The Lurkers Below

by Keith Robinson

  He thought about fumbling his way across the debris to get a better look outside, but something held him back. He wasn’t ready for that yet. First he had to find Madison and check the rest of the house. Surely it wasn’t all as bad as this.

  Liam coughed some more as he crawled out of the closet toward the bedroom doorway, which seemed to have withstood the collapse despite the sagging ceiling. He remembered something about people in earthquake zones being taught to get out of buildings if there was time, but otherwise stand in a doorway, which acted as a brace.

  Still crawling, he held aloft his glow stick and found his way into the hallway. The laminate wood flooring, which his dad had laid himself, remained glued together in large twisted sections. He peered into the shadowed hall, envisioning rather than seeing the doors to the laundry room and bathroom on his right, his own bedroom on the left, and the lobby leading to the kitchen and living room at the end. He knew those doorways were there in the darkness; he just couldn’t see them.

  “Maddy?” he said softly.

  Thinking of flashlights and candles in a drawer in the kitchen, he headed straight up the hall, staying low, afraid to stand. The ominous creaking and groaning reminded him that the place could collapse again, so he crawled in near darkness, illuminated in a lurid green glow which stretched maybe five feet ahead.

  He passed the bathroom on the right and glanced inside.

  “Maddy? Are you in there?”

  Seeing and hearing nothing, he moved on to the laundry room, also on the right. There was nothing of interest except a squarish hole in the floor, a washer and dryer, a spilled laundry basket, and a fallen shelf.

  “Maddy?”

  His bedroom was next, on the left-hand side, and he couldn’t help thinking about his last remaining precious things, all of which had escaped being sucked into a wormhole last Saturday: a few favorite science fiction and fantasy novels, his Star Wars action figure collection he’d always kept stashed under the bed, his Frodo sword, and of course his laptop!—all most likely destroyed.

  Liam called again for Maddy but was greeted only by silent darkness. Gritting his teeth, he crawled past and on to the lobby, then into the kitchen through a twisted doorway. “Maddy?” he said again as he entered and tried to penetrate the shadows with his glow stick.

  Still no sign of her.

  He edged down the kitchen’s sloping hardwood floor and bumped into the cupboard under the sink on the opposite wall. Something crunched under his knees, and he winced and jerked away. The floor at this end of the house was tilted sharply in two directions, but as the green glow filtered into the darkest corners, Liam realized the room wasn’t in bad shape all things considered. At least the walls weren’t buckled and folded, and the ceiling, though warped, was in one piece. The refrigerator leaned back against the wall. If the room had tilted the other way, the monstrous appliance would have launched across the room.

  The door to the garage stood wide open, revealing a black nothingness beyond. The extension, which had been built onto the house many years ago, seemed to have vanished.

  Liam sniffed. He smelled gas, but it wasn’t incredibly strong. He just had to hope it wasn’t seeping into the house. Perhaps it was escaping into the backyard.

  Thinking of the backyard, he noticed again how utterly black it was outside the glassless window and adjacent double doors that led onto the deck. He had come in through those doors just a short time ago to fetch a chair; now they stood open with a few remaining shards of glass poking out of the frames, the rest having slid down the slanting floor to where Liam knelt.

  He couldn’t get his head around what he was seeing outside. Or rather, what he wasn’t seeing. There was nothing—no light from the moon or weenie roast fire, no stars, no flashlights bobbing frantically as rescuers scrambled over rubble, no strobing blue lights from fire trucks and ambulances. Nothing at all except blackness. And no sound either, just an eerie silence.

  Yet the doorway offered a clear exit from the house. Madison had probably already staggered outside, dazed from a head injury. Liam knew he had to follow her out.

  He climbed to his feet, discovering for the first time that his left ankle hurt. Come to think of it, his right elbow hurt too, and when he touched it and held up his finger in the green light, there was something dark smeared there. Blood. He leaned against the countertop, his back to the sink, and checked himself over. His t-shirt was torn on the right side where the closet door had pressed against him. He was bruised there, too. The side of his face felt a little delicate as if he’d been scraped by something. His ear on that side felt sensitive, like someone had clobbered him upside the head.

