by Curran, Tim
Lily nodded. “I know. I’ve been watching.”
Mitch didn’t say anything.
He supposed Lily had been scoping him out.
“You have to be careful these days,” she said.
“Sure.”
“You’re a real natural with her,” Lily said. “Do you have kids? You must.”
Mitch just shook his head. “No, but I’m having fun. I think I might go buy one.”
They both laughed.
Chrissy said, “Is that where you get kids?”
But Mitch was staring into Lily’s deep green eyes and wanting to swim in them and knowing, somehow, that he was going to get the chance. He liked Lily and she seemed to like him and isn’t that just the way it worked sometimes? Love just found you purely by accident and took you away?
“Mama,” Chrissy said. “We have work to do.”
So then the three of them spent the next two hours working on the wall and building a fine castle behind it, listening to the waves and the gulls and the incessant monologues of a five year-old girl who could speak at dizzying length about the secret lives of butterflies, Popsicle sticks, and the shapes of clouds in the sky. And, the nefarious activities of giant ants, of course.
And that’s how Mitch came into their lives, just a few short years after Chrissy’s father had died in a car accident.
That’s how it happened.
That’s how he had fallen in love with Lily and married her.
And that was the day that Chrissy first captured him and owned him, had owned his heart every day since.
3
That afternoon in Witcham, there was a seeping grayness that was gunmetal, quicksilver, and leaden. Gray rain fell and gray mist rose from the puddles and sluicing pools of debris and that uniform grayness flooded the city, keeping it and holding it with a gravestone stillness, a waiting, and an expectancy. It pressed itself against rain-specked windows and slid over roofs with a sly whispering and climbed stripped trees in dingy coils. Leaves fell before its dead breath and covered the ponds and leechfields in a multicolored mantle that went first brown and then ultimately gray as everything else.
Deke Ericksen, dressed in dripping foul-weather gear that belonged to his father, arrived on Kneale Street by foot, struggling through puddles until finally he stood at the door of the Barron house and knocked. Standing there, feeling the damp down into his bones, he listened for sounds of life and heard not a one. He might as well have been knocking at the door of a tomb.
C’mon, Chrissy, he thought, I walked six blocks in this to see you.
Somebody had to be home…didn’t they? Sure, a lot of people were abandoning the city with what was going on, but Chrissy would have said something to him…wouldn’t she?
Deke looked around, seeing nothing but rain and dripping trees, lots of houses that looked empty. He shook the water from himself and tried the knob. It was open. He stepped into the house, feeling the warm dryness in there reaching out to him.
“Anybody home?” he called out.
Somebody was there, he could sense that much. Somebody was nearby maybe holding their breath or peering from a half-closed door.
“It’s me,” he said, “Deke…Deke Ericksen, Chrissy’s friend.”
And then a voice, weak and low, said, “Deke?”
The living room.
Deke hung his rain gear from the coat tree by the door. He stepped out of his boots and went through the archway. Chrissy’s mom, Lily, was sitting on the sofa, knees pulled up, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Damn, she wasn’t looking right. She looked thin, thinner even, and pale like her blood had been sucked out. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was staring off into space.
Deke had not seen her since the funeral of Chrissy’s aunt Marlene, but the physical change since then was almost spooky. There was no substance to her, like she was a shadow cast by someone else.
“Hi, Mrs. Barron,” Deke said. “Just popped around to see Chrissy. She around?”
Lily blinked a few times, then looked at him. “No…no, she’s gone, Deke. She went out with Heather and Lisa, hasn’t come home yet. Mitch went to look for her. I’ve been waiting and listening.”
Deke licked his lips. The bait had been tossed out, but did he want to bite it? Did he really want to know why she had been listening? No, he certainly did not. But it would have been childish and rude to simply say, okay, gotta go, see ya bye. So he sat down in the rocking chair opposite her and got used to feeling damn uncomfortable.
“What are you listening to?” he said, soul of naiveté.
