The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  Jack closed his eyes and bowed his head. Then he remembered that Bishop had said there was nowhere in the Bible that said you had to bow your head when you prayed. So he lifted his chin and opened his eyes.

  “Guess I’m going to find out now if all the things Theresa and Bishop have been saying are true.”

  His voice sounded small and hollow against the background of the fire’s roar and the distant rumble of the front part of the building beginning to collapse.

  He turned his face to the smoky ceiling and cried out, “Are you there, God?”

  Then he looked around as if he expected to see some sign—an angel, maybe, like Becca saw. But there was nothing but the dust and smoke in the air and the cavorting red-yellow flames where the subfloor had caught on fire near the trapdoor. Behind him, streaks of sunlight from slits in the coal chute door stuck in the dirt at his feet like flaming arrows.

  “I need help! To…die like a man. So Bishop would be proud of me.” He paused as another rumble reverberated in the ground around him.

  “And…I’m scared, ok! I’m really scared.” Now that he’d let that out, set those words free, the rest that he’d wanted so badly not to say came tumbling after it. “I don’t want to die! I want to grow up and be a soldier…or a cop…or…a minister.” He only threw that last part in because he thought he should, and then realized if God was who he was supposed to be, he knew that. And if he wasn’t…the rest of it didn’t matter. “Ok, not a minister. But a good man. Please…don’t let me die. Do something!" That sounded whiney and like a little kid, but he couldn’t help it. “Please show me a way out of here.”

  There was no voice, no apparition, no sound but the roar of the blaze.

  Then Jack saw fire move out from the burning floor around the trapdoor, and he watched with the fascination of a mouse watching a cobra as a single strand of red-yellow flame, almost like a candle, moved toward him. It lit up the crawlspace as it came his way, casting shadows. When it got to the area over the dugout hole where the furnace had been, it grew brighter, almost like someone had turned up the wick on a lantern. In its glow, Jack saw what he’d been unable to see before. A pipe.

  Set in the dirt across from the incline leading to the coal chute doors was a black opening maybe eighteen inches across. Jack ran to it and tried to see what was inside, but the flame’s glow only extended in a couple of inches. What was the pipe for? Drainage? Sewage? He stuck his head into it and sniffed, trying to detect if there was clean air in the pipe, but there was so much smoke and dust around there was no way tell. Did the pipe travel through the ground and on to an opening somewhere? The riverbank, maybe. Or was it only a piece of metal junk left in the ground, open here but long since plugged up at the other end?

  “You want me to…to get out through this?” he cried out, and the response was the crackling of burning wood. “I can’t crawl in there—what if it doesn’t go anywhere? I’ll be trapped.”

  The pipe was so small he would barely be able to get his whole body into it, no room to turn around. If he crawled into it, he would have to follow it wherever it went. There’d be no coming back and nowhere to come back to when the building collapsed. And if the pipe was blocked off or went nowhere at all, Jack would die in there.

  Die in the dark, squashed up in a pipe!

  Die how? Suffocate? Stuck until he died of thirst.

  And if he died in there, nobody…nobody would ever know what happened to him. Jack Carpenter would vanish, like he’d never really been here at all.

  “I can’t, God!” he cried. “I…”

  He put his head and shoulders into the pipe and pulled himself forward on his elbows. Only a little way. Most of him still dangled out at the end. He could still change his mind.

  It was dark and tight, cold and scary. Nothing but inky blackness ahead.

  “I can’t!” he cried and scooted frantically backward. He popped out of the pipe like a cork and fell on his butt in the dirt. The heat above was cranking higher and higher. It was like lying on the rack in an oven set for broil.

  Cook? Or suffocate?

  Choose.

  “Nooo!” he wailed. Then stood, stepped to the pipe and started down it again. “Nooo!” he cried out in the darkness, then shoved himself forward as far as he could, again and again until he was so far in there was no going back.

