The Trapdoor

by Andrew Peterson

  “I’d like to see that report,” I said.

  He spared me a disdainful glance. “Public information,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  He heaved another sigh, a sigh as big as he was. “On the other hand, I don’t need to tell you to keep away from this area until we come back in the morning.”

  “You don’t need to tell me,” I said.

  “Good. That certainly puts my mind at rest. Just the thought of you having to find out what a hunkering piece of a son of a bitch I can be makes me bleed inside.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Good again. You have a pleasant evening, then, Mr. Wells.”

  I nodded. He turned. It was like watching an ocean liner swing around in the harbor. With a heavy breath he led the way back up the hill. The two officers followed. They carried the blanket between them with the dog rolled up inside.

  I waited until their cruiser disappeared down the mountain. Then I went to my car to get a flashlight. I wanted to have a look at that cave.

  10 I had only been in a cave once before, and that was to cover a disaster. It happened more than fifteen years ago, outside a little upstate town called Skyhawk. A guy by the name of Frank Nichols decided to take his nine-year-old son Gary and another boy spelunking. Old Frank was an advertising salesman for a radio station. He was one of those fellows who used to be good at things. He’d say, “Football? Oh yes, I used to be pretty good at football when I was a boy.” The thing was, though, he’d never been any good at football. Never played. His mother made him sit on the sidelines. Frank used to watch the other kids go running past him, back and forth, and I guess he’d imagine he was one of them, and maybe that’s what he remembered—the imagining. It was the same with tennis. His mother insisted he play tennis. She’d get him all dolled up in his whites and he’d go out there with the instructor and trip over his own feet for an hour. Then when he grew up, he’d say, “I used to be a fair hand at tennis when I was a boy.” And that really was the way he remembered it.

  Anyway, Frank used to be quite a spelunker in his youth. He’d never been in a cave, but clearly the talent was there. So one sunny weekend he gave these two boys the treat of a trip with the old master. Led them into a maze of caverns that would have baffled an expert. Two days later they were still there.

  I did not mind going into that cave so much. I went down with a lot of cops and firemen, a lot of flashlights and torch helmets and ropes. Even in the tight spots I never felt any more underground than you do in a subway tunnel. The whole place was just as noisy and crowded.

  I did get an idea, though: an idea of what it would be like down there without the people, without the lights, without the noise. What it would be like to be down there alone in the heart of the earth where there is no fresh air or sun or sound of birds or signs of life. I got an idea of it when I looked into the faces of the children. They were in a chamber about a mile from the hole they’d entered. It was a big circular room with a flat rock floor and a low ceiling. Frank was sitting against the wall on one side of it, and he was long dead. A coronary. The two boys were huddled together on the opposite side. They’d spent about twenty-four hours with the corpse in the pitch dark. They were clutching each other, curled up in a single ball. One of them couldn’t do anything but stare into space and drool and make a soft, high-pitched keening sound. For all I know, he’s doing that still. The other kid, Gary, was dying. I helped haul his stretcher out to the light. He kept saying, “Tell my dad I wasn’t afraid, okay? Tell him I wasn’t scared at all.” He went out about six hours afterward. No one made much of an effort to save him. I wrote his obit, though. I wrote about how he wasn’t afraid. I told everybody.

  It was from this experience that I’d formed my impression of what it was like to be in a cave alone. From the look in Gary’s eyes. I remembered that look as I came down from the hotel parking lot, back into the woods, to the sinkhole.

  I had a small flashlight with me now. Not much. One of those palm-size plastic ones. I keep it in the trunk for road emergencies. I made my way back to the oak where I’d found the dog. From there I spotted the dip in the earth again where it sat under the drifting mist. I took off my overcoat, laid it in the grass. I sat down on the rim of the sunken earth. I felt the leaves, damp and cold with the mist, chill the seat of my pants. I slid down slowly until my feet were in the tunnel. The water washed around my shoes. I stepped to the hole: a black circle in the ground, an eerie opening into the nothingness below. I got down on my knees. I put my face to the hole. I shined my flashlight into the blackness. I saw about two feet of green, slick stone. Then more blackness beyond.

