Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  There is a fault in his memory. He thinks he has made the correct turns but finds himself back at the beginning after what feels like an hour of crawling in tunnels scarcely wide enough for him to pass. He turns on the light above the containment door, removes his clothes, examines himself. The cuts on his hands are deep, the shards of glass may have severed tendons, his clothes are heavy, soaked with blood and sweat. Without the clothes he will move faster. It is impossible to traverse the obstacle without starting from the uppermost of the two possible entrances. The earth around them has been packed and repacked, the roots, twigs, leaves, and stones now settled into their places: holes in the ground, holes in the earth, nothing about them appears man-made. That was his mistake, not starting through the topmost entrance. He pulls himself up and into the darkness. Naked he can move faster, concentrating on turning in the right direction, remembering when to go up and when down, left or right, and then, after no more than five minutes, he is back in his hallway, sweat cutting camouflage through the coating of blood and dust that encases his skin.

  IN SLEEP HE DREAMS OF leaving the bunker by the rear exit, walking through the old stone storm cellar, up the stairs, into the woods, and as he steps onto the woodland floor his clothes fly from his limbs, the cotton shredding in a sudden wind that scrapes the hair from his body, scouring him until he is hairless, his skin withering, aging all at once under the force of the elements, his body declining, bones becoming brittle, spine shrinking and curving in on itself until he can no longer stand upright but must crawl, always on all fours, sniffing the ground, unable to raise his head high enough to see the path in front of him, and as he crawls, head swaying left and right, his nose to the ground, he turns to look back at the burrow entrance where he sees a great dark shadow approaching through trees, shifting, elongating, plunging through brush and down stairs, discovering his retreat.

  He wakes, the down comforter speckled with dried semen, blood, sweat. The pelt covering his chest and head is still there, his long eyelashes twitch, a week’s worth of beard stipples his face. There is no time to shower. Taking the dream for prophecy, he dresses, arms himself, flees the bunker. From a hiding place high in a tree, he watches the entrance to the cellar. Although he cannot remember when he last ate, he is unaware of hunger in the first hours of his watch, seeing nothing and no one apart from squirrels and birds. For a moment he stands, looking out through the thicket of branches. On a hill in a tree more than forty feet off the ground, he recognizes Demon Point, the crest where the land rears up suddenly before dropping again to the river. When the house was still his, he had been able to see the Point from his bedroom. Every year several kids, usually teenagers, would break legs sliding down its vertical flanks of loess, or be unable to stop themselves and go flying to the river, hit their heads, catch on a snag and drown, so people would say, in a way that was at least half-believing in forces beyond the visible, the Demon got him, see, the Demon got that boy.

  When he is too tired to stand he sits again, straddling a branch as big around as his newly narrow waist, and leaning back against the trunk he is aware for the first time of hunger and thirst, of the dryness of the air after so much rain. The ground is waterlogged, the rough ridged bark of the tree still damp, a smell of wet growth and decay rising up through the branches. In the course of the first day no one comes, and once it is dark he can see so little he has to rely on his hearing. While day is a time of distant machine noises, cars and aircraft, beeping construction equipment and howling sirens, night settles into its natural cacophony of owls, winds, and the leaf-crunching movements of animals he can no longer see. Staring into the navy black ground below, listening, he keeps himself awake. An owl is close, whinnying a long descending note that makes Paul quake and hold himself. At some point he sleeps, stirring only late the next morning when he hears voices and looks down to see the child led by the Washington woman straight to the old stone steps of the storm cellar. He forgot to lock the doors to the cellar, left one of them wide open, and the containment door itself will be unlocked as well. He is as careless as his father always suspected.

  “There used to be a house here, an old house, older than my house was. It burned down a long time before I was even born,” he hears the widow say.

  “And this was part of the house?” the boy asks, as the two of them pull more branches away from the entrance.

  “This is all that’s left of that place. Deeper in the woods, closer to the river, there’s a chimney and a fireplace, all made of stones. That belonged to a log cabin once upon a time but the walls fell down and rotted years ago. My mother would take me there and we’d sit inside on a hot afternoon because it was so cool and quiet. Deer used to come up to the window and stare at us.”

  “Can we go down there?” the boy asks, pointing into the cellar.

  The woman opens the other door and leans into the dark cavity. He does not breathe. If her vision is acute enough to see in the dark she will discover his lair. A moment later she comes back up.

  “Better not,” she says. “The ceiling might not be safe. Come on, I’ll show you the chimney.”

  He exhales as the two of them walk north through the woods, disappearing beyond his sight. The widow will have seen evidence, the marks of human presence on the floor of the cellar, on the steps, all the scratchings and leavings, smelled odors of body and breath. He waits until they return, the boy and the widow, walking up to the fence he built, placing a key in the lock, letting themselves into the backyard and locking the door behind them as if they expect the arrival of savages.