  But nothing serious. No broken bones, no gaping wounds.

  He pulled open the drawer next to the sink—or rather yanked at it for half a minute until the handle came off, then levered it open with a bread knife. Inside he found the flashlight he had been expecting. He switched it on and dumped the glow stick on the floor.

  Then he shone the flashlight outside onto the deck.

  And saw nothing but a wall of rock.

  Chapter 3

  Ant Carmichael couldn’t help feeling anxious when Liam disappeared inside the house to fetch the chair and glows sticks. Madison couldn’t, either; she sat fidgeting and chewing her lip as precious minutes ticked by.

  6:52 PM. Liam’s house. Keep Ant out.

  It was already 6:49 PM.

  “He’s not going to make it,” she murmured. “He shouldn’t have gone in.”

  “No, he shouldn’t,” Ant agreed, suddenly feeling irritated. What was it with Liam? Why did he always have to leap into danger? He could have thought up a dozen excuses to avoid the place for an extra few minutes. Heck, he could have flat-out argued with his parents, obstinately refusing to go inside. Yes, it might have gotten him in trouble, but he would have been forgiven the very instant a laser bolt from space hit the house and obliterated it.

  Instead, Liam had thought it better to dash inside and get the job done.

  Idiot.

  Madison repeatedly checked the time on her phone, her hand shaking. Meanwhile, Barton loitered in the background, clearly aware that something was about to happen.

  Abruptly, Madison climbed out of her chair. “I’m going to hurry him up.”

  Ant jumped to his feet also. “Maddy, don’t be an even bigger idiot than Liam. He’ll be out in a minute.”

  “We don’t have a minute,” she said fiercely, waving her phone in his face.

  Actually they did. Three minutes remained on the clock. Still, it was cutting it close.

  He grabbed her arm, but she shook him off and whispered, “I’m not going inside. I’m just going to yell at him from the door to get his butt out here.”

  Ant opened his mouth to say that a laser bolt from space wouldn’t care if she stood inside the house or in the open doorway; it would still fry her. But she was already hurrying across the lawn.

  All four parents had been deep in conversation, but now they looked up. “Where’s she going?” Mr. Parker asked.

  “Bathroom?” Ant suggested, returning to his seat and trying to look nonchalant.

  That simple answer did the trick. They resumed their conversation, unaware of the impending doom. Ant wondered if he should try to move them farther away. Just how big a blast would this laser bolt cause? Would the parents be caught up in it? And Cody was just a small thing. He was standing away from the fire with a flashlight in his hand, pointing the beam directly into his face, a picture of innocence.

  Ant grimaced. A laser bolt from space? Maybe he was jumping to the wrong conclusion about this latest sleep-written event. Maybe it was just another wormhole. If so, Liam and Ant might end up being sucked into it, but at least it wouldn’t be as dramatic as a massive beam of light incinerating the house.

  He watched as Madison climbed the steps to the deck and stuck her head inside the double glass doors. He didn’t hear her calling Liam’s name, but he guessed she was doing so. A
nt reached for his phone and thumbed it on. Roughly two minutes left.

  When he looked up again, he had time to see Madison disappearing inside.

  “What the—?” he growled. Looking up at Barton, he whispered, “She said she’d stay outside! What is it with those two?”

  “I fear I’ve caused a major problem,” Barton said, reaching up to remove his chauffeur’s cap so he could smooth back his thinning hair. “If I hadn’t showed up here, Master Liam wouldn’t have been told to go inside and fetch me a chair.”

  “Or glow sticks,” Ant muttered.

  Barton leaned forward and spoke in Ant’s ear. “Are you expecting something other than a wormhole to appear?”

  Any other time, Ant would have been surprised at how much Barton had picked up on. Right now, though, he didn’t care what the chauffeur knew. “I had a vision of the house being destroyed by the Ark Lord, but the Ark Lord is dead, so I don’t see . . . I mean, I might be wrong about this. Maddy’s never wrong about her messages, though. Something’s going to happen. We just don’t know what.”