  I stuck one foot into the hole. I lowered myself in, turning. I held on to the edge of the hole with both hands as my other leg went down. My feet sought purchase. I felt the rock sloping away beneath them. It was slippery with the brook water, but not particularly steep. I eased myself down until my head went into the hole. The night disappeared above me.

  Slowly, my hands clutching at the wall, I sank down the slanting rock into the cave. It took about sixty seconds. A long sixty seconds. The rocks dug into my hands, my own weight strained my arms. The night rose up away from me, growing smaller, like a kite sailing into the sky. The still, thick air of the cave closed in around me, and the urge to climb back up tightened my throat. I breathed hard, fighting it off. The rock sloped gently for a few seconds more. Then it leveled out. I let go of the wall. I was standing under the earth.

  Here, there was only the sound of the brooklet. There was only the light of the flashlight before me. Above me, framed in the small circle of the sinkhole, there was only the faint trace of the moonlit mist. The dark on every side of me, the dark that pressed against even the flashlight’s beam, was so complete that it almost seemed solid. An impassable wall of dark.

  I followed the water. I kept the flashlight trained on the ground, and edged along the thin stream as it continued to burble over the limestone. I lifted the beam now and then to study the place. It was an earthscape as barren as the moon. The walls, the floor, the ceiling of the cave: all of it was green and featureless, slick and wet. It was beautiful, but only the way the desert is beautiful, only the way the dead are sometimes beautiful if they died very young: it was beautiful in the monotony of its perfection. There was literally nothing here but rock and water. And dark. And me.

  The path before me narrowed. I had to bend down. Then I had to drop to my knees. I felt the walls of the place move in until they were touching my shoulders. The ceiling grew lower until it was pressed against my back. I lay down. I stretched out. I was lying in the brook water. By the light of the flashlight I saw the little corridor open out in front of me. I dragged myself over the water and the stone.

  At the corridor’s end I climbed out carefully. There was a little drop-off. I sat on the edge for a moment, then lowered myself until my feet touched down.

  I sent the beam dancing around me. It did not illuminate much. The dark overwhelmed it. But I did make out corridors to my left and to my right—openings into more darkness—I saw rugged walls leading high up to vaulting ceilings. I saw bats upside down in the far corners, their wings half scrolled around their curiously naked bodies. For a second I was struck by the fact that the sinkhole was no longer visible behind me. The earth above was no longer visible. I was sealed in. A baseball game could be going on up there in the night woods … a beautiful woman could be standing just above me with her skirt tapping against her legs in the breeze. … I could reach up to them, call out to them, and the world would continue on for them as it always had and they would come and they would go and they would never know I was here. The thought went through my head. And then the look in the eyes of Gary Nichols went through my head, and I felt my chest tighten. Then I lowered the flashlight’s beam and saw the trail of the person who’d brought me here tonight.

  It wasn’t much. It was all in one corner, as if he or she had sat down to rest on the way here or back. I
knelt down on the rock and played the flash over the remains. There was a plastic bag with what looked like bread crumbs in it; a couple of cigarette butts, Kents, that had been crushed out on the rock—I could see the smudge of the ash. There were some dead matches. And there was also, in a little pile, the charred remains of what looked like paper. I studied that closely, running my fingers over it gently. Whoever had burned it had taken care to crush the remains almost to nothing. But there was one corner of a piece that hadn’t gone up completely. I could still make out the green of the page and its thick, grainy texture. I picked the fragment up and turned it over. There was nothing else to see. I replaced it with the other stuff to give Tammany Bird something to do in the morning.

  I stood up. I cast the flashlight around the chamber one more time, eager to go.

  “Don’t forget, Mr. Wells,” he said from beside me. “Death in the woods.”

  The high, light voice had come from one of the corridors. I whirled to find its source. But as I pivoted, a hand flashed out of the darkness. It struck me on the wrist. My hand went numb. The flashlight fell from my fingers. It tumbled through the air. The beam spun crazily once before me. Then the flashlight clattered on the rock. The light went out.

