The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  “Here,” he says. “See?”

  She blinks and scrutinizes the spot where Peter is pointing. At first it seems identical to every other part of the excavation, a rough tunnel of gray stone. Studying the wall more closely, though, she realizes that the tunnel is riddled with tiny indentations and hairline fissures.

  Looking at the pitted granite in the flickering lantern light, she feels a faint tug, as from a distant magnet, from somewhere beyond the rock wall.

  She turns to him. “What now?”

  In answer, Peter takes a rock hammer from the sack and presses his ear to the stone. He taps delicately, moves the hammer, and taps again. Lowers the hammer and looks at her. “There’s a cave,” he says. His voice echoes strangely in the lifeless underground air. “The wall isn’t thick. Another six inches, maybe, they would’ve been inside.”

  “How big is it?”

  “Hard to say. Not very, I’d guess.”

  She shivers, imagining a teeming of unseen presence in the air around them, a soundless whispering. Abruptly, her heart is pounding in her chest. “Can you blast the wall? Is it possible to get through?”

  “Maybe.” He considers. “Dangerous, though. Could bring the whole tunnel down on us. Or could be a pocket of gas behind that wall—kill us just as quick.”

  She does not say anything, only looks at him. Peter returns her gaze. In the inhuman silence, this meeting of eyes carries the intimacy of a kiss.

  “Peter—” she starts.

  “I brought two blasting caps,” Peter interrupts, doubting his own resolve and unready to hear what she might say. “So we’ll have a second chance.” Without waiting for her response, he presses his ear to the rock.

  The first thing every miner learns is to never blast inside a tunnel without cross-bracing. Even a small explosion can cause the fragile arch of an excavation to collapse, so that seasoned rock men won’t even stand inside a tunnel when dynamite is involved. Peter remembers this clearly, along with all his father’s other warnings. And now, he has nothing to reinforce the tunnel, not even clay or wood to direct the explosion. Trying to ignore these facts, he closes his eyes and concentrates on the stone reverberating beneath his hammer, its secret flaws and hidden volumes. Somewhere he knows this is craziness, but the fact is oddly untroubling to him. In fact, he thinks, there’s almost a reassurance in giving up on the idea of living as if the world made sense.

  Finally, when he has found the place where the wall seems thinnest, Peter removes the box of blasting powder from the sack and surveys the rock surface.

  Despite the underground cold, his palms are sweating. He sets to work, chipping out a channel between the three largest bubble-concavities in the granite. When this is done, he fills the hollows with blasting powder and uses all his strength to tamp down a layer of dirt above the explosive. The blasting cap goes into the topmost depression. Finally, the fuse—looking at it, his heart sinks.

  At Paolo’s apartment, the roll of magnesium-laced cord that the Italian had smuggled out of an excavation site looked substantial enough, but now Peter realizes that it’s less than ten feet long. The tunnel runs for at least fifteen feet before it bends—so even without saving any of the fuse, he thinks, it won’t be enough to get away from the blast.

  He looks up at her. Around the two of them, the lantern casts a fragile globe of light, a few illuminated feet amid the miles of underground darkness. His heart catches.

  “Get around the corner,” he says. “Put your back against the wall, plug your nose and ears.” He shows her how, and she nods. “I’ll be there soon.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for everything, Peter.” She rests her hand on his arm. The ghost-lightness of her fingertips carrying an electric charge that rushes through him.

  A surge of recklessness and longing takes hold of her, and, ignoring the inner voices of lifelong restraint, she leans forward, pressing her lips to his. His arms go around her and she closes her eyes, the looming weight of subterranean night and peril irrelevant for a moment as something seems to pass between them, a wordless message like a promise of everything that can never be put into words.

  Shivering, she pulls back, looking up at him, naked beneath his gaze.

  “Go,” he tells her.

  Abruptly self-conscious, she nods, turns, and walks away.

  Peter watches her retreating shape, his head spinning. He takes a breath, trying to focus on the task before him, and surveys the packed charges of blasting powder. He mentally reviews the layout of the tunnel, the exact series of motions that his body will need to perform next. Gripping the end of the fuse, he lights a match, noting dispassionately that his hands are shaking. Touches the flame to the magnesium-laced string. He hesitates for a fraction of a second to make sure it has caught—then launches himself into a run.

  The force of the explosion catches him mid-stride, lifting him off his feet and hurling him forward. For an instant, he sees the tunnel wall rushing toward him with incredible clarity. He sees a particular small depression in the rock, its dark texture and grain.

  Then darkness. The touch of her fingers on his face.

  Peter tries to open his eyes but his eyelids are sticky, and even when they seem to be open he sees only blackness. He tries to sit up, but dizziness overtakes him. He lies back down. A wave of nausea hits and he vomits helplessly onto the ground.

  “What—?” he croaks. “Can’t see.”

  “Can you speak?” she asks. “Can you hear me?”

  Peter realizes that he must have lost consciousness. He takes a ragged breath, manages to nod.

  “Can you hear me?” she repeats, her voice edging closer to hysteria.

