by John Everson
His jeans slipped to the floor; Zav had cut through them with its claws. The cold of the cave made his bare thighs goose bump. He felt the cold of metallic fingers tracing the inside of his legs, and then sliding coolly across the low sling of his testicles.
At first Ron was afraid. Yet trapped.
And then he gave in. There was suction. And movement. And clear intent.
Zav wanted to bring him to orgasm.
He was being jacked off by an alien voyeur that had lain dormant inside the wall of a subterranean cave for centuries…maybe eons.
Ron didn’t protest. He couldn’t move anyway, so instead of fighting, he closed his eyes and enjoyed the strange, but amazing sensation.
When Zav’s grip suddenly turned from stroke to snip…Ron screamed.
Before he could begin to try to escape, six black-steel arms set to work on his fingers and toes.
Something drew a line of cold pain across his neck, and then his belly.
“Zav, no,” he pleaded, but the rush of warmth that preceded the wave of pain told him it was already too late.
The alien had carved him up the same way he’d done Erin. It had followed his blueprint for human interaction.
It only took seconds before he lacked the strength to scream.
“No,” he gasped, air hissing through the slash in his neck. “It’s not like this. We’re not like this.”
Ron’s mind suddenly filled with a barrage of images. The collection of an alien voyeur.
Snap.
A blur of space; darkness passing. A fiery flight. Jungle. A million plants and trees straining to reach the blue sky he’d just fallen from. Animals. Some screeching, hunting. Others quietly eating, hiding. The eye focused on each animal in turn. A freeze frame. Then a flurry of white text in some unknown language materialized next to the frame. And then a predator emerged, and clawed at the animal, pinning it. The image faded, and the eye focused on something new. Something reptilian, with teeth. They killed and were killed. Again and again, a rapid succession. Cataloguing creatures, and hunting…
Zav carried Ron’s body across the cave and tossed it down the crevasse to join Erin and A.A. CZAVN`M was trained to observe, learn, and fit in. It had seen what was required. It fulfilled.
For the first time in a millennium, CZAVN`M left the cave.
It was ready to finally carry out its mission and join the local culture. It knew what it needed to do to fit in; it had seen enough.
The Hole to China
The hole was deep enough to step into now. It was slow going, with his shovel, which was meant more for moving sand than packed gray dirt. He’d broken the edge of it already on a rock that had been hidden in the ground.
Jeremy had started digging the hole on something of a lark two days ago. He’d been sitting there behind the shed, searching for water bugs under the green-stained flagstone piled up near the weedy back fence, when he found the faded blue shovel lying in a patch of weeds. He’d picked it up and used it to dig into the trails of an ant colony at the edge of one of the bits of flagstone, and after he’d unearthed the nursery (and a thousand tiny white eggs) he had just kept on digging.
Tonight after dinner, he’d come back to work on it again. When the yelling began, he simply slipped out the back door of his house and took refuge behind the old rotting wood shed at the back of their lot. Just as he had on many nights after his father came home. His parents never noticed. They were too busy threatening to strangle each other.
The spot behind the shed was as far away from the house as he could get and still be in the backyard, which he was forbidden to leave without explicit permission.
He could still hear them inside the house.
Once one of them started, it would go on and on. It made his stomach twist in a particularly unpleasant way. It felt both empty and like he had to throw up all at the same time, and he hated it. But nothing he did could get them to stop. He used to try to intervene, begging his parents to stop fighting because they were scaring him, but he either got yelled at, slapped or sent to his room. Usually all three, actually.
So lately, he’d come out here until the voices in the house quieted or it got too dark to see. Usually the latter happened before the former.
“Whatcha digging there?” a soft voice asked.
Jeremy jumped. He turned to see a woman standing on the other side of the fence. She had long black hair that spilled over her old T-shirt. Freckles spotted her nose and cheeks. She looked older than his mom, but not by a lot. He thought she looked happier than his mom. But that wasn’t hard. Nothing ever made his mom happy.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the woman said. “I was just doing a little yard work and saw you over here.”
Jeremy nodded, but didn’t say anything. He had never seen the woman before, though she looked friendly enough.
“My name’s Roxanne,” she said. “But you can call me Roxy for short.”
“I’m Jeremy,” he said.
“So what are you digging for, Jeremy?” she asked again. “Looking for worms?”
He shook his head. “I’m digging a hole to China,” he blurted out.
The woman had a nice smile. When she did, there were all these little crinkles that stretched and made her eyes look happy.
“That’s going to take a lot of digging,” she said.
He nodded.
“It might be easier to buy a plane ticket,” she said.
He shrugged. He didn’t have enough money to buy a plane ticket. But he’d heard if you dug far enough, you’d go right through the center of the earth and end up in China. And that would be about as far away from here as he could get…which sounded good to him. It might take a long time, but he had nothing else to do.
“Tell you what,” the woman said, leaning closer to him over the fence. “If you want, I can give you a better shovel to use.”
Jeremy’s face perked up. The blue plastic shovel was kind of a pain. But then he frowned. He wasn’t supposed to talk to—or take things—from strangers.
