Above

by Isla Morley

  “I’m not saying the end’s going to happen tomorrow. When it does, though, we’ll have no time to react. There are some who think it’ll be biological. Anthrax is easy enough to get your hands on, but it won’t travel well. Smallpox, maybe, if they figure out a way to use it in aerosol form. Can’t be too hard to hack into the grids and shut off the nation’s electricity, but I think it’s those bankers who are going to shut us down. I may be wrong, but whatever it’s going to be, you have to prepare for it all.”

  We’re up against the enormous door again. The handle has a thick chain around it with a padlock. I keep my face turned away because I can smell Dobbs sweating with excitement.

  “You’re about to see engineering on the level of the pyramids.”

  He turns the massive red steering wheel. “Now, we’re already a good sixty feet below the surface, but this baby plummets to a depth of one hundred and seventy-four feet. That’s like an eight-story skyscraper.”

  “Please. I don’t want to. I’m afraid of heights.”

  For some reason, he finds this incredibly funny.

  I can’t imagine how he gets that door open all the way. It’s three times the size of one of those filing cabinets. “Six thousand pounds, right there,” he says.

  Even before it has swung all the way open, the pitch dark comes at us like an avalanche. Dobbs’s flashlight is no match for it.

  “It can be a little spooky, so you might want to hold on to my arm.”

  No, I can’t go in there! He can’t lock me up in there!

  “It’s okay, I got you.” Dobbs has a hold of my wrist. I twist, but he won’t let go.

  “No!”

  “But this is the best part.” His eyes are wide, as skittery as loose marbles.

  He pulls me onto some kind of platform. It clangs when we step on it, and a gust of air rushes up through the holes. It’s too deep down here. I don’t even like swimming in deep water. I’m always afraid there are monsters that are going to see that churning water and come all the more quickly. Thrash all you want—the horror is going to reach its tentacles up and grab you by the ankles.

  Something creaks. Something sounds like a chain rattling or the strain of a terrible weight that can no longer be borne. He intends to throw me to the darkness. The floor is giving way. We’ve stepped on something else that starts to sway. It’s too much. I scream.

  A draft takes my shriek and flings it against some far wall, where it ricochets and returns to us as a cackle.

  Dobbs tells me to quit screaming. He tries to get me to step out farther onto the platform, which his flashlight means to assure me is solid, but I won’t be budged.

  “There’s a railing.”

  “No!” My insides are about to drop out of me. I squeeze my legs together, hold myself down there. Then, my legs give out. Crying’s no use. Pleading’s no use. Nothing’s no use.

  “Okay. I guess we’ll have to do this another time.”

  By the time he gets the door closed, it’s too late. Whatever horrors he meant to lock back in place, some of them have escaped.

  WHEN WE ARE back on the upper level, Dobbs looks at his watch. “Don’t know about you, but I worked up an appetite.”

  He does not solicit my help. Instead, he insists I rest. I stand in the kitchen and watch him open a can of meat and spread it on bread along with something unidentifiable from a packet. He pours the contents of another can into a pot and puts it on the burner. He sets out two place mats, two cups of water, and a milk glass vase with fake daisies. By the time he is done, on the table are two bowls of mystery meat and a platter of sandwiches cut into triangles. He motions for me to sit like we’re at some fancy restaurant.

  I’ve listened to his stories and taken the tour and paid attention, all reasonably well. Because he is smiling at me, I take it he agrees.

  “Can I go home now?”

  He stops chewing, puts his sandwich down.

  “I really need to go home.”

  He doesn’t have to shake his head. I can see it in his eyes. My voice rises, as do his hands, like he means to pat everything back into place.

  “Settle down, now.”

  “Please! Please just take me home! What have I ever done to you? I thought you were my friend! I trusted you!”

  “Blythe—”

  “No! I don’t want to hear any more of your stories! I just want to go home. You’re sick!”

  It’s the wrong thing to have said. I can tell by the way his mouth puckers, like an empty coin purse. Stupid of me. Who’s to say he won’t drag me to the silo? Kill me? Torture me?