But Lily shook her head. “Oh, it’s not what I’m listening to, but what I’m listening for.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m not sure,” Lily said.
Deke wasn’t liking this. Uncomfortable? No, that was listening to your best friend talk about his penis or overhearing your parents discussing their sex life. That was uncomfortable, this was just spooky. And in his mind he could hear Chrissy’s voice, I know I’m a rotten person and a worse daughter, yada, yada, but my mother is totally wigged out. You touch her and she’s cold, she looks at you and her eyes are even colder. She’s like a mannequin pretending to be mom, you know? At the time, Deke had not known, no. He was sixteen and maybe sixteen-year-old boys weren’t known for the level of their compassion, but he had thought that Chrissy was being a little harsh about her mother. After all, her sister had killed herself and all, you had to feel sorry for her.
But now?
Oh, he felt pity still, but Lily also made him feel…crawly. Like maybe she was nuts or about to go that way. And those eyes, damn, like there was something hiding behind them, something tensing that wanted to scream hysterically at you.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Barron? Are you all right?”
He said this and meant it, because deep down he was very concerned. Maybe it was because he knew tragedy when he saw it and maybe it was because he was in love with Lily’s daughter. Regardless, he was concerned. Had his own mother seen it, she wouldn’t have believed it. Once upon a time, before Deke’s little brother had died and ripped the guts out of the family, his mother would have said: Deke? My Deke? His whole world is his stomach, his karate lessons, and that awful music he listens to that sounds like a soundtrack to hell with singers that always sound like Cookie Monster’s deranged brother trying to vomit all over the microphone, she would have said. Are you sure we’re talking the same Deke here? He has no compassion, un-huh. He laughs when his little brother hurts himself, calls the kid “Butt-Wienie” on a good day and simply “The Discharge” on a bad day. As in keep The Discharge out of my room, mom. No, you’re talking a different Deke here. That’s what she would have said. But therein lay the rub. Children could often be callous beasts at home, but perfect angels around strangers. Because at home they were always accepted. Parents might shout and stomp their feet, but in the end they never turned their young away. But with strangers you had to prove your worth. You had to show them you were not selfish and immature, that you actually had a heart beating in your chest.
And particularly the mothers of girls you were wild about.
So Deke, who was as sixteen as any boy ever had been, was worried. Creeped-out maybe, but worried, too. Sitting there in his Slipknot T-shirt with his shaven head, the piercing in his left eyebrow, and the little goatee under his lower lip, he was worried.
When he didn’t get an answer, he said, “I mean, I know this is none of my business and all, but you don’t look real good, Mrs. Barron. You been eating okay?”
She stared off into space. “Last night I dreamt that all the people that ever died were living underneath us,” Lily told him. “That there was a world beneath us. A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. Down there, down in the sewers and drains.”
“Wow,” Deke said, knowing it was stupid, but at a real loss for words.
“Down there, Deke, they’re all down there waiting for
us. That’s what I dreamed. Down below.”
Deke wasn’t up to this noise.
Maybe Chrissy was right and Lily should have been renting rooms upstairs on account of all that extra space in her head. He knew it wasn’t nice thinking shit like that, but how could you not? A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. That was not just disturbing, it was just this side of freaky. And especially for Deke. And especially because almost two years before his kid brother Nicky went through the ice on the Black River and drowned. When she said that, Deke immediately thought of Nicky down there, pictured him as he’d looked in the silver casket with the little gray burial suit and tie on. And why in the Christ did they bury kids looking like that? Nicky had never worn that suit but once a year at Christmas Mass…they should’ve buried him in a baseball cap and that fruity tiger-striped Frosted Flakes shirt. That was Nicky. That was what he had been about, not suits and ties and all that nonsense.
Lily had been talking right along, but Deke had tuned her out. “…down there, I think of them down there. It’s a nice thing to think about.”
Deke just stared at her until common sense told him to look away. He tried to think of something to say and this is what came to him: “There’s lots of room down there, Mrs. Barron. I know because we had to do a report on it a couple years ago in school.”
