No, don’t be stupid, he told himself. The part of the ceiling you cut has all collapsed. The saw must be just a few feet under the shallowest part of this earthfall.
He probed with the handle of the sledgehammer. Right. The saw was right there. He reached in, felt through the dirt till he got it by the handle and pulled it out.
Only now he was turned around. He swung with the sledgehammer until it rang against stone. Here’s the wall. The left wall, as he headed up the tunnel. He didn’t want to stay on the right side, where his feet would stumble across the mattress, across Sylvie’s ruined body. He could hear snapping and creaking overhead. Was more of the tunnel going to collapse? Even where he hadn’t cut the wood? This was going a little better than planned.
He finally saw the light at the top of the tunnel, just as he heard the rotten wood snapping and tearing like velcro as tons of earth collapsed into the tunnel, zipping toward him. He ran, faster, scrambling. He thought of dropping the tools, but couldn’t get his fingers to let go of them, he was holding so tightly. A huge cloud of choking dust blew past him. He couldn’t breathe. He staggered, fell. The crackling sound was coming toward him. He couldn’t see at all now. He got partway up, crawled, stumbled, until he ran into something hard, right in his path. What could he possibly have run into?
The coal furnace. He was out of the tunnel. But he still couldn’t see. The fine moist dust that had blown upward through the tunnel was hanging thick in the air in the basement. He blinked; dirt was in his eyes. They teared up, he couldn’t see. Still pulling the skillsaw with him, he picked his way around the furnace, out into the open. Except the skillsaw suddenly snagged. Of course. The cord had been buried. Don grabbed the cord and pulled hard. It came free. But it was only the short cord of the saw itself that he had. The long extension cord was trapped down the tunnel.
“Don!” She was calling his name. She sounded so far away.
“I can’t see,” he said. “I’ve got dirt in my eyes.”
“I’ll lead you.” He felt her gentle touch, tugging at his arm. She kept letting go. No. Not letting go. Her hand was sliding free. She was getting less substantial all the time. Less real.
He couldn’t think of it that way. She wasn’t getting less real, she was getting more free. She would let go of this house that had trapped her for so long. That was a good thing for her. It’s not as if he was losing her, because he never really had her. Just the dream of her, the idea of her. It felt so real to hold her in his arms, but in the end she was always a ghost. And here, now, with his eyes closed, surrounded by darkness, he could believe that. This was reality, this choking blindness. What Sylvie was, what she meant to him, was a moment of clarity in the dark. She would be his memory of light. He could live with that.
Barely.
At last they were up the basement stairs. She led him into the bathroom. “I can’t turn on the faucets anymore,” she said.
“Can’t you get the house to do it for you?” he said.
“Oh,” she said. Then laughed. “I was getting used to being real.”
He was still fumbling with the faucet when he felt it move on its own, and the water gushed out. He filled his hands again and again, splashing it on his face. Finally he could blink his eyes open without pain. His hands were filthy. He soaped them up to his elbows, then washed his face with soap. After he rinsed, as he toweled himself dry, he looked in the bathroom mirror. His hair was caked with mud. His clothing was completely covered.
“I thought you were dead down there,” she said. “What was exploding?”
“No explosion,” he said. “That tunnel was ready to collapse. I got it started and it didn’t know when to stop.”
“Well,” she said. “I guess I finally got a decent burial.”
He shuddered. He thought of her body lying on that mattress, now covered with broken, rotted timbers and tons of earth. Buried was buried, with or without a box. With or without a marker.
“What I need,” he said, “is a shower.”