  He passes me a handkerchief. For a moment, I can’t think why. “Don’t cry. I hate to see you sad.”

  I understand now that it is better to know. “Are you going to—?” I can’t say it. He must have the idea.

  “Am I going to what?”

  “Are you going to . . . Because . . .” I look at my hands. Sex can’t be as terrible as dying or being locked up. And if we get it over with, he can let me go. “Because, I’ll . . . let you.”

  He scoots his chair back and marches to the wall where an old calendar hangs. It’s a picture of a red barn near a meadow full of longhorns. You’d think he was staring out a window. “You think I’d ever do anything to hurt you?”

  I don’t know what the right answer is anymore. What does it take to please this man?

  “You think I’m a monster. I understand why. You will see things differently in time. Everything you need, I’m going to take care of. You’ll see.”

  I ball my hands into fists. If I still had fingernails, they’d be slicing open my palms.

  He juts out his chin, moistens his rubbery lips. After scanning the ceiling, he locks his eyes on mine. Here it comes—here comes the explanation.

  “It’s the hair, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Shaving you—that’s what’s got you so upset.” He goes over to the cubby.

  It’s as though some invisible monster has come for me, some beastly slithery thing from the silo that a six-thousand-pound door can’t keep caged. It’s come up behind me, through the gap in the floor. I pivot around, but there is nothing there. Above me, then, because a tentacle dangles down and begins winding itself around my neck. I put my hands to my neck, but there is nothing to yank away. Impossible to take a deep breath.

  “I’ll get you a wig. Until then, I have just the thing.” His lips are moving, but the words have trouble catching up. I can’t hear because another tentacle has dropped down and stiffened into a knitting needle, and is poking itself into my ear. My head, skewered.

  Dobbs is holding out a basket of scarves to me. “Pick whichever you like,” I think he says.

  Another tentacle straps itself around my chest. I start to feel numb. My fingers tingle. I am having a heart attack. “I think—a doctor . . .”

  Dobbs is digging around for just the right one. He lifts out a gray scarf with tiny yellow dots. I shake my head and tug at my collar.

  “Will you allow me?” He intends to fasten it beneath my chin.

  I shake my head. Can’t breathe. Black spots. Camera flashes.

  “You’re all right. Just take a few breaths; it’ll pass.”

  His face has gone funny.

  Have to keep standing. Can’t sit. Can’t listen to him telling me how he’s bought it all for me.

  There’s an old gumball machine in Mr. Minta’s store. You have to give it a good hard whack after you put in your quarter if you want a gumball to fall down the chute. It’s like the gumball’s just fallen down. I motion to the rack with the clothes on it.

  “Yup, I bought those for you, too.”

  I glance at the shoe rack.

  “Guilty, Your Honor,” he says. He smiles. He is enjoying himself. “Take a look at the bookshelf.”

  Brontë, Austen, Harper Lee, Louisa May Alcott. Not only my favorites but also books that are on next year’s reading list. I turn around. No longer is the room an arrangement of obj
ects in a missile silo. It is some kind of a museum. Around me are relics from the part of my life I have yet to live.

  I’m sure I am standing quite still; it’s only the question that keeps revolving.

  With the shallowest of breaths, I ask, “How long have you been planning this?”

  This is when he’s supposed to say, “Planned what? I haven’t planned anything.” This is when he’s supposed to say, “Don’t be crazy—I’m not going to keep you.”

  This is what he says: “The part regarding you, about two years, give or take. All the rest, eighteen years.”

  “How long . . .?”

  “Well, I just told you.”

  I shake my head. “How long are you going to keep me here?”

  He shrugs, looks away.

  It must be asked. “Forever?”

  The monster sucks me all the way down to the bottom of the silo. It is a long way down, just as Dobbs said, but I still manage to hear every last word. “We are the Remnant, Blythe. After the End, you and I will rise up together. You and me—we will one day seed the new world.”

  II

  YOU NEED TO quit thinking there’s any escape. You’ll only drive yourself mad,” Dobbs says.