  “Can’t—” His mouth is full of blood and he spits, clears his throat. “Can’t see,” he rasps.

  “The lantern went out.” With the sound of her voice, all at once Peter’s sense of the world returns, and with it the weight of remembering. The terror of where they are at this moment, of the fact that something has gone horribly wrong. For a moment he longs only for oblivion, to just close his eyes and—

  “Are you hurt?” she asks.

  “Don’t know.”

  She helps him lean against the rock wall of the tunnel and he sits there, gasping, for a few moments, trying to regain his breath. Every part of his body hurts, most of all his left leg. He feels blood on his face, tastes blood in his mouth. Painfully, he tries to move and discovers that—miraculously—all of his limbs still work.

  “Can you stand?” she asks.

  He nods.

  “Can you?” she repeats, more urgently.

  Belatedly, Peter realizes that his gesture is invisible to her in the absolute darkness around them. “Think so.” He coughs, tastes more blood. “What about you? You all right?”

  “I only had the breath knocked out of me. But you—”

  Peter feels the flutter of her hands against his shoulder, his cheek. He closes his eyes, but when he does so a wave of dizziness hits him. He forces himself to sit up straighter and fumbles the box of matches out of his pocket.

  “Need light.” He tries to strike a match but his bruised fingers are too clumsy for the task. He holds the box out toward the sound of her breathing. “Here, light a match.”

  She gropes through the darkness and finds the small box. A moment later, the scrape of the match and the whiff of sulfur—and both are blinking at each other in the brightness of the tiny flame.

  Her hair is a tangled mess, soot smeared across her cheeks. As for Peter—she tries not to wince at the deep cuts and fragments of rock embedded in his face and hands. She looks away, over her shoulder, toward the pile of rubble where the blast went off. The match starts to burn low and she drops it.

  Darkness covers everything again.

  “The lantern,” Peter says.

  “Yes.” She gropes at the rough stone floor of the tunnel, unsteadily rises to her feet. “I will find it.”

  Peter hears the shuffling of her footsteps. Abru
ptly, with painful clarity, he recalls the spot where he put down the lantern. “It was by the wall, where I set off the powder. No way it could’ve survived the blast.”

  Another match flares blindingly to life and he looks up to see her silhouetted a few feet away, gazing toward the loose rock that clogs the excavation’s width.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s gone,” he says.

  The second match goes out and she lights a third, cupping it in her hand as she returns to where he sits against the tunnel wall, lowering herself beside him. The match burns low and she blows it out.

  “Careful,” Peter says. “How many matches left?”

  The lisping sound of the box being opened.

  “Eight, I think.”

  “I need to think,” he says.

  He is silent in the dark and, abruptly, she feels a knot of panic growing inside her as she registers their situation. Sightless and freezing, lost in an underground maze, likely to be arrested, or worse, if they are discovered—she bites her lip, struggling for calm.

  Peter says nothing.

  Something begins to happen in the blackness around them. By slow degrees, she feels the darkness solidifying. As if it were more than the simple absence of light, but a substance with its own weight and thickness. A curtain of blindness beyond which, she images, something is beginning to stir and wake.

  “What shall we do?” she whispers, trying to suppress the growing pressure of hysteria that she feels. “What should we—”

  “I need to think,” he says.

  Peter tries to consider their options. Maybe, if he can walk that far, they could find their way out of the tunnels using feel and echoes alone. But in the darkness, more likely they’d end up lost, or worse: easy to stumble into an unseen crevice and break an arm or a neck.

  He feels lightheaded and drowsy, struggling to concentrate. Distantly, he suspects these are the effects of his collision with the rock wall. But somehow, between the heaviness that fills his body and the warmth of her presence beside him, he can’t find a way to put his thoughts in order. Better to stay here, he thinks.

  “We’ll wait,” he says. “Shouldn’t be more than three or four hours until the crews arrive.”

  “But the police—”

  “I worked with these men. More than a few hate the law.” He closes his eyes, waves of something like sleep lapping at the edges of his consciousness.

  She draws a shuddering breath. The black of the tunnels is so intense that it appears lighter when she closes her eyes and catches the stray motes of imagined vision.

  “Could we—” Her mouth is dry. “Could we fashion a torch of some kind?”

  “Not without oil or paraffin.”

  A silence, punctuated by the faint echoes of their breathing.

  “We should at least look,” she whispers finally. “Now that we are so close.”

  Something in her voice, a note of barely suppressed panic, prompts Peter to open his eyes and brings him back to himself by a few degrees. Still, the ache of bone-deep weariness remains with him. He shakes his head in the darkness.

  “If it exists, then”—her voice cracks—“perhaps we could escape that way. We could go back and change all of this.”

  She listens to the dying echoes of her words in the cavern silence and shivers, hearing aloud the possibility that, until now, she has not permitted herself to consider.

  At this moment, he is too numb to really register the significance of her words. Instead, again, it’s the tone of her voice that moves him. Gritting his teeth against the protests of his body, Peter climbs to his feet.

  She lights a fourth match and they link hands. Slowly, they limp toward the pile of rubble.

