Still no answer.
“And you never got your degree. After working on it for so many years.”
“Some of us don’t suffer from completion anxiety.”
Good. She was talking. She was joking a little. “What held you here, Sylvie? There were other people living in this house that last year before the landlord closed it down. I bet some of them even lived here longer than you. They were able to leave. The house didn’t hold them. Your roommate, Lissy. She left, right? Got her degree?”
Sylvie shrugged.
“But you stayed.”
“I guess I washed up here.” She wasn’t crying anymore. That was good, too.
“The whole house, you feel it, the shape of it, the strong points, the weak points. All the . . . moods. Of the house.”
“Maybe. I feel things, anyway. Nobody knows everything about anything.”
“Why not that tunnel in the basement?”
“I don’t like the cellar,” she said. “So sue me.”
“It’s more than that, Sylvie,” he said.
“The house wants to be beautiful again. The tunnel doesn’t have a thing to do with that.”
But it did. He knew that. Whatever was holding her here had something to do with that tunnel. She couldn’t go near it, but she couldn’t get too far from it, either. He thought of how the tunnel had been closed off. The rocks piled up, yes, but placed lightly, balanced, not a solid barrier, not enough to contain anything large or strong. Just enough to keep from having to see what was down there. Or to keep something down there from seeing in.
“I thought for a while you were getting in and out of the house through that tunnel.”
She shook her head. “Please just forget about that. It’s nothing.”
Forgetting it was the one thing he couldn’t do. He was already filthy from plaster, from the dust of the rubble. He might as well do it now. He was going to have to do it eventually. “Look, just stay up here, OK? Nothing down there can hurt you.” He got up from the bench and stepped through the newly disarranged piles of his tools until he found the pick.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Like you said, it has nothing to do with you. I’m going to walk the tunnel, see if it’s caved in. See if it’s a hazard. If it is, I have to seal it off for real.”
“It’s no hazard.”
“Forget about it. It’s nothing. Like you said.” He grabbed his flashlight and headed down the hall for the cellar stairs.
She ran after him down the hall. “Please,” she said. “Leave the tunnel alone.”
He didn’t pause in his stride. “I have a feeling that tunnel’s the most interesting feature of this house.”
“It’s not. It’s just damp and dirty.”
“So you have been down there.” He jogged down the basement stairs.
“Yes. But I stopped going because it isn’t safe, it could cave in on you.”
Don reached up and switched on the basement worklight. “Fess up, Sylvie. What are you hiding down there? You keep your stash down there?”
He meant it as a joke, but she wasn’t laughing. “There’s nothing down there that belongs to me,” she said.
“Then stand back and watch the rubble fly.”
Now, with a light, he could see how much the barrier had collapsed from his previous foray here, searching for the wrecking bar. The gap at the top was now several feet high. He could crawl over. But he didn’t want to do that. He’d have to clear the rubble away to seal up the gap or to open it permanently. Either way, the job needed doing.
He set to work with the pick. Mostly he just used it like a scraper, drawing the stones away from behind the furnace. As he cleared them away, more fell from the barrier. “Look at this,” he said. “Easy. Not much of a barrier at all.”
He turned to face her. She stood half-hiding behind the furnace.
“Flimsy,” he said. “Like it was built by somebody little and not very strong.”
Finally it had collapsed as much as it was going to. Then the work got tedious and slow as he bent over and picked up the stones and pitched them or hiked them across the cellar out of the way. Sylvie backed out of range. He was vaguely aware of her waiting by the stairs.
By the time the job was done, his back was aching from holding that bent-over pose. But the door into the tunnel was clear. Taking up the flashlight, he took a couple of steps into the tunnel.
“Wait!” Sylvie called from behind him.
He turned back, found her standing between the furnace and the foundation.
“I’m begging,” she said. “Don’t go.” She looked almost frantic, and yet she spoke quietly.
“Tell me why not,” he said.
“Because I like you.”
“What, there’s something terrible down there?”
“Yes.”
