Two

The woods behind the new house were dry and crackly and, stepping through them, Edgar turned down a slight hillside in a direction he had not yet explored. Using his arms for balance, he zigzagged down a decline into a greenish, wooded valley below, where he suddenly found before him a babbling brook partly hidden by trees and shrubs. Clear, cool mountain water bubbled and gurgled over miniature falls that trickled sweetly through the trees, pooling up around a few mountain rocks every few feet or so. Edgar could tell by the deep cuts in the valley how wide the brook normally was, and how much higher, and noticed that tree roots had emerged in the valley walls like stairs. 

The drought had certainly taken its toll.

He hopped across the rocks through the center of the valley, when suddenly, a few skittish fish darted beneath his feet.

Rainbow trout! He’d never caught a rainbow trout before. The next day, when he came back, that would surely change.

Then, from the corner of his eye, something brown came into view through a patch of alder leaves to his right. Just as a hot gust blew through, the leaves revealed the structure like a theater curtain. Keeping his balance on the rocks, he slowly peeled back the leafy partition and squinted through the leaves. There, in a slight clearing, was an old, broken-down cabin that looked like a slaughterhouse from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only smaller and less threatening. Ever so cautiously, he stepped from the rocks and began to move through the branches toward the building, motivated now by abject curiosity.

Out in the sunshine, free of the thicket, he beheld the cabin with a hand shielding his eyes from the sun.

“Hello?” he said loudly, but no one answered. Of course no one’s gonna answer. What the heck would anyone be doing way out here? He looked around the clearing, scanning for signs of movement. He moved closer in, entranced. The windows on either side of the door were practically glassless with a few foggy shards remaining like dangling teeth in a rotten mouth. The hot wind whistled through the gaps in the wood where termite holes had turned everything into a honeycomb.

“Hello?” he said again, but received no response. OK, just had to make sure. This might just make an adequate hangout if it’s not too rotten on the inside.

He paused with his hand on the ancient, rusty doorknob, and thought of the backwoods cabins back home in Alabama. Back home you sometimes came upon a structure while out exploring but you never went in since there were just too many stories of crazy old men with shotguns and mean, ferocious dogs, or just plain old copperhead snakes. Not to mention ghosts.

Finally, when he mustered his courage enough, Edgar turned the rusty knob and the door groaned open. He ducked into the dark, creepy opening, and before his eyes could even acclimate, a strange smell hit his nose. The smell took his breath away, not that it was bad, but it was just strange, unidentifiable—like something musty and warm. It definitely didn’t fit the setting.

Rubbing his eyes to focus, a strong, hot gust from the valley slammed the door shut, and he nearly soiled himself. Once his thundering heart calmed, he surveyed the dark room again and took a timid step forward. Beneath his feet, the floorboards creaked and moaned. Once again, just like a horror movie.

The building was bare except for loads and loads of cobwebs, all draped across the wooden rafters above. There was no furniture, no pots, no pans, and no stove. Just a plain, old, funky room.

The decay of the logs and the strong, weird smell indicated that nobody had lived there for quite some time. Which was great.

Edgar turned a few circles and smiled big. Yes, this would make a great hangout.

Suddenly, something made him stop spinning. What was that? He cocked his head sideways to listen. It was a strange, eerie sound—something faint, constant, and nearby. Something below.

Listening as deeply as he could, concentrating hard enough to drown out the distant screech of two red-tailed hawks in an argument above, he closed his eyes tight and cocked his head further sideways until, finally, there it was. He looked down. From beneath the floorboards emerged a faint, strange sound. A strange whistling.

It was air. Whistling air.

Hot air, his ankles told him, and that’s when he realized the gust had been licking at his ankles all along. He took another big sniff.

The rising air was definitely responsible for the strange, unidentifiable smell.

“Is there a basement down there?” he asked aloud, squatting to the floor. He squinted through the cracks and rubbed his chin but could see nothing. It was far too dark between the cracks to see.

Closing an eye, he peered deeper into the crack but to no avail. He stretched his hand to the floor and could feel the draft of air coming up. His cell phone rang violently in his pants pocket, almost giving him a heart attack. He nearly toppled over sideways.

“Hey Mom,” he said breathlessly into the phone. “No ma’am,” he muttered, “I haven’t died yet.” He decided not to mention the cabin. There’s no way she’d ever let me come back here.

As he listened to her go on about how she registered him for school the next day—how she was holding his new schedule of advanced classes in hand (and consequently, he better get ready to study his butt off)—he rose from the floor and yanked a pack of Big League Chew from his back pocket and stuffed an oversized wad into his mouth.