  I stood stock still. The dark was shattering: so complete I felt entombed in it. Tell Daddy I wasn’t afraid at all. My heart hammered in my ears. It was the only sound.

  “Who are you?” I said—and I hated the sound of my voice. Hated the fear in it. “Who are you?” I shouted it this time.

  “He did it. In the woods. He did.”

  The voice was moving away from me, its echoes fading down the corridor.

  “He did it, did it, did it.”

  “What?” I shouted. “Killed her? Nancy? Who did what?”

  “In the woods, Mr. Wells,” said the echoing voice. “In the woods.”

  And then it was gone.

  I knelt at once, passing my hand over the stone around my feet. I heard myself whispering. I whispered, “Come on, come on, come on …” My fingertips brushed the flashlight. I grabbed it. I felt for the switch. “Come on,” I whispered.

  The light went on. I turned—and now the beam was flashing and shaking everywhere. I turned and stuffed myself back into the little tunnel. I dragged myself through it quickly. I pulled myself out the other side, the brook water splashing around me. I looked up. I saw the moonlit mist through the sinkhole. I breathed with relief to see it.

  Quickly, I followed that brook again, until the rock rose upward toward the night above. Then, my feet slipping under me, my fingers scrabbling over the stone, I struggled upward. My head emerged in the cool air. I sucked in a breath of that air—that fine, cold air. I pressed my palms against the earth and hauled myself up. Dragged myself out of the brooklet, out of the little cavity into which it ran. I climbed up onto the rim of the forest floor and tumbled down. I lay there, breathing hard, for a long moment.

  Finally, I worked my way to my feet. I retrieved my coat, put it on. I walked slowly up the slope to the hotel and went back to my room. I let the door slip shut behind me. I took off my wet shirt and pants and collapsed, breathless, facedown on the bed.

  I figured I was tired enough now to sleep without dreaming.

  I was wrong.

  11 Tammany Bird sent some men around in the morning. They went down into the cave with rope ladders and torch helmets and powerful flashlights. The smart way. After about a half hour they came up with the cigarettes and the matches and the paper. They informed me that the dog had apparently been poisoned before being hanged. Then they reiterated the official opinion that some kid, upset by the suicides, had decided to take it out on me. Then they drove away.

  In the morning sunlight I tended to agree with them. In fact, the entire night—the dream, the chase through the woods, the dog, the cave—seemed to me now like one long continuous nightmare. It was breaking up, like ice on the spring water, the way nightmares do when morning comes.

  Still, I tried to consider it. I tried to keep it together in my mind. As I sat in the parking lot, blowing the night chill out of the Artful Dodge, that voice came back to me under the revving engine. That weird, high, sexless voice: Death, he had said to me. Death in the woods. But Nancy Scofield had died in her room. Her parents had had to break the door down to get to her. The medical examiner had declared she died of an overdose of tranquilizers. Murder seemed pretty much out of the question. She hadn’t even died in the woods. Not like the dog. Not like my daughter.

  The old Dodge coughed and spat, and after a while, hummed quietly. I eased it out of the lot into the cul-de-sac before the hotel’s front porch. I came around the curve and headed down the mountain.

  Sure, I thought. It was a prank of some sort. A sick prank by a sad and angry kid. The trick was not to let it get to me. In a way, that was the trick to the whole assignment.

  I headed for town. On orders of my managing editor, I had to file as much of the series as I could before the weekend. I guess that way he could look at it personally and make sure I didn’t try to sneak any serious journalism past him. So when I got to Main Street, I stopped off at the post office and sent the Scofield piece down to the city by express. After that I had breakfast in a nearby diner. I read the Star. I wanted to make sure Carey was mangling the Dellacroce trial as only he could. Then, satisfied, I went back to work.

  The job now was Fred Summers. Sixteen. An old-fashioned kid, judging from his picture in the high school yearbook. Thin, long, gawky. Wore the school sweater. Very short blond hair. Big grin. Put a shotgun in that grin, he did, and pulled the trigger. Three weeks before.

