What Is It, Mother?

by Dylan Lee Henderson

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

conclusion

Above the low hills west of town, a single star was shining faintly in the blackness, its feeble light flickering like a crippled firefly. I watched it through the dusty window as it struggled to stay lit. Then it disappeared, as if the night sky had been covered with an immense sheet of black iron.

I turned and, in the reddish glow cast by the lamp, saw the bed my mother and father shared. Beside it, there was a young woman sitting in a rocking chair, a child asleep in her arms. The floor squeaked as her chair rocked slowly back and forth, but the woman never moved, and her glassy eyes never left the floor.

I knew that I needed to be very quiet, that I must not, at all costs, make the smallest sound, and so I crept forward, my intestines filled with dread, until I was standing less than a foot away from the chair and its seated figure. The child, I now saw, was the color of wet ash, and its brown eyes were like rotten apples.

I stepped back, my shoulder blades hitting the dresser, but the woman continued to stare at the floor, and her chair continued to rock. Then the young woman’s lips parted, as if she were about to speak, and I bent forward, hoping to catch her words, but instead, I saw a thin stream of clotted gray silk dribble out of her open mouth.

At that moment, I became conscious of others in the room. There was movement by the bed, a faint, almost imperceptible stirring, followed by a muffled, slopping sound. Through the curtains, I thought I could see the outline of a familiar shape beneath the blankets.

Expecting to see my mother and father, I took a step forward and saw a man lying, very still, beneath the canopy, but he wasn’t my father. He was smaller and thinner, and what I could see of his face looked like crumpled leather. The black shape of a woman was bent over him, her face pressed against his. When she heard me call my father’s name, she raised her head, and all her eyes glittered in the darkness.

* * *

A hand was shaking me.

“What is it?” I murmured, still half-asleep. The air in that place was so cold and dirty that it stung my nose and throat and made my eyes water.

“You were dreaming,” my father said. “It’s time to wake up.”

Roland was somewhere to my right. I could hear his labored breathing, his weak chest struggling against the pollution.

“You had a nightmare,” Roland whispered, scrambling a bit closer, his voice hoarse and feeble. “Did you see her?”

My father ignored him. “Kepler left. He took the lantern with him.” He paused for a moment, and I felt his suspicions watching me carefully in the darkness, their lidless eyes all aglow. “Did you see which way he went?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “I must’ve fallen asleep.”

My father didn’t answer. I could see his face in my mind, could see his tiny, sharp eyes boring into me.

“They’ve left the house,” he said finally, though I couldn’t tell if he was talking to us or to himself.

Roland crept forward on his hands and knees, his breath rattling in his chest.

“We should go,” he whimpered, “before Gerber’s boys come back. We ain’t the only ones down here, Bruce. There are worse things, things that ain’t afraid of guns or knives.”

He thinks my father still has his gun, I thought. If he didn’t, he would break and run.

“We don’t know where they are,” my father said. “They could be waiting for us outside in the ravine.”

Roland wet his lips. “I ain’t scared of them. What can they do? I ain’t afraid of gunshots, Bruce. You know I ain’t.”

My father was silent. What he was thinking I couldn’t imagine.

Suddenly, Roland tried to grab me in the dark. I could feel his bony fingers and sharp nails snatching at my arms and legs. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you, boy? Tell your father what you saw. Tell him. He don’t believe me.”

Lunging forward, my father seized Roland, who yelped in pain, and for a moment, the two men struggled in the darkness. Then my father, overcoming the weaker man, hissed something in his ear, and they both froze. Too late, I realized that we were all listening to the same unmistakable sound: the steady clump of heavy boots on the rungs of a wooden ladder. Someone was climbing into the pit.

They’ve found the diary, I thought. They know where we are.

In a flash, my father was on his feet. He pulled me up and, with a push to the back, thrust me down the corridor. I could hear Roland scrambling to his feet behind us, his cowboy boots clattering against the stony floor.

“Run, goddamn you,” my father hissed, pushing me again. Then, when I hesitated, he grabbed me by the wrist and, with a yank that almost dislocated my shoulder, pulled me along behind him.

Together, we plunged into the darkness like pennies flung into a well, but how long we fell I don’t know. I remember mostly a sense of terror, bordering on madness, as the floor beneath us rose and fell, in places forming stony cliffs that we had to climb up or, screaming at one another, crawl down.

Now and again, the walls on either side would contract, forming gaps so narrow that the rough-hewn stones tore at the buttons on my father’s coat. Farther down, the corridor expanded, the narrow tunnel giving way to a series of rooms or halls of enormous size, places so large that our echoing footsteps rang like bells.

All the while, a frenzied shouting or barking, distorted and unearthly, reverberated through the multitudinous passages, swelling until the nightmarish cacophony drove every thought from my mind, every thought, that is, but the realization that we needed to run, to hide, to bury ourselves somewhere we could never be found.

And then, everything cleared, and we were no longer running. I was kneeling on the floor, a cut on my forehead bleeding steadily into my left eye, and Roland was there, coughing and coughing and struggling to breathe. The shouting of our pursuers had faded, though I could still hear it, now and then, floating up from somewhere down below. We could have been miles from the house, but I think now that we had doubled back and were not far from where we had started.