“Mom,” he said, smacking, “please. Can we not talk about school today? This is the last day of summer. I just want to check out the Indian Hills behind that old-timey McDonald’s. Yeah, the one with the moose meat.”

Holding the phone against his ear with a shoulder, he lowered himself to a knee and waved a palm over the floorboards. Where is that air coming from? He slumped to both knees and, with one hand, stuffed the rest of the pouch into his mouth and nodded.

“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I swear to God on your future grave I won’t get killed in the woods. Not by drifters or bears or swarms of hornets. Just let me . . .” He flicked the empty Big League Chew wrapper across the room and it did the most amazing thing: it played air hockey . . . with itself.

Instantly it was caught upon the uprising air and floated all the way across the room, then bumped into the opposite wall and bounced back, returning to Edgar’s outstretched hands. It never even touched the floor. 

“Yes ma’am,” he muttered into the phone. “I’m still here.” He stood and dusted off his knees and stuffed the wrapper back into his pocket. “Just let me check out a few more things, OK?” he asked. “I promise I’ll be home for dinner. Just a couple more hours.”

He hung up the phone and shoved it back into his pocket, then inhaled deeply, experiencing the musty, warm odor again. So strange. It was salty, like the sea. Which didn’t make sense. There was no ocean around Mount Lanier—not for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Edgar knew the smell of the sea, though; it was an unmistakable smell. It was something that made him miss home terribly.

He studied the floorboards and wondered how well they were nailed down. Reaching out, he took one and gripped it by its edge, then gave it a good, upward tug, but it didn’t budge.

Then he stood, kicking the corner of the plank with the back of his foot, trying to bend and tug as hard as he could to see if it would loosen. Yes. It wiggled. Finally! He kicked it once more, this time more vigorously than before, then bent and tugged again, rising and kicking and bending and tugging and it budged even more. After one more good kick and another violent yank, he could dig his fingers beneath the loosened board. With an angry growl, the plank surrendered its grip on the ancient, rusty nails, rising up from the floor with a scream.

“Yes!” he grunted triumphantly, tossing the board aside. Kneeling, he stuck his entire face into the dark hole and looked in.

But there was nothing—nothing but darkness. Only the earthy draft of air flowing freely that lifted his brown, stringy bangs and cooled the sweat on his forehead.

“Ugh,” he groaned. “It’s too dark!”

For a moment he paused, trying not to think of tarantulas and snakes, or fangy rodents that could be lurking down there. Mustering every bit of courage he had in him, he reached his hand down anyway and felt around in the creepy darkness.

“Dang!” he shuddered, shutting his eyes tight, thoroughly expecting to get bitten. Ultimately, he felt nothing. No bugs, no fangs, no snakes and, strangest of all, no ground beneath the cabin.

Slowly he opened his eyes. With renewed confidence he reached even deeper into the hole—all the way down to his shoulder—so far down that his cheek pressed against the adjacent plank on the floor. Still, his fingers reached no foundation below. No brick, no cement, no rock. Not even dirt from the hillside that Edgar knew must be down there. There was only air, a non-stop supply of the warm, salty breeze.

He stood. He scratched his head and studied the crack in the floor, then picked up the plank he’d uprooted from the floor. Holding it firmly in his hands, he slid it beneath the dark gap and, using leverage from an adjacent board, leaned on the plank with all his weight and suddenly up it popped from the floor like a weed from the dirt.

With a triumphant smile, Edgar snatched the loose floorboard from the floor and tossed it aside, hovering over a now even larger gap in the floor.

“Dang!” he said. He still couldn’t see a thing.

He wiped the sweat from his brow and renewed his grip on the plank, then, using the wood as leverage, popped another floorboard from its nails. And then another. And yet another. And as they came up from the floor, he tossed them from the glassless windows into the meadow outside, until, before he knew it, most of the boards in the room had been removed.

Breathless and sweaty, he turned to survey what remained. It was unreal. He had never seen anything like it.

A massive hole, obviously man-made, existed beneath the floorboards. That’s where the salty air had been coming from!

Energized by the mystery, he was now even more frantic in removing the remaining boards. The more he studied the vast depth of the hole in the room’s center, the faster he worked and the quicker he was forced to the outskirts of the room in order to not fall in.

When finally he stood on the last few remaining boards, he leaned over the edge. How far down the hole went, he did not know.

It was eerie and beautiful and lined with bricks around the top—something like an old-fashioned water well, except much, much bigger. He guessed it was around eighteen feet in diameter.

Edgar kneeled to inspect the bricks that shaped the hole. They had each been smoothed and decorated with ornate, inscrutable markings. The markings weren’t in English, but rather something like the dot-dot-dash of Morse code combined with some other type of writing.

