by Ike Hamill
He stood and shut the door against the wisps of smoke.
“I’m fine,” Deidra said.
“It’s easy for you to say that, you don’t have kids to worry about,” Henry said.
“That’s right,” Jules said, nodding, “think about your kids—both of them. What are you going to do, get Penny out and leave Sam to wherever he’s hiding? This is June’s test. Travis said she had to save your son from flames and that’s all we’re smelling. It’s the smoke from the test.”
“But if you’re wrong…” Kate began.
“They’re not wrong,” Auggie said. “Look at GUT.”
They all turned when he pointed. The old man was still sitting at the table, smiling and giggling to himself as he looked at his own hands.
“So what?” Deidra asked. “He’s always been crazy.”
“He set the last fire, and he set this one. Or, at least, he wished the circumstance on June. Either way, this is his doing and he’s not worried about it,” Auggie said.
“He’s too old to worry about anything,” Kate said.
Everyone was silent until Kate started to herd their daughters towards the door again. Auggie moved to intercept and she gave him a hard look that told him to stand down. He lowered his voice so only she would hear. “Kate, we know what happens if we try to leave. You have to trust me—this is the only sensible approach. We can’t risk trying to exit the room in the middle of a test.”
“You’re trying to be reasonable in an unreasonable situation, Auggie. Step aside. This is common sense.”
Auggie didn’t see a choice. He stepped aside.
Chapter 40 : June
EVEN IF SHE HADN’T already known where to look, June would have been able to spot the door. It stood open a few inches and the gray smoke was beginning to explore the hall with wispy tendrils.
June ran to it, putting her shoulder against the door’s panel and shoving it inward. Plowing through was like entering another world. The crackling flames roared around her and the searing heat made her skin tighten. She saw him immediately—the boy was on the other side of a wall of flames, huddled in the corner with his head down between his knees.
“Sam! Come to me.”
“I can’t,” he yelled. His voice didn’t come from the shape in the corner.
“Sam?” she screamed over the sound of the fire. Something crashed behind her. June saw a flaming timber sag and realized that if it gave out, it would block the door. This was all wrong. When she and her brothers were still kids, Travis had set a fire in this room in a jealous tantrum, but Uncle Tommy had put it out before it did much damage. The fire had never gotten this big.
The child lifted his head and turned towards her. It wasn’t Sam. The kid looked a few inches shorter than Sam and his hair was longer. His resemblance to Gus was unmistakable. There was something else familiar about him as well. It was his eyes—the kid had the eyes of Jules when he was a little boy. They were round and terrified. June felt a ball of ice in her gut, aching to help the kid.
“Aunt June!” Sam called.
When Sam yelled the second time, June realized that the sound of his voice was bouncing around. It was actually coming from her left. June spotted him immediately on the other side of the room. His situation was just as dire as the unknown kid who looked so much like family.
It took less than a moment for June to realize what was happening. This was her chance to set things right—she could trade back the imposter for their real family member. She could give Deidra and Henry their true son. It was a choice that parents would never be able to make.
June looked back and forth between Sam and the other kid. They were both in terrible danger. She probably only had time to save one.
There was only one answer that made sense.
“Come to me!” June yelled at Sam. She looked to the other child and yelled it again.
“I can’t,” Sam said. The other kid had tears streaking through the soot on his cheeks.
“Come to me!” she screamed.
Neither boy moved.
June backed towards the door. The sound of the flames diminished quickly when she stepped backwards through the door. She mustered her strength to stand tall and called one more time through the doorway.
“Last chance,” she yelled.
When neither boy moved, she braced herself, leaned into the heat and noise, and shut the door.
The energy flooded out of her body when the latch clicked. June needed to collapse on the floor and succumb to the building sorrow. Rationality couldn’t wave away what she had just done. It may have been an illusion, or a test, but she couldn’t deny the fact that she had just looked Sam in the eyes and shut the door on him.
“This is a test,” she whispered to try to make herself believe. Great Uncle Travis had told her to save the boy from the flames.
Uncertainty blossomed in her heart and she suddenly knew that she was wrong. Yes, the other child had been an illusion—part of the test—but how could she have left Sam in those flames? She had closed the door with the hand of death.
Her hand darted out for the door knob. She paused when she could feel the heat baking off of the glass knob. There were other flames than these. June took a deep breath and let it out as she closed her eyes.
“There are other flames than these,” she whispered. She reached out with her senses, trying to figure out where the real Sam had gone. At first, panic rose up again when she sensed the young shape in the room that she had just left.
“Not real,” she whispered, but it was. There was something in there. A little more probing revealed what she already knew—the thing in that room wasn’t Sam. It was an imposter, maybe the imp. They had tried to trick her into a false choice while the real Sam was being threatened by other flames.
Her eyes flew open.
She still couldn’t sense Sam, but she knew where he must be.
