by Lydia Millet
It was a light she’d seen a hundred times before—a light she knew from cinematography as well as from life, a certain familiar watery flutter of sun through high-up openings in the leaves. The way it slanted down, the way it wavered through the blur of green, conferred a sense of a life unmoving yet slowly filtering memories—waiting, existing without a sign of change in the long, semi-bright moment before dark.
•
When he drove the backhoe away and her front gates closed behind him it was dusk.
Jim wasn’t coming; he had stayed late at work and she would see him later at the restaurant—a famous, touristy place where the Chinese food was bland and greasy but the good tables had an unparalleled view, on a verandah high on a hillside, overlooking the valley.
She scrounged around in the kitchen drawers till she found a flashlight with live batteries and took it out to the hole in the yard. The soil had been smoothed back and she stood a few inches from the edge, pointing the flashlight down into the hole. She saw the metal rungs of the ladder and could make out, on the walls of the tunnel, a pattern of brickwork. She didn’t think it was deep; she thought she could make out the bottom, a dim, flat floor.
If the bricks collapsed, no one would know where she was. She stood still, hesitating.
In front, headlights scoped around and then cut off as a car turned into the drive. It was someone who had the gate remote. She stood with her flashlight pointed at the house, listening. A couple of car doors slammed faintly.
The old ones had returned.
They left Angela with Ellen Humboldt in the kitchen, heating up microwave dinners: chicken with small cubes of carrot, Susan noticed, which resembled the rehydrated food of astronauts or recalled the gray airplane upholstery of economy flights to Pittsburgh. Angela had once been a good cook but these days she was catering to Ellen, who preferred to eat small portions of highly processed frozen entrees. Portia and the gray lady came outside with Susan—the gray lady whose name, she realized, had been told to her enough times now that she could never ask again. She would have to listen slyly to the others until she caught it.
“So where do you think it could lead?” asked Portia, carrying her own flashlight.
There were footlights along the path, but once they came to the end of the flagstones and into the dark of the trees they needed the spots of light at their feet.
“Maybe down to an old cellar, at least,” said Susan. “On the original plans there was a basement and a wine cellar. But it’s so far from the house, Jim says there’s no way.”
“It would be better to wait till morning,” said Portia.
“I’m just going to take a quick look,” said Susan. “That’s all. Just to see what it is. Then I’ll come up the ladder again.”
She knelt next to the hole, her flashlight in a back pocket, as the lades focused their beams on the first rung of the ladder. She stretched a foot back and felt for the bar.
“What if the ladder’s unstable?” asked Portia. “You could fall down and break your neck.”
“It’s not that deep,” said Susan. “Maybe twelve feet. Maybe fourteen.”
She looked up at their faces, relieved to see that the gray lady was nodding.
“Hold on to my hand till you get down a ways,” said Portia, and reached out to Susan, who grabbed it.
“Here goes,” she said, and put her weight on the top rung. It held; it was solid. Down to the second, the third, the fourth, until she could let go of Portia’s hand and grab the top rung with both of her hands. Their flashlight spots glanced off the bricks, into her face when she looked up, blinking, and then away again. A few seconds later she felt hard ground beneath the leading foot, stepped onto it and switched on her own flashlight.
“Concrete floor,” she called up as she turned. Her magnified voice echoed.
“What do you see?” asked Portia.
“A door,” she said. She stood in a kind of simple well, nothing to see but the bricks around her, the cement beneath her feet and the gray of the door.
It was metal, with a key lock. She felt a sinking disappointment but reached out anyway and grabbed the knob—gritty with dust, but it turned without stopping and she felt the mechanism click. She pulled it toward her and it gave; cold air swept in. Ahead there was a hallway with the same concrete floor and brick walls. The end of it was too dark to see, but it seemed to lead back toward the house.
“Give me five minutes,” she yelled, turning her face up so that the old ladies were sure to hear.