  “The Ark Lord?”

  Ant shook his head. “Evil space villain with a massive prison ship. Liam lured him into a wormhole and then deactivated it. The Ark Lord had no space suit on, so he died.”

  After a pause, Barton said, “And I take it Liam had a space suit on at the time?”

  “No, he was a robot, so he didn’t need one.”

  “Ah.”

  No doubt Barton was putting several pieces together in his head. He’d seen things but had never been told the full story.

  “Where are they?” Ant demanded, standing up again.

  Liam’s dad looked up. “I was wondering that myself. How long does it take to find a chair?”

  “And glow sticks,” Mrs. Mackenzie said.

  Ant took a deep breath. “I’ll go look.”

  As he strode across the lawn, he realized he was falling into the same trap as the others and labelling himself an idiot. This was exactly the kind of scenario he hated in TV shows and movies. Why couldn’t characters stay put? Madison had even mentioned him specifically in her sleep-written message: Keep Ant out.

  He stopped, clenched and unclenched his fists, took another few steps, paused again, and ended up checking his phone once more.

  6:52 PM.

  He felt the blood drain from his face. If the event hadn’t happened already, it was about to, anytime within the next sixty seconds. Or forty seconds, or whatever was left . . .

  A sudden rumbling caused him to freeze. This was it. He instinctively looked up, expecting to see a massive spaceship descending from the evening sky, or perhaps the creepy shadow of it blocking the stars, or maybe even just a fiery ball of destruction plummeting toward him. He saw nothing, but the rumbling quickly grew louder, and the ground began to shake.

  “Earthquake!” one of the dads shouted.

  Ant backed away from the house. A crack appeared in the grass, rapidly lengthening, snaking its way all around the main structure in a zigzagging circle but passing under the deck and then the garage. He watched, amazed, as the ground within that circle began to sink, taking the house with it, along with plant beds, bushes, part of the concrete path outside the front door, and the steps. Some of the deck descended too, but the rest stayed behind, cracking and splintering as it broke up.

  He fell to his knees. Dimly aware of shouts and screams behind him, he remained where he was about twenty feet from the newly formed abyss into which the house was sinking. The modest property was gone in seconds, the roof vanishing from sight and leaving a shaft some fifty or sixty feet wide, its edges crumbling and cracking. Only the garage remained, along with the Mackenzies’ cars in the driveway.

  The grinding, crashing, booming noises continued for another half-minute, gradually receding while the shouts and screams behind him grew louder. Parents rushed past him to the edge of the abyss and threw themselves down on hands and knees to peer over the edge.

  “Get back, get back!” Mr. Parker cried, yanking at his wife’s feet as clods of turf tumbled away beneath her hands.

  They all scrambled backward as sections of the shaft wall slid away and the rim widened. The twisted remainder of the deck teetered on the edge, secured by several concreted support posts that stuck firm. Dust plumed in the air, rolling outward across the lawn.

  “Liam!” the Mackenzies screamed over and over.

  “Madison!” her parents shouted.

  A firm grip on Ant’s shoulder caused him to wake from his shocked paralysis. He looked up to see Barton leaning over him. “Is this what you saw?” he whispered.

  Looking again, Ant realized it was true. This was exactly what he’d seen when he’d used the echo wand. From his limited vantage point in the lane, he’d assumed the hole in the ground was a burnt-out crater, but a closer inspection would have revealed to him this enormous, seemingly bottomless pit instead. The future really was set in stone, just open to interpretation.

  “They’re okay,” he said softly. “Liam has seen himself as an old man. He’s definitely okay.”

  “And Madison?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I think so. The message she wrote to herself said I should stay away, but it didn’t mention her or Liam because . . . because they were meant to be inside the house.”

  “Meant to be?” Barton repeated, sounding almost cross.

  Ant climbed shakily to his feet. “I think that if I’d been inside, I probably would have died. Or might have. But Liam and Madison were never in danger. Maybe they got banged up a bit, but they’re okay. I’m sure of it.”

