Jewel Reservoir

Jewel Reservoir is a storm-water basin within Chicago’s Deep Tunnel Project, but in Jason Crowder’s story it is more than an engineering landmark: it is a place he visits to think, a mirror for his unsettled state, and the setting of a desperate confrontation with Danny Hartman. Its ordinarily quiet water becomes a torrent during a storm, transforming underground flood-control infrastructure into the route toward a fall that Crowder believes will kill them both.

Setting and Infrastructure

Crowder knows Jewel Reservoir as one of his favorite places to ruminate and sort through his worries. On the night that brings him back, he drives down a road that slopes toward the water, parks, and climbs onto the concrete walking path along the rim. The setting is familiar enough to promise a pause from the violence and uncertainty closing in around him.

The reservoir is part of Chicago’s Deep Tunnel Project, a vast network intended to prevent the city’s periodic flooding. Crowder has lived in Chicago for more than a decade and has often read about the project. After a month of heavy rain, he understands that its runoff tunnels must be carrying an exceptional load. The basin’s dark water, normally low and dormant, is instead turbulent, its movement made visible and audible by the storm.

Across the water, Crowder sees three large concrete tunnel openings arranged like a stoplight. They pour excess rainwater into the reservoir. The lowest opening hangs about twenty yards above the water, the middle one about thirty yards higher, and the highest projects about eighty yards above it. The outlets stand roughly a football field away. Their scale gives the infrastructure a striking vertical form: water is not merely collected here but driven from elevated mouths into the basin below.

A Place for Reflection

When Crowder first returns, he is trying to make sense of his involvement in recent violence. He thinks about the carnage in a convenience store and the pleasure he experienced while Malephar used his body to murder men there. The reservoir offers a familiar vantage point from which to consider what that experience means and what the authorities might conclude about him.

That concern is not abstract. From the authorities’ perspective, Crowder has been involved in two violent episodes in only a few nights. He wonders how long they will continue to regard him as a hero and when suspicion will replace their goodwill. Leaning over the railing, he looks down without really seeing the water; his anxiety has begun to overtake the purpose of his visit.

The contrast between the basin’s ordinary stillness and its storm-swollen state sharpens his unease. The roar of the overflowing outlets agitates him because the water’s turbulence resembles his own emotional condition too closely to offer relief. Crowder turns away from the rim and enters a dense thicket of trees, an area he usually avoids because he considers it unsafe. At this moment, however, he judges himself to be the danger. The reservoir’s familiar surroundings have become a measure of how much his own presence has changed.

From Flood-Control Tunnel to Escape Route

Later, the reservoir’s role shifts from refuge to the visible endpoint of a pursuit. After struggling to his feet in the dark, Crowder moves through ankle-high water and recognizes that the slimy concrete tube around him belongs to the Deep Tunnel Project. A light farther along suggests that he is near Jewel Reservoir. The place he had visited to think is now connected to him by the enclosed channels that carry the city’s storm runoff.

The current makes the tunnels dangerous. Crowder knows that if he wades deeper into the rushing water, it will sweep him through the tunnel and into the falls. From earlier visits, he has watched runoff erupt from the giant openings and strike the reservoir with enough force to churn the water like a storm-tossed sea. He understands that no one could survive a fall into the basin, and that following the current toward the tunnel’s mouth would mean certain death. His first hope is to move upstream and find another exit.

Danny Hartman appears behind him, sliding down the curved incline with a gun drawn. With the route back cut off, Crowder runs toward the reservoir, even though that direction leads closer to the rushing water. The tunnel has turned the basin’s drainage system into a confined path of pursuit: the same engineered channels that carry rain away from the city now narrow Crowder’s choices to flight toward the falls.

The Falls and Their Aftermath

At the tunnel’s edge, Crowder stops with the drop only three feet away. He estimates that the fall is at least half a football field, perhaps more, and the sound of the water is earsplitting. Danny orders him to raise his hands. Rather than allow the confrontation to end there, Crowder grips Danny and launches them both into the falls. The reservoir is no longer a place from which he can observe danger at a distance; its water becomes the means of a final, deliberate gamble.

Crowder’s aim is to die and take Malephar with him, ending the demon’s reign. But he survives the plunge. As he treads water, the relief of being alive gives way to alarm: Malephar has survived too. Crowder is about sixty yards from the retention wall, and he imagines joggers using the fitness trail around the reservoir helping him out. That possibility becomes another threat in his mind, as he pictures Malephar attacking the people who might come to his aid. He cannot accept the thought of the demon striking again.

The reservoir does not resolve Crowder’s struggle with Malephar; it makes the cost of that struggle newly immediate. Crowder eventually begins to lose strength in the water, but Father Patterson reaches him, takes hold of his hand, and brings his head above the surface. Patterson repeatedly forces water from Crowder’s body until he can breathe again. The rescue turns the basin from a presumed site of mutual destruction into the scene of Crowder’s return to life—and leaves him confronting the fact that Malephar remains.