Lily was interested now. There was a wet mist in her eyes. “Really? What’s it like below, Deke?”
And then he was telling her, even though a voice told him that she was terribly distraught and possibly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He told her about the elaborate system of drains beneath the city that were for the most part a combined system of sewage and rainwater. That much of it had been designed back in the mid-19th century and updated and added to as the population of the city grew until nobody was sure what led where and the maps were outdated and it was anyone’s guess where all the tunnels led. Then in the 1970’s, he explained, Witcham had gotten a federal grant to install the Deep Tunnel system which was a series of interconnecting tunnels two-hundred feet down. Lot of people didn’t even know about it. Deke had interviewed a guy from public works about it. He said the tunnels went on for miles and were like thirty feet deep and forty feet wide. Like a sea down there. It was connected to the regular drains by a series of vertical shafts and controlled by a series of pumps and valves and flues.
“They did it because Witcham sits on the flood plain and it’s been flooding for years,” Deke told her, finding it easier to talk about these things than the nature of her problems.
Lily seemed interested. “Can you go down there?”
Deke swallowed. “Um…you mean the regular sewers? Sure, you just go down the manholes in the streets. I went down there with the public works guy. Lots of pipes are only big enough to crawl through and some even smaller than that, but they all connect up with the main drain lines that are big enough to walk around in.”
“But what about those Deep Tunnels? That sea down there?”
Deke knew he should stop right there, because where this was leading was nowhere good. “Yeah…I mean, there are shafts that connect to the Deep Tunnel system. They’re in the main drain lines, a whole bunch of them. Sometimes guys in special wet suits go down there to clean blockages and work on the pumps.”
“Is…is there anything down there?”
“Lots of water.”
“Anything else?”
“The public works guy said the sewers are full of rats. Sometimes they find bodies down there. Bums sometimes pry a manhole cover off or yank the grating off an outlet pipe and go live down there.”
Lily got up and went to the window. She stared out into the drab streets at the water bubbling at a storm drain. “They’re down there now.”
“Who?” Deke said, brushing sweat from his brow.
“All of them. All of them we lost through the years, they just went below into that secret sea and that’s where they are now. All the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.” Lily turned from the window, her face as colorless as the streets outside. Just as cool, just as damp. “I dreamed I saw my sister, I saw Marlene, but she didn’t look like she did before she died. She didn’t look sick and worn-out with gray in her hair and that awful hollow look in her eyes. She looked different, she looked younger, like when we were teenagers. When she was Chrissy’s age. She said I should come below. That everyone was below. That mom and dad were down there. And Grandpa Joe and Gramma Bridgette and Aunt Helen and even Joey Spalten who drowned in the quarry when we were kids. They were all down there and they were asking about me, when would Lily come down, when would Lily come down. Marlene said there were places down there, seas and rivers and creeks to swim in and hidden ravines to run through. She asked me…she asked me if I remembered the story Aunt Ilene had read to us. The Ray Bradbury story where a woman’s lover went down into the sewers and how he was dead down there, waiting for her. And you know what, Deke? I did remember! And that story was true because now it’s happened here, hasn’t it? All down there, all down below waiting for me and I suppose I’ll have to go, too, because I shouldn’t disappoint them.”
Deke realized then he was smiling and he couldn’t seem to stop.
He was seeing Nicky down there, sloshing through the water in a mildewed burial suit, his face like a fungus.
“Is there someone you’ve lost, Deke?” Lily said, getting psychic on him now.
“No,” he said, more sternly than he’d intended.
But Lily just grinned. “We’ve all lost, but maybe in the end, we can all find again.”
Deke was shifting in his seat now. He wasn’t up to dealing with this. He didn’t know how to handle it or what to say. Where was Mitch? He would know what to do. He always knew what to do. “But Mrs. Barron…that…that was just a dream.”