“Some kind of monster?” He said it mockingly. “I’m not much afraid of a monster that couldn’t get through that barricade.”
“There’s no monster now.”
His patience was wearing thin. “Stop the mysteries and tell me!”
Sylvie started crying and leaned against the furnace, her head bowed.
This again, thought Don, too tired now to be sympathetic.
“I’m going, OK? I’ll be fine.”
“I know you’ll be fine,” she said, trying to control her crying. “My roommate’s down there, all right? Lissy’s down there.”
If there was one thing Don didn’t expect, it was that. And yet it fit. Why she couldn’t leave. Why she hated the tunnel. “I don’t think you mean she’s living there.”
“She was cheating,” said Sylvie. “She spent all her time that last semester with her stupid boyfriend, she was going to flunk out. So she started stealing my work and copying it to write papers for her own classes. If she got caught we’d both be kicked out! Nobody would believe I wasn’t helping her cheat.”
“You killed her for cheating?”
“I didn’t mean to!” Sylvie turned to face him. “You think I’d plan something like that? She was always in the tunnel. Our apartment was the only one with access to the basement. So she did keep her stash there, her stash, I never used that stuff. But she had pot, sometimes coke, and she and her boyfriend would go down there to get high and . . . so I knew where she was. I was just going to talk to her. Lay it on the line. She had to stop or I was going to the dean with it.”
Sylvie didn’t like to go down the tunnel when she knew Lissy was there, mostly because she could never be sure Lanny wasn’t there too. He often came up the tunnel the other way to join Lissy there, so Sylvie had no way of knowing if they were together or not. That was a scene she didn’t want to walk in on. Sex didn’t bother her, or even the idea of seeing people doing it—you don’t go to college for this many years without getting an eyeful now and then. What she didn’t like was to see Lanny and Lissy doing it. She’d heard it often enough in the next bedroom. Lissy was a squealer and Lanny was a grunter. It sounded like a pig farm and it nauseated her. She couldn’t shake the memory of Grandpa’s pig farm, back when she still had family. She stood on the second rail from the top, with her daddy holding her up to make sure she didn’t fall into or out of the sty. She must have been all of four years old. The pigs were all bigger than her. Like elephants, that’s how they seemed. Huge fat muddy pink backs lurching and trotting around in the mud, muzzling the trough, making hideous noises, grunts and squeals. And there was Papaw, teasing her by telling her not to fall in, those pigs would be just as happy to eat little girl as slops. In memory she knew he meant well enough. He’d forgotten the terrors of childhood, the credulity. But at the time she had no perspective. She believed in the danger, and for weeks after that she had nightmares about the pigs looming and grunting over her. They’d be trotting past, back and forth, and then all of a sudden one would notice her and start to squeal. Mud sharks, that’s what pigs seemed like to her. So the sounds she heard from Lissy and Lanny, they weren’t erotic,
they were disgusting and, when she admitted it to herself, terrifying.
But tonight was the last straw. Lissy wasn’t even bothering to paraphrase now. She had taken Sylvie’s old paper on the system of filing active documents during World War II—her senior thesis, for heaven’s sake—and turned it in for a history class. She probably thought it was safe because Sylvie was in library science, not history, but there was a history professor on her evaluating committee and the paper was on an eccentric enough topic that it would be remembered. She had to find out if Lissy had already turned the paper in. If she had, then she had to withdraw it. If she hadn’t, then she could take the incomplete and write another. That was it. There would be no compromise, no sweet-talking, no tears that could soften the hardest heart. It’s not my heart that’s hard, anyway, thought Sylvie. It’s hers. Having no concern for what she’s doing to me, the risks she’s making me take against my will. My whole future down the toilet. She can marry Lanny, but my career is all I’ve got. My education and my career.
Midway down the tunnel, in the level stretch, Lissy had her candles lit, four of them, perched up on the two stone walls that lined the tunnel. She was alone, lying on a dirty old mattress, wearing only a t-shirt. Hadn’t she worn more than this to come down here? But there were no other clothes visible. The things Lissy did when she was high.
