The Shelter Cycle

by Peter Rock

  There was still light outside, fading. Thick snowflakes fell, white slanting through gray. The room around them was five feet square, its ceiling low. Levers on the wall slapped open other, smaller windows—only inches across, enough for the barrel of a gun—and freezing air rushed in before he snapped them shut again. There was one swiveling office chair here, and an old copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, hundreds of dead flies on the floor.

  Last night he’d heard footsteps, or sounds like footsteps. Faint laughter that sounded almost like wind, that was likely only wind. Little things—his multitool, his maps—migrated from the pack while he slept, ended up on shelves or desktops. Sometimes he’d return to his family’s quarters and the floor would be open when he was sure he’d slid the plywood cover back across. All he could do was notice these things, and prepare himself, and wait.

  Back down the ladder, he found his way to the classroom. The secret wall, the hidden door. Every few hours, several times a day, he came here, and each time he made some progress. Soon, he would be able to withstand this energy, meet it with his own.

  Bending down now, he crawled beneath the table of the altar. He felt the waves, pressure in his ears, a slight pulse in his bones. He leaned in, laid his hand flat against the trembling door. He had never touched the lock, and now—for only a moment—he held it in his hand. Hot, it shook his whole arm, twisted his shoulder. He let go, stumbled to his feet. With Kilo close behind him, he hurried away, back toward the tunnel.

  The trailer felt so temporary as a place to live, just as our bodies were temporary houses for our souls. Once in the kitchen I looked up and saw a mouse run across the clear plastic below the light, disappear into the ceiling. The window near the sink was bowed, plastic, scoured cloudy by the wind. Wings brushed softly in the walls, swallows making their way beneath the trailer’s siding.

  Maya and I slept. We woke up in the living room of the trailer, warm beneath our blankets on our mattress. We stayed in bed sometimes until Mom said we had to get up. Rarely we’d hear Dad as he left for the shelter, since he woke up so early. More often it was Mrs. Young with her morning decrees. Their altar was on the opposite side of ours, on the other side of the wool blanket and the bookcase, on their side of the living room. We could see movement, their bodies, in the gaps above the books, and we could hear them, their conversations, their footsteps. The whiskery clatter of the wires that Mr. Young carried, or the bitter smell and hiss when he was soldering something.

  Mornings, the heavy wool blanket shook and trembled as if from the force of Mrs. Young’s decrees, the energy of her breath forced out. She wanted the child she was carrying to be special, to come into the world with a lot of Light, and she was preparing the baby as it moved toward embodiment to join us in the physical plane. Maya and I just sat up in bed, listening, brushing each other’s hair. Mrs. Young gasped, her voice circling, going so fast it was hard to see how she breathed. We listened, and we understood, or we thought we understood.

  Now I can see, I can feel how she felt, wanting to do everything possible for the baby so it will be born healthy and happy, and lucky, so it will have the best life it can have. I don’t sleep enough, now. I try to eat as healthy as I can. If I still believed, if I could believe like Mrs. Young did, I’d be decreeing all night, collecting pictures of gemstones, drawing double-helix diagrams of DNA, listening to waltzes, traveling in my dreams.

  We had so many rules to guide us, our parents did, and now I wonder how I will raise you, what beliefs I have to pass down. Back then, everything was clear: you ate sugar, your energy fell; you listened to rock music, the bass and drums made your chakras spin backward. Christmas carols were always in season, filling a house with holiness. Stuffed animals were never allowed, and neither were comics where animals talked, or books by Dr. Seuss.

  And then there were all the rules about food, the posters and diagrams hanging in our kitchen. The Messenger said that carrots were the only food that could grow at ten thousand feet, so they had to be right for us. We ate so many carrots that our skin was tinged orange.

  14

  IT HAD BEEN half an hour since she’d talked to the Messenger, and Francine’s fingers, on the steering wheel, still trembled.