“I warn you, after that it’s 911,” said Portia. “Because we’re not standing here all night, and I’m certainly not coming down.”
Susan pointed her beam at the narrow hallway’s ceiling: a naked bulb with a dangling cord. That meant it was wired. She reached up and pulled: nothing.
Maybe the bulb was out, she thought, and kept walking.
The hallway turned and she faced another door—nothing but that. It was just like the first and like the first it opened. She pulled it all the way back until it scraped the wall beside her and stopped; she stepped in. And here she was, in her own basement.
It was a gray, industrial space, almost clinical. There were old pipes along the ceiling, dusty and utterly dry, bearing no beads of moisture; there was the same gray cement floor, stretched out from where she was standing. In rows stretching along the far walls, and then spaced neatly between them like library stacks, were banks of metal cabinets that looked like high school lockers, and between them aisles with enough space to walk. There was the thick smell of mothballs and also something else—a chemical scent she couldn’t identify.
It was surprisingly dry. She scoped her flashlight around again, looking for another lightbulb, and finally saw a switch on the wall. After she flicked it there was a pause, then a series of clicks and flickers and the overhead fluorescents went on, long bulbs in the ceiling, mostly out of sight beyond the tops of the cabinets. They cast a sickly, clinical light. She turned off her own. Other than the closed cabinets everywhere she noticed only one other element: sacks marked with printed words, lying along the tops of the cabinets and piled on the floor at their ends. She leaned down to the pile nearest her and read the words on the bags: SILICA GEL MIXTURE. DESICCANT.
Desiccant, she thought. Desiccant?
She heard someone call, then—it must be Portia. She propped the basement door open quickly with a bag of the silica so the light would fall into the hallway, then ran back along the hall.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. No 911 needed,” she called up from the bottom of the well. “It’s a basement. It’s just a basement. But there’s a lot of storage space and I want to check it out.”
“I’m curious,” came Portia’s voice. Flashlight beams shone into Susan’s face.
“Relax, get on with your evening,” said Susan. “I’ll give you a full report. Go inside and have dinner, don’t wait outside in the dark. Really—it’s just a basement. Concrete and brick and there are lights that work. The walls aren’t going to fall in on me.”
She waited till they took their flashlights and left, then went back down the hallway. In the morning, she was thinking, she’d bring Jim down and he could help her look for the connection between the basement and the main house—there must have once been a door, must have once been a passage between them. It made no sense, this isolation.
The metal cabinets were of all different widths, she saw, some tall and thin like lockers, others as wide as a walk-in closet, and all closed tightly, though she could see no locks. When she pulled at the handle on the first locker she felt another pull against her, as though the door was vacuum-sealed. But the handle moved down, there was a pop, and the door was open.
She thought at first it was a fur coat. But it was simply a fur—beautiful, striped—or maybe more like a hide, not as thick as a fur, coarser and more like horsehair. Striped horsehair, golden-blond and white.
She pulled it out gently—it was fastened inside somehow, maybe hanging from a h
ook or something—and saw it had a mane, and even the mane was striped. Moving up from the mane, it had ears, eyelashes and eyelids. It had a face. It was a whole skin, maybe—a whole beast, minus the architecture. On the inside of the door a sticker bore careful notations in ballpoint block letters: Africa Mammals 2.1.6.11. Damaged. Equus quagga quagga. South Africa native. Collection. Zoological specimen, Artis Magistra, Amsterdam. @ 1883. In wild, @ 1870s.
She let the hide fall back into its closet. You couldn’t mount it, she thought, at this point—she suspected it was too late for that, though she was no expert. Maybe her uncle had kept it because of its monetary value. An antique skin had to be worth something—possibly even for DNA study, if he had known about that, although he’d never struck her as much of a scholar.
She counted the doors, moving back through the room—dozens of separate compartments, hundreds even. She would open a couple more before she went upstairs. Possibly these were the spillovers from his collection, the skins that were substandard and therefore not fit to mount.