“You missed the party,” said Lissy. She started to laugh.
Don listened to the story, liking Lissy less and less—but how else could Sylvie tell the story? Turn the girl into a saint or something? Still, he believed her. Believed her, but also hated hearing the tale. He didn’t need another dark story rinched out of somebody’s humid conscience.
“I confronted her about cheating,” Sylvie said. “About how she had no right to put my whole life at risk, everything I worked for . . . I got emotional. That never worked with her, but I couldn’t help it.”
“Lighten up, Sylvie,” Lissy said lazily. “You take it all too seriously.” She settled back down on the mattress as if she meant to go to sleep.
Sylvie was used to Lissy’s selfishness. It used to be that was part of her charm. Her unconcern, her childlike innocence of the complicated moral questions that plagued more responsible people—Sylvie used to admire it, back before they lived together. Used to laugh with Lissy about some fretful teacher or heartbroken ex-boyfriend. “Why do they have to get so intense?” Lissy would always ask.
Well, now Sylvie knew. They got intense because Lissy was so destructive. She wasn’t childlike, she was devilish. Because she knew exactly what she was doing. She enjoyed it. Sylvie understood that now. Lissy had used Sylvie’s senior thesis, not because she didn’t know the harm it could cause, but because she did know. She liked the risk. She loved dragging Sylvie into it.
“You’ve got to live more on the edge,” that’s what Lissy always said. But Lissy herself, she never seemed to get near the edge. She lived on other people’s edges. And when they fell off, she’d admire how pretty they looked as they fell.
So Sylvie lost it. She’d spent her life being quiet and well-mannered. She had to, with no parents to look out for her. If she pushed people, they slapped her down. But if she was quiet and endured all things patiently, yes, they took advantage of her, but they also tolerated her. Didn’t throw her out. Let her stay in places where they didn’t really want her. That strategy had suited her fine, for many years, until Lissy. Quiet endurance was over.
Sylvie had slid down the furnace and was sitting on the floor, her toes pressed against the basement wall. She didn’t look at Don as she told her story.
“I screamed at her and finally she sobered up enough to scream back at me and one thing came to another.”
“It always does,” said Don. But the truth was it didn’t always. As Sylvie talked about reaching the end of her rope, Don wondered: Why hadn’t he ever reached the end of his? Sure, yesterday he had broken down and cried, but when did he ever just lose it and start screaming? Maybe if he’d gone a little crazy, he could have broken through the barriers that kept him from justice.
Of course, look what “losing it” did for Sylvie.
“She accused me of the most terrible things,” said Sylvie. “She called me everything, she said no wonder my mother died, no wonder my father died, anything was better than living with me. She wasn’t my friend anymore, you know? She wasn’t even human. Her face all twisted up, screwed up, her mouth open, her teeth like—it was like the monkey island at the zoo. An animal. She didn’t justify herself, she didn’t argue, she just went on the attack, saying I was worthless and boring and nobody liked me till she took me on as a project, to try to prove that there was nobody so lame and hopeless that she couldn’t bring them out and give them a life. I tried to scream back at her about how she wasn’t giving me a life, she was taking it away, but she never heard me. She wouldn’t shut up and listen at all, and I admit it, I was an animal too. We were both animals right then. And there was a loose stone. Lots of loose stones. I just wanted to shut her up, to hurt her. But I’d never hit anyone before. In my whole life, Don. Never hit anybody. And I’m not very strong. So I didn’t know how hard to hit. I just swung with all my might. The rock hit her in the side of her head.”
“Bet it shut her right up,” said Don.
Sylvie nodded. “You see people get knocked out on TV all the time. They go unconscious and then they get up and in the next scene they aren’t even groggy.”
“I take it she wasn’t groggy, either.”
“I shook her and shook her and she didn’t wake up. It was terrible, what she’d been doing to me, the things she said to me, but she didn’t deserve to die.”
