Into That Darkness

by Steven Price

  What?

  She stepped back and scraped the toe of one shoe over the cobblestones as if to get her bearings. The cars in the street poured past without slowing. She felt light-headed, strange.

  God, she murmured. I haven’t felt a tremor in years, not since I was a girl. Then peering up at the old man looming pale and spectral in that light she added, My dad and I used to feel them all the time. Earthquakes, I mean. He said they were good luck if they came in the morning.

  She did not know why she had mentioned her father. Perhaps it was the old man’s voice, low, crackling, like a tire driven slowly over crushed rock. She heard her father in it.

  He was from Trinidad, she added. I guess they reminded him of home.

  But the old man just cleared his throat and frowned and cleared his throat again.

  Well, he said. And after a moment, as if he did not know what else to say, he said, Well. Thank you for the wallet.

  And he nodded to her with one hand held to his heart, a gesture from another time, and he turned away.

  When the old man entered the tobacconist’s he did not at first see her and he called a greeting into the gloom. She was in her shirtsleeves, sweeping out back. She pulled on a brown cardigan and walked slowly to the counter and propped her broom behind it. The old man’s head was not clear and he shook it slowly thinking still of the fainting woman in the square outside. He set his coffee on the counter to cool. The tobacconist was peering up at him through her bifocals as if he were an inventory to be checked.

  You alright Arthur?

  He swallowed and nodded. I guess so, he said. I guess it’s just one of those mornings.

  I know how that is, she said.

  I brought you something.

  He reached into his greatcoat pocket and withdrew a small photograph and handed it across without looking at it.

  What is it?

  He nodded at it. Have a look.

  She took up the photograph and held it out in front of her as if at something she dreaded to see. Then very slowly she smiled. Is that me with Callie? Where did you find this? She glanced up at him but he said nothing and she stared again at the picture. We must’ve been down at the breakwater. Look how young we were. What were we doing down there? She set the photograph upright in a slat between the keys of her cash register. He had said nothing and she glanced at him now. You always thought there were more secrets than there were, she said.

  Well.

  It drove her crazy.

  She turned then and took down a jar printed Carib Special Blend and measured out and bagged and weighed and wrapped in paper the loose black tobacco. She had been a model for his wife’s sculptures and later a friend and when he saw her now he saw a door that was closing but was not yet closed. She was ill and rarely left her chair behind the counter and the old man knew that one morning the shop would not be open, and what that would mean.

  Anything else? Her eyes flicked down to a stack of papers beside the register. She waited with a finger curled above the register and the old man shook his head no.

  I think I already read that one, he said.

  I suppose at our age not many surprises are left, she said.

  I wish I was old like you’re old. I’d be running marathons yet.

  Go on.

  The old man smiled a little, the wrapped tobacco caged in his open fingers. He turned his face and studied the street outside but made no move to leave and the tobacconist took up a cloth and wiped at the counter.

  He said instead: Aza? Did you feel something a minute ago? Just before I came in?

  Like what?

  I don’t know. Like an engine starting up underground.

  She looked at him a long moment. You mean like an earthquake.

  No. Yes. I guess I do.

  She shook her head. It’s got so I don’t even hardly notice them anymore, she shrugged. My mother lived here eighty-nine years and she swore she never felt one. That’s just fine with me, I say.

  I hear they’re good luck in the mornings.

  Tell that to the broken dishes.

  The old man smiled again.

  In the yard behind the shop a dog was barking and barking but it fell suddenly silent.

  The sunlight thickened.

  A slow spackled dust was drifting in the shafts of light above the door and the mobile was turning faster in the display window. The old man closed his eyes. Opened his eyes. His legs were trembling. The tobacconist was still speaking and there was no sound and he watched her mouth and then all at once there was a great roaring in his ears. Car alarms along the street began to screech. The glass jars were rattling. Then his knees buckled and he grabbed at the pitching countertop, he looked out in time to see a car leap in the street beyond and the asphalt crest like a wave and then like that it was upon them.