  With the blue sky overhead, she drove down the long incline toward Livingston. She skipped the town and took the second exit. Past the McDonald’s, the small shops of taxidermists and fishing guides. She drove south on 89, through the narrows, into Paradise Valley; the Yellowstone River flowed on the left, closer and then twisting away, returning. She passed a flatbed truck stacked high with hay bales, stalks and leaves fluttering across her windshield. She accelerated back into her lane and suddenly slowed again. Here was the turnoff to Mallard’s Rest campground. Here her father’s station wagon had gone straight into the river. He had been going in the other direction, north, in the other lane, just gone to pick something up in town.

  That was almost twenty years ago, and it had been almost that long since she’d been in the valley. She hadn’t come back; she hadn’t been able to return. Not until this morning. The radio played static, humming higher and lower as she accelerated. She switched it off.

  A new gas station had gone up across the street from the little town of Emigrant. The place itself looked almost the same: the post office, the saloon, all the haphazard houses of Glastonbury speckling the foothills behind it. Francine turned right, past the buildings and onto the gravel roads, then left, up the long switchbacks.

  Writing about it hadn’t fully prepared her for how beautiful it was, how broken. The makeshift cabins and the nicer ones, the dented trailers, the Airstreams, the pickup trucks, that blue sky everywhere pressing down on it all. Someone else might not recognize the bumps in the landscape like she did, the white hooked pipes that stuck out of the ground, ventilation for the shelters below, or recognize the half-hidden doors leading into the earth. The Kletter Shelter, Mark’s Ark, all the ones whose names she’d forgotten.

  Gravel rattled in her wheel wells, kicked up under the car. She had never driven here, had never been old enough; she lost her way, doubled back, found it again. Here the road leveled off and five trailers clustered. Ornate little houses stood against their outside walls. Someone else might believe they were dollhouses, or birdhouses. She knew they were for Elementals, and she wished she could feel the nature spirits now, helping her, invisible, all around her.

  She parked, climbed out, then turned and walked away from her car, up the road. Already she was out of breath; she’d take the longer way, which was less steep. Helios Way, Capricorn Way, Sirius Way. These signs were new; these streets had never had names.

  Higher, ahead, juniper trees hooked across the horizon. To the left, the plateau where their trailer had been, now completely bare. No triangle cut the air of the narrow canyon, the tepee long gone. She closed her eyes, shivered, then kept on, following the long curve around. She could see her car below, waiting where she’d left it, and now someone was watching her. She could feel it. Not from behind her, where she had been. It was from one of the houses she passed, set back in the limestone cliffs.

  There. A two-story house, fifty feet away. Two people in different windows, upstairs and down, looking out. Who lived here, whose house had it been? Perhaps they recognized her.

  Smoke sifted, blown sideways out the top of the chimney. The house was dark blue, its door pale yellow with three diamond-shaped windows. A blue Ford pickup with one black door stood parked to one side. Francine stepped past the mailbox, down the gravel driveway; halfway to the house, she looked up again and the faces were still there in the windows, watching her, so motionless that she realized they weren’t people at all. They were posters pressed against the windowpanes, and there was a reason they looked familiar: El Morya with his turban, his black beard, his stern glaring eyes, and, in the upstairs window, Saint Germain beaming down.

  Turning again, she climbed back to the road, around the last corner. She paused, her hands around her belly, her h
eart beating so fast. She tried to breathe, to slow it.

  She turned off on a path she knew, worn down through the scrub as it arced along the side of a rise. The slope grew steeper; stones kicked loose, rolled downhill. She paused, rested, took another step, two. Her lungs held so little air, compressed by the baby. Then she went around the last corner, onto the small plateau.

  The black metal door was set into the hump of the hillside, framed by railroad ties. A short square tunnel to reach it, and then the door with all its hinges on the inside, its three dead bolts. She unbuttoned, unzipped her pants, squatted down out of the wind, and peed between two clumps of sagebrush; then she stepped into the dark tunnel, to the door. It took a moment before she found the key Maya had given her—it was still too early for Maya to catch her, to catch up with her, to meet her—then to force the key into the stubborn locks. Slowly the dead bolts loosened, gave way. Still the door scraped; it took all of her weight to get it open enough to slip through into the darkness.

