Gran was about to ask all these questions, and maybe answer the one about where he got his brass C, when he heard a rumbling. Then he felt it. It sounded and felt much like the rumbling he’d heard and felt before, when he’d been chased by the hurricane, but this time it was louder, and he was sure it was moving far quicker. He looked to Catalina, who was listening intently, her eyes closed.
“I had a feeling this might happen,” Catalina said, her eyes still closed. “We’ll have to get a move on.” But she made no movement. She seemed to be deliberating.
“Is it the Hollows?” Gran asked.
Catalina didn’t answer. She lifted a finger, telling him to shush and wait. He stood, silent and ready.
Finally she opened her eyes, gave him her look, and he knew: Of course it was the Hollows. Her eyes closed again, as if she needed to block out all unnecessary senses to concentrate on what her ears were telling her. She opened her eyes once more, and this time she seemed ready for action.
“I think they’re taking an interest in you,” she said. “We have to get to the surface.”
The howling sound of the Hollows was growing louder.
“So let’s go!” Gran said.
“We will. I’m just trying to figure out the best way up.”
Catalina stood, her hands on her head as if she were suffering a terrible migraine. Finally she nodded to herself and started running.
She was fast. She was twenty feet away before she thought to turn around and yell, “Follow me!”
They ran down a long tunnel, dodging the supports all the way. Now the rumbling was deafening. Soon the tunnel split into two. Catalina took the leftward path.
Gran followed, and had the momentary thought that the Hollows would be tricked down the rightward path, but in seconds he heard the wind behind him. The walls of the tunnel began to shake.
“It’s coming!” he yelled ahead to Catalina. She said nothing. Of course she knew this.
This leftward path angled upward, and the going became increasingly difficult. It was like running up a slippery ramp. Then the tunnel got steeper and running up it was like scampering up a playground slide greased with oil. Ahead, Catalina had slowed, but she was making her way up with great agility. She was using her legs and her hands in a spidery way, moving so quickly that she seemed to be barely touching the surface of the tunnel.
The wind was so loud now, and so close, that Gran couldn’t hear anything but the howling, the scraping of all the stones and dirt the wind carried with it.
“Wait!” Gran yelled, but Catalina made no effort to slow down.
Finally she stopped and, her legs splayed out as if she were a gymnast doing the splits, she removed the handle from her waist and thrust it into the wall of the tunnel. A door appeared and Gran saw the welcome sight of a night sky, framed in a rectangle. But he was twenty feet below.
“Get up here!” she yelled.
Gran looked up. He tried to find a foothold or a handhold and saw nothing. How had Catalina gotten that high?
The roar of the Hollows grew louder. The first rocks hurtled forth from the maelstrom and landed at Gran’s feet. He had no options. And just as he’d had the sense before that the wind was a thinking thing, and he intuitively knew its plans, now he knew that it did not intend to tunnel through the Earth. This time, he was sure, the Hollows were coming for him. He was sure that they would take him and retreat with him, as a ravenous lion would with its prey.
And he had no way to save himself.
He jumped, he screamed, he grabbed at the walls of the tunnel. His hands were useless, his feet had no function. Pain radiated from his shoulder. His face was soaked with tears and Catalina had abandoned him.
But then she hadn’t after all. He felt a snaky thing on his shoulder, and turned to find it was a rope.
“Grab it!” she yelled from above. He looked up to find her face framed by the new door.
With his good arm, he grabbed the rope.
The Hollows came for him with a new speed and vengeance. They came like ten caged, rabid dogs suddenly unleashed.
“I can’t pull you without your help,” Catalina yelled. “Climb!”
Gran scrambled up the rough dirt wall, his shoulder screaming as Catalina pulled. Soon he was up and out. Catalina closed the door with finality and threw herself back on the ground, exhausted.
Gran lay under the welcome dark sky, gasping for air. He was filthy and soaked in sweat. He didn’t recognize the part of town where they’d emerged, though he could hear the sound of the river. In the distance, he could see the lights of the town.
“I don’t understand what’s happening.”
These were the words Gran wanted to say, but Catalina had just said them instead. This left Gran doubly baffled. If Catalina didn’t understand, then who did?
“You’re okay?” she asked him. Or rather, she declared it: “You’re okay.” Gran saw her look him over, as if she could discern, just by scanning him, the presence of broken limbs or injured organs. Satisfied, she walked off. “See ya,” she said over her shoulder.
Gran crawled to his feet, stumbled toward her and finally caught up with her. “You mean you don’t understand why it’s happening now, or where it’s happening, or…”
Catalina sped up, as if wanting to outpace Gran, to leave him behind—the same way Gran sometimes did with Maisie.
“Catalina,” he said. “Please.”
She exhaled loudly. “I just mean there’s something new,” she said. “From what I was told when I started, it used to be that these incidents would happen once every few years at most—and you never saw a whole house disappear. It never got that bad. It used to be that I’d get an occasional call that there was a new tunnel, and I’d go down and prop it up and that would be that. But now it’s happening all the time. The Hollows are everywhere now. That’s why the Regional Manager is so interested.”