  ******

  2011

  Andi didn’t know what she’d landed on until she opened her eyes. It was soft, and kind of sticker-y and the smell of it was familiar. When Daddy took her to the zoo in the summer and the workers were hosing down the enclosures, you could stand close and lean over the railing and smell the animal poop. And another smell, too. This one. The smell of the wet hay.

  She opened her eyes and saw the hay all around her, almost covering her, stuck to the almost-dry blood on her upper lip. But she could see sky through the hay and the top of the cliff. And Tattoo Man staring down at her in disbelief. Then he shoved the knife into the scabbard at his waist and began to climb like a monkey down the side of the rocky cliff face.

  Andi tried to get up out of the hay so she could run. Where? But she’d fallen into it hard and was buried down deep in it. She tried to stand, but she couldn’t get her feet under her and she had nothing to grab to pull herself up. It was like trying to get out of Jell-O.

  Tattoo Man was coming fast down the side of the cliff.

  Maybe she shouldn’t try to get out of the hay at all. There was a lot of it. It must be one of this huge hay rolls she saw when they passed by farms on the highway. When there was snow on top of them, she thought they looked like Frosted MiniWheats. Maybe she should try to burrow down deep in it, roll up in a tiny ball where he couldn’t find her. She didn’t really have to decide to do that. She couldn’t stand, so she rolled over on her belly and began to dig her way through the hay. She’d dig all the way to the bottom. He’d have to tear the whole pile apart to find her.

  She knew he’d reached the ground and was wading into the hay because he was cursing, saying awful things. Which was good because as long as he was making noise, she’d know where he was and he didn’t know where she was.

  He must have figured that out because he shut up. Then it was quiet, except for the sounds of digging and swishing hay. Andi hunkered down as far as she could, rolled in a tight ball, bit her lip hard to keep from whimpering.

  In her head, Andi cried out to the voice that had spoken to her, the lady made out of light.

  Help me. Please. I’m scared. Where are you?

  But the voice said nothing.

  Then she heard a grunt, close by. How did he find—?

  Big fingers closed around her ankle. He’d spotted the red striped socks she’d put on with her red Converse sneakers. He yanked on her leg, and she kicked at him with her other foot, but it didn’t do any good. He pulled her up to the top of the hay. He wasn’t even trying to stand up. He was down on his knees. When her head came up out of the hay, she could see him crouched there. He grabbed her by the hair again, pulled her toward him as he drew the knife out of the scabbard.

  Andi shrieked, “Mommy!”

  He raised the blade in the air—

  “Drop the knife!”

  The words came down to them from the top of the ridge, spoken with Uncle Jack’s voice.

  The man froze in surprise, jerked his head around so he could see who was yelling. Tattoo Man was between Andi and Uncle Jack so she couldn’t see him. But he must have looked as mad and mean and scary as he sounded because Tattoo Man remained frozen.

  “You got seconds to live, pal.” Uncle Jack said. “Open the fingers of both hands. Slowly. You so much as twitch, and I will put a bullet square in your right eye socket.”

  “I’ll cut her throat!” Tattoo Man threatened, but he didn’t sound near as mean as Uncle Jack did, and he didn’t move when he said it.

  “No, you won’t. Try and you’ll be dead in a puddle of your own brains.” Uncle Jack paused, then ground out the next wo
rds in the meanest voice Andi’d ever heard. “I want to kill you so bad I can taste it. That’s my little girl. You will not draw in another breath after this one unless you drop the knife now!”

  Tattoo Man dropped the knife into the hay and let go of Andi’s hair.

  Andi knew better now than to try to stand up and walk in the hay. She merely scurried away from Tattoo Man on all fours over the top of the hay roll and crawled/slid off it to the ground.

  “Run away, Andi,” Uncle Jack called out. “Run!”

  She bolted down the small strip of muddy shoreline where the river lapped up against the rock wall of the bluff.

  CHAPTER 47

  1985

  Jack started to cry, to sob. Terror welled up in his chest, like pulling the cord and inflating one of those navy dinghies he’d seen on TV, and he couldn’t breathe. But there was only forward, so he continued to crawl. Crushed on all sides by the cold metal, dragging the skin off his elbows and burned knees and legs, his hands out in front of him, feeling…air. Fear that any second he’d touch something solid in the darkness ahead was worse than the fear of the fire when he’d been in the building.