She was near the back, standing in front of one of the larger compartments; it had double doors, two metal handles that met in the middle. She took one in each hand and wrenched them downward. It took a minute, but then the seal broke, they too came open and she stood back.
It was a wolf, already mounted. A gray wolf, it looked like to her. It stood with its front paws close together, its head raised, as if listening. The mouth was shut; it did not look fierce at all, merely attentive, even faithful.
She turned to look at the right-hand door, where another white sticker read North America Mammals 1.1.7.01. Newfoundland wolf, Canis lupus beothucus. Canada native. Extermination. Wild specimen, @ 1911. It was a kind of wolf she hadn’t heard of, she thought. But she couldn’t leave it here: she would have it moved upstairs. The next cabinet took her by surprise: a huge penguin-like bird, black on its back and white on its stomach, standing on a fake rock. It was almost three feet tall, and had big, webbed feet and atrophied-looking wings. North America, Europe Birds. 1.2.1.02. Great auk, Pinguinus impennis. Iceland native. Collection. Zoo specimen, @ 1844.
The great auks were extinct—had been for a long time. She had read about it in one of the old man’s natural history books, a thick one in the library with lithographs or pen-and-ink drawings, she didn’t know which. She’d trailed her fingers over them for their minute details and the fineness of the lines. She found it while she was looking up another bird, looking up albatross. She’d wanted to know what kind of scenery an albatross would need, to order a fix on an albatross mount, and then she came to auk and read the auks’ story and it was impossible to forget. Auks mated for life; they did not know how to fly and walked very slowly, so they were easily taken. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the last known pair in existence was found incubating a single egg on a rock in Iceland. Both the adults were quickly dispatched by strangling and their only egg was crushed beneath a boot.
The auks had been known to be on their way out, down to that one last, isolated colony, and collectors had wanted them for the skins.
Had the wolf and the quagga also vanished?
She crossed the room and opened another cabinet at random—a small, square one at eye level. She saw what looked like a mouse. South America Mammals. 3.1.8.06. Darwin’s rice rat, Nesoryzomys darwini. Galápagos native. Competition by nonnatives. @ 1929.
Beside it, in another square compartment, was a brown frog with yellow spots sitting on a large plastic leaf, which looked, like most of the amphibian mounts in the old man’s collection, as though it had been shellacked. South America Amphibians. 3.3.7.14. Long-snouted jambato, Atelopus longirostris. Ecuador native. Uncertain; disease, weather warming. @ 1989.
She turned and went to another wall, opened another small locker and this time found a bird: Asia Birds. 5.2.2.08. Bonin Islands grosbeak, Chaunoproctus ferreorostris. Japan native. Habitat destruction by nonnatives. Zoo specimen, @ 1827.
She stopped and looked around her—the many closed doors beneath the fluorescent tubes, the few she’d left standing open with their mounts visible within. The bags of silica gel must be to keep them from molding, though it wouldn’t work forever. Maybe they were already gathering mildew, breeding the larvae of beetles and moths beneath their wings or claws … they should be moved, she should move them as soon as she could. She wondered what T. would say, with his interest in rare animal species. All of these were extinct, obviously; the dates would have to be when they disappeared.
In a dark back alcove off the main room, past what looked like a disused furnace, she saw a big glass case. There were no fluorescents on that section of ceiling and it was too dim to see; but maybe the case had its own light. She walked over and looked around on the wall for a switch, but couldn’t find one and impatiently turned on her flashlight instead.
Inside the case there was no backdrop—no diorama at all, only a bare plywood floor and an oversized bird skeleton. It was brown and ancient, not the usual clean white of bones, and its bill had a bulbous, rounded end. From head to foot the skeleton was easily the size of the great auk and looked like a dinosaur to her, maybe a kind of bird dinosaur, but the sticker on the side read Raphus cucullatus. Dodo. Competition by nonnatives, some collection. Mauritius @ 1688–1715.