  Struggling for breath he props his back against the trunk, dizzied from watching the woman and child and knowing they were never aware of him. If he could watch them, vulnerable as they were, then anyone might be watching him. Even if he managed to get back into the cellar, someone might follow him, see him enter, discover his hiding place, flush him out. All it would take is a muffling of the ventilation shaft hidden in the hollowed-out trunk that stands not twenty paces from the stairs to the cellar. They could smoke him out, gas him, force him to come fleeing into the open where there would be no choice but to present himself armed, to go out battling for his liberty.

  Only when his legs and arms go numb does he move them, adjust his position, climb to a lower, broader branch, nearly falling as he grapples down the rough trunk, feeling the weight of his body pulled backward in space. Planting a foot, he clings, grasps, pivots, slides his legs around the new branch, heaves in air, and notices the sun is setting, the world turning red, air throbbing with this new coloration, the forest distorted, the greens popping neon, fluorescent, a patch of red label on his shoes shimmering as the woods are suddenly full of deer, a few at first, the forerunners, darting a path through trees, flying, and then dozens more in stampede as he takes aim, the suppressor muffling his shots, bodies falling, others coming faster, in panic and disorientation, piling up, a carnage of brown and white flanks, some still bellowing, eyes rolling, staring up at him as the lights go out, the wind picking up, clouds cantering in from the west, the first fat and acidic drops forcing him from the tree, half sliding down the trunk to the ground where he surveys his kill.

  One by one, he guts them and carries each body down to the storm cellar, through the containment door, and into the bunker. He works slowly, rain falling harder, bodies cooling, requiring more work with his knife, a slip in the rain, blood coming now from his own skin. Five deer, all at once, enough to feed him for a year.

  As the rain belts him harder, wind driving water through wood, he retreats once again, sealing himself inside the vault. The hallway of the bunker is a landscape of bodies. He cuts off the legs and skins them but lacks the energy to complete the job. At the stove he cooks rice and beans, eating from the pot as he looks at the carcasses, imagining how he will butcher and freeze them, find ways to preserve all that meat; some of it will have to be cured or go to waste. He eats two days’ worth of rations until he feels sick
, and then, before he can even turn to the carcasses, he stumbles to his bed, strips off his wet and bloody clothes, watches the trickle of blood from his arm slow and stop, its browning crust caked across his skin, a smear on the blankets, a track, his eyes burrowing into the path that cuts through the folds of his comforter, a lane through hills, a red trail into darkness.

  When he wakes he turns over and sleeps again, forgetting his dreams. In the moments of waking he wants only to return to the red path and follow his bloodline back to mountains he has never known.

  A high whine screaming through the bunker wakes him. Climbing and tripping through deer carcasses that emit a tart-sweet smell of decay, he searches for the source of the noise, but everywhere it has the same intensity, a bright screeching drone, like the scream of the child. Or perhaps it is not whining so much as some watery rushing, surging up from beneath the bunker, the aquifer rising to engulf him. Or else it is something alive in the walls of the bunker itself, between the concrete and lead lining, and the only answer is to dig, to find the source. A drill will make too much noise, the people upstairs would notice, but a spoon, a spoon will work, cutting into the walls. He finds a spoon in the kitchen’s utensil drawer and begins scraping away at the corner of the hallway closest to the rear containment door, sensing the noise might be loudest there, that in fact there is a shift of intensity and pitch, a higher gurgling-whine, a rotating whooshing. He scrapes and scratches, wearing down the spoon, creating a small mound of dust on the floor. For the first time since rising from his bed he notices his nakedness, the stains of blood and dirt still traced along his arms. He has defecated and urinated on the floor as the noise, growing in intensity, exploding up through the walls, penetrated his brain. It is not water, nothing mechanical or electronic, not a whine, not a gurgle, but that same terrible scratching and clawing noise he has heard in the past, a beast from deep in the bowels of the earth rising up, breathing in and out, clawing through the ground surrounding the bunker, approaching, circling, scrambling in fury against the lead lining, clawing its way in, piercing the outer shell. He stumbles backward, tripping over the carcasses, sliding between them, the hunger erupting out of his gut, tearing into his mouth, his hands reaching, shredding, pulling away a strip of flesh from the carcass closest to him, his fingers bringing it to his mouth, the flesh on his tongue, the tart-sweet odor, and then a sudden blackness and night.

  PART III

  FALL

  4:53 AM: He stares at the red numbers on the clock radio. Individually they are masculine but 4:53 is somehow feminine. It has to do with adding them all together, or multiplying. Either way, the result (12 or 60) is feminine. This is not something he has to contemplate. He knows the time is feminine before he is conscious of making calculations. He wonders if three men make a woman. It calms him to know there is now another woman in the house, although he is still unsure if he can trust her. She has told him to call her Louise. His father thinks this is too familiar and wants him to call her Mrs. Washington. During the day, when the two of them are alone, he calls her Louise. As soon as his mother or father gets home, he has to remember to switch to Mrs. Washington. He asks her one day at dinner if she is related to George and Martha Washington. She laughs and says no, but her husband might have been since he could not tell a lie. He turns off the alarm before it can buzz. It is a Friday. He is in no hurry to get ready for school.