  He felt it in the small of his back, a sort of shiver. As if the cold teeth of a zipper were swiftly undone down his spine.

  His fingers began to ache.

  It came on.

  It came on and pulsed shuddering up through the woman’s feet and knees and up through her hips and ribs and the woman where she stood leaned pitching in it like a figure in a storm. The café countertop rippling in her grip like so much ribbon in a wind.

  The cups and cutlery were rattling in the shelves. And it came over the boy in a roar and he reeled where he sat and the heavy table bucked and the walls began to sway.

  Mom, he shouted.

  Through the glass he could see the oak thrashing the cobblestones.

  A crack sundered the drywall and dust sifted down and glass jars were shattering around the tobacconist where she had fallen to her hands.

  The café ceiling flexed and sagged and flexed and sagged.

  And her son staring at her terrified and the light fixtures blooming and dimming and then the storage room door behind the counter was banging shut and banging shut again.

  Stay here, the old man was shouting. Don’t move.

  Mason, Mason, the woman shouted.

  The old man crawling past the overturned shelves cut his hands on a shattered frame and his fingers fumbled at the door to the basement. The floor billowed under him and he leaned into it with a hand on the trim, the pipes in the walls groaning. The door opened onto blackness, a dry dust smoking up out of it.

  The café air thickening with drywall dust.

  Mason, his mother was shouting.

  Then the old man stood in that door frame with his hands held to either side as if to hold that building upright through his strength alone. He could see the tobacconist screaming at him. The blood from his upraised hands was dripping warm into his shirt cuffs.

  Then the floor buckled and the boy could hear the hardwood ripping apart around him and he breathed deeply in the dust and sawing heat. Watching from the great distance of his heart the window glass clouding over as if rimed in ice then pushing out into the street.

  And all of this silent, slow.

  Glass. Exploding into the sunlight.

  The woman grabbed her son, pulled him to the storage room doorway. She held him there. She covered his head with her arms and she held him.

  His mother was crushing him to her chest and he could not breathe.

  She held him.

  As the ceiling lifted, as the floor gave out, as the world hurtled in with a roar.

  When it ended it ended roaring and engulfed them in a white brilliance and it seemed their very bodies burned and then for a long while was nothing but silence and darkness. The woman lay with her son breathing in that new strangeness and then someone was weeping, and she knew it was her own voice, and she hefted a shoulder and sobbed thickly: Go. Now.

  And her son wriggled gasping out from under.

  In the blackness she told herself she must be calm. She choked and coughed and tugged at her left arm but it did not give and she could feel nothing in it.

  Are you hurt? she asked. Her voice shivering. Mason? Are you hurt?

  When the bo
y did not answer she brushed at his nape, his forehead. He felt hot.

  Try to keep still, she murmured. Let me think for a moment.

  I can’t see anything, he said.

  I know honey. It was an earthquake.

  She flexed her legs, her ankles gone bloodless and just beginning to ache and the chunk of brickwork above groaned deeply. It’s alright, she told her son, hush, it’s fine. The walls clattered and rapped and fell still. In the darkness with her limbs twisted as they were she could not turn her face and she lay very still, blinked wetly. She coughed.

  Listen to me, she said. We’ll get out of here. Don’t be afraid.

  I’m not afraid, he whispered.

  The old man snorted and spat a thick clot of dust and blood and he turned his head gingerly as he came to, his eyelids shut fast. The air was grey with dust.

  In his ears a white roaring. His head ringing.

  He could just make out the slats of the ceiling stoven in around him, loops of wire, a wall leaning wildly. In the ruins of that small tobacco shop he groped about, seized a tin, struck at a girder angrily with shaking hands. Nothing. He kicked his legs and something, broken mortar, brick, shifted loosely. When he shut his eyes he was still plunging through that darkness.