“There’s a way out,” my father panted. “I can see a light... through there.”

He was right. I could see his eyes shining in the darkness like dying stars.

I leaned down and saw not a light, but a sort of mist, which glistened faintly. It seemed far away, as if it were at the end of a long tunnel. In my mind, I saw a sort of crack in the fractured rock, through which we might crawl, but when I felt the wall, my palms touched something sticky and slightly damp. I was too tired, I think, to pay any attention to the warm air that wafted out of that hole or the smell it carried with it.

Roland could barely talk, but I understood what he said all the same.

“We ran straight to her.”

My father said nothing, but I sensed something rare in him, an uncertainty, a growing, gnawing sense of doubt.

“We can’t go back,” he said finally, his voice small in that strange place. “We have to go on. It’s the only way left.”

I swallowed. I didn’t know how to make him understand. “There’s something in there,” I said, feeling around in the darkness for his hand. “It brought us here.”

Again, my father hesitated. He started to light a match, but it wouldn’t light, and he finally tossed it, unlit, onto the floor.

“Come on,” he said wearily, starting for the gap in the rock. “Let’s go.”

But Roland was gone. We called to him as loud as we dared, and we searched for him in the darkness as best we could, touching the walls and floor, but he had disappeared.

“You’ll come with me,” my father said, turning back to the hole he had found, “won’t you?”

I didn’t answer, but I followed him, and together, we crawled into that sticky, malodorous funnel.

* * *

Inside was silence, and whatever murky light there may have been at the end of the passage was blocked by my father’s huge body. Because of its low ceiling, we had to crawl on our stomachs, our chests and sometimes our faces pressed against the floor. The lace coating the rock was stronger than it appeared, and more than once, my father was caught in its sticky web and had to struggle, sometimes violently, to free himself. The passage was not much larger than his body, and in places, its rocky fingers pinned him to the floor for what felt like hours, leaving him as helpless as a child. Soon, he was breathing hard, and I thought I could hear his strong heart beating with repressed excitement.

Lying there, with my cheek resting on the warm, smooth rock, I thought of my room in the old house and the bed where I had slept, surrounded by books and toys and drawings I had pinned to the walls. In my mind, I covered myself with a heavy quilt and, snuggling deeper into the soft mattress, turned toward the window. I could see the stars shining over the pastures and pecan groves west of the house. With its uncertain flicker, the closest made me think of a lighthouse glimpsed from the deck of a rolling ship tossed about by heavy seas.

“I’d like to cross the ocean someday,” I said to my mother, whose warm body I could feel close to mine. “They say there are cities in Europe where people have lived for thousands of years.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her head nod.

“They have things there that we don’t have here,” I continued, pressing my fingertips against the cold glass, “inventions we can’t even imagine.”

Closer now, she nodded again, though I was too sleepy to understand what she said.

“Things,” I said sleepily, “we can’t even imagine.”

I closed my eyes, knowing that it was time for my goodnight kiss, and I felt, rather than saw, her dark shape bend over me, the mattress sinking a little under her weight. For some reason, I pulled away, but the steady, almost mechanical beating of her heart comforted me, and I relaxed. Her mouth opened, her lips making a soft, wet sound as they parted, and I felt a little saliva drop onto my cheek — and burn, like acid, into my flesh.

With a jerk, my head struck the rock, and I was awake. I was lying on the rocky passage, the blood throbbing in my ears, but at least it was no longer completely dark. In front of me, I could see a soft, misty glow, which made me think of a lamppost hidden beneath a wet fog. Grunting a little, I inched forward, the webs in front of me broken by my father’s passage.

I was about to call out to him when I heard his voice coming from somewhere nearby, though it was softer, gentler than it had been in a long time.

“With the money,” he whispered, “we’ll buy back the house and the land. You’ll see. It’ll be ours again.”

From out of the darkness came a purring sound, a murmur of assent barely audible over the sound of dripping water.

“There’ll be no more worrying about money,” he said, “about anything.”

The end of the passage was approaching. I could see a little into the murky, dimly lit cavern beyond, the air of which was so warm and humid it was nearly hot. The smell radiating out of it made me almost frantic.

“And Peter will go back to school. They think he’s a smart boy, you know. Soft, but smart. He sees things the other boys don’t.”

As I wriggled forward, I felt something touch my hand, something hard and cold. It was the lantern that Kepler took from my father.

“You’ll see. It’ll be just like it was.”

Before the lantern’s feeble, flickering beams died and left me in darkness, they showed me the chamber’s rocky ceiling, revealing a cluster of familiar shapes, some as large as a grown man, which hung there, drooling and twitching silently in their white lace. Beneath them, on the other side of the chamber, my father, his eyes closed, was standing next to what looked like an infection in the earthen wall, a bloated, thick-skinned bag or sac that, throbbing slightly, swelled and stank, as its long, thin metal arms caressed him and, pulling him down, pressed their open mouths together.