If there wathn’t an up, then there wouldn’t be anything to be afraid of, now would there?”
There was a short pause before Daisy replied. “What do you mean?”
What did he mean? The logic had been there and gone, but maybe he could find it again. Daffy grappled for reason like a man grappling for the soap in the bath. Slowly, he said, “We can’t jutht have ‘down’. If there’th jutht down and no up, then down ith all there ith and there’th no reathon to fear it, becauthe that’th jutht what the world ith. In order for uth to be afraid of being trapped here, we have to know there’th an alternative, right?” He saw Daisy’s eyes bob as if she was nodding, and nodded as well. “Right! Tho we know there’th an up. And that meanth we can find it.” He glanced over his shoulder and felt, with a renewed sense of hope, the presence of the Ceaseless Watcher. “In fact—I can thenthe it now! Come on, Daithy. Up we get.”
“What about your friend?” Daisy asked.
Daffy hesitated. He’d come down here for Porky, after all. He wanted to save him—needed to. But…
“I—I can’t thenthe him,” he admitted. “I think he’th lotht. Maybe I’ll come back later, but for now…I need to get you out firtht. You can’t thtay down here any longer. Now that we know there’th an exthit, I don’t trutht it not to kill uth.”
“Thought Toons couldn’t die.” Daisy coughed.
Daffy sighed. “I wish I thtill thought that, too.”