  He crawled and crawled. He had been in the pipe for—what? Ten minutes? Two hours? Each moment was the longest moment of his life—until the next. It felt like his time in the pipe was as long as the whole rest of his childhood, and with every scooting motion forward, he left a piece of his childhood behind him. How far had he gone—thirty feet? Fifty yards? Half a mile? There was no gauge to use to measure anything, time or distance. He realized he was still sobbing when he heard the sound and wondered for a moment what it was. When he stopped crying, the pipe was still, silent.

  A tomb.

  Buried alive.

  Panic rushed in, a hairy black monster gorging its belly full of the meat of his soul. The walls slowly tightened, began to crush him, squeezing the air slowly out of his lungs.

  “Let me out! I want out!” he cried, his voice ragged. “I’d rather die, burn—anything.”

  He fought the walls around him, tried to push them away, bawling in terror, kicking his feet and banging with his fists. He lifted himself up on his elbows and screamed, “God, get me out of here!”

  Some part of him registered the act of rising and he froze, his cries echoing in the silence.

  Had the pipe gotten bigger? He hadn’t been able to rise on his elbows before, had been ducking his head to keep from dragging it across the roof of the pipe. Now, it seemed that the space above him was larger. He was breathing hard, panting as he crawled on another few feet.

  Then his hand in front connected with something solid. He felt around on it desperately, scratching, clawing, feeling for some kind of opening.

  But there was none. He’d reached the end of the pipe. He was going to die in here.

  A deep, guttural wail of horror rose out of his chest, a sound he’d never heard any other human being utter—a desolate cry of bone-deep terror that reverberated around him as if he were inside a huge bell. He shrieked, threw his head back and—

  His head didn’t hit the top of the pipe.

  He lifted his hand and felt above his head, reached up as high as he could, but he couldn’t feel the pipe overhead anymore. Slowly, he twisted his body until he was lying on his back. Then he reached both hands up…into empty air. He felt around, waved them around, but he couldn’t reach the top.

  How big was the opening above? Had the pipe not ended, but merely turned—upward?

  Jack rolled back over onto his belly and began to scoot forward. When he got to the solid wall in front, he moved up it, pulling himself forward and pushing with his feet. He wiggled and squirmed and scooted until he was on his knees. Then he carefully stood. The vertical pipe he was in now was not as tight a fit as the horizontal one had been. He had room, air around him. But there was only blackness everywhere, like being blind. And nowhere to go but up. How could he…climb up? The pipe was smooth, no handholds. He stood thinking, trying to puzzle it out, trying to stop the wild hammering of his heart that thundered in his ears far louder than the fire had. He leaned his back against the cold pipe wall, and the toes of his shoes bumped into the wall across from him.

  Before he had a chance to form the intent to do it, he flattened his back against one side of the pipe and began walking his feet up the other. Then he scooted his body upward. He did it again. And again, developed a bit of a caterpillar rhythm. Pushing his body upward, scooting and pulling.

  Light!

  No.

  Yes. It was light.

  Only a tiny glimmer of it trickling down through some pinhole above. He dragged himself upward toward the light, which didn’t get any bigger or brighter as he approached. Then other lighted shapes emerged out of the gloom. A semicircle of light around the first light. A familiar shape. It was light coming in around some kind of round lid!

  He shoved himself frantically upward, now, the light growing brighter, until his hands struck something metal overhead. It was a cap of some kind blocking the pipe. Jack pushed. It didn’t move. He shoved again, but only succeeded in shoving himself back down the pipe. He had no leverage. He scrambled his toes around, trying to find—there! Something was sticking out of the pipe maybe an inch, right above his right foot. He didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t matter. He rested the toe of his shoe on it, put all his weight on that foot and shoved upward.

  The lid moved. Only a little. But it moved. Which meant it wasn’t locked down.

