“Yes, crawlspace.” She maneuvered herself back to her knees and set the candle next to her.
“Crawlspace?” Nitro said. “This shithole doesn’t have pipes or nothing. Why would Solano need a crawlspace?”
“Maybe it’s a tunnel?” Pita suggested.
Jesus said, “Why would he dig a tunnel?”
“An escape route?”
“Escape from who?”
“Could be a hurricane shelter,” Jack said. “This house isn’t too sturdy.”
Pita said, “It’s holding up to this storm.”
“Fuck this dicking around,” Nitro said. “I’ll go down and have a look.”
Elizaveta glanced at him. Was Jack right? Did he know what was down there? Would he do a perfunctory search and tell them there was nothing but dirt—all the while concealing…what?
Apparently Jack was thinking along the same lines and said, “I’m going to go.”
“You?” Nitro said. “Why you?”
“Because I want to see what’s down there.”
“You’re too big, chavo. You’ll get stuck.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Jack began positioning himself to climb down the ladder.
“We’ll both go,” Nitro said.
“I think you should stay here, Nitro,” Elizaveta told him, not wanting Jack to be alone and out of sight with him. By way of explanation she added, “You have gun. Keep us safe.” He was, she’d noticed, wearing his backpack again.
“That’s why I should be the one to see what’s down there,” he said. “I can protect myself. All Jack Goff can do is scream like a girl.”
“You want to put your shirt on again, Muscles?” Jack said. “You’re giving my eyes a headache.”
“I don’t think you should go down by yourself, Jack,” Pita said.
“There’s nobody down there, Pita,” he said.
“You don’t know—”
“If someone went down there,” he told her, “how could they pull the rug back over the trap door again?”
Pita folded her arms across her chest. “I was going to say, you don’t know it’s a somebody.”
Shaking his head, Jack attached himself to the ladder. Elizaveta, however, couldn’t rid herself of the image that had popped into her mind: a handful of dolls huddled underground in the tomb-like blackness, knives or other deadly weapons clutched in their small hands, waiting.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go,” she told Jack, hating herself for letting Pita’s superstitious hoopla get to her.
“We need to know what’s down there.”
“Why?”
“Pita was right when she said it could be a tunnel. Which means it’s not just a way out, but a way in as well.”
A drawn-out silence ensued.
“Fuck it,” Nitro said. “Let Jack Goff go. Maybe he’ll get stuck after all and we’ll have some peace and quiet tonight.”
Jack collected the candle and started down the ladder. After a moment’s hesitation, Elizaveta latched on to the ladder as well.
Jesus seized her shoulder and said, “What do you think you’re doing, cariño?”
“Jack shouldn’t go by himself—”
“You’re not—”
“I am, Jesus,” she said, shrugging free.
5
The wood ladder leaned against the wall of the hole at a steep angle. The risers felt rough beneath Elizaveta’s hands, and she hoped she didn’t incur any slivers. Below her, Jack had stepped off the last rung and was now on his knees and elbows, bent sideways, as if he were peering beneath a sofa. “What do you see?” she asked him.
“You were right,” he said. “Some sort of crawlspace. Dark.”
“Be careful!” Pita called from above.
Jack army-crawled forward until his upper body disappeared, then his legs. Elizaveta continued down the ladder to the bottom of the hole. The ground was hard-packed earth. The crawlspace was barely half a meter in height and extended away from her in every direction; she couldn’t be certain how far it went because everything was black. She started the way Jack had gone, the dirt cool beneath her hands and knees, the low ceiling scraping her back.
“Hey!” Jack said suddenly.
Elizaveta’s heart leapt. “What?” she whispered. The claustrophobic space deadened her voice.
“There’s a basket or something ahead.”
Elizaveta scuttled to catch up. Jack pointed. The candlelight’s reach didn’t extend far, and she had to squint. At first she thought she was seeing a cardboard box, but it resolved into a wicker basket of the sort you might find on an apple orchard.
“Wonder what’s in it?” he said, army-crawling forward again, pulling himself with his elbows.
Elizaveta reached the basket first. She tipped it to see inside, flinching in anticipation of the unexpected. She relaxed. “Potatoes!” she said.
Jack stuck his arm in the basket and retrieved a spud. He turned it over in his hand. The skin was yellowish-brown and covered with small sprouts.
“This is nothing but Solano’s root cellar,” he said, sticking the potato in the pocket of his shorts.
“You will eat that?” she said, surprised.
“Why not? Potatoes don’t go bad.”
“Everything goes bad.”
“It’s still firm. That means it still has its nutrients.”
“You are some potato expert?”
“Are you?”
“Russians know potatoes.”
“I’m hungry, I’m keeping it. And look, I think that’s another basket over there.”
They crawled through the deeper darkness and discovered two baskets placed side by side, one containing carrots, the other turnips.
“Nice,” Jack said. “I love carrots.” He grabbed three. They had lost their rigidity and flopped. The tip of one had turned black. Still, he tucked them in his pockets, adding a turnip as well. He had to roll to his side to do this, and when he rolled back his shoulder pressed against hers. It seemed accidental. In fact, he didn’t even seem to notice.