  Fred’s father was Walter Summers. He had an engineering firm in Rogersville. He was also something of a local politician. He’d served five years on the Zoning Board of Appeals before he’d been elected, last November, to the county legislature. As I understood it, he was considered a good bet for county executive when the present man stepped down in two years.

  Walter met me on his front lawn that morning. He had a ranch house in the Grant Valley woods. It was a twenty-acre spread that rose into the hills behind the house. Those hills were flaming with red oak leaves now, standing out from a background of yellow maples. As he extended his right hand to shake mine, Walter Summers gestured to the world around him with his left.

  “Glorious autumn,” he said as he shook my hand. He grinned, too, as he said it.

  He was about my age, tall and muscular. He had ash-blond hair, thinning a little but not much. It capped a tan face of chiseled features. Piercing blue eyes surrounded by laugh wrinkles. An easy grin. He had the voice of a statesman and made it work. He spoke deeply, clearly, in round tones.

  “My wife’s inside. So’s my son, my older son, Michael. He stayed home from school ’specially. We’re all eager to talk to you. We think it could do a great deal of good for the community.”

  I nodded. Summers led me inside.

  We entered a broad, well-lit living room. It was quite a place. It came complete with an eight-point stag’s head mounted on the wall—a wall paneled with unfinished oak. The carpet was brown, and most of the furniture was one shade of tan or another. There were hunting and sports magazines on the coffee table and in the rack next to the easy chair. There was a pipe carousel on a little table, and ashtrays here and there. There was a fireplace, and on the mantle above it were photos of Walter Summers hunting or playing football. A football trophy was on one end of the mantle. A rifleman’s trophy was on the other.

  Mrs. Summers—Alice Summers—rose from the sofa as I came in: She was a small woman in her thirties. Still pretty, but she’d clearly been a real knockout once—movie-star quality, with her delicate nose and her full sensual lips and the auburn hair that rolled lush to her shoulders. Walter Summers stood looking at her proudly as she offered me her hand. And I couldn’t help thinking—as my glance went from the stag’s head to the football statue to Alice Summers—I couldn’t help thinking: This must be where he keeps his trophies
.

  Mrs. Summers gave me a small, worried smile. Her eyes—green eyes—seemed worried too. It was the sort of look that seemed to be wondering whether you were going to be kind to her or knock her down. It was the sort of look that made you want to do one or the other. I smiled at her. Her eyes seemed almost to melt with gratitude, and at that moment, without knowing why, I knew I did not like Walter Summers.

  We sat down.

  “I guess the best place to start,” Walter Summers announced, “is with what happened … I mean, what Fred decided to do. It came, as you might expect, as quite a shock.” He paused for me to say, Yes, of course.

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Until that moment …” Summers went on, as if he were telling an adventure story at the Old Explorers Convention. “This was in early October … and until the moment it actually occurred, we had absolutely no idea that anything was wrong. None.” He glanced at his wife—for confirmation, I expect. She stared down at the marriage rings on her fine, small hands. She pursed her lips. She said nothing. Walter barreled on. “Freddie was …” He pursed his lips, spread his hands, considered. “… an average kid, I guess you’d say. I don’t know how else to put it to you. He liked girls and sports and school. He always seemed cheerful. If he had any problems … well, maybe he didn’t apply himself enough … to his grades, or maybe he could’ve done more in the way of intramural activities. But those are average problems, I think. Something that could happen to anyone. Teenagers, you know.” He sighed. He gazed at me earnestly. “Well, anyway … one Saturday, last month, he went down to the pond—the pond we have out in back. He took his hunting rifle—a forty-forty shotgun—with him. I’d given it to him for Christmas. After a while his older brother, Michael, went down there and joined him. I was working at my desk upstairs. I saw the two of them, chatting, sitting by the pond. They were always pretty good buddies. Anyway, Michael got up and started back to the house. His back was turned, but I saw what happened next. Freddie was still sitting there by the pond, facing away from me. But I saw him pick up the shotgun from where it was on the ground beside him. I saw him hold it in front of him. Then I heard the shot … and I saw … well, you can imagine what I saw. He shot himself in the head.”