  He’s caught me staring up at the escape hatch again. I know the circular trapdoor in the ceiling goes nowhere. I’ve already pulled on that handle. Nothing but a forty-foot concrete plug. If this were 1960 and the silo still operational, a four-ton column of sand would be released, providing clear access to the surface.

  “There’s no way out of here. You should know that by now. It’s been two months already.”

  “Two months, three weeks, and two days.”

  He looks at me like I’ve got maggots crawling out of my mouth. He rounds off weeks as though they don’t matter. That I keep strict records bothers him. The only time to be concerned about is the End of the World, he tells me. I tell him the End of the World has happened.

  “All I’m saying is the sooner you think of this as home, the better off you’ll be.”

  He exits through the door, walking backward, as is his custom now. He will come back in a few hours or a few days and enter the room just as cautiously. He is used to stumbling over tripwires, or putting his foot in a pot of hot water, or finding a chair poised above his head. It’s why he wears a helmet when he comes. Sometimes, he’ll have on the thickly padded false sleeve like the kind they use to train police dogs. The bite marks took a long time to heal.

  No matter how many times I’ve heard it, my skin always crawls when that door closes. Fingernails on a chalkboard.

  Home. It makes me angry that such a word can come out of his mouth. But I’m glad for the anger, because it’s the only way to fight time, which is trying so hard to make all this start to feel normal. This will never be home. I scream it, breathe it, protest it with every drop of sweat and every angry tear. He can keep me down here two lifetimes, and home’s still going to be the yellow clapboard house on Fall Leaf Road. Thinking about it is what keeps me from going mad.

  It was Daddy’s idea to move us out of town. Before that, we’d lived in a rental behind Broken Arrow Park that looked like some fleshy thing had molted and scurried off leaving its crackled skin. “I just don’t see the point of moving kit and caboodle to the back of beyond,” was how Mama took to the idea, even though “back of beyond” was just three miles outside Eudora’s city limits.

  With the Crawford property up for sale, Daddy said he had a way to buy back land his family lost during the Great Depression. With Mama’s bridled consent, he plunked down a deposit, bought himself a John Deere, and walked around from then on like he were a rich man. Moving day was a community effort, much like a rummage sale or a funeral. By eight o’clock in the morning, just about every pickup in Eudora was parked outside our house. Flasks of coffee and packs of cigarettes were passed around, and it seemed like every wife came by just to pat Mama on the shoulder. “Picked the hottest day of the year to move, didn’t he?” they commiserated, as though Daddy hadn’t yet shouldered enough blame.

  The moment my bare feet hit those creaky oak floorboards, I was home. The windows were warped, and some had been painted shut, and Gerhard would eventually put his hand through one of them trying to get it to open, but, oh, the view. Land—acres and acres of it. For the couple dozen or so disheveled rows of corn Daddy planted, a modern sprinkler system would have been just fine, but he called our place a farm and said any farm worth its salt had to have a well. Not quite a month after moving in, while I was helping Mama hang up the wash, Mr. Walt Wallis pulled up in his Ford pickup. He was wearing standard bib overalls without a shirt, which meant you had to look the other way unless you wanted an eyeful of graying body hair and jiggly flesh. Mama waved at him when he called out his howdy and pointed to the toolshed where Daddy was fixing the plow.

  The two men stood talking in the shade a while, until Mr. Wallis went over to the willow tree and indicated the place where Daddy’s hacksaw had to go to work. Mr. Wallis whittled the branch some with his pocketknife until it made the letter Y. Daddy flagged me over just as Mr. Wallis handed him his thick spectacles. The old man spat in each hand, rubbed his callused palms together, and then clapped them heartily. He looked at me. “You believe in magic, little lady?”

  He took the ends of the fork in his hands and bent them till they looked like they were ready to snap. Mr. Wallis raised the branch to the level of his navel, so that the end of the Y stuck out in front of him like an arrow.

  “All set!”

