by Scott Carson
Aaron thought about this and nodded. “Can they hurt you?” he asked.
Deshawn Ryan paused, his dark eyes reflective. “If they can,” he said finally, “they haven’t done it yet.”
This felt right as well. The pick slicing through the water toward him had been terrifying, but it struck only the wall, and he didn’t think that was because he’d moved fast enough to avoid it. The woman’s focus had been on the rock, not on Aaron. She’d seen him, but he hadn’t mattered much to her.
The rock wall had mattered to her.
“What did she look like?” Gillian asked.
He tried to come up with the right words, but it was difficult to give the ephemeral sight of the woman in the water the sort of stark power she deserved. He found himself choosing an emotion instead of a physical description.
“Tired,” he said. “She looked very tired.”
This seemed to jar Gillian. She winced and put her own hands on the fence.
Below, another boom reverberated. Aaron could envision the slab of rock that it had knocked free and sent tumbling into the bottom of the basin.
“I think the tunnel is dry,” he said. “I didn’t get far, but I think up ahead it’s dry. The water that’s in there is collected from all of this. It doesn’t have any current or any pressure.”
Gillian didn’t answer. She seemed preoccupied with Aaron’s description of the woman in the depths.
“Well,” Deshawn said, “what do we do?”
“The hole is real,” Aaron said. “I don’t care if anyone else sees ghosts down there or not, the hole is real, and that means it can be sealed.”
Gillian said, “I can call people down here and tell them we… I don’t know, that for some unknown reason we decided to wander out to the basin and discovered the start of a tunnel? Yeah, that’s gonna sound normal, isn’t it?”
“I don’t care how it sounds,” Aaron said, switching his grip on the wall from his right hand to his left to relieve his aching shoulder. “I can show them the damn thing. It’s real. Just like your grandmother’s body.”
She winced.
“You can’t see how far it goes?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Aaron said. “It’s so damn dark in there.” He thought of the woman’s pale, tight-lipped face again, of the sparkle of the metal pick coming toward his skull. Then he swallowed and said, “I’ll go give it another look.”
“I don’t know about that,” Deshawn said. Aaron had a sense that Deshawn would rather be the one to go below. Maybe not in the water, but at least in the tunnel. And maybe he should be. Aaron didn’t know the rules of the strange, terrifying game. He didn’t know what could puncture reality and what couldn’t. All he knew was that the water was real, and you had to be skilled in it just to get through that hole, let alone to make it through until you reached dry ground.
If you reach dry ground. If you push too far and don’t find it, you’ll never make it back. You’ll die in there. Your body will be floating down there on the other side of that wall, beneath the mountain. Floating alongside that woman with the pick.
“If it seems to be more than a crack in the wall,” Gillian said, “I’ve got to do something about it. I don’t care what story I have to tell, how crazy it sounds, or what it does to my life, I will need to get people down here to seal it off. Because if the tunnel actually goes through that mountain…”
She pointed, and they both followed the gesture with their eyes, staring into the dark mountains.
“If it goes through, then it’s connected to the Chill,” Aaron said. “Or it’s very close. I can’t answer that for you. But I can see how far it goes.”
“You get stuck down there, and…” She didn’t finish, and he was grateful for that.
He held her eyes while he nodded. “I understand. But we’ve got to know, right?”
“It should be me,” Deshawn said. “It was supposed to be me.”
Aaron shook his head. “You won’t make it.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m not sure I will,” Aaron answered, “and I’m the best in the water.”
The best in the water. How long had it been since he’d said that? Felt it? He’d meant he was the best of the three of them, the best of bad options, but when the words left his mouth, for just a second there it had felt like old times. He was the best in the water. He knew this because the water told him so. It worked with him, not against him. The water knew him.
“Try it,” Gillian said decisively. She faced her father then. Braced him, almost, a defiant look, one that brooked no argument. “We need to know, and Aaron’s got the best chance of finding out and coming back to the surface.”
Alive, Aaron thought, say alive, not just back to the surface. Because Mick Fleming came back to the surface, and I do not want to return like that.
“All right,” Deshawn said in a grudging whisper. “Go see what you can see. But, Aaron? If you’re not alone down there, just pass by them, okay? Like you don’t even see ’em. Just keep your head down, son, and do your job. If they come for you directly, it’ll be a different story. But you’ll know that. I think they’ll make that clear.”
Just keep your head down, son, and do your job.
The word son had been a colloquialism, maybe even inadvertently patronizing, but Aaron was glad to hear it. The instruction felt familiar to him. It was Deshawn’s voice, but Aaron seemed to hear it in Steve Ellsworth’s.
“I will,” he said. He looked from Deshawn to Gillian. “I’ll see where it goes, and then I’ll come back quick.”
“Sure,” Gillian said, but her voice was distant. Below, more muffled thunder echoed in the water. “Good luck, okay?”
Aaron gave her the A-OK sign and slipped the mouthpiece in. Then he released the wall, dropped, and let the water take him again.
66
When he was gone and it was just the two of them, they didn’t speak. They just stared at the flat surface of the water where once Aaron Ellsworth had been.
“I’m sorry,” Deshawn said, breaking the silence just before another concussed crack shook up through the depths.
Gillian looked at him with confusion. “For what?”
“Ever leaving you in this place. And then letting you come back. I knew better, I knew I should open my mouth then, but… but I didn’t.”