  The tunnel continued, the dirt floor slanting downward. She waved her hand in the cool air above her head; spider webs against her fingers, then a string. When she pulled it, the walls around her flickered, the air bluish. Two fire extinguishers, a shovel, a camping lantern. The one long fluorescent bulb ticked and hummed overhead.

  A twinge, a painful tightness in her stomach. Francine almost sat down. She waited, settled, then walked ten feet to the wooden handrail and went carefully down the steps.

  Not so large as the outside door, this one was covered in huge rivets, two dead bolts locking it. In the dim light it took a while to fit the key in, to force the door open. She pushed with her knee, and then slapped around the corner with her hand, flipping on every light switch she could reach. She was inside.

  Straight across the hallway from the door hung a poster of Cyclopea, the all-seeing eye, greeting her, staring. Watching over or just watching her. Next to it a framed portrait, the usual one, of Saint Germain. Water and insects had gotten inside the glass, so the left side of his face was pale and wrinkled, tattered, half of his blond mustache worn away. None of it seemed to bother him. He gazed out, reassuringly, as handsome and serene as ever, as if he didn’t mind being buried here for so long.

  Francine turned right, followed the curve of the hallway, stepped around mousetraps, boxes of rat poison torn and spilled open. It was warmer here, out of the wind; the air pressed close around her. It smelled more like dirt than she remembered. When it was all new, it had smelled like sweet wood, new lumber. It had hardly felt like being underground.

  She passed the kitchen, the light flickering, all the chairs and tables stacked on top of each other. Huge pans hung from hooks in the curve of the ceiling. She kept going as the hallway narrowed, past the first numbered rooms.

  There were thirty of them, thirty families. And when she reached the door with the brass 7 on it, she paused and could not quite stop. She was not ready. Not yet.

  She kept walking, following the hallway’s curve. Overhead, round openings, the inlets for the vacuum system that would spit dust and dirt back out into the world; beneath her feet, larger capped openings, which led to all the grain and food storage below.

  Here, long shelves of books, covered in clear plastic; here, a treadmill, a weight bench; here, startling her, radiation suits hanging like white bodies from their racks.

  The silence felt thick, pressurized, black in her ears. When she whistled, the sound echoed and followed the hallway all the way around, returning behind her. This was where her father had taught her, one day when the shelter was almost complete, with no one else inside. She was running around and around the circle of the hallway, doors and numbers flashing past. Her father’s whistling echoed down the tube; she could hear it from the other side, where she couldn’t see him. And then she whistled and it echoed to him, and he whistled back to her.

  She whistled again. The faint sound that returned to her made her feel better; as if it were more than her own breath.

  Next she came to a short metal ladder, bolted to the inside wall, which led to the lookout, the periscope where she and Colville had once played. Another twinge, sharp in her stomach, a shifting ache inside. What time was it? She had no watch, didn’t have her cell phone to tell her the time or to call anyone. Did Maya say she was definitely coming? Francine waited, let her body settle, her breathing slow.

  Number 7. She passed their room again. At number 4, she tried the door, stepped inside, flipped on the light. Nothing except bed frames. No mattresses or clothes or books left behind. This had been Colville’s family’s room, before the Messenger called them away to the shelter at the Heart.

  Francine sat on the lower bunk, which must have been for Colville. His name was written on the wall, in pencil, the graphite reflecting the light. Next to it, a few small flying saucers were scratched, hovering over a kind of figure. She leaned closer. It was a person with long hair, an enormous belly. She sat up at once, hit her head on the bunk above, then realized that it was not supposed to be her, that Colville hadn’t been here for years and years. The drawing was of Colville’s mother, of course; Mrs. Young had been expecting Colville’s little brother back then. Moses.

  Francine returned to the kitchen, took a chair from the top of a table. She sat down, closed her eyes. It made her so happy, and it also made her so tired. All the work and then all the years after, this space becoming so empty and lonesome and misguided. It would feel different if it had been used, if the bombs had come. And then her parents might still be here.