Maybe alien!

Edgar inspected deeper into the hole and saw an occasional stick figure intertwined with more of the indecipherable words, all drawings of people hunting animals, utilizing ancient vehicles and tools. Edgar reached down and traced a pinkie over what seemed to be a picture of a dark cloud with a yellow bolt of lightning shooting through it.

“This is really old,” he estimated. Maybe cavemen drew this. The whole world would want to see this, he suddenly realized. It could even make him rich.

With that money maybe we could move back to Alabama, he thought. He was going to be famous, that was for sure, but he didn’t want to tell anybody just yet.

“Hello!” he yelled into the hole.

“Hello!” he screamed again, but this time he noticed the lack of echo.

“HELLO!” he yelled once more.

What kind of deep hole has no echo?

Perhaps it was full of moss at the bottom. Maybe the moss was absorbing the sound. 

“HELLLOOOOOOO!” he yelled one last time. Still no answer, and still no echo. Then, leaning over the hole, he did what any ninth-grader might do when standing before a dark, deep hole: he spat. And as the mound of spit darted into the depths, he listened intently for the splat, but strangely, there came none.

Weird!

Vexed, but armed with an idea, he carefully skirted the edges of the hole and slipped from the cabin, out to the piles of wooden planks sitting outside the window. There, he selected a plank and checked it for rot. When satisfied, he walked it back to the hole’s edge and tossed it down, standing still as a statue as the board disappeared from view.

He listened intently for a loud thud or clank or clap, but no such sound emerged. He scowled into the darkness.

This thing’s deep, he thought.

He cast his eyes upward to study the roof. There, thin beams of sunshine streamed faintly down through rotting logs. Of course, he thought, sunlight. It was exactly what he needed.

Returning to the woodpile outside, he snatched up another floorboard and carried it inside. Then, in a corner of the room, he leaned the plank against the wall and gave it a bit of weight with his foot to make sure it didn’t snap in two. Satisfied, using the board as a ramp, he skirted right up toward the rafters, and just as he neared the top, straining to reach the closest rafter, the plank snapped violently beneath him.

“Ah!” he grunted, shooting his hands upward. At the last moment, he snagged a rafter and hung above the floor. The pieces of the broken plank thudded flatly beneath his two dangling feet.

Groaning and grunting, he yanked himself up onto the rafters, then teetered precariously in the attic on squatted legs. Above, he took a moment to find his balance and studied the hole from this new, elevated perspective. Then, slowly, he stood and placed his palms on the V-shaped roof overhead.

This is nuts, he thought, trying not to fall.

Slowly, carefully, he began to make his way across the rafters, and each step brought him ever closer to the dark, yawning hole below his feet. Each board growled threateningly as he stepped, but still he pressed forward, placing one shaky foot in front of the other, his lips moving in silent concentration and counting the steps, his heart beating wildly in his ears. Despite his fear he carried on. He just couldn’t stop himself. He had to know what was down in the hole and his curiosity wouldn’t let up until he did. He knew it was a Dewittian thing, that deep sense of curiosity handed down by his studious, investigative parents, that raged like a monster in him.

Inch by inch, step by step, he carefully navigated the rafters until the center of the hole was entirely beneath his feet like the mouth of a kraken. Cold sweat emerged all across his body, dampening his clothes.

“Why,” he asked the empty room. “Why do I do this kind of stuff?” Beneath his tennis shoes a sure death awaited.

With each foot firmly planted on a rafter, he slowly, carefully raised his right hand over his head and, maintaining a wobbly balance, began to claw at the disintegrating wood above.

“C’mon,” he muttered, his lips pursed tight. Not daring to look up, he continued to claw and claw, peeling away at the rotten wood, until suddenly, just as he thought it would, something moved. The wood, spongy with age, began to give way.

“BLAH,” he spat as debris began to fall, some of it onto his face. For several endless minutes, he held tight to the rafters and clawed and picked at the roof, jabbing and prodding, poking and punching at the rotten wood that soon began to surrender a bit of sunlight.

Then, magnificently, a massive chunk of the mushy stuff began to give way.

Yes, c’mon, he thought, willing the chunk to fall. When it did, it came down with violence, finally raining down in a cloud of debris so large that he was unable to breathe for half a minute. His grip on the rafters remained, however, as he brushed the pulp and rot off his body with his other hand. Slowly, he looked up and beheld his work. There, just above, was bright, blazing sun. It beamed gloriously down through the hole.

As the dust settled and sunlight filled the room, he looked down, a huge smile on his face. Beneath his feet, the tunnel had been illuminated with a brilliant flood of sunshine. It was like a spotlight.