  Chunks of rock litter the ground around where the charge was laid. As they approach, in the flickering light of the small flame, Peter sees that the wall of the passage is scarred and uneven, a gouged-out crescent curving from waist-height up to the ceiling. She stumbles and he almost falls beneath her sudden weight. She drops the match and it goes out.

  “Did you see anything?” she whispers.

  “Don’t think so. You?”

  She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to visualize the ruined tunnel wall. The dark streaks left by the blasting powder on the dull gray rock, the debris and puddles of mud on the ground.

  She feels him shift, unseen, beside her. “Then we should—”

  “Wait,” she interrupts, groping blindly to put a restraining hand on his arm. “Perhaps I did see something. I am going to light another match.”

  Peter silences the objection that starts on his lips and a moment later light blooms through the cramped underground world. Blinking against the sudden brightness, she points. “There, on the wall—you see? A darker place?”

  He peers and then sees it: one of the gouged fissures in the rock that looks infinitesimally different from the others, a deeper shadow to its darkness. Peter half falls toward it.

  “What do you see?”

  “There’s an opening.”

  Peter hears her draw a sharp breath. His heart is racing as well, his earlier drowsiness vanished. “Give me the matches,” he says. “I’m going in.”

  The fifth match sputters out.

  Gingerly, he fits his bruised body into the fissure in the tunnel wall. The jagged opening is hardly wider than his chest and as Peter pushes farther into the narrow space, his coat pocket catches on an outcropping. He pulls at the fabric but it holds fast, his arms wedged helplessly against his sides by the rock. He becomes abruptly aware of the mass of stone around him, the tons of blackness pressing downward on this fragile pocket of air. The crushing weight of granite—

  A wash of terror hits him, and he stifles the urge to scream. Beyond the verso of the unending subterranean night, he can feel something growing closer, some kind of presence, hungry and poised. With a burst of panic-born strength, Peter frantically jerks again. With a tearing sound the snagged pocket gives way and he tumbles forward, crying out as his aching body lands on jagged rock.

  “Are you all right?” she calls.

  He stands. “All right,” he croaks, hardly recognizing his own voice.

  Shakily he lights a match and holds up the flame to the crevice in the cave wall—which is suddenly reduced in scale to a few difficult steps over a rocky ledge. She is standing in the outer darkness of the tunnel, her arms wrapped across her chest, squinting against the light. He holds his hand toward her, helping her through—then raises the match, and together they survey the space.

  The cave is the size of a small room, a dozen feet across and the same in height. The walls and floor are dull gray granite, flecked with quartz. The stone is molded into uneven arcs as if shaped by gas or water—a space that has been here, he thinks, since before the city and before all of us, unknown and waiting. And in the wall, opposite where they stand, is a small wooden door.

  For a time, both of them simply stare.

  The most disturbing thing about the door is its utter ordinari ness. It is made of old, unpolished wood, reinforced with three horizontal iron bands. Five feet tall and three across, it is set directly into the sheer rock wall of the cave without any visible frame. It is the most unlikely thing, here in this impossible place, Peter has ever seen.

  And everything, all of it, was true. This is the thought that hits him, the realization accompanied by a wave of dizziness that nearly makes him stumble beside her. Her story, the journey through time—all of it. He shakes his head, stunned by the wealth of sudden possibilities.

  Some letters have been carved into the center of the door. C-R-O-A-T-O-A-N, he reads. She starts forward but he grips her arm, holding her back.

  “Wait,” he says. The match burns his fingers and he blows it out.

  In the darkness that descends, neither says anything. Half-formed thoughts are leaping at the edges of her awareness: threads of hidden meaning, each leading away into the warp and weave of things unseen. She tries to remind herself that now,
more than ever, it is essential to be careful and scientific. But at the same time, unthinking, the door seems to pull her closer. On her arm, she can feel that Peter’s hand is trembling.

  “What does it mean?” he asks. “Those letters?”

  “I do not know.” Her throat feels constricted and tight. “I saw this door and the letters in the basement of my father’s house. I never thought about their meaning. The mark of the carpenter, I supposed.”

  Again, neither speaks for a time. The darkness and silence around them broken only by the faint sounds of dripping water and their breathing.

  She reaches out and touches the dry, rough wood. Lets her fingers drift across the letters, down to the door’s iron handle. Silently he does the same. In the dark they are standing almost cheek to cheek.

  “What now?” he whispers.

  She closes her eyes. The alternation of absolute blindness and sudden light, together with the swarming murmur of underground echoes, prevent her from thinking clearly. She pictures the green vistas of Ohio, the landscapes that haunt her memory. The quiet rooms of the house in Toledo where she grew up, the order of her basement laboratory with its racks of polished instruments, the look of hopeful confusion on her father’s face—

  All this comes to her, an abrupt longing that takes her breath away. And now, all these things are possible and within reach. This, and even more: perhaps she could travel back even further and prevent the invasion of Toledo, to save everything that was lost. To be reunited not only with her father, but with her beloved, long-dead mother, whom she can hardly remember—