It was almost like the woman read his mind.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s just an old shovel. It used to be my husband’s—I got it for him to dig his own hole to China. He left it behind when he went.”
She grinned at some private joke and held up a finger. “Wait there, I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared from view, and Jeremy felt a little uncomfortable. He thought about slipping back around the shed and going back to the house, but at that moment, he heard his mother’s voice escalate again. “…care what that bitch says, you can just…”
His father’s voice crescendoed in answer to Mom’s shrill taunts. “…shut the hell up! I’ve got half a mind to…”
Jeremy decided that it was better if he stayed where he was. He wondered how fast he could get to China with the strange woman’s shovel. Probably faster than with the old broken blue plastic one. He heard her moving things about in the shed next door. He’d never seen her there before; he’d never really seen anyone in that backyard before. But he knew the shed. It was older than the one in his yard. You could see the places where the wood was rotting away. The birds had built nests inside it, and sometimes he sat here behind his own shed and watched the birds fly to the roof of the decaying structure next door and disappear inside. There were a couple of missing shingles and you could see the dark spots where the wood had gone soft, letting the sparrows peck their way in.
“Here you go,” the woman said, interrupting his contemplation of the neighboring shed’s rotten roof. He hadn’t seen her pop back up at the fence line, but she was holding a small spade with a wooden handle. The part used for digging into the earth was polished and shiny.
“That looks like gold,” Jeremy said, taking the proffered shovel from her hands, and lifting it to look closer at the exceptional
ly clean metal that was supposed to get dirty with earth.
“It’s copper,” she corrected. “It’s very strong, and it’s perfect for working in the earth. It can be your bridge from here to China!”
“Wow, thanks,” Jeremy said, unable to take his eyes off the garden implement. “But I don’t know…”
“It’s not doing anyone any good in my shed,” the woman said. “Use it whenever you want to dig, and when you’re done, just set it back on this side of the fence, right here,” she said, pointing at a spot to the right of an overgrown mulberry bush that dropped so many berries in the summer that the grass near the fence turned purple.
“Okay,” he said slowly, but his face still betrayed his unsurety.
“Don’t even worry about cleaning it off,” she said. “I’ll do that before I put it away in the shed. I’m just happy someone else will get some use out of it.”
The woman’s face beamed at him; her lips were wide and the freckles made her look as if she were a girl just about to laugh. “Dig your way to where you want to go,” she said softly, and then slipped away from the fence.
Jeremy took the shovel to his hole, and pushed the spade into the earth. It seemed almost a crime to get that perfectly burnished tip muddy, but after the first couple shovelfuls came out of the ground, he didn’t worry about that too much. He couldn’t believe how much better this was than using his plastic hand shovel. The spade seemed to cut right into the earth like a spoon into mashed potatoes. In five minutes he had moved as much earth as it had taken him to move in an hour with the hand shovel. The hole was growing wider and deeper, and now when he stood in it, his belt was below the edge of the ground.
“Jeremy!” his mother called. He heard the back door slam, which meant she had stepped out on the patio. He climbed out of the hole and hurriedly set the shovel back over the fence where the woman had instructed. He hoped it would still be there to use tomorrow. He hated to give it back so quickly, but he knew the meaning of that voice. Time to go in, clean up and get ready for bed.
“Jeremy, get in here!”
It had gotten dark out over the past few minutes—he hadn’t even realized. But now he could see the moon peering through the violet sky just over the top of the roof next door. Jeremy took one last look at the hole, and then turned to walk toward the house, where his mom was waiting.
He wished he could just stay out here, and sleep in the hole.
The shovel was still there on Tuesday night, which was good because the arguments started before dinner was even on the table. Mom spit nasty words under her breath that he knew he wasn’t supposed to say and Dad pantomimed strangling her when she turned her back. Jeremy wolfed down his spaghetti and asked to be excused from the table.
Mom’s cheeks were flushed and she nodded quickly; he didn’t waste a second slipping off his seat and setting the plate on the counter.
Thanks to the shovel, by the time it got dark, he had dug down three more feet. It was getting difficult to get the dirt out of the hole now, because the edge of the ground was now above his head.
“I’m going to have to dig some stairs,” he said to himself. If he went any lower, he wouldn’t be able to pull himself out of the hole!
He started slicing furrows into the existing walls, and slowly carved out four stairs into the existing sides of the hole, so that he could step up them and dump the dirt out onto the growing mound along the back of the shed. After stepping up and down them a few times, he realized that he needed something else.
A bucket.
Half the dirt was falling off his shovel by the time he got it above ground. He needed something to put it in. And then he could get more dirt out than just a shovel full at a time.
Jeremy climbed out of the hole and went to his dad’s shed. There were lots of buckets in there; he picked out the biggest one he could find—an old white one that used to hold tar or something for the driveway. It had a long silver handle and should be able to hold several shovels-full at a time. He heard his parents’ voices echoing in the shed. They weren’t whispering anymore.
“…frigid bitch…” “…perverted asshole…”
There was a lump in his throat as he heard things he knew he wasn’t supposed to. It scared him when they got this way, which happened more and more these days. Once upon a time, the fights had been infrequent, a hot blowup now and then, and the rest of the time, Dad had rolled around on the floor with him and Mom had made dinner, kissed both of them and called them her boys.