Edgar kneeled carefully on the creaky beams, gazing headlong into the hole, studying its walls that seemed to stretch countless yards into the earth, how far down he didn’t know. Another thing he noticed: the walls had been decorated with more of the same sorts of writings he’d seen on the bricks at the top.

Still, there was no sign of the bottom—just a shroud of darkness in the earth far below where the last beams of sunlight could stretch.

Investigating the hole, mesmerized, he almost didn’t notice the large insect that was slowly crawling across the base of his neck. When he did finally feel it, though, the creature had traveled almost halfway around to his throat. Edgar’s hand shot instinctively to the creature, and for a split second he could feel its twitchy legs in his fingers: a crawly, fuzzy body convulsing threateningly against his throat.

In one violent motion he snatched the spider and hurled it across the room, but when he did, he lost his grip on the rafters and immediately began to fall. Wham! His shoulders slammed against the rotting beams and then his head nailed them, too.

For a moment all he saw was the blinding blitz of sunlight above, coupled with stars in his eyes. Suddenly, he was slipping—falling into the hole through the beams.

Pain flashed through his head like lightning, the reddish sparkles storming his vision, but Edgar clung to consciousness long enough to flail his arms around and reach for the rafters. And, in the last possible moment, just as he was through the beams and in midair, by some sort of miracle, he snagged a rafter and hung tight. With all his remaining strength, he reached his other hand upward and grabbed a hold, then dangled dangerously above a certain, grizzly death.

“Oh . . . my . . . God,” he muttered, swaying slightly side-to-side like a pendulum. He closed his eyes tight and tried to steady himself, but very quickly he began to feel his grip loosening on the rafters.

He would have to act fast.

Mustering all his strength, summoning his old monkey bar skills he’d mastered back in Alabama, he began to swing his legs forward for momentum, letting go of the rafters at the very last second, and flung himself to the next rafter, snatching hold. Then he did it again—whoosh, onto the next rafter. Each move strained his screaming fingertips to the breaking point; splinters from the wood began digging into his flesh. But Edgar ignored it. With every moment, with every swing to the next rafter, all the strength leaving his hands, as hot, salty air from below shot up his pants legs like the hot breath from a dragon’s mouth, he swung.

Please, God, he prayed in his mind. Please get me out of this.

The beams groaned like rocking chairs as he continued to swing across the room, making his way over the threatening hole, and finally neared safety. His shoulders screamed in pain. Hot sweat stung his eyes, blinding him. 

And that’s when he remembered what he’d told his mother earlier.

I won’t get killed today. 

No, he wouldn’t.

Remembering it gave him a new wave of strength. With gritted teeth, he swung to the next rafter, and the next, clinging to each with all he had left, swinging like a wounded gymnast across the room, snorting and grunting, ignoring the howling cramps in his stomach and in his chest until finally, he was there. He looked down and thanked God. He’d made it past the hole. He was safe. Below his feet, a thin stretch of flooring awaited.

Counting to three, he let go of the rafters and dropped ten feet to the ground, collapsing on the remaining floorboards, rolling upon impact. He groaned in pain as tears filled his eyes, but he was safe. He brought his burning hands to his thighs and felt around, seeing if his ankle was broken, but it didn’t seem to be. He lay on the remaining floorboards heaving, gasping for breath, staring blankly at the afternoon sun through the brand new hole in the roof.

As the burning in his muscles finally subsided, he rolled over and checked his wristwatch. It was 3:43 pm. His mother would be worried soon.

On wobbly legs, he stood and brushed himself off, then stepped to the edge of the hole to look down once more. He gazed into the murky depths and marveled at how completely it swallowed up the brilliant sunshine.

The tunnel, now aglow with symbols and pictures that stretched down into the depths, had been constructed with an endless expanse of golden bricks reaching as far as the eye could see. He stood massaging the last persistent pain in his shoulder, gazing down at the writings when suddenly, inexplicably, something strange began to emerge down there. It came shooting up from the depths with great speed. 

What the heck?

Something was there, something was definitely coming up, careening up the tunnel with such velocity he wondered if he should get himself out of the way.

With each second, the thing streaked up like a blur, spinning around like a helicopter blade, slicing up through the air and twirling all around, like a rail-thin gymnast. Suddenly it was before him, springing up from the hole and freezing in midair.

Edgar, mystified, reached out and plucked it from its arc, just as it began to fall back down.

“What the . . .?” he said, studying it.

In his hands was the same floor plank he’d tossed into the hole an hour earlier—the first plank he’d pulled from the floor—the one he’d thrown down to make a SPLAT.

Somehow, it had come back up.