  •

  Footsteps, descending the stairs, and then the slight creak as the door opened.

  Maya’s voice called: “Hello?”

  “Down here,” Francine said. “The kitchen.” She stood, brushed back her hair, felt the tangles, the sticky spider webs. Maya walked toward her, into darkness, under a light again, back into shadow. She wore her heavy boots, her tan Carhartt jacket, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.

  “You all right?” she said.

  “I was resting.”

  “Your face is dirty. You look terrible.”

  “It’s dirty in here.” Francine took the bottle of water Maya held out.

  “So many things,” Maya said, “when you’re growing up, you go back and they look so miniature. But this place still feels so big.” She looked past Francine, down the hallway. “You’ve already been through our room?”

  Francine twisted the cap onto the bottle, handed it back. “I was waiting for you.”

  They headed along the hallway, the brass numbers on the doors counting up.

  “You didn’t have to wait.”

  “I know.”

  “Couldn’t go in alone?”

  Maya opened the door, holding it so Francine could squeeze past, inside. There was the click of the light switch. The darkness remained.

  “Hold on.” Maya brushed past, swore as she unscrewed a light bulb in the hallway. Returning, she passed the hot bulb from hand to hand. She stood on the edge of the bunk, her hand on Francine’s shoulder.

  The room flickered as she screwed in the bulb tight. Brighter and brighter, the blue spines and red stripes, the gold numbers of the encyclopedias, the dusty framed photographs, the bare mattresses chewed by mice, cotton batting pulled loose onto the floor.

  “Here we are,” Francine said.

  “This room actually does feel smaller than I remember.” Maya pointed to Francine’s bunk, perched above the door. “And that would have fit you for how long? It’s tiny.”

  Francine squinted upward. The two dark knotholes in the ceiling were still there, staring down at her. She looked away, bent over to reach for an empty plastic bucket with a lid. Sitting on it, she pulled out a box from under the bed, opened it. Shoes, sneakers and leather boots, growing in size from left to right, from 6 to 11.

  “You would’ve been wearing my hand-me-downs the whole time,” Maya said. “Seven years of them.”

  “I did, anyway.”

&n
bsp; Maya brushed off the mattress, then lay down on her side, cradling her head on one arm. “Did you go downstairs?”

  “No,” Francine said.

  “That’s the part that always gets me. Those little desks and chairs, the way Mom painted those windows onto the walls so it seemed like you could see outside. The sun, the trees, the river. What are you looking for?”

  “Nothing,” Francine said. “Just looking.” She pulled out a plastic box that held socks, balled up tightly in pairs; shoelaces, sorted by length and color; fingernail and toenail clippers. She pulled out a sheepskin jacket, then a pale blue sweater with a glittery horse on the front.

  “Beautiful,” Maya said. “Awful.” She rolled over, staring up at the slats of the bunk above. “I don’t know, Francine. It’s just—it’s always like this. Every couple years I come back down here, have a cry, and then I’m good for a while. It’s the classroom that gets me, all the Montessori shit, the felt board and sandpaper letters, all of Mom’s work. Dad, he was having a great time. He always said it was like building a big fort. He could really see it that way. He could make people believe.”

  Francine turned her back, shifting herself off the plastic bucket to the floor. Opening a cabinet, she found pads of blank paper, piles of documents, envelopes with writing on them. She checked behind her; beneath the shadow of the bed, it was hard to tell if Maya was watching. Then her sister picked up a framed picture from the bedside table, held it to her face. Francine carefully pried the lid from the bucket, slipped some of the papers inside. Next, a notebook with her name on the cover in her mother’s perfect cursive. She slipped in a knit scarf, a pair of mittens connected by a length of yarn.

  Maya set the framed picture back on the table. It was a photograph of their grandparents.

  “I remember that night,” she said, “thinking about all the people like Grandma and Grandpa we’d left behind because they were on the outside and didn’t understand how things were. I remember thinking about all the beautiful places I’d been to that wouldn’t be there anymore.”