“So that was the Regional Manager?”
“What was?”
“On the phone. The person who called on the phone.”
“I wasn’t on the phone. And there’s no such thing as the Regional Manager.”
“You just said there was.”
“No I didn’t.”
Gran didn’t feel like arguing the point. Catalina didn’t seem to be able to decide on what information she could reveal and what she had to conceal.
“So the Hollows happen other places, too?” he asked.
“You think this is the only town with sadness?”
The town came into view below. Catalina paused, as if unsure that she wanted to rejoin the people of Carousel. From their vantage point, they could see that City Hall was still brightly lit. A crowd of people was outside.
“What do you mean?” Gran asked. “That’s what makes the Hollows come?”
“You know sharks?” she asked.
“Like, personally?”
“No. But you’ve heard of sharks, right? You’ve seen pictures of them, watched them on TV?”
“Sure,” Gran said.
“You know how they sense blood in the water and then come to feed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this is the same thing. Only instead of sharks, it’s this voracious underground hurricane that thinks and feels, and tunnels through the earth. And instead of blood in the water that attracts them, it’s despair, emptiness, hopelessness.”
“I don’t get it. They’re attracted to despair?”
“That’s as much as we can figure out. The Hollows sense it and come to make it worse. Like the shark—it comes when something’s bleeding and then finishes the job.”
“And the wind thinks?”
“You saw it. Don’t you think it thinks?”
“I guess so. It seemed to have a plan.”
“It does have a plan.”
“What is the plan?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Gran and Catalina stood for a second, both of them thinking about all the things they did not kn
ow.
“So we just wait for the next collapse?” Gran asked.
Catalina’s face darkened. “No. We wait for the next new tunnel and go down and prop it up as long as we can. Actually, I go down there alone and prop it up. Not you. You’re done. You’re out. The Regional Manager doesn’t want you involved.”
“So there is a Regional Manager!” Gran said.
“Maybe,” Catalina admitted.
“Why can’t I be a Lifter?” he asked.
“Because this work is dangerous and you’re not a Lifter.”
“I know it’s dangerous. And that’s fine with me. So how do I become a Lifter?”
“That’s up to the Regional Manager.”
“So do you apply or something?”
“Do you apply? No, you don’t apply. This isn’t a job at Burger King. Boy, he’d laugh at that one.”
“Okay, then how?”
“You’re called.”
“How do you get called?”
Catalina stopped and looked into Gran’s eyes. Or rather, she looked at his forehead, and spoke directly to his forehead. (This is what people often do when delivering bad news: they speak to your forehead.) “Listen,” she said. “You already know more than you should. Can we just let it go? You should get home. Just go back to your perfect little life. This work is for people who know about mess. Who aren’t afraid of mess.”
“Perfect life?” Gran said, almost laughing. “Are you kidding? And I already figured out how to get underground. I did it with my own handle.”
“It’s called a Lift,” Catalina said.
“What is? This handle?”
Catalina pointed to Gran’s handle, and to her own. “These are called Lifts,” she said. “When they create doors in the earth, they’re called Lifts. Capital L. Not handles, lowercase h. Got it?”
“Fine,” Gran said.
“And that thing in your hand isn’t a Lift. You just followed me. That thing didn’t open any door.”
“Yes it did. My great-great-grandfather made this.” Gran was convinced that the fact that his ancestor had made it, had hammered its shape and carved it by hand, and was from this town, had something to do with it working.
“It’s not possible,” Catalina said. “You have to be a Lifter to use a Lift, and you’re not a Lifter. So you can’t come. You really should go home and watch TV or something. Play a game. This Hollows business will only get nastier and weirder and more treacherous. That’s what the Regional Manager says. Get out while you can. I have to go back to work. And you need to go home. Take your nice watch and go back to bed.”
“I won’t. I’m staying. I’ll be a Lifter too.”
For a second something passed over Catalina’s face. It was almost as if she was impressed. Then she shook it off.
And with that, she dropped onto one knee, inserted her handle into the ground, pulled open a door, and dropped in. She closed the door so quickly Gran didn’t even have a chance.
Gran had a problem, and that was that whenever someone said nasty things to him, as Catalina just had, he collapsed. It had happened to him before, just about every month since he was five. Some classmate would call him short, or strange, or poor, or Granite Countertop, and though he had seen films where a boy or girl was called names, and they pressed on and overcame these judgments, he found himself unable to do so. When he was treated cruelly, especially by someone he liked and admired, someone like Catalina Catalan, he felt himself drop like a marionette whose strings have been cut.
He stood there, looking at the invisible door through which Catalina had just disappeared, and his eyes felt raw. His throat was dry. He felt like he’d just lost the only friend he had in the world.
But had Catalina ever really been his friend?
Probably not. She’d helped him once. And then she’d asked for his help, and asked him to borrow his mother’s wheelchair. Would a friend do that? He wasn’t sure.
He was sure, though, that now he didn’t want to be around Catalina Catalan. She was mean. He wanted to be anywhere but with her. He was filled with a sudden anger toward her, a cleansing anger.
