What Is It, Mother?
by Dylan Lee Henderson
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Kepler’s hand was on my shoulder. “What are you doing?” he asked, shaking me a little.
We were standing in front of the narrow door beneath the stairs. For some reason, it stood open, revealing a black aperture strewn with cobwebs. From the basement below radiated the unclean smell that permeated that house.
Too dazed and sick to answer, I could only shrug, and he pushed me away. “You’re lucky Uncle Kepler was here, weren’t you?” he said, smirking. “If it weren’t for me, you would’ve spilled yourself on those stairs.”
At that moment, my father appeared in the hall, his gun pointed at my chest. For a moment, I thought he was going to fire.
“Stay away from the windows,” he barked. “They’re not far from here.”
He was right. I could hear them now, could hear their hounds baying in the distance. They had followed us across the frontier into the wilderness, the desolation of the West, and now it was too late to run.
The three of us stood there for a moment, listening. My father said nothing, but his eyes were sharp and narrow, and his face flushed with blood.
“Get downstairs,” he murmured, nodding his chin toward the door. “Don’t make a sound.”
The thought of that dark hole made my soul sicken, and in my mind, I could feel its cobwebs licking at my face before the first of them touched me, but I knew not to protest. I covered my nose with the collar of my shirt and, taking a step forward, felt the fetid darkness cover me like wet snow. When I looked back, I saw that Roland had joined my father. His legs were shaking, and the little knife he held in his bony hand was trembling.
Spiders of all sizes, some small and hard, others soft and bloated, dangled from the walls and ceiling, but they were all dead, or at least motionless and, though I shuddered when the sticky fingers of their webs pawed at me, I somehow reached the bottom of the stairs. The floor of the basement was packed earth, hard and cold and pitted with thousands of tiny, pore-like holes.
Most of the room lay hidden behind deep, black shadows or beneath layers of reddish dust, which distorted and corrupted everything, but a pale light, seeping through a small dusty casement near the ceiling, illuminated a little, and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the shadowy objects below the window gradually became tools and paint cans and broken toys. Shelves lined the crumbling wall, and in the corner were stacks of rotting boxes, some of which had toppled over and spilled their contents onto the floor.
I walked over to the window and, standing on my toes, tried to look through it, but the thick, brownish glass was blocked by dust, weeds, and decaying leaves. I couldn’t hear the dogs anymore, but I could hear a faint throbbing, a pulsating whose source I couldn’t locate. The smell down there was almost overpowering, far worse than it was on the ground floor of the house, but after a few minutes it ebbed, and I could breathe a little.
It was coming, I soon learned, from a large round hole in the center of the room. What it was I couldn’t tell, but it couldn’t have been too deep, judging by what I now saw were mounds of dirt, which squatted sullenly in the shadows.
Keeping my eyes on the cavity in the floor and on the ladder that protruded from it, I sat down on a bundle of newspapers beneath the window and, brushing the webs from my hands, took out the small leatherbound book I had found. What would I do, I wondered if, while I was reading, something crawled out of that hole and began to inch across the floor?
Distracted by the thought, I understood only a little of what I was reading, but then my mind cleared, and I realized, though I didn’t have a word for it at the time, that I was holding the dream diary of Mrs. Virginia Bell, whose name, in a soft, flowing script, was written on the inside of the front cover.
She had apparently brought the diary all the way from Virginia, and memories of her childhood there filled its first few pages. I read about her grandmother, a quiet, white-haired woman who appeared in many of her early dreams, and the small fishing boat that her grandfather owned. As I read, I forgot about the men outside, who were searching for us in the dying woods, and my mind filled with the symbols she had cherished: an oak forest with a sandy floor, a chimney standing alone in a meadow, the brick shell of an abandoned hospital.
At some point, she and her husband had headed west, and her dreams, very slowly, began to shift. There were nightmares now and then about the cramped voyage across the plains; the cold, starry void that, every night, stared at them with lidless eyes and fumbled at their wagon with icy fingers.