  In his left hand he was holding the tobacconist’s wrist.

  It was not moving and he understood she was dead. He let her go and tried to sit up but just slumped to one side, his head spinning. The cuffs of his shirt were crusted with blood. The old man felt a terror coming up through his body as if it were not his own but coming from someplace deeper. The darkness under him pulsing like a great blood-chambered heart. He turned his head and shut his eyes and he stoppered his ears with his hands.

  She could not be certain which wall had collapsed. She did not know how long they had been buried and she wondered then if the entire building had fallen. Likely only the floor above them. Rescuers would be coming soon. They would phone her daughter.

  Kat will be trying to reach us, she said in the darkness.

  Kat’s mad at me, her son murmured.

  Oh honey don’t say that. She’s not. She won’t be when we get out of here. I promise.

  I don’t care. She can be mad at me.

  And remembering then her daughter, small, bird-wristed in her bedroom. She wondered if her daughter had tried to reach her yet. Shook her head weakly. Returned instead to a vision of her daughter three years ago, them sitting parked in the driveway at her middle school in the rain. The old school hazed through the windshield, the engine idling smokily in the grey light. The other children in their uniforms running stooped and blurred through the courtyard. And her daughter crying because she felt she was ugly and because she did not want to go in to class. A lump rose in the woman’s throat as she remembered. She had sat with her hands on the wheel not knowing what to say as big drops of rain flecked the glass and shadow-flecked her hands, shadow-flecked her daughter’s beautiful dark cheeks.

  Kat’ll find us, her son said quietly and she felt him nodding to himself in the black.

  He did not remember clambering free.

  There was no sound. The old man stumbled into the square, hands dangling at his sides. Dust billowing and smoking about him. He saw a child’s shoe and glinting tins of beans and he saw bits of clothing and drapery wrapped tattered around bricks and pipes and shredded under slabs of masonry and he picked his way between these and the smashed grouts of furniture scattered there.

  Then he was crouched on all fours in the manner of a beast and panting. His clothes hanging off him. He stood shakily, staggered into the ruined street. Everything was very still and white as after a snowfall and the stillness moved very slow. He could see others stumbling in the smoke.

  Then a high sun, warm and dry on his neck.

  Then nothing.

  Then his bare skin, trembling. His lips tasted of dirt and steel and he gagged and spat and doubled over hacking. Clawed two fingers into his mouth to clean it. When he straightened he ran his hand across his face and noticed as if from a long way off that he was crying.

  The woman coughed and could not stop and then she was gasping long slow ragged gulps of air.

  Oh honey, she said. Oh I can’t. My arm’s stuck.

  The air was sour and an oily wisp of gas was seeping in through the walls and a line of sweat slid itching down her ribs. She turned her head this way and that in the darkness, she tilted her chin, she forked her free elbow birdlike behind her and she dropped her hip and rubbed at her legs. Her calves bloodless and prickling there. All at once she froze.

  Mason, she hissed into the blackness. Mason do you hear that?

  A voice, very faint. Unwinding through that labyrinth of pipe and hairline fracture: Is anyone in there? Hello? Can you hear me, hello?

  Yes, she cried, yes oh thank god, we’re in here—

  Her voice, burned hoarse and crackling from the dust and heat and pain. We’re in here, hello, get us out of here, she shouted and then her son was shouting also in his own high scream: Hey, hey, hey, hey.

  After a moment the voice echoed again down to them but softer now, less distinct. Hell, anyone, can you hear. Then it faded and was gone.

  I think he heard us, her son said. I think he did.

  She reached for his hand.

  The old man’s ears were bleeding as if the earthquake thundered yet within him and he shook his head slowly to dispel the noise. Cries were coming to him out of the drifting dust, distorted and slow.

  He saw the figure of an old man stagger up out of the smoke, face streaked with dirt, and then the two old men approached each other as if stepping towards a reflection.

  What happened, the old man whispered. Still shaking his head.