That was all.
It had to be: the old man’s legacy.
•
Upstairs the women drew near her when she went into the kitchen—Portia and the gray one, at least, who hovered close at her elbows and plied her with questions. Angela and Ellen stayed seated at the table, forking up their frozen meals out of cardboard boxes with the lids peeled back; Oksana had come back and was counting pills into piles on the counter.
“It’s just a regular basement with a lot of closet space,” she told them. “And more skins for taxidermy.”
“Good lord,” said Portia.
“Talk about overkill,” said the gray lady, in a small chirp of a voice.
“I think these might be valuable, though,” said Susan. “I think maybe a university or something might even want them. Maybe they could be donated.”
“Dear, aren’t you late for the meeting with your lawyer friend?” asked Angela—as though Jim didn’t, for all intents and purposes, live in the same house with them. With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the far distance and then came close again. She moved a cube of carrot around with her fork.
Susan had almost forgotten, she realized, after the basement. It was late but she could still go to meet him.
“Thanks for everything,” she told Portia, and took the back stairs up to her bedroom to change her clothes.
In fact she felt cut off and subdued. She couldn’t say anything to the old women, she was not qualified to tell them about the basement’s contents. She was marginal in all this and they were even further away from the matter: they had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t bear to say the wrong thing about it, disturb the truth with a false statement. She didn’t know what the legacy was, if it was important or run-of-the-mill, whether its specimens were real or reconstructed, contraband or legal. For all she knew they had been stolen in the first place. Best to move on, best to close off the subject of the mounts in the rooms beneath to casual discussion and quietly bring in her own natural history expert.
Best to leave out what purported to be the skeleton of a dodo.
10
When they got back she’d had too much wine—Jim had driven them home—and she collapsed on the bed, useless for sex. He kneeled at the end of the bed and took off her shoes for her, slipped off her skirt and lay down beside her as she pulled the sheet over herself, groaning.
“Ice water?” she asked, pathetically. “Please?”
“Sure,” said Jim, and heaved himself off the bed again. “I’ll brave the geriatrics.”
“Aren’t they asleep?”
“Some of them are nocturnally active.”
He didn’t come
back immediately and soon she felt too dizzy lying down. To make her head stop spinning she stood up and went to the bathroom sink, where she splashed water on her face. She found some aspirin in the medicine cabinet and swallowed three tablets with tepid water drunk messily from the tap. She thought of the shaft walled in bricks, the shaft that struck right down into the ground, and now it seemed to be imbued with a mysterious and magnetic attraction … down into the earth, down below, into the caverns that for years had known no footfalls but her own. She thought of the stainless steel rungs of the ladder, which she had descended with care and with deliberation as though she were an explorer, a miner, a sailor on a submarine. When she descended the rungs of a ladder she had a direct, secret and linear purpose: she would open the doors. She would go down there now and open all the doors.
She expected to run into Jim on the way out of the house, take him with her down into the well. But she cruised through the empty, well-lit kitchen and did not see him, cruised out to the back, clutching her flashlight, stumbling awkwardly over pieces of ground in the dark. Still she often felt she was floating, elevated—no doubt due to the fact that she was so far from sober. Barefoot, she had to pick her way over the flagstones, not wanting to step into the cracks between them, not wanting to feel the hard nubbins of rock on the tender soles of her feet. She had never had the benefit of tough feet, never formed calluses on the balls of her feet or the back edges of the heels or the big toes.
“Never got the tough feet,” she said aloud, sloppy.
At the shaft she told herself to be extra careful, reminded herself she was loaded and this would be a perfect time to break her neck, crumpled and wasted at the bottom of a brick-lined well. She held the flashlight in her teeth—it barely fit, and biting down on it made her jaw ache—and descended with the unevenness of her own heavy breathing filling her ears. She almost lost her footing twice, her bare feet slick on the metal.