She dreamed, too, of the house her husband built not far from the frontier. In one of her dreams, she was standing on a ladder, painting the clapboards with a thick white brush. In another, she was holding a baby in her arms and whispering to it while her husband, on his hands and knees, was nailing shingles to the roof. Sometimes there were dust storms, and she and the baby would hide in the bathtub while her husband prayed beside them and the horses screamed in the barn.
And then came the digging. In her dreams, there was something beneath the house, a lodestone, a pearl of great price, which needed to be found. It called to her and her husband, and her previously vivid descriptions gradually gave way to simple, curt phrases, which conveyed a disturbing sense of urgency. Her handwriting deteriorated, and several of the later entries I couldn’t read.
Near the end of the diary, she began to repeat the same phrase over and over, stating repeatedly that she “wanted to dig” or perhaps “wanted to die.” Once, she dreamed that she placed her little girl in a basket and, kissing her on the forehead, slowly lowered her into the pit. Then the dream diary ended, and on the next page was an account, a single page long, which I read again and again, my eyes skimming the page and then glancing at the gaping hole that yawned in the floor before me.
Her girl, she wrote, was gone. They had searched the house and the barn and the other outbuildings. They had searched the fields and the woods. Her husband, frantic, had climbed down into the well but found nothing. A sinking feeling in her stomach, she had checked what she called “the mine,” but she could see, standing over it with a lantern, that it was empty, completely empty. There her narrative paused, her pen pressing into the paper, and when it resumed, it was wilder than before.
Her child, she said, was still in the house, was beneath the house. She could feel her presence, could almost hear her struggling and sobbing softly in the darkness. At her urging, her husband had climbed down into the mine, and at the bottom, he had discovered that part of the earthen wall had collapsed.
Little fingers had scratched at the soft dirt and exposed several large, loose stones, which had fallen away, creating a small hole and revealing what her husband said looked like a passage. He was down there now, had been down there for some time — she didn’t know how long exactly — but she thought he had been down there for a long, long time, for a very long time, perhaps.
The next page was blank, and very slowly, I closed the diary and placed it on the floor. A dull pounding, like the beating of a giant heart, came from out of the hole, and the thick, warm air pouring out of it stank.
I heard a door open, the rusty hinges creaking, and I saw the shadows above me stir as my father and his men descended the stairs. Outside, someone was yelling, and the barking that followed was horrible to hear.
“They’ve seen the house,” my father said dully, his voice devoid of emotion. “They’ll be here any minute.”
Kepler, I think, was the first to see the mine, if that’s what it was.
In that dim, gray light, his face was wild, his eyes wide and full of blood, and he paid no attention to the stench that issued from that pit and enveloped him in its cloud. In an instant, he was down the ladder, and I could hear him cursing and fumbling in the dark.
Roland stood at the edge, prodding uncertainly at the soft rim with his foot. “How deep is it?” he hissed.
“There’s a hole down here,” Kepler called. “Goddamn it, give me a hand, will you? We’ll give those sons-of-bitches the slip yet.”
My father grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me to my feet. “Get in,” he ordered, shoving me toward the hole.
“There’s something down there,” I said, almost crazy with fear, but he pushed me again, and I stumbled. When I started to resist, he seized me by the arm and, without a word, dragged me across the room.
The hole was no more than ten or eleven feet deep, but the odor it exhaled was so foul that I could barely hang onto the ladder. By the time I reached the bottom, where Kepler and Roland were feverishly digging, I was too dizzy to stand and collapsed against the wall. My father, cursing my name, followed.
There was no light down there, but I could feel movement and, every now and then, could hear the clatter of stones. Somewhere, my father had found a lantern and, when he lit it, I could see Roland scrambling on his belly through a hole in the earth. Kepler, elbowing my father aside, followed. Somewhere above us, I heard a door open, and someone shouted triumphantly. Then my father, seizing me by the shoulder, thrust me into the gap between the stones.
