by Jane Langton
“No,” lied Owen. He leaned back again, feeling feeble and dizzy, and stared up at the square patch of light. The hole through which he had fallen looked small and far away. They were imprisoned in a dark circular room with water for a floor and a pitch-black ceiling. How deep was the water below them? Owen shuddered.
“Are you cold?” said Ellen quickly.
“No, no,” he said, lying again. Then the trapdoor slipped out from under him, and water lapped over his mouth.
Swiftly, Ellen wrestled him up again. “Don’t talk,” she said gently. “Here, can you wrap your fingers around the other handle?” Skillfully she closed Owen’s hand over the rope.
He was lifting his head, looking at her with concern. “You must be tired.”
It was Ellen’s turn to lie. “No, not at all. I can stay like this forever. And Peter will be back in a minute.”
Dreamily it occurred to Owen that Peter was not the messenger he would have picked, if there had been a choice, but he merely gazed at Ellen and smiled. “Your face,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and dropped his head back. “Beautiful. You shouldn’t have—come down here—after me.” Then his fingers opened on the rope handle. Letting go, he rolled off the trapdoor and his head went under.
Panic-stricken, Ellen seized the shoulder of his jacket and hauled him up again. And then she was aware of a change in the water around her. There was a noise, not just the hollow ricochet of their voices, but a deep shuddering echo, a tremendous booming that rattled against the metal walls. Below them, far, far down, there was a heavy rushing, a thundering, vibrating hum.
Around them the water had begun to move in a slow circle. Now it was swirling faster and faster. It dragged at Ellen, and she struggled to keep her place, paddling with one arm, splashing with her legs. The trapdoor was swept away. Like bathwater gurgling down a drain, the water was spinning in a descending vortex, guided by the helical vanes on the cylindrical walls of the shaft. Frantically, Ellen clung to Owen as they whirled in the sucking darkness, dropping lower and lower like chips of wood tossed into a whirlpool.
Far below them the valve at the bottom of the shaft was opening. In a mighty flood the water of the Quabbin Reservoir was bursting into the tunnel, gushing in a pouring tide four teen feet high, surging toward the spinning blades of the hydroelectric station of Wachusett, and from there, plunging through deep rock, to the thirsty pipes and water mains of the city of Boston.
39
The River reaches to my Mouth—
Remember—when the Sea
Swept by my searching eyes—the last—
Themselves were quick—with Thee!
“Here we are,” said Mary. “This must be it.”
In the clearing beside the reservoir stood a little building of gray stone. The door was open, banging against the granite wall in the chill wind that was lapping the blue water into whitecaps. A car was parked beside the building, its hood thrown high.
“I know that car,” said Homer. “Did you meet Peter Wiggins? That’s his car, I swear. I remember the fog lights, and the nick in the fender. What on earth is Peter Wiggins doing here?” Homer got out of the Volvo, then stopped to listen.
A huge sound was pouring out of the building, a thick liquid sucking, an appalling, terrible noise.
“My God, what’s that?” said Homer, staring at the open door.
Together they ran up the steps and entered the building, then stopped short, their ears assaulted by a deafening roar, as though someone had pulled the plug in a stupendous sink.
The room was empty except for a scattering of shoes on the floor. Grasping Homer’s arm, Mary shrieked at him, “Something’s wrong.”
Then both of them saw the hole in the floor, and they ran forward and knelt beside it to look down.
What they saw seemed not of this earth. Black hole, thought Mary. Below them was nothingness, and below the nothingness, water swirling, plunging down in a vortex like a whirlpool, and, spinning in the whirlpool, a square object and two small round ones, bobbing like corks.
Homer shouted, and the two round objects became infinitesimal pale spots, looking up.
Mary gasped and stretched her arm into the hole. “We’re here,” she cried, but her words were lost in the overwhelming noise that pounded on the iron shaft and dinned against the walls.
“Christ,” bellowed Homer. “It’s the shaft over the tunnel. The valve is open. Jesse Gaw opened the gate. He just opened the gate.”