“You’re like chipmunk,” she said, and blew out her cheeks to demonstrate what she meant.
“Some are for Rosa,” he said.
She pointed. “There’s another basket over there.”
“This is like Easter,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you have Easter in Russia?”
“Of course,” she said. “Easter is very important holiday.” Some of Elizaveta’s fondest memories of her pre-orphanage childhood were of saving yellow onion peels a month or two leading up to Easter day, which was always the first Sunday after the spring full moon. She and her mother would boil the peels with a half dozen eggs to turn the eggs a rich red.
Jack said, “What about the Easter bunny?”
She frowned. “What bunny?”
“The Easter bunny! On Easter morning it leaves a trail of chocolates all throughout your house, leading to a hidden Easter basket filled with a chocolate Easter bunny and chocolate eggs.”
“Are you making this up?”
“Maybe it’s an American thing…”
“It is definitely not a Russian thing.” Elizaveta thought about the monthly stipend she’d received from the state to attend college. It was supposed to be enough to cover all her living expenses, yet it was barely enough to purchase two large chocolate bars. And Americans sprinkled their floors with chocolates and ate chocolate bunnies and eggs?
“You’re supposed to follow your own trail so you can find your basket,” Jack went on. “But my sister and I always picked up the chocolates as quickly as we could, erasing the trail, so sometimes it took hours to find where our baskets were hidden.”
Elizaveta snorted. “What other stupid holiday traditions do you have?”
“Halloween was my favorite.”
“Yes, I know Halloween. You dress up like ghost or witch.”
“And go trick-or-treating.”
“What’s that?”
/> “You go around the neighborhood with a bag—I usually used a pillowcase—and knock on doors. Everyone gives you a chocolate bar or some other kind of candy. One year I think I filled up three pillowcases.”
“Three pillowcases full of candy? And strangers, they just give you this?”
“If they have a jack-o-lantern on the front porch, yeah. If they don’t, it means they probably don’t want you knocking.”
“You Americans are like cartoon character. You live in cartoon world.”
“What are you talking about?”
Elizaveta was about to tell him if he walked down a street in Russia—the Russia she knew before she left four years before—with a pillowcase full of candy he wouldn’t make it to the corner before he was robbed, if not killed. Instead she simply shook her head.
They continued their “Easter bunny hunt,” moving in a general clockwise direction, discovering several more baskets filled with more vegetables.
The crawlspace turned out to be quite vast, and Elizaveta suspected it mirrored the floorplan of the cabin above. She wondered how long it had taken Solano to dig out. Even with a shovel and pickaxe it would have been long and laborious work. But what else did you do when you lived on an island by yourself with little to no human contact?
Elizaveta contemplated this. What did Solano do with all his time? He didn’t have company, aside from the occasional local who swapped him dolls for produce. He didn’t have electricity, which meant he couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio, even if he found either in a trash heap on one of his jaunts to Mexico City. Then again, people had managed without such modern conveniences for the vast majority of human history. They were hardly necessities for happiness. Solano had his freedom, his heath, a tropical climate, food and shelter. Maybe this was enough. Moreover, he created, didn’t he? He built all the huts, and the cabin. He cleared the paths and constructed the bridges they had seen. And he hung up all the dolls, of course—and that was creating too, that was art.
Elizaveta recalled life in Saint Petersburg in the early- to mid-nineties. The brutal winters, the jostling for food and other basic supplies, the overcrowded buses, the cynicism and aggression, the robberies and racketeering, the misfortune and disdain etched on everyone’s faces. Despite all this, her compatriots certainly had more than Solano—yet were their lives any better than his? Were they more fulfilled?
“There’s another basket,” Jack said.
“My knees and back hurt,” she said.
“Okay, last one.”
They adjusted their course slightly and stopped before the basket. Jack raised the candle to see inside it. “Whoa. Check this out,” he said excitedly. He set the candle aside and withdrew from the basket a small, unadorned wooden box.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Beats me.”
“Can you open it?”
“No, it’s locked. Look, a keyhole.”
“Can you break it?”
“Not down here.” He glanced past her into the surrounding darkness. “Where the hell was the ladder?”
6
When they found the ladder, Elizaveta climbed it first. Nitro and Jesus and Pita were all bent over the trapdoor, looking down, talking to her, talking heads. She emerged from the hole into the candlelit room, which seemed bright in comparison to the dungeon-like crawlspace, then helped Jack out. His shorts bulged with vegetables, impossible not to notice.
“It’s just a root cellar,” he said in response to the barrage of questions. He emptied his pockets, setting the vegetables on the floor. “Help yourselves.”
“They’re dirty,” Pita said.
“They’re food,” he said. “And we haven’t eaten since midday.” He took a crunchy bite of a carrot.
Nitro chomped into a turnip and shrugged.
“I’ll pass,” Jesus said.
“Ugh,” Pita said.
“Oh,” Elizaveta said, lifting her T-shirt, revealing the mystery box she’d stuffed down the front of her shorts. “We found this also.”
“Let me see that.” Nitro reached for it.