So he went home. He walked down the hill, through the trees, and through the park until he reached City Hall. The lights he’d seen from above were burning bright, and the lawn was full of people. They were arguing outside, and the voices from inside were loud, too. Some people carried Propositions P&S signs, and others held Propositions M&H placards. One woman supporting P&S was dressed as a tree. A man supporting M&H was wearing a moose costume.
Gran walked on. He wanted to be home.
When he saw the yellow lights through the windows, he cried, just a little. Maybe what he did wasn’t actually crying. His throat simply closed and his breath climbed quickly and sunk again, and his eyes were a little wetter than usual. But he didn’t cry. No water left his eyes. No one could call it crying.
He dropped his Lift behind a bush in the yard and opened the front door. Maisie was there, in the foyer. It was late, but Maisie was still awake. All rules of the house had been thrown away, it seemed.
“Oh you should have seen it!” she said, and pointed to the TV. “There was this horse, and every time it wanted something, it nodded like a real person, and then it learned how to talk by watching TV, but it had this crazy voice!”
Gran wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Maisie talk so much all at once. He followed her to the living room, where she pointed again to the screen, even though by now the horse show was gone and the news was on.
Gran dropped into the soft couch and brought Maisie up onto his lap. He held her tight and smelled her strawberry-scented hair.
“What are you doing?” Maisie asked, squirming away from him.
All Gran wanted to do was sit with her, close to her warmth, her squirmy arms and legs, to hear her ridiculous cartoon voice, and to stay home, and be away from the chaos underground. He didn’t need to be contending with underground hurricanes hellbent on hurt; he didn’t need to be contending with Catalina. He was happy to be home, and safe, and he could smell something good coming from the kitchen.
“Whoa,” Maisie said. “Look.”
She pointed to the TV, where video taken from a helicopter was showing what seemed to be a giant sinkhole.
“Turn it up,” Gran said, and Maisie adjusted the volume.
A reporter stood in front of a chaotic scene—fire engines, police cars and dozens of rescue workers. “I’m here in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and as you can see, there’s a swarm of activity here as authorities and workers try to find survivors of the collapse…”
“Dinner!” Gran’s mom announced from the kitchen. Gran, in a daze from his encounter with the Hollows and now the knowledge that the winds were still at work and seemed to be expanding their range, sat down and stared at his food. In his altered state, it didn’t look like food at all. The baked beans looked like a cave, the celery looked like supports needed to hold the ceiling up.
Just as Gran’s mother rolled to the table to start on her own dinner, her phone rang. She looked at her screen, and then put the phone on the table and turned it to speaker.
“We’re all here!” she said.
Gran and Maisie said hello to their father.
“Hi, you two,” he said, sounding weary. “Can you ask your mother to turn off the speakerphone? I have something to talk to her about.”
Gran knew that usually his mother was careful not to have adult conversations in front of him and Maisie. Countless times she had cut a discussion short, to be continued later, in his parents’ bedroom. So it was unsettling when she continued this conversation, sitting at the table in front of him and Maisie.
“What do you want me to tell the kids?” she asked.
Gran and Maisie could hear nothing on the other end of the line.
“That doesn’t help,” she said.
Silence. Gran looked over to Maisie. Typically she wasn’t tuned in to the parental frequency—she never seemed to hear any of their fightin
g. But this time, she was staring straight at their mother, rapt and comprehending.
“So what—you’re not back for Thanksgiving, Christmas?” Gran’s mom said.
Silence.
“Wait. I was kidding. You’re serious?”
Silence.
“I’m getting very tired talking to you. I’m hanging up.”
Gran’s mother always did exactly what she said she would do. All his life, Gran knew this to be true. If she said she would pick Gran up at five o’clock, she was there precisely at five. If she said she was about to hang up the phone, she hung up.
Gran’s father, though, sometimes had a more slippery grasp of time and promises. He had told Gran that he could go to sleepaway camp last summer, but when June arrived, he said there was no way he could go, that the prices for those camps were ridiculous, that he had never promised Gran a sleepaway camp.
But Gran knew he had promised.
And the last night he’d been at home, he’d said that Gran and Maisie could get dessert if they ate their dinners, but when they finished, he said that they didn’t need dessert. “Need” has nothing to do with it, Gran wanted to say. “Need” wasn’t the point. The point was you promised.
And here your narrator would like to agree with Gran. A promise is like the earth underneath us. It must be solid. How can we walk, and run, and live and laugh, when we can’t count on the ground beneath us? And so it is with promises. They keep us upright. They hold up everyone and everything.
The next day, Carousel Middle School was in a state of elevated distress. When Gran entered, he found that the sinkhole had grown. Now there was only a narrow catwalk from the front door to the hallways where the classrooms were. Everything in the front foyer had fallen in.
When Gran entered the Duke’s office for lunch, he found him standing, his back turned to Gran and his shoulders pressed to the cinder-block wall. He was talking heatedly, but there was no one else in the room. For a second Gran thought the Duke had lost his mind and was talking to the Earth balls stacked at the back of the room.