With one motion, Homer and Mary leaped to their feet and stared at each other. Wildly they looked around, their hands jerking involuntarily in grasping, saving motions. They were too far away. They couldn’t reach. Then Mary saw the bucket, the great metal bucket, lying on its side on the floor.
Homer saw it too. “Overhead crane,” he roared, pointing at the ceiling. “Runs along a rail, see? Kind of a trolley. How in the hell does it—?”
“Box on the wall,” screamed Mary, and she ran for it, falling over the wood that was stacked beside it, barking her shins painfully, leaping up to throw open the metal door. “Overhead lights,” she muttered under her breath, reading the labels beside the switches. “Outdoor lights—crane.” There it was, the switch that controlled the crane. Swiftly, Mary yanked it up, then turned her head to see if anything had happened. The crane was shaking slightly. The power was on.
Homer found the ropes that worked the pulleys. It wasn’t easy. Jerking too hard, he kept overshooting. The great hook raced past the bucket, while below them the vast sucking sound in the shaft grew lower in pitch and began to throb with deep harmonic overtones as the column of air above the descending water grew ominously longer and longer.
Homer Kelly had always been butterfingered, his muscular coordination was terrible, his mechanical know-how had been neglected, and he couldn’t even repair a defective lamp cord. But in this crisis he caught on quickly, and soon he was jerking at the pulleys with clumsy effectiveness.
“More,” cried Mary, her hands on the dangling hook. “A little more. Oh, ow, ow! What? Never mind!” Careless of her pinched fingers, she eased the hook under the heavy bail of the bucket. “Now, up, up! Up, first, then bring it over. No, no, Homer, not like that!”
Homer was dragging the bucket across the floor. The metal bottom shrieked on the concrete floor and struck out sparks. “Stop,” screamed Mary, but it was too late. Bashing into Homer, the bucket knocked him down.
He hardly seemed to notice. He was up on his knees, yanking on the ropes, staring up at the crane, his face bleeding.
At last he had the bucket poised directly over the hole, hanging silently above the abyss, shaking gently up and down.
Gasping, Homer climbed in, and Mary ran to take over the guide-ropes.
Blood was running down Homer’s cheek. He shouted at Mary, “The echo will be bad. You may not understand me when I yell at you. One yell for stop, okay? Two yells for go.”
Mary nodded. With a jerk she started the bucket down, and then hurried back to the hole in the floor. Dropping to her knees, she peered past the bucket to catch a glimpse of the water.
Deeper! It was deeper down! Where were they, the two faces? Gone? Drowned and gone? No, no, now she could see one of them. It was much smaller than before, much farther away. Mary gasped as the head submerged, then reappeared. The second one appeared again too, dragged up by the hair. Then the bucket descended and the faces vanished.
Mary stood up again and watched with her heart in her mouth as Homer’s frowsy head fell slowly out of the light into the hollow reverberating darkness of Shaft 12.
40
It sets the Fright at Liberty—
And Terror’s free—
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!
Peter Wiggins, was lost in the wilderness.
Peter had meant to wander aimlessly for four or five hours, then find his way back to the road and flag down a car, and explain that two people had fallen into a hole, back there at the gate where people went fishing, only it didn�
�t look like a fishing place, and he didn’t know exactly where it was because he had been lost, but those two people certainly needed help and somebody should call the police or the fire department right away.
But at dusk Peter couldn’t find the road.
When the stars came out, he was still stumbling in the middle of the square mile of roadless forest that lay south of Shaft 12. He was exhausted, but he didn’t dare lie down on the ground and go to sleep. The thought of spending the night in the woods was too frightening. He had never slept in anything but a bed. He had never been a Boy Scout. He had never even gone to summer camp.
Peter was lost in the woods for forty-two hours. After the first blundering night of shivering cold and fear there was an endless day of mist and fog, and then a final terror-stricken twelve hours of utter horror.