But when he left the bathroom, he didn’t go out to the ballroom to head up the stairs to the shower. Instead he went down the basement stairs. The dirt had settled on everything. A thin skiff of it covering the whole basement, even clinging to the beams overhead. The light was dim because of moist earth spotting the bulb. He walked over to the coal furnace. Dirt spilled out from both sides like the fan at the mouth of a canyon. Behind the furnace, it was piled up as tall as he was. And daylight was visible above. The tunnel had broken down along its entire length, and what he feared had happened—there had to be a sag in the back yard right behind the house, marking where the tunnel was. If Lissy wanted to, she could sneak into the house through this gap in the foundation. But he didn’t think she would. The gap wasn’t all that high. She wouldn’t know to look for it. If she couldn’t get into the far end of the tunnel, she’d assume she had to come through the door.
The plugged-in end of the extension cord still emerged from the tunnel. He unplugged it and started to pull. At first it came easily. The earth that had fallen wasn’t tightly packed, and he could straighten out the bends in the cord. It got harder as the cord straightened out and the weight of all the earth of the tunnel began to oppose him. Stubbornly he pulled and pulled. He had some vague idea that he didn’t want to leave a cord like a trail, tempting someone to excavate and find Sylvie’s body and disturb it. He leaned against the resistance of the cord, putting his whole weight behind it. And then suddenly it came free and he fell down on his butt, like a baby just learning to walk. It hurt his tailbone; the pain really stabbed as he got up. I’m getting old, he thought. All I need now is a broken tailbone.
The rest of the cord came out easily. He found what had given way. The second extension cord had come free. All he had pulled out was the first one. Well, that was fine. No part of the buried cord was sticking out. Nothing was left dangling.
He coiled the cord and walked up the stairs as he finished. She wasn’t waiting for him at the top of the stairs. But he heard water running in the house. He gathered up the sledgehammer and the skillsaw. They were caked with dirt. He brushed them off at the back door. I could use the Weird sisters to clean my tools right now, he thought.
In the back yard, the sag of the collapsed tunnel was only visible right up against the house, where the entrance had been. The rest of the tunnel was deep enough that the sag didn’t make a sharp line across the lawn.
He looked around. Could anybody see him from the nearby houses? Screw ’em if they could. He stripped off his shirt and pants and chucked them in the garbage can. There wasn’t a coin laundry in America that could cope with this dirt without breaking down. His shoes, though, he could clean. He got them off and beat them against the wall of the house until they merely looked dirty instead of encrusted. His socks went into the garbage with his pants and shirt.
Even his underwear was muddy brown from dust that had got through his jeans. That stuff was in his lungs. He’d be coughing up mud for a week, he was sure. He glanced around one more time for onlookers, saw none, and stripped off his briefs and dropped them in the garbage can. Then he picked up the skillsaw, cord, and sledgehammer, and dodged inside the house. Maybe I take this neatness thing too far, he thought. I’d rather be naked for a whole minute out in front of God and everybody than leave my filthy clothes anywhere but in a closed garbage can, or set down my tools anywhere but in their proper place. He imagined the police showing up at his door with a warrant for his arrest for indecent exposure. Maybe they’d arrive just as Lissy got there with her gun.
Lissy. If he had harbored any ambition of getting her arrested, it had sure faded now. His best evidence was now lying under tons of dirt in a tunnel. He could see the police excavating with pick and shovel, tearing apart Sylvie’s body in the act of discovering it. No, whatever happened with Lissy would be private. Just between the three of them.
Don put the saw and cord and sledgehammer where they belonged, then rummaged for some clean clothes
. He could hear the water running. He knew it was Sylvie starting the shower for him. Man, was he ready. He felt his skin crackle as the clay dust dried all over him.
Holding his clothes, he turned around to head for the stairs, and there was Sylvie, watching him. Instinctively he brought his clothes down to cover his crotch. “Um, sorry,” he said.
“I’ve seen you naked before,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“I watched you all the time,” she said. “You were the only interesting thing going on in the house, Don. You can hardly blame me.”
He wondered how she watched him. With her own eyes, or somehow using the house to see for her? He didn’t understand how this thing worked with a house and the spirit that haunted it. It responded to her, did things that she wanted without her even knowing she wanted them. It watched whatever she wanted to see.