  4:58 AM: He turns on the light and picks up the book he is reading. He has finished the book about the boy who goes in search of his father on a distant planet and is now reading its sequel, in which the same boy becomes very ill and his sister has to shrink herself down to sub-molecular size and enter his body to save him. Like the boy in the book, he also has a mysterious illness, a battle going on inside him, but unlike the boy, he has no sister to save him. His father says he should spend more time outdoors in the backyard, climbing trees, but the trees are tall, and there are no branches anywhere within reach. Last weekend his father tried to help him climb, giving him a boost so he could touch the closest branch. As he was reaching for the branch to pull himself up his arms began to shake, and then his legs, and they shook so hard he lost control of his body and found it squirming out of his father’s arms, dropping to the ground. He turned his ankle and began to cry. “Come on, Copley,” his father said, “don’t be so afraid.” Sitting on the wet grass, looking around at the world, he did not know how to say to his father that he was afraid not just of heights, but of the open space around him, so wide it seemed ready to consume him, to take him in its gaping jaws and replace him with itself.

  5:10 AM: He watches himself in the shower, looking at his head, his feet, his elbows, the backs of his knees, seeking himself in the body he no longer recognizes as his own. Only when he glances into dark corners of space does he sense something that looks like his thoughts. Empty space has consumed him. He now belongs to space.

  8:02 AM: He and Louise eat breakfast together but do not talk. He wants to speak with her but every time words begin to form, rising up in his head like buildings, before he can place them on his tongue they flatten and slide away, filling his throat with debris. It is not a question of having nothing to say. He has many things to say. He feels as though he came into the world to speak, to name, to describe things in the way he sees them, but something is now stopping him, either the illness or the pills that are supposed to make him better. The pills might, he thinks, as well as being a remedy, also be a kind of poison. After the last time he thought he saw the man, and followed him into the basement, discovering the short door at the back of the pantry hidden under a shelf, he told his parents. “I saw him again,” he said, “and I know where he lives. He’s behind the pantry.” His father told him to stop making up stories, but the following evening, while his mother was working down there, he took her by the hand and pulled her past the empty shelves. “There, under there, he lives down there. Look, please look.” She leaned over, crawled under the shelf at the back of the pantry, and felt the wooden back wall of the unit. “Pull it,” he said, “pull the handle.” “There isn’t a handle, Copley.” “The tab, the thing holding up the shelf.” She huffed, she was impatient with him, he understood this. He asked her again to pull it. “I’m pulling it but nothing’s happening,” his mother said, backing out from under the shelf and dusting off her hands. “There isn’t anything there, sweetheart. You’ve been having such vivid dreams, haven’t you?” She told him that now, in not too long, dreams like that would stop. He wonders if she meant they would stop because he is going to die, especially now that the words are flattening out and slipping away. “Are you looking forward to school today?” Louise asks. “No,” he says, “I hate school here.” She holds his hand. “Try to find something good,” she says, “it won’t be forever.” This is all she can ever tell him. It won’t be forever, he knows, because he is very sick and he is dying. His parents know it, his doctor knows it, and even Louise knows it, but all of them are refusing to tell him the truth.

  12:40 PM: He sits across from Joslyn at the end of their usual table in the cafeteria gym. Lunch today is fish sticks with tartar sauce, peas, carrots, and fruit compote. Ethan, one of his tormentors, has not been in class all week, and this morning Mrs. Pitt removed the nametag from Ethan’s desk. Joslyn, who lives across the street from Ethan, says the family disappeared over the weekend. “And on Monday, the house was boarded up.” “What do you mean boarded up?” “There were boards nailed over the front door and all the windows.” He wonders what kind of neighborhood Joslyn lives in. He has never seen a house boarded up, except for Louise’s house, and in that case it did not have boards, just a big lock on the front door. He has told no one at school about the man in his basement but he decides, now, that he should tell Joslyn. “You mean living in your basement?” she asks. “That’s right.” “And your parents are letting him live there?” “No, they don’t think he exists. They think I’m making it up. My father says I read too many fantasy books.” Joslyn looks a
t him as she chews her food. She is careful when she eats and he likes this about her. She chews each bite fifteen times, more if it’s something tough, but never any less. She eats slowly and is always done just before the lunch period is finished. Sometimes this makes him anxious, because he’s afraid she won’t throw away her trash in time to line up for recess and then she’ll get a fine. “What’s wrong with your voice?” she asks. “What do you mean?” She wipes her mouth with her paper napkin, puts her hands down on the table, and leans over to whisper to him so the girls sitting next to them won’t hear. “You’re talking different than you used to.” “Different how?” he whispers. “Like you’re dead.” “Like a ghost?” he asks. “Not like a ghost. Like you’re dead.”