  Frantic with hope now, desperate with pent-up claustrophobia, he shoved with his arms, shoulders and legs. The lid moved again. It had been set down in some sort of groove, and Jack managed to move it out of the seating. Now light and air flooded in—smoky air—and heat. Wherever this pipe came out, it was still very close to the fire.

  Jack shoved his fingers into the crack between the lid and the edge of the pipe and pushed sideways. The lid scooted five or six inches to the right. He did it again. Another six inches. And again. Crying now, sobbing, bordering on hysteria, Jack shoved the lid one final time, then pulled himself upward by grasping the rim.

  The top of his head peeked out of the pipe. He was on the south side of the building, in the lawn at the edge of the woods. There was nobody here. Firefighters and equipment were out front where there was water. Jack would have to move the lid off the pipe, then leap out of the hole and run for the woods to get away from the heat of the blaze. He took a deep breath of pipe air, shoved the pipe lid all the way off the pipe into the grass, grabbed with both hands, pushed off with his foot on whatever he’d been standing on and got the top half of his body out of the hole on his belly. He dragged himself forward, flipped over onto his back, yanked his legs out of the hole and staggered to his feet, trembling all over. Then he headed toward the woods at what was as close as he could get to a dead run.

  He hit the boundary of trees, stopped for a moment and looked back, then kept going, deeper into the woods, away, away from the smoke and the heat and the flames. He came to a small clearing and dropped to his knees, panting. Then he started to sob again, great, gulping sobs for what he had endured and for the murdered people in the building and for—

  “How did you get out of there, nigger?”

  Jack’s head snapped up.

  Cole Stuart stood in front of him with the other Bad Kids arrayed behind him. They were all cleaned up, no blood or gore. They wore clean, ironed shirts, their pants were unwrinkled. Victor Alexander's mop of brown hair was combed, Cole's Mohawk stood up straight and stiff. It appeared they’d all taken a shower.

  “You look like you crawled out of a rat hole,” he said.

  Compared to the Bad Kids, Jack was a filthy, tattered, bloody, burned mess.

  “Now, I’m gonna kill him,” Victor Alexander snarled. “Ever since his girlfriend’s dog bit me, I’ve been wanting to do one of ’em.” He advanced a step toward Jack.

  “Uh-uh, he’s mine,” said Jacob Dumas. He glared at Jack. “You didn’t roast af
ter all, nigger, but I like my dark meat raw.”

  “What about the other two?” Cole said and put out his hand between them. “Where are they? And the light? Do they know what we—?”

  It was almost too fast to follow. Victor jumped at Jacob, who almost dodged the lunge. But Victor managed to get a handful of his shirt and pulled Jacob to the ground with him. Then they were a tangle of arms and legs, angry, snarling animals.

  Ronnie tried to pull them apart. Roger knocked him away, and Ronnie came up swinging. In seconds, they were all at each other—clean clothes forgotten in their untamable rage.

  Jack staggered to his feet and ran away through the trees. If he could make it to the road, there’d be cars and people and—a hand grabbed him from behind, yanked him backward off his feet and threw him down. He was again on the ground, looking up at Cole, whose split lip was dripping blood on a shirt smeared with dirt and missing two buttons. Cole glowered at the other boys, who now stood disheveled but no longer violent in a circle around Jack. Cole held the others in check with a murderous gaze.

  “We’re not going to kill him until he answers some questions,” he said, looking from one of the Bad Kids to the next. There was an uneasy rustle among them.

  Jack’s mind flitted to Becca’s words: Cole’s demon looks like a dragon, don’t you think?

  “We’ll take the nigger back. Let…him do the asking.”

  “How are we going to get him back there without somebody seeing?” Walter Stephenson sneered. “Look at him. It’s pretty clear where he’s been.”

  “Then we’ll clean him up,” Cole said. He looked pointedly at the boys’ soiled clothing. “We’ll all clean up.”

  The others didn’t argue this time. Ronnie Martin grabbed Jack’s arm and hefted him off the ground, and they set out through the woods toward the river, dragging Jack along.