“Well fine,” he said. “You’ve seen me naked, I’ve seen you dead. We got no secrets.”
She laughed.
He jogged up the stairs. His tailbone still hurt and his muscles were sore from all his exertion of the past few days. Hard work was a good thing but he hadn’t been giving his body enough rest. He set his clothes on the lid of the nonfunctional toilet and stepped into the shower. It took three soapings before the water finally rinsed away clear. He must have been carrying ten pounds of dirt, from the thick mud that formed in the bottom of the tub. He washed it all down the drain and soaped and rinsed himself a fourth time before he opened the shower curtain to find Sylvie leaning nonchalantly against the door, watching him. He grinned and shook his head, reached for his towel, and dried himself. “They got laws against peeping, you know,” he said.
“I don’t peep,” she said. “I stare.”
“That’s all right then. As long as you don’t point and laugh.”
He pulled on his clothes. He tried not to look at her too much, because if he did, he’d see how he could kind of make out the door behind her, right through her. She was fading way too fast.
Sylvie, of course, didn’t try to avoid the question. “What if I’m not here when she arrives?”
“That would be a bummer,” said Don. “Let’s hope she drives fast.”
“Believe in me, Don,” she said. “Keep me here.”
“I have something better than belief,” he said. “I know you. I love you.”
“Well what do you think belief is?” In the doorway he bent to kiss her. He could feel her, yes, but only faintly. Like the memory of a kiss. Like a gentle breeze. He started to cry again. “Damn,” he said. “Damn, I’m not the crying kind of guy.”
She touched his cheek. “I can still feel your tears,” she said.
“I feel like this is just one sadness too many, Sylvie. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve got to sleep now,” she said.
“Sleep? You think I’m going to waste any of the time we have together?”
“She’s coming, Don. And you’re so tired right now you can hardly stand up. Look at you, stooped over like an old man. What good will you be to me or yourself if you’re falling down from exhaustion?”
“What if you’re gone when I wake up?”
“I won’t be gone, Don. Even if I’ve faded, I’ll still be here. In the house. I’ll still be here.”
“She has to see you, Sylvie. She has to face you.”
“I’ll hold on. I’m stronger than you think. I’ve got the strength of the house to hold me here, don’t I? And your strength to keep me real. But for now you’ve got to sleep.”
She was right and he knew it. He nodded, unhappy about it, and started for the stairs.
“No, not down there,” she said. “You can’t sleep down there. What if she sneaks up in the dark before either of us knows she’s there, and shoots you through the window?”
“Didn’t think of that.”
“This isn’t TV,” she said. “Bad guys don’t really stand there and confess everything so there’s time for the good guys to get there and rescue you. They just shoot and down you go and they’re out of there.”
“I don’t know, even bad guys like to have somebody hear their story.”
“We’ll find out tonight, won’t we. Here, sleep on my bed. In this beautiful room you made for me.”
“I didn’t know it was for you till it was done.”
“I didn’t know you loved me until you gave it to me.”
Her bedding had gone unwashed for ten years, but it felt clean enough as he lay down atop the bedspread. Whatever was hers was clean enough for him. Or maybe it really was clean. Like her faded dress. Maybe the house had the power to do that, too. All that was missing was flower petals to mark her passage through the house.
With all his aches and pains, with the evening light still coming in through the windows, he thought it would take him forever to get to sleep, or that perhaps he might not sleep at all. But within a few minutes he felt himself fading. For a moment he thought: Is this how it feels to her? To fade like this? But he knew it was the opposite. His body was heavy and real; it was his consciousness that was fading. Her consciousness would stay, locked up in this house until he tore it down and set her free. And that’s what he’d do. He’d have ten, twenty thousand left, maybe a little more, after paying the demolition crew. That was enough for a down payment. He’d work his way up to cash purchases again. He’d done it before. His life wasn’t over. It only felt that way.
