Wendell wished he could. For one suspended moment, he almost did. Then something knocked beneath the floor.
Three short.
One long.
Reverend Bell sobbed once.
The knock came again.
Three short.
One long.
Then Mabel Thornquist’s voice rose from under the boards.
“Cornelius?”
The old man’s face collapsed.
“Mabel,” he said before anyone could stop him.
The floor ring lifted by itself.
The panel opened.
Darkness breathed out.
Part 5
Later, none of the men would agree on how deep the opening looked.
Sheriff Voss would say it was a crawlspace, perhaps three feet from floorboards to earth, though he could not explain why the lantern light failed to touch the bottom.
Reverend Bell, before silence claimed him, would write in a single note that the opening contained “distance without room for distance.”
Cornelius Holloway would refuse all questions.
Absalom Reeve would say only, “It was not dark. It was looking.”
Wendell Crisp saw roots.
That was what his mind chose first, perhaps because roots belonged beneath a cabin. Thick cedar roots twisted through the black, pale where bark had split, wet as tendons. They descended farther than roots should descend, crossing and recrossing into a throatlike passage. Between them, embedded in packed earth, were objects.
Buttons. Teeth. Hair combs. Compass needles. Wedding rings. A child’s shoe. A rusted buckle. Glass beads. A pocket watch with no hands. A pipe. A strip of blue ribbon. A small Bible swollen with damp. A woman’s jawbone threaded with wire.
The smell rolled up, wet iron and old leaves and birth gone wrong.
Mabel’s voice came again.
“Cornelius, help me.”
The old man took one step toward the opening.
Absalom caught him around the chest. Cornelius fought with sudden strength, clawing at the tracker’s hands.
“She’s down there!”
“No,” Absalom said. “That is what it has of her.”
“Let me go!”
Mabel began to cry beneath the floor.
It was not theatrical. Not ghostly. It was the exhausted, embarrassed crying of a woman who has held herself together too long and broken only when someone kind arrived. Wendell knew the sound from the journal before he knew it by ear.
“Please,” she whispered. “It’s so cold.”
Reverend Bell fell to his knees.
Sheriff Voss aimed his revolver into the opening. “Who is down there?”
The crying stopped.
A different voice answered.
“Aldie?”
Voss went white.
The voice of his mother rose tenderly from the root-dark. “You got so big.”
The sheriff’s revolver dipped.
Wendell moved without thinking. He struck Voss’s arm upward just as the gun fired. The shot punched into the ceiling. Birds exploded from the roof outside. Voss staggered, blinking like a man waking in a place he did not recognize.
Then the roots moved.
Not much. Just enough.
They flexed around the objects embedded in them. A button shifted. A tooth rolled free and clicked against another tooth. Something pale unfolded between two roots, long and jointed and almost like fingers.
Absalom shouted, “Out!”
The lantern went out.
Darkness inside the cabin became complete in an instant, though daylight poured through the open door. It was as if the room had separated itself from the morning.
Voices filled it.
Mabel calling Cornelius.
Orson laughing softly.
A child asking for his mother.
Voss’s mother humming.
Wendell’s mother telling him the door was open.
Other voices too, overlapping, pleading, scolding, welcoming, each intimate to someone living or dead, each shaped around longing with obscene precision. The cabin was full of the beloved lost. Full of bait.
Something brushed Wendell’s cheek.
It felt like hair.
He stumbled backward and struck the table. Tin cups clattered. A hand found his sleeve. He nearly screamed before realizing it was Reverend Bell.
“Deputy,” the minister whispered. “I see her.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Don’t look.”
“She’s standing where the stove was.”
“Don’t look!”
Bell turned anyway.
His face softened.
“Oh,” he said, with such heartbreaking relief that Wendell knew they had lost him.
Absalom appeared out of the blackness, shoving Cornelius ahead of him. “Move!”
Wendell grabbed Bell by the collar. The minister did not resist, but his body had become strangely heavy, rooted by vision. Voss recovered enough to help. Together they dragged him toward the rectangle of daylight that marked the door.
Behind them, something climbed from the opening.
Wendell did not see all of it. His mind would spend years refusing the memory and failing. He saw a tallness unfolding where height could not fit. He saw brown wool stretched over angles that were not shoulders. He saw a face in progress, features sliding toward arrangement and then away, as though several dead people were trying to surface through the same skin. He saw Orson’s mouth and Mabel’s eyes and the smooth blank oval from Thomas Marr’s drawing. He saw roots threaded through flesh like veins through marble.
It spoke with no single voice.
“Open,” it said.
The cabin door slammed shut.
Daylight vanished.
Cornelius screamed. Not in fear. In rage.
“You don’t get her,” the old man shouted into the dark. “You hear me? You don’t get to keep saying her name!”
He broke free from Absalom and swung his cane toward the sound. It struck something with a wet, wooden crack. The voices shrieked together. For an instant the darkness thinned.
Wendell saw the door.
He fired his revolver at the latch.
The shot blew splinters inward. Absalom kicked the door with both feet. It burst open, and daylight flooded the room like water.
They fell onto the porch in a heap.
All but Reverend Bell.
Wendell turned back.
The minister stood inside the cabin, facing the corner. His hands hung at his sides. His expression was peaceful.
“Reverend!” Wendell shouted.
Bell looked over his shoulder.
For one second, he seemed to see them. Not the thing. Not his mother. Them.
Then something behind him said, in a woman’s gentle voice, “Josiah, shut the door. You’ll let the cold in.”
Bell smiled.
The cabin door closed.
Absalom held Wendell back with both arms as he fought to return. Cornelius was on his knees in the yard, weeping soundlessly. Voss stood frozen, revolver empty, smoke curling from the barrel.
Inside the cabin, Reverend Bell began to pray.
Then his prayer became humming.
Then the humming became the sound of a kettle just before it boils.
The vertical mark appeared on the outside wall.
It began at the foundation and climbed toward the roof in one dark, wet stroke.
When it reached the eaves, the goat gate tore itself from the fence and flew backward into the trees.
No hand touched it.
No wind blew.
The cabin shuddered once, as though something beneath it had turned over in sleep.
Then all was still.
They burned the cabin.
Not immediately. Fear first drove them down the draw like animals fleeing fire. They reached Cornelius’s place near dusk, half-mad with exhaustion, and barred the door. No one spoke for an hour. Then Sheriff Voss, who looked twenty years older, said, “Kerosene.”