  The more he spoke, the more he felt sure of their safety . . . even though his logic about Madison might be badly skewed.

  He heard crying and turned to find Madison’s little brother Cody standing alone, sobbing. Ant hurried over to comfort him, knowing the boy’s parents were far too busy yelling for their lost daughter. “It’s okay, buddy,” he said over and over. “Kind of scary, right? But Liam and Madison are okay. They’ll be back soon.”

  I hope.

  Chapter 4

  Liam stepped through the open doorway and out onto the deck, his rubber soles squeaking and flashlight beam quivering. There wasn’t much of a deck left—just a few support beams nailed to the wall and a section of short, snapped-off decking planks. The rest was gone. It had been a good-sized area surrounded by fencing, decorated with pot plants, and furnished with a round glass table and four chairs, with a set of steps leading to the neatly cropped lawn. Now there was just a three-foot wooden ledge jammed up against a wall of solid rock.

  “No way,” he mumbled.

  He remembered the scene outside his parents’ bedroom window when the earthquake had started: the cars rising and the wall of rock moving up past the window. At the time, Liam had assumed the driveway had bulged upward, or perhaps he’d wanted to believe that, because the alternative was that the house had sunk into the ground. The thought had been nagging him since he’d crawled out of the closet and seen total darkness outside, and now he had to accept it as reality.

  Ant’s vision had come true, but not in the way he’d expected. The house hadn’t been pulverized by an alien laser ray or meteor. It had sunk into the ground.

  But where was the daylight above? The house’s roof overhung, but there was still a big gap between the gutter and the rock wall. Even if it were the dead of night, wouldn’t he see a glimmer of light up there somewhere? A faint glow of moonlight around the eaves? Flashlights pointing down at him? Why was nobody yelling his name?

  All he could see was the rock wall all around. He had to get a better look.

  With the flashlight gripped between his teeth, he found plenty of footholds in the twisted, broken siding. The house was only one story, and he knew he could make it onto the roof. When he reached the overhanging roof, the gutter cut into his hand as he pulled himself up and over. Moments later, he clambered onto the gritty tiled roof.

  “Maddy?” he called. “You u
p here?”

  The roof was badly warped but in one piece as far as he could see. It had only been repaired last weekend, and the contractors should be proud how well it had held up. He walked to its apex and stood there shining his flashlight around, a sense of utter doom descending on him.

  The house was stuck at the bottom of a circular shaft only a fraction wider than the four corners of the house. The flashlight wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate the walls higher up. He saw nothing but blackness, heard nothing but silence.

  “HELLO!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

  Only his echo replied.

  He couldn’t believe his house had fallen such a long way and not been smashed to bits. He thought back to the falling sensation followed by the deafening impact and bone-jarring scrapes. This was no earthquake. This was a sinkhole. He imagined the ground below the house had dropped away at a rapid but controlled speed, acting like a speeding elevator. The house had been supported the whole way down until it finally hit bottom.

  Where had all the millions of tons of debris gone?

  And more to the point, where was Madison? Her absence mystified him more and more.

  “Madison!” he yelled, his voice echoing.

  There had been many incidents of sinkholes on the news in recent years, mostly in Florida, but never on this scale. The shaft seemed endless, and if there was light at the top, then it was a mere pinprick. He squinted. Was he imagining that light?

  Terror gripped him. How could he possibly be this deep underground? Just how long had he experienced the sensation of falling? It had seemed like just a few seconds, and yet here he was, apparently miles underground. The foundations of the house and everything below it had literally run away like mud in a pipe, leaving an almost perfectly circular shaft.

  Impossible, he thought.

  He sat heavily, trembling all over. “I’m alive,” he said aloud, liking the sound of his voice. Yes, he was alive. But how? He knew precious little about sinkholes but enough to know they were often deadly for families trapped inside homes. And surely this was the deepest sinkhole ever! He’d seen pictures of men rappelling into sinkholes, but usually only two or three hundred feet. Yet this one . . .