# # # #
After squinting down into the darkness for a moment, June reached forward and flipped the switch up and down again. She ran back for the drawer next to the fridge, where she found an old silver flashlight. This was nothing like the searing white beams of the lights that Gus loved so much. Those sipped on tiny batteries and provided cold light that seemed to shine for a mile.
This one was an old, yellow, flickery beam that faded before it even reached the bottom of the stairs. June began to descend.
“Hey, Sam?” she called.
At the fourth step from the bottom, her feet automatically paused. That was where she had stood when Trudy had handed her the last box of canned peaches. It was as low as she dared to go. Any lower and the hands might be able to reach her.
“Sam?”
Trudy had come up with the excuse for why they moved the jars of canned fruits and vegetables. Trudy had calmly explained that the jars were cracking mysteriously down there and needed to be moved to a more stable place.
“We always used to keep jars in the root cellar,” Tommy had said. “That’s where they go. Out in the shed, they’ll turn rancid before you know it.”
“What’s worse—the chance they’ll turn rancid, or the certainty that we’ll have to throw them away because they’re cracked?” Trudy had asked.
“You probably put them too close to the furnace,” Tommy had said.
Trudy had given him her little frown, accompanied by the way that she used to let her eyelids drop halfway. Tommy hadn’t even noticed. He had been eating something at the time.
Judy hadn’t cared one bit what Uncle Tommy thought about them moving the jars to the shed. She only cared that she didn’t have to go in the cellar ever again. She had made a promise to herself and kept it until this moment.
“Sam?”
# # # #
Before she took the next step, her brain replayed the terror of her youth. It had only taken some fresh lightbulbs and a little tidying up for her to be okay with the cellar when she and Trudy had first decided to use the old shelves. They swept away c
obwebs and bagged up all the junk that had accumulated over the years. Someone had tried to store a bag of concrete on the bottom shelf. It had hardened into a sixty pound solid lump. Someone else had stored insecticides—the old powdered stuff that the government had decided was too dangerous for the environment.
“It poisons birds,” Trudy had said when June suggested they dump it out back in the family landfill. Eventually, Trudy had gotten Auggie to take it to the real town dump. He had complained, but did it for five dollars and the meal of his choice.
By the time they cleaned everything up and got rid of the junk, June was more than comfortable in the cellar. The place wasn’t so gross and mysterious anymore. She even almost liked the smell. She and Trudy had carried their crates of jars down the stairs, talking about some movie the whole time. They arranged them by contents and by date. Trudy had a whole system worked out.
It wasn’t until a week or two later that June began to feel uncomfortable down there. She had gone down to turn the jars. It was an old superstition that Trudy happened to believe in. For the first month, Trudy said that a different person had to go down every five days to turn the jars. That would prevent them from going bad. According to Trudy’s research, some people kept jars of pickles for forty years after executing that simple trick.
“How do they know?” June had asked.
“Know what?”
“That the jars lasted forty years just because a different person turned them every five days? Did they put out a million jars and have one set that someone turned every three days, and one set that two people turned every ten days, and one set that…”
“Shut up. This knowledge has been handed down for generations. You can’t reject wisdom just because it’s old. This folklore survives into the modern day because it saved lives,” Trudy had said.
Eventually, June had agreed that it was better to be safe than sorry. If a few minutes work could potentially prolong the shelf-life of their jars, who was she to argue?
It didn’t take long for her to understand the wisdom behind tending to the jars. Spending a little time, turning each jar, gave her a reason to really focus on their effort and enjoy the results. June worked methodically, starting on the left side of the upper shelf and winding her way down to the last. When she got to the bottom shelf, she grew uneasy.
The floor down there was hard-packed dirt. It had been smoothed and leveled over time by the feet of her ancestors. As Tommy eventually told them—people had stored jars down in the root cellar for decades before they were born. It wasn’t until the grocery store removed the necessity that the family had stopped putting up jars and jars to make it through the winter.
June realized that what had made her uneasy was the loose patch of sandy dirt right in front of the bottom shelf. The floor around it was still packed down, but there was one spot, no bigger than an orange, where the dirt was loose.
That night, she had mentioned it to Trudy, only because Trudy had remarked on how solid the floor was.
“I don’t like that place, right in front of the pickles,” June had said. “I wish there was a way to tamp it back down.”
“My fault—totally,” Trudy had said. “Don’t you remember when I cut my arm trying to loosen that screw? I’m such a klutz. I bled all over that spot. That must be what loosened up the dirt.”
The explanation only made June even more uneasy.
“I don’t want to go down there anymore,” June said.
“Then don’t. Who cares? Everything will go bad, but who cares?”
Trudy always got like that when she was really mad. The more calm and dismissive she appeared, the angrier she was.
“Fine,” June had said.
The next time, everything was much worse. June took an extra flashlight and wedged it into the stone wall. She wore her boots in order to have more material between her feet and the dirt floor, and she worked quickly, not falling into the calm meditation of jar turning, like she had done before.