If Peter had been a student of Calvinist doctrine, if he had agreed with the notion that God punishes the evildoer, or even if he had believed with Henry Thoreau in the moral lessons of nature—Every zephyr speaks of some reproof!—then he might have taken his misadventures in the woods as a personal reprimand, a kind of savage, enforced atonement for his misdeeds. But Peter was too close to those misdeeds to see them in a moral light. What he had done seemed perfectly natural to him, the necessary response to the circumstantial crises in which he had found himself. And of course during his two nights and a day in the forest, he was too galvanized with fear to think sensibly about anything at all.
The terrors of the first night were perfectly ordinary. In his ignorance, poor Peter failed to understand how trivial his misfortunes were. If he had known anything about the animal life of the New England backwoods, he would not have been so dismayed when he stumbled up to his knees in a beaver pond at midnight. Later on, struggling out of a swamp and shaking in every limb, he would not have screamed when a startled partridge flew up in his face out of the undergrowth. A few minutes later, he would have recognized the warbling gobble of a wild turkey, and then he might have been able to dodge the sharp beak that raked at his thigh. Of course the nest of bobcats that swarmed under his groping hand in the small hours of the night would have electrified anyone, but only an ignorant innocent like Peter would have run shrieking away from the wild howl that rent the silence of the deep woods just before daybreak. It wasn’t a pack of wolves, it was only a coyote.
But Peter knew nothing about any of these creatures, and therefore at dawn he was a gibbering wreck. Dragging his bleeding leg from tree to tree, mopping his torn face with his bleeding arm, he was tearfully thankful to find himself alive.
A mist had formed during the night, and now there was a chill drizzle of rain. Peter was glad to sink down under the stone arch of an abandoned railway and try to sleep, before making another attempt to find the road that surely lay just within his reach over that way—or perhaps that way, or—of course, he was completely turned around—it must certainly be just a few hundred yards in that direction over there.
But when darkness came again, he was still lost. And his second night in the woods was a thousand times worse than the first. Or perhaps it was a thousand times better, since it was a succession of extraordinary adventures.
If Peter could have known the rarity of the things he was to behold that night, if he could have imagined the thousand failed attempts by sportsmen and nature-lovers to catch glimpses of the astonishing wonders he was about to witness, then perhaps he might have rejoiced when he was trampled by the largest deer in North America, a gigantic sixteen-point buck. He would have been thankful for his good fortune when at the top of a rocky ledge the only nesting eagle in Massachusetts rose above him, spreading her enormous wings, and dived at him, driving a beak like a dagger deep into the flesh of his shoulder.
And then there was a final miracle. As the mist at last dispersed, as Peter staggered, sobbing, into a moonlit clearing, bleeding from three places at once, he nearly tripped over a giant cat. He should have fallen to his knees in gratitude. Instead he stumbled backward in helpless dread as the catamount gazed at him with its luminous eyes, lifted its narrow head, opened its terrible jaws, and uttered a scream like a woman’s.
The gracious greenwood of New England, the forest of leafy verdure for which Peter had hungered, had brought him to death’s door.
41
No Wilderness—can be
Where this attendeth me …
On the second morning after Peter’s disappearance, Owen and Ellen joined the search party that spread out to look for him, a network of volunteers and MDC police, fifty people strong.
Ellen’s face was bruised from slamming against a corner of the trapdoor as she whirled, half drowned, at the bottom of the shaft. Owen’s forehead was bandaged and one arm was set in plaster to support the shoulder joint, torn from its socket when Homer snatched him from the last guttering revolutions of the swirling water before it sank into the tunnel, to be swept away forever in the rushing underground river.
But now they were risen souls. It was a bright morning. Hand in hand, they crossed a meadow and entered a sunny patch of woodland. Red-winged blackbirds flew ahead of them, alighting to utter their piercing peep. Ferns unrolled in fronds of fresh pale green. Rabbits sat in trances.
At first Owen didn’t recognize the pitiful apparition that tottered toward them, whimpering, his hair full of twigs, his face black and bleeding, one eye swollen shut, his clothing in shreds, his body poulticed with clusters of blood-soaked leaves.