But Lily shook her head. Patient and kind as if she were dealing with a complete idiot that insisted the world was flat. “No, it’s more than that. Much more than that. I’m not crazy, Deke, it’s just that I can’t stand being alone anymore. I miss Marlene and she misses me.”
“But she’s dead, Mrs. Barron.”
Lily nodded. “Yes, but she’s no longer in her grave.” She paused, listening again for something Deke could not hear and was pretty sure he would never want to. “Before you came…I went upstairs. In the sink, yes, in the sink I heard a voice calling to me up out of the pipe. It was Marlene’s voice. She said, we’re below, far below. Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us.”
Okay, this was insane now. Voices from drainpipes. Lily had hallucinated it all, of course. He had to keep that in mind. She was not well. Because if the voice of a dead person called up to him from those pipes, black and gurgling, he would have screamed. Yes, he would have screamed and right then, the idea of dead voices calling up drainpipes to a mad woman made him want to start. Oh, but Jesus, dude, get a grip here. This is all wicked mad bullshit. Dead people aren’t down in the sewers and they don’t call to the living, they don’t—
“So that’s what I was listening for, Deke, when you came,” Lily said. Her eyes were huge and feverish, her mouth gone crooked. She brushed pale fingers to the paleness of her face, cocking her head. “I thought…I thought maybe I heard a scraping and I knew it was Marlene, she was scratching at the sewer lid from below.”
Deke figured that must have sounded like dead fingers scratching at the inside of a coffin lid, begging to be let out. But he wouldn’t go there. He just wouldn’t. Could madness be infectious? Could you go crazy being with a crazy person? For he thought maybe he was losing his mind, because, God help him, he almost believed Lily. There was absolute conviction in her eyes and didn’t that count for something?
No, it does not.
That was reason talking and he had to listen to it. Because it all made him think of Nicky, little sweet Nicky-boy who’d wandered away that March afternoo
n and died an awful, dirty death when the ice on the Black let go beneath him. He’d always been a curious kid and that had been what finished him. Deke and his friends always played hockey out on the Black come winter when it froze up hard and gray, but Nicky was too little to be out there. But he’d gone anyway. Gone to show how grown up he was, only he’d never came back—
Sure, he came back, dumbass, don’t you remember? Those divers went down there and fished him out, found him floating just under the ice. Then they put him in that awful little suit and slid him in that box and then you got to see him, you got to see what your brother looked like when he finally…came…home…
Deke was breathing hard.
All that shit, it was hard. Even eighteen months later, that particular blade was still sharp and cutting and its edge was fine enough to slit his belly right open, to slice all those poorly-healed scabs off and start that poisoned blood running again. Deke thought for sure he’d never be able to squeeze out tears over his kid brother again, but, surprise-surprise, they were still there, stored up in that reservoir that never seemed to run dry. He could feel the pressure of those tears, how they needed to get out again, and he had to force them back and, God, it actually hurt to do that. But he was not about to break down in front of his girlfriend’s mother, of all things. He could see the look on Chrissy’s face now. What did you do today, Deke? she’d ask and he’d smile and say, You weren’t home, so I sat there and had a good fucking cry with your mom.
But all that aside, the pain was still real.
Not that he’d honestly doubted it, because he saw it every day in his mom and dad’s eyes, like they were bleeding inside, just withering away. They’d smile sometimes and now and then, they’d even laugh, but that laughter was forced and synthetic and almost scary-sounding when it came out. Rusty and creaking, the sound of machinery broken-down by neglect and operated by unpracticed hands. Not real, not right, just…agonizing somehow. As if it wasn’t laughter, but just screams from the pits of their souls masquerading as laughter. The loss of their youngest and the ensuing funeral had sucked them dry. They became depthless, cold wind-up toys that mimicked human beings, but that was about it. Being around them, you could almost hear them thinking things like, Nicky would have been in fourth grade this year or Nicky would have been turning nine this year or Nicky just loved Tony the Tiger…remember how he loved Tony the Tiger? or God, we still love you, too, Deke, but we’d trade you in an instant if we could have a weekend with Nicky.