  The door, the other was saying, the door, the door.

  And then that figure too was gone. The old man walked, turned, walked. Thought vaguely of going to his house and then thought in alarm: Where’s Callie? although it did not make sense, his wife had been dead almost forty years, and then he leaned against a grimy mailbox and began to tremble. There were people in the street now, standing with arms folded in shock and murmuring to themselves, and now the old man could hear sirens very far off.

  A silver motor scooter came wending through the maze of rubble with a low whine and the sunlight flared off its fuel tank. Poles were downed along the sidewalk and there were figures half-naked and shouting. The smoke was lifting. Many buildings had slewed or collapsed entirely. He stood at the corner where the bank once stood and stared down the side street at the houses behind their rows of dahlias and rhododendrons and at the white wood fences and wicker arbours still of a piece and standing. The front yards strewn with bits of glass and with plastic chairs fallen on one side and with twists of clothes hurtled from clotheslines and from the buckled houses themselves. As if all along that street occupants had been evicted in force.

  Then he saw the dead girl. Rolled onto her stomach and lying bonelessly on the hot asphalt. Her dress was rucked up over her waist. He sat down next to her socked feet, his face slack. The rubble was moving, there were figures coming out. The old man peered around him and the light in that narrow street seemed suffused with a fiery stillness and all that it fell upon appeared to burn.

  Mason, the woman whispered with strain. The counter. Go over to the counter. Can you?

  Her son was silent, breathing beside her. She ran a finger lightly over his face.

  Mason? You have to get outside, you have to tell them where we are.

  He was very quiet and then he said, sleepily: Why is it so dark in here?

  She swallowed down her sudden fear.

  It was an earthquake honey, she said. You know that. You asked that already. Right?

  But when she bundled a dishtowel and lifted the boy’s head onto the makeshift pillow he did not stir. As she turned her left arm spasmed with a black spiking pain and she cried out. Her son’s thin chest rising and falling under her palm. She rested next to him in that darkness
her legs throbbing and her ruined arm spectral beneath her and it seemed almost as if she had dreamed her way to this place, so much was the darkness around her like the darkness within.

  She felt herself beginning to drift. Thinking: Oh god, Kat. She choked and coughed and spat up a great mouthful of phlegm to keep from crying. A reek of gas still pricking her nostrils, as if the stove lines were punctured.

  After a time she could hear a scrape of iron and then the slab overhead shuddered.

  She shook her son by the elbow. They’re getting closer, she whispered. Mason? Can you hear them? They’re coming.

  She shut her eyes hard and spots of light flared up and faded before her. So loud was the digging that the woman braced herself, it seemed the slab overhead would peel back any moment, that sunlight would come flooding in upon them, sleek silhouettes bending down to fold them in their arms. But it did not come. And then she could not hear any digging at all.

  We’re down here, we’re in here, we’re people in here, she screamed.

  The darkness shuddering, the dust sifting down over them.

  Her son was awake now and breathing.

  They’re coming for us, she said.

  But then her voice choked and she began to cry silently and when her son held her she cried the harder for it. His dark hands in her hair years ago like small birds, soft, cool, savagely clever. Pecking manifold and dexterous her tight braids. His sober eyes the colour of slate.

  The woman lifted her wrist to her mouth, the saliva and dirt and tears smearing there.

  The old man stood twisting a brown cardigan in his hands as if to wring it dry. He did not know where he had found it. When he heard a voice mutter something familiar he turned, dazed. Thinking: What was that? What was that he said?

  A kid with a patchy beard was staring him down. Dressed in stained baggy jeans, clutching a crowbar.

  I said, are you Arthur Lear?

  His teeth were very yellow.

  The old man was shaking his head like a fool. Do I know you? he asked.

  The kid frowned as if he did not understand the question. You dropped this, he said after a moment, holding out the old man’s billfold. I mean I think you dropped it. And then, uncertainly: Didn’t you drop this?