Inside, sprawled on the floor, I felt cold, smooth rock beneath me and, in the spaces between the stones, thin, crooked veins of ice. The air around us was hatefully moist, like the breath of an animal, but freezing cold, and terrified though I was, I could still sense it undulating ever so slightly. Crawling away from the men, I crouched against the wall, my whole body shaking, and tried to calm myself, but my eyes kept darting back and forth, desperately trying to distinguish one blackness from another.
My father had extinguished the light, and in the darkness, he and Kepler were replacing the dislodged stones, fitting them together so that, at a glance, no one would notice the hole started years ago by Virginia Bell’s missing child.
From up above came the creak of floorboards and the whining of dogs, followed by a series of sharp barks and an agitated scratching. Then the last stone was heaved into place, and the sounds we were all straining to hear stopped, as if someone, coming up behind us, had placed his fingers in our ears.
Nearby, Roland was whimpering and muttering inaudibly to himself. Every now and then, I thought I heard him mention my name.
* * *
Hours must have passed. I don’t know how many. Eventually, Roland drifted off to sleep, followed by my father, whose thick, muscular legs twitched feebly as if he were having a bad dream. I thought Kepler was asleep, too, but then he spoke, and I realized that he was sitting next to me in the darkness.
“Your father,” he said softly, “wanted to wait for you. I told him we needed to leave, but he said, he said we needed to wait for you. Now they’re up there, and we’re down here, where they’ll find us.”
“Maybe they’ll leave,” I whispered, trying to see him in the dark, “when they can’t find us.”
The murderer chuckled. “No, if you look long enough, you can find anything. After what your father did, they won’t stop.”
I wondered if he was holding that knife of his.
“We could surrender,” I said, speaking so softly that I wasn’t sure that I had spoken at all.
He had the knife in his hand. I could hear it now. He was slowly scraping it across the stone floor.
“Do you think they’d forgive us?” he asked, an awful levity in his voice. “Do you think they’d let you go? You were the one who climbed through the transom and unlocked the door. Do you think, when I tell them that, they won’t mind?”
My mouth felt dry, and my head, poisoned by the bad air, ached. I started to say something, but there was no point.
Then the man’s mind, searching for something, seemed to forget about me, and he spoke as if to himself. “We need to go. We can’t stay here.” The knife stopped its scraping. “Hand me the lamp.”
“There’s something down here,” I whispered, the words heavy and awkward in my mouth. “If you leave, it’ll draw you to it, like a drain.”
I could see the knife in my mind, hovering somewhere in the darkness.
Kepler didn’t respond. When he spoke, his voice was thick and sluggish, as if his throat were full of infection. “Hand me that lamp.”
I could feel it on the floor beside me, next to my father, and I gave it to him.
He lit it, and its flickering radiance, feeble and sickly though it was, nearly blinded me.
We were sitting, I now saw, in a vaulted tunnel or corridor, its walls constructed of thick blocks of rust-colored stone. Instead of being vertical, the sagging, ice-encrusted walls leaned inward so that they met overhead in the middle of the passage, creating a disturbing impression of precarious stability. The point where the walls touched was no more than five or six feet from the floor, and from this ceiling hung long, knotted strings of dead moss, which, when I saw it, made me think of the hair of a corpse.
“Give me the gun, too.”
It was lying on the ground beside the old man’s broken watch, which I could sense ticking frantically in the darkness. Trembling a little, I picked up the gun and, very slowly, handed it to Kepler. Then I closed my eyes, and for a moment, I thought I could feel the cold, hard metal pressed against my forehead. When I opened my eyes, I could see nothing, and I wondered, as I sat there, blind and deaf, if Kepler had fled, taking the light and the gun with him, or if he had fired.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Dylan Lee Henderson