“You’re sure you killed her?”
“There was so much blood.”
“There always is, from head injuries. But it’s usually just from the skin.”
“You think I didn’t try to feel her breath? Her pulse? I screamed at her, I slapped her, I got her blood all over me trying to wake her up and nothing worked. And then it finally dawned on me what I had done. My life was over, too. I couldn’t live with it. Don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t. Why wasn’t there an investigation when she disappeared? Why weren’t you arrested?”
“Nobody knew. She didn’t have any family, either. Just like me. And her boyfriend, Lanny—he never came back. Can you believe it? What a jerk. She disappears and he doesn’t even look for her. Doesn’t even ask.”
“And you never left this place.”
“The landlord gave up on the house that summer. It stood empty. What could I do? Go out and live my life as if I hadn’t committed murder? Take the job? I didn’t have the heart for it. I couldn’t even go pick up my diploma. I already defended my dissertation. I was done. But I couldn’t bear to go out there and . . . be alive. When I had killed her.”
“So you stayed there by her body? You checked her? You buried her in the tunnel?”
She looked horrified. “Of course I didn’t,” she said. “When I knew she was dead I ran out of the tunnel. I . . . put up that barricade. From stones near the entrance. I was crying the whole time, it kept collapsing, I kept piling it up. And then suddenly the stones started staying where I put them. Balancing themselves. The house was helping me, you see. Because now I belonged to the house. I was never going to leave.”
“So how do you know she didn’t wake up two hours later and go out the back way?”
“She was dead, Don!”
“That would explain why the boyfriend never came back. She went and met him and told him how you were going to turn her in for cheating and they split.”
“It didn’t happen that way. I wish it had!”
“But how do you know it didn’t happen?”
Sylvie looked at him, horrified at a possibility she had never considered. “She had to be dead. I had hit her so hard.”
“Like you said. You never hit anybody before. You’re not very big. Getting blood from somebody’s scalp is easy. Killing them isn??
?t.” Don knelt in front of her. “She isn’t down that tunnel, Sylvie. She’s out there, alive. For ten years she’s been out there having a life and you’ve been in here doing penance for a murder that never happened.”
“She is dead! How would you know anything! You weren’t there!”
“But I’m here now,” he said. “And I’m going to go down that tunnel and see for myself.”
She started to cry again. “She haunts me, don’t you get it? When I sleep, I dream of her coming for me, dragging me down in the tunnel, strangling me. I wake up, I can’t breathe, because she’s come to get even with me.”
“She doesn’t haunt you, Sylvie, you haunt yourself. You’re doing all this to yourself.” He picked up the flashlight and started down the tunnel.
It felt old to him. Dank, heavy, cool. No, cold. It had been sturdily built. The stones formed into walls on the left and right weren’t structural, they were more like a retaining wall to keep the sides of the tunnel from eroding when it rained. The real structure was wood as thick as railroad ties, vertical posts every four feet or so, bridged by wood the same thickness, and then the whole tunnel spanned by more railroad-tie-sized beams forming a continuous ceiling. This was a lot more tunnel than any rum runners would need, he thought. Like the house, it was built to last forever. But why would Dr. Bellamy need a passage like this? It made no sense.
He could hear Sylvie behind him. She was coming down the tunnel after all. Well, good. She should see for herself. If Lissy had really died, there would have been an investigation. Policemen would have come to the house, asking Sylvie questions. Since that never happened, Lissy didn’t disappear. It was Sylvie who disappeared, hiding out for years. But no one came looking for her because the diploma really doesn’t matter. In fact they probably mailed it to her. They probably thought she was off in Providence, Rhode Island, starting her new job. Maybe some professor was a little hurt that she never wrote to him. Maybe at some professional conference, years later, somebody from UNCG met somebody from Providence and asked how Sylvie was working out and found out that Sylvie had never shown up for the job. But by then where would he start looking? The house where she used to live was boarded up. She had no family to write to. And in the end there was no reason for anyone to search for her.