The lower collector vault beneath Lower Haven-Hold was eighty feet underground.
Carved directly out of dense, impermeable blue shale, the vast chamber smelled of stale drainage, damp moss, and the pungent rotten-egg reek of the void.
Through the center of the vault ran the thirty-foot main town collector sewer.
It had been engineered five years ago with five courses of glass-fused glazed brick, designed to carry eighty thousand gallons of stormwater and heavy-duty runoff per minute out toward the tidal flats.
Usually, the wastewater flowed smoothly along its concave baked-clay invert with a steady, calm hiss.
Today, the water was roaring backward.
A violent vortex of black, negative-pressure air rushed down the barrel of the channel, sucking mist, gravel, and loose bricks toward a gaping spatial rift at the outfall.
From the center of the vortex, a huge multi-space-folding maw was attempting to swallow the drainage network whole.