It seemed like a long time since she’d done that.
Jeremy closed the shed door and walked back around it to the hole carrying the bucket. He tossed it down into the dirt and picked up the shovel, intending to follow.
“How’s it going?”
It was Roxanne. She was leaning on the fence; a long lock of kinked black hair trailed over to rest against the gray wooden slats on his side.
“Hello, Miss Roxanne,” he said. Mom had always taught him to address adults as miss and mister.
“Just Roxy, please,” she said. Today she was wearing glasses—they were sort of squarish, and had emerald arms that disappeared into her hair. Roxy stared at him over the top of the glasses. Her eyes were brown, and he thought she looked amused, somehow.
“How deep did you get?”
Jeremy smiled. “I’ll show you!” he said, and stepped into the hole. He was proud of how far he’d dug in the past two evenings. He stepped down his newly carved stairs and disappeared temporarily from sight. Then he popped back up, just bringing his head above ground.
“You look like a gopher,” Roxy said with a laugh.
Jeremy laughed. “Can gophers dig all the way to China?”
“Maybe,” she said. “It depends how much they want to get there.”
“I want to get there.”
The smile seemed to slip from her face just a little bit, and she nodded. “I know,” she said quietly. “You just keep using my shovel whenever you need it. You’ll get where you want to go.”
The dirt slipped under his feet just then, and Jeremy stepped down a stair to regain his balance. When he stepped back up, Roxy was gone.
On Friday night, Jeremy’s dad didn’t come home. Mom ordered pizza for dinner, and they sat at the table in silence. Jeremy kept looking at the empty chair to his right.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked finally.
“Hopefully six feet under,” his mom said, and shoved another bite into her mouth. It looked to Jeremy like she was attacking her food, not simply eating it. He didn’t ask any more questions.
Without Dad, the house was quiet. Jeremy felt his stomach work itself into knots; somehow the silence was even worse than the yelling. He stole back out to the yard, and found the copper shovel waiting for him again on the other side of the fence. It looked as if Miss Roxy had cleaned it for him; the blade was gleaming in the fire of the sunset.
There were now thirteen steps leading down into the hole. Instead of going straight down, it had to kind of angle its way deeper and deeper, to allow for the steps. But he was making progress. It was like he entered another world when he stepped all the way down the bottom of the hole. The sky grew farther away and the air was cooler. Damp. Sometimes dirt fell from the walls and landed on his neck, making him shiver and jump. He wasn’t the only one working down here. Bugs were busy digging holes too. They scurried about on the walls, ducking in and out of tiny tunnels in the earth. He didn’t mind working alongside them, so long as they kept to themselves.
Jeremy thrust the spade down hard into the dirt. He came back with a big hunk of dirt and dropped it into the white bucket. Without pause, he shoved the spade down again. He wanted to get to China more than ever now. A tear ran down his cheek and he rubbed it angrily away on his sleeve.
The bucket filled up fast.
He picked it up, and hefted it step by step to dum
p out above on the growing mound. It was almost a relief to get back down to the bottom of the hole. He felt safer here. It was his own space. Nobody yelled or did bad things to each other here…because…it was just him.
Jeremy hefted the bucket up the steps a half a dozen times. It was starting to get dark outside; the sun had disappeared behind the houses, and there was a faint breeze ruffling the leaves of the trees around him. He looked towards his house. The lights were on in the kitchen, but there were no voices coming from inside. The quiet was refreshing…but eerie. Jeremy wondered where his dad had gone. Maybe he’d decided to go to China too. But he’d probably get there a lot faster since he’d driven away in their Ford Escort. Driving had to be faster than digging.
“How’s it going?”
Roxy was there at the fence again. Jeremy shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I think it’s going to take a really long time to do this though,” he said.
“I think you’re closer than you think,” she said.
“But China is all the way on the other side of the world, and I’m still just a few steps down.”
Roxy smiled. “I’ll tell you a secret. There is a whole network of tunnels beneath our feet that lead to wherever it is you want to go. I think your hole has almost reached them. And once it does…you can go to China…or anyplace else you want. As long as you really want it.”
“I do,” he said. “I want to be anyplace but here.”
Roxy nodded. “Then I’ll let you get back to it. Right now—when the day is gone but the night is not quite here? That in-between time? That’s the best time for digging to where you’re going.”
She grinned, and Jeremy could see her freckles bunch up around her nose. “Good luck,” she said. And then she walked away, through the tall grass in the yard behind his.
Jeremy stepped down into the hole again, carrying the white bucket. He thought about what Miss Roxy had said, and pushed the shovel into the dark earth near his feet. He might be close! The thought made him dig faster. And he filled the white bucket in no time. The dirt trickled over the edge of the rim, and he decided to try to put one more shovelful on top. He pushed the spade in once more, and this time, when he put his foot on the copper edge of the spade, it sank down easily into the ground. When he brought it back up, there was dirt on the shovel…and a hole where the spade had been. A hole that went much deeper than the little bit of dirt he’d lifted out.