She was still there, sitting on the floor, her back against the wall. “Sylvie,” he whispered.
“Aren’t you asleep yet?”
“Almost,” he said. “Promise me you’ll wake me when she comes. Don’t try to face her alone.”
“I promise,” she said. “I’ve been alone long enough. The house kept trying to draw me in, make me part of the walls, the timbers. I never did. I knew I had to stay separate. Myself. I was waiting.”
“For Lissy to come back?”
“No. For you.”
She crawled the yard or so to the bed and leaned on it with her face just inches from his. “When Lissy was around, men always ignored me and fell for her.”
“I’m smarter than those guys,” he said.
And then he slept.
Sylvie watched him for a while, but then she began to wander through the house. As she was fading, she felt the pull of the house on her growing stronger. She could already feel her footsteps as strongly from underneath as from above; she felt through the floor as much as through her own feet.
For ten years she hadn’t let herself want anything. Not sunlight, not food, not love, not life. Nothing. She hadn’t known she was dead, but at the same time she knew she felt that way. Only when she stopped being dead, only these few weeks with Don Lark in the house did she understand how dead she had been. Lost in her guilt, her shame, her pain, her losses. Now that she had learned again to love and hope, now that she was no longer ashamed or guilty, of course it was that very joy that was killing her again. Whoever set up this universe, she thought, it really sucks. If you ever get around to making another one, change the rules a little. Lighten up on your creatures. Give us a break now and then.
She walked the house, feeling like a ghost now for the first time. She could sense the house responding to her. Windows rattling as she passed. Boards creaking because she wanted them to. Doors opening, closing. She walked among Don’s tools as if they were a field of butterflies; they rose up and flew out of her way as she walked among them, then settled back down, right where they had been, when she was gone. The flue opened and wind blew up the chimney because she wanted to exhale. She could feel her own heartbeat throbbing in the walls. This house was strong now. Don had made it strong. So now when she faded into the house there would be real power in it. She would own this house.
Please tear it down, Don. Please don’t leave me trapped here, with timbers for a skeleton and lath-and-plaster skin. Windows are no
t eyes. This alcove is beautiful, but it’s not my heart, not my heart.
The sky grew dark outside. The nearly leafless trees whistled in the gathering wind. Cold front coming through—she felt the temperature dropping through the contraction of the clapboard of the house. It would rain, it would blow; the last leaves would be stripped from the trees. Rain would probably pour down into the house through the sag in the lawn, the new opening in the basement. Mud would spread across the basement floor. The beginning of death. She could feel it like a wound. Not serious yet, but it would be infected. Left untended, it would kill the house. She wouldn’t let Don fix it. She wouldn’t.
And yet she felt the house’s need for it to be repaired, felt it like a deep hunger, like thirst, like a full bladder, those strong desires. When she was fully swallowed up by the house, would she have the strength to tell him not to repair it? Or would the house’s hungers become her own, the way most people were never able to distinguish between their bodies’ hungers and their own. As if their body were their self. They tore their lives apart, all for the sake of giving their body what it wanted, thinking all the time that it was what they wanted. Then they looked at the wreckage of their lives and wondered what had seemed so important about getting laid right then by that person; they lay in the hospital tubed up and dying, wondering what it was about each new cigarette that had made it seem so much more important than life itself. It takes death to wake you up, she thought. And then it’s too late. And when I’m caught up in the house, will I remember what I learned? Not likely. I’ll be mortal again, and die when the house dies, never remembering that its desires were never my own. My love for Don will be a distant memory. And he’ll forget me, too.
No. Not so. Never. You don’t forget this, any more than Don could forget his daughter. He’ll remember me. And I’ll feel it. I’ll know that I was known, that I am known. That someone holds me in his heart.
If she could have wept, she would have. Instead she let the rain cry for her, streaking down the side of the house, faster and faster. She let the wind sob for her, throbbing against the house, gust after gust.