But when the stranger said Owen’s name in a feeble croak, Owen and Ellen ran to him and helped him to the road.
Owen had no suspicion Peter had ever meant him harm.
42
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the World!
Next day the wind picked up, tossing the expanding leaves of the white oak tree in the Dickinson garden, blowing a shower of pointed magnolia petals onto the lawn. On the Common it snapped the flag on its tall pole and swung the traffic lights dangling over the crossing. In Ware the projecting sign of Astrella’s Doughnut Snack Bar trembled on its supporting wires. All over the Connecticut Valley men and women students trudged to their final exams, their hair blowing this way and that. And at the Quabbin Reservoir the nesting eagle left her three white eggs to soar above the sunny wooded slopes on the rising thermals and gaze down with her golden eyes at a disturbance in the water.
A diver was dragging something out of the reservoir, depositing it on the stony riprap beside Shaft 12.
It was the body of Alison Grove. Taking off his face mask and flippers, the diver watched as the MDC patrolman picked up Alison and carried her to the police van. The bell on her ankle tonked dismally once or twice.
The chief engineer for the Quabbin branch of the Metropolitan District Commission was looking on, feeling a melancholy pride in the correctness of his prediction. As the patrolman laid Alison in the back of the van and covered her with a blanket, the chief engineer explained with sweeping gestures how he had figured out where to find her.
“That guy in the boat—what was his name? Koop? No, Kloop. He sighted her right there east of the pass at Mount Zion. So she was sure to drift through and go south, because that’s the way the current goes, and then I was positive she’d end up at Shaft Twelve sooner or later, especially since we opened up the valve. I mean, the pull in the direction of the opening was bound to create a swift underwater current and drag her right up against the screen, do you see?” Then the chief engineer was moved by the sight of Alison’s childlike round arm protruding from the blanket, and his face fell. “Poor thing,” he said.
The diver was unaffected. “That screen down there, it really needs cleaning, Jeez, you oughta see it. Choked with smelt!”
It was a good day for drying. Tilly Porch was hanging out the laundry, and she had to hold on to the sheets firmly to keep them from whipping out of her hands.
At the same time Tilly had her eye on Elvis, who was playing in the tall blowing weeds that had s
hot up overnight around the vegetable garden. Elvis was shrieking happily, chasing something. Suddenly there was a yowl and a wild tumble, and the neighbor’s cat leaped as high as a house and bounded away. Elvis’s head appeared again above the weeds. Grinning, he toddled after the cat.
“No, no, Elvis,” called Tilly. “Time for your nap.” Chasing him, she scooped him up and carried him, giggling, upstairs to bed.
Debbie Buffington had not come back. It was beginning to look as though Tilly was going to be stuck with Elvis. And stuck with her husband’s old boat of an Oldsmobile Cutlass, because Debbie had disappeared in Tilly’s little Toyota. Tilly wondered what her daughter Margie would say when she found out. Well, she would be furious with Tilly, tying herself down at her age with somebody else’s child! “Mother, really, it’s not your problem.”
And of course Margie would be right. But somehow Tilly had become fond of Elvis. Of course he was a horrid child in many ways, but there was a curious new cheerfulness in him that looked promising to Tilly. When he choked the cat, he didn’t do it out of malice, he was simply holding it firmly to get a good look at it. For the past few days Elvis had reveled in Tilly’s house, and in the yard around it, inspecting everything with voracious curiosity, rolling over and over down the little grassy slope between the house and the driveway, entangling himself in the roll of chicken wire in the shed, climbing the grapevine to the shed roof, tugging at the plastic covering on the woodpile until the wood tumbled down on him, poking his finger in the nest of a house wasp and getting himself stung, pulling all the petals off the tulips, falling down the cellar stairs, eating all the crackers in the cupboard, breaking a Toby jug. Elvis reminded Tilly of that old explorer in the poem, the way he was looking at the world with a wild surmise.