Elizaveta batted his hand away and unhoused the box from her shorts herself. “It’s locked,” she said, going to the wall on which hung the farming equipment. There was no shortage of tools to choose from. Large spanners, fencing pliers, an old fashioned saw. She selected a hammer, returned to the others, and set the box on the floor so the lock was facing upward. She gave it a solid whack with the hammer. Wood splintered but the lock held. She whacked it again. This time the lid flipped open. A battered leather wallet tumbled out, along with several sepia-toned photographs.
“That’s all there is?” Jesus said, unimpressed.
“Solano’s wallet?” Nitro said.
“Who are those photos of?” Pita asked.
Jack picked them up. There were four in total: a handsome woman, two young girls, and a group shot.
“Solano’s family?” he said, passing them to Elizaveta. She studied them before passing them to Pita.
“Open the wallet,” Nitro said.
Elizaveta did. There was a single identity card printed on green paper issued to Don Javier Solano. In the money sleeve was an old article cut from a newspaper. Elizaveta unfolded it.
“What does it say?” Pita asked.
She read the Spanish out loud:
MEXICO CITY - At least 25 people were killed and 17 others severely injured when a firecracker factory exploded Sunday in a blast of flames and black smoke.
The factory was located on the ground floor of a 28-family apartment building. Officials searching the smoldering ruins said most of the victims sustained severe burns. Dozens of people were still unaccounted for, raising fears that the death toll could rise.
Police said the explosion took place at about 11:30 p.m. and could have been triggered by burning heating oil from an overturned stove in an adjoining apartment. They were not ruling out other potential causes, including the improper mixing of the raw materials used in firecrackers.
Dolores Elias, a twenty-year-old retail clerk who lived in the neighborhood, said the explosion sounded like the end of the world, and she saw people flying through the air “like flies.”
Firecrackers are often produced in small, home-based factories that are unregulated and lack proper safety equipment. They are usually used in rural areas to celebrate weddings, circumcisions, and other festivities.
Last month, a spark set off boxes of fireworks in a market in Celaya, killing 55 people, injuring hundreds, and levelling parts of the downtown area. Most of those killed or injured were buying firecrackers for the celebration of the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
While Jesus, Pita, and Nitro debated with alacrity why Solano would care enough about a firecracker explosion to keep a newspaper clipping in his wallet, Elizaveta summarized the story for Jack in English.
“Maybe Solano caused it?” Jack said.
Elizaveta frowned. “Set off explosion?”
“Could be why he ended up on this island. He was wanted by the cops and needed a place to hide out.”
“For fifty years?”
Pita was listening to them and said, “What about the photographs?”
“What about them?” Elizaveta said.
“They’re probably of his family. You think he’d just leave his family behind?”
“Maybe they died in explosion.”
“But if he caused it,” Jesus said, chiming in, “you really think he would stick around to search the rubble for family photos?”
“The photos are all the same size, wallet size,” Jack said. “Good chance he always had them in his wallet. Anyway, whatever,” he added. “It doesn’t matter what happened. The question is: why would he hide the wallet and pictures in a basket in a root cellar?”
Jesus shrugged. “Painful memories?”
Pita nodded. “He wanted to forget them, forget his old life.”
“Why bother even keeping the wallet and photos then? Why not—” Jack
cut himself off, and when he spoke again his voice was low and edged with caution: “Eliza, don’t move.”
7
Elizaveta froze, her muscles in lockbolt, every nerve ending tingling with sudden alarm. “What?”
“There’s something on your back,” Jack said.
Pita and Jesus were crouched before her, while Jack and Nitro were to either side of her. They both had a view of her back.
“Oh, fuck,” Nitro said, seeing whatever Jack had seen.
“What is it?” she blurted.
Pita and Jesus both scrambled around behind her so they had a view too. They gasped.
“What is it?” She couldn’t feel anything on her back. Nevertheless, she wanted to tear off her top and toss it across the room. She didn’t do this though. Whatever was freaking everyone out might bite her.
Jack was up and moving, looking for something.
“What is it?” Elizaveta said.
“Stay still,” Nitro told her. Then to Jack: “Get the saw.”
Saw? Saw? Did they need to cut it off? What was it?
She was going to ask what was on her again, but she didn’t. She realized she didn’t want to know until it was off her.
Jack returned with the saw. It was old, the hard-toothed blade rusted.
“Careful,” Nitro told him. “Just slip it beneath it.”
Elizaveta felt the saw blade press against her back, near her left shoulder.
“Slip it under.”
“I’m trying!”
“Ow!” A white hot pain seared her back.
“It stung her!” Pita exclaimed.
“Get it!” Jesus said.
In a blind panic now, Elizaveta leapt to her feet, tearing her shirt off her back, tossing it away, so she stood there in nothing but her bra. Pita was yelling, but so was she.
“Is it off?” she cried. “Is it off?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said.
Jesus and Nitro hurried to her shirt. Nitro toed it, trying to startle whatever was hiding within it into the open.
“What is it?” Elizaveta said. “It bit me!”
“It didn’t bite you,” Jack said.
“I felt—”
“It stung you.”
World's Scariest Places: Volume Two Page 39