  Set for what I couldn’t say, not with him zigzagging around the yard through a menace of gopher mounds and old tree stumps. Just when Mr. Wallis looked set to collide with the bird feeder, he made an abrupt turn and clomped through the thistles, sending fluff flying. He was making a beeline for Mama’s tomato plants. I could tell what Mama thought about this by the way she put down the clothespins, fastened her hands on her hips, and called Daddy by his first, middle, and last name.

  At the last minute, Mr. Wallis made a sudden turn and went marching down the middle of the yard like he was leading Custer’s men. When he cried, “Geronimo!” we rushed over to where he came to a standstill. “Found your water, Hank.”

  All I saw was a dry piece of dirt between two scuffed work boots, but Daddy might as well have been witnessing the parting of the Red Sea.

  Mama scratched the back of her neck. “How can you be sure, Walt?”

  “Haven’t been wrong about an underground stream but once in the last fifty-seven years, Mrs. Hallowell. Can’t say I know how these things work—wish I could. All’s I can say is I guaran-darn-tee you, you’re going to find water. You got to go deep on this one, I’ll give you that.”

  While Daddy and Mama commenced their arguing, Mr. Wallis winked at me.

  “Magic. What’d I tell you?” He beckoned me out of earshot. “Come on, have a go.” He held out the green branch like it was a BB gun and I was at the shooting gallery on the midway. “It ain’t going to hurt you none.” Mr. Wallis wrapped my hands around the ends of that sweaty branch. “You got to keep it bent, like that. Keep the tension. You feel that?”

  I nodded. All I felt was a useless piece of wood.

  “Good. You just keep the end as level as you can. That’s it. Now start walking. Just keep going till the magic grabs hold.”

  So as to get this silliness over as quick as possible, I double-timed it to the tractor tire. I did a quick loop, and when I turned to head back, the stick made a little jump. Of its own accord, the end of it started to tilt down. I tightened my grip on each handle and tried to rotate the tip back into its horizontal position. In response, it jerked itself downward with alarming force, as though an invisible hand had reached up out of the ground to snatch it from me. I fought to right the darn thing, but it wouldn’t budge. I squeezed my hands and turned my wrists, and felt the ends of the stick twisting in my palms, shearing off some of my skin with it. The stick began turning further, looping through the space between my
arms.

  I hollered, “Daddy!”

  “Hold on, sweetie!” They came trotting toward me. I could see Daddy was worried, like maybe I’d found another patch of poison ivy and he was going to be skinned by Mama.

  Mr. Wallis took one look at that unruly branch and said, over and over, “Well, I’ll be!”

  “What do I do?”

  “Keep walking, girl; keep walking!”

  I took a few steps forward and the stick twisted a little more.

  “Don’t drop it. Keep hold of it.”

  I cut across the corner of the yard, all the while fighting that stick like it was a serpent. Just in case the end swiveled up and bit me, I kept my elbows far apart.

  Mr. Wallis made a rough sketch on the back of his cigarette box and then told me I could quit. I handed him his branch and that’s when we all saw how it was coated with blood. Daddy turned up my palms, raw where the reddened skin had bunched up.

  Mr. Wallis passed me his kerchief. “Hank Hallowell, I do declare you’ve got yourself here a water witch.”

  Daddy had them sink a borehole right where I had stood bleeding that day. They didn’t have to go but six feet for a geyser that gushed all afternoon.

  Mr. Wallis said witching was a rare gift. He said it like it had singled me out, made me special. “You can divine water, ain’t no telling what other secrets will give themselves up to you.”

  Besides me, there is another secret down here, and its name is Escape. If I can witch water from the dusty earth, I can witch my way out. If I can divine down, I can surely divine up. I can surely divine out.

  And just like that, my head’s picturing that Y-shaped branch, not the one Mr. Wallis handed me, but the one stuffed in Dobbs’s steamer trunk. I rush over to his recliner and tip out the contents. Mr. I Think of Everything has overlooked something. I shuffle through spinning tops and die-cast tractors until I find it: a slingshot in perfect condition.

  * * *

  The only good thing about this place is the ample warning I get that Dobbs is about to make an entrance. The thud of the middle blast door and then the lock turning on this door gives me more than enough time to take my position.