Reaching up for the apple jam, her skin rippled with goosebumps and June’s eyes went down to the dirt. The loose patch was different. Trudy had smoothed it over on her last trip down in an effort to make June feel better. Now, it was dimpled in the center.
“No. Nope,” June had said, backing away. As she retreated towards the stairs, the dimple deepened, sucking more of the sand down to some unknown place.
Still, Trudy had been dismissive. At least she allowed June to lead her down the stairs to look at what had been so frightening. The flashlight was still stuck in between the rocks of the wall. The battery had long since expired.
Trudy reached down, unfazed by the cone of sand that looked like a funnel. Trudy dug in the loose sand and turned her hand over to reveal what she had found. It was a little white rock.
“Huh,” June said.
“You’re right. You’re not coming down here alone anymore,” Trudy had said.
June nodded even though she hadn’t known why Trudy had changed her mind.
“I read this book one time,” Trudy said. “Trust me—you don’t want to know what happened.”
That same day, they had carried the crates, one at a time, out to the shed. Trudy moved them across the cellar floor. June picked them up from the fourth step, never going any lower than that.
# # # #
“Sam?” June called.
She cast the yellow flashlight beam into the depths of the cellar. The light picked up his frantic eyes. His jaw was clenched with effort. June was on the bottom stair, holding her hand out. She pointed the light down towards the floor so he could see her better.
“Sam? Can you come to me?”
He opened his mouth and the slapped his hand over it to keep from saying anything. Instead, he shook his head violently.
“Something has your foot?” she asked. He had stepped in the very spot that she had been thinking about—the soft part of the floor. His leg ended at his ankle. The foot was buried in the soft floor.
Sam nodded, holding his hand over his mouth.
June gathered her courage and stepped down to the dirt floor, expecting it to fall away. She was surprised when it supported her weight. It took just as much effort to release her grip on the railing and step the other foot down. This was harder than swallowing poison. She had been able to accept the idea of her own death. Whatever was beneath the dirt floor might be much, much worse.
Trudy’s voice came back to her. Until they moved all the jars, Trudy hadn’t said a word about the book that she had read. Later, with the task done and in the safety of her nook, Trudy had finally spilled the beans.
“Some places don’t have as much crust between the living and the dead. In places like these, a really angry soul can dig its way up from the underworld and make contact. That might be what’s happening in the cellar.”
“What makes you so sure?” June had asked.
That’s when Trudy had dug in her pocket and pulled out the white rock.
“This is super weird, but touch this to your tongue,” Trudy had said.
“Gross. No way.”
“Just do it.”
Eventually, because Trudy wouldn’t explain until June complied, she touched the white rock to her tongue. It stuck there and June pulled it off and then took a long sip of her soda in order to get rid of the taste.
“Rocks don’t stick. Only fossils do that. That’s not a rock—it’s a bone.”
“What? Gross!”
June spat and then wiped at her tongue with her fingers.
“They’re attracted to you. If you spend too much time down there, they might be able to grab you.”
“Who?”
“The people in the underworld.”
“What?” June had asked.
Trudy had nodded as June let the information sink in. The certainty had faded with age, of course. People went in and out of the cellar all the time, and nobody had reported anything creepy. Now, looking at Sam, Judy believed it again.
“Does it f
eel like something is grabbing your foot?” June asked Sam. She didn’t want him to panic, but she needed to know—was he stuck, or being restrained?
Sam nodded.
“Ankle, or toes, or foot?” June asked.
“I think…” Sam started. He screamed and flailed his arms as his leg jerked downward. Another inch or two of his pants leg was lost below the dirt.
Sam slapped his hand over his mouth again.
June understood.
“You sink when you talk?”
Sam nodded vigorously. Tears were streaming from the corners of his eyes. Whatever had him, it was taking him down into the underworld. In some depictions of that place, it was filled with flames. This was what she had to save him from. That burning room had been an illusion—a distraction.
“It’s okay. I’m going to get you out,” she said. She handed him the flashlight as she dropped down to her knees. It took a moment before she could collect herself enough to plunge her hands into the sand. It was easier when she imagined Gus trapped in this same situation. He had just been down in this cellar recently. This could be his foot submerged in the dirt. June was the only one who could save him.
As she scattered the sandy dirt to the sides, she saw the first white flash of bone around his shoe.
“Tilt forward a little,” she said to Sam. She felt her own balance shifting as the floor beneath her became a little less solid.
“A little more,” she said, trying to pry the bones from around his shoe. When she spoke again, her knee dropped into the loose floor.
June opened her mouth to ask him to tilt his foot back and then thought better of it. Talking seemed to be a bad idea. The bones weren’t giving in. Even when she could tear one away from its grip, it only returned when she moved onto the next finger. They were squeezing so tight that the shoe was dimpled under the bones. Sam must have been in agony, but he was keeping his pain to himself.