She pushed away from the fence. “We both knew I shouldn’t come back,” she said. “You telling me not to wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“I mean telling you why it was a bad idea.”
“You didn’t understand why. Not the way I did. And I still came back. I would have pretended it was all a lie, the same as you did. We might have commiserated about poor me, and maybe even poor mom, living in the house of madness, growing up with all those disturbing stories, but we wouldn’t have talked about anything that might have been real, would we?”
“Maybe,” Deshawn said.
She gave a dry laugh. “You think, Dad? You really think the two of us, stoic souls that we are, were going to sit down and say, ‘Now, what if it was the truth all along, and there are ghosts trapped in those mountains, working to finish a water tunnel that they can’t possibly dig… ’?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t guess we’d have said that.”
She smiled faintly. Reached out and squeezed his arm. “It was a story you couldn’t believe. Don’t blame yourself for that. Until you came face-to-face with it, how could you believe what you heard about Galesburg?”
He nodded, suddenly looking as exhausted as she felt. Another boom came from below, a shiver in the earth. They turned back to the water, stared into it, and shared silent thoughts about Aaron Ellsworth, silent fears.
“Why can he see them?” Gillian said. “How? The two of you can.”
“I’m not sure, but I know it’s only going to happen down there. In the tunnels, or in the water, maybe. Somewhere belowground. Somewhere within the waterworks. I don’t know why they show up, or how s
ome see them and others don’t. I don’t know why they were silent for so long and then chose to speak. All I’m sure of is that it will only happen to you down there.”
She felt a perverse jealousy. The tired woman Aaron had seen—was that her grandmother?
The farmhouse where she’d been raised would be gone now, she realized. It had sat in the heart of the floodplain. Maybe the foundation remained, like the old homes in the Dead Waters, but the rest would be gone. The old boards of the schoolhouse would need to be dredged up again. Or left to rot. She could smell the clean dampness of the room and hear the rasp of chalk on the chalkboard and feel the cut-glass edges of the inkwell against her fingertips. If she closed her eyes, she thought she could actually hear her grandmother’s voice.
Sacrifice. Be part of something bigger than yourself, Gillian. Something that was here before you and will be here after you. The rest of them only saw the town of Galesburg, you know. They only see the city in New York now. They forget what it once was, they don’t remember and don’t care, and there’s a danger to that. Especially because the past isn’t passive. What we are doing, what we are bound to, is the crucial work of making others look back. Making them remember.
She opened her eyes. The voice ceased. For a moment there, it had seemed as real as if Molly Mathers had been whispering in Gillian’s ear.
“You said one ghost gave you instructions,” Gillian said. “But are there more than him?”
“Yes. Lots of them, but most don’t speak to me. They just watch and wait. I don’t think they’re all the same, then. The ghosts up here and the ones down there might be very different.”
He was right about this, but when Galesburg arrived downstream, the ghosts that waited there wouldn’t have options. They would have to go to work then.
Galesburg, like gravity, pulled you down whether you liked it or not.
It was a very special place. Her ancestors had tried to warn everyone about that. It was not the sort of place you flooded out and dammed up. Maybe it wasn’t even the sort of place you should build a house in. The Iroquois had stayed away for a reason. The Europeans hadn’t listened.
Now, nobody even remembered. Nobody except Gillian. And if the stories she’d been told were true, then those ghosts beneath the city streets weren’t active yet, but they would be soon. When the Galesburg crew arrived with all of its unique force, everyone would work.
All they had to do was make it downstream. They’d be picking up a man per mile along the way. Probably many more than that. There were so many unrecorded dead from the old reservoirs, the old pressure tunnels, the aqueducts. Galesburg would sweep them all up, and keep on going. The work would go quickly then.
The city wouldn’t have a chance.
Below them, steel struck stone again, but this time the sound had a different tone—higher, cleaner. Drier. It drew both of them to look back at the far wall of the basin, where Aaron had found the hole. Water sloshed at the surface line. Gillian stepped closer, staring. Another crack—not a stifled boom now, a crack, clean as an axe splitting wood—and this time she saw a piece of stone shear from the wall just above the waterline and splash into it. A band of blackness showed where once the blue-gray rock had been.
“They’re almost through,” she whispered.
Her father stepped close to her. Both of them staring together.
CRACK, scrape, splash.
Another block of bluestone sinking. The hole from beneath the mountain widening.
The Galesburg residents were almost back.
“I need to see them,” Gillian said. With each block that fell, with each widening of the gap, she felt the magnetic, electric tug toward the darkness beyond.
Gillian. Honey. Gillian.
The voice seemed to come from beyond the wall. Gillian stared at it, then back to her father.
“You hear that?”
“I heard it, but I don’t agree,” he said. “You don’t want to see them. Trust me. If you never see anything like them, you’ll be better off for it.”
“No, I don’t mean did you hear what I said; I mean do you hear…”
She let her voice trail off, because she could hear more whispers floating at her out of the darkness.
It was true. The stories were always true, and it was your job to learn them and believe them and teach them. Sacrifice. Volunteer. You’ve got to make the hard choice for yourself. Make it with confidence.
She took a few steps closer.
“Hear what?” her father said behind her.
“Nothing,” she muttered. She felt dizzy, untethered, and wanted to sit down. She wasn’t sure if the whispers were actually coming from the other side of the wall or from somewhere within her own exhausted brain.
All of it was playing out just as she’d been taught. Just as she’d been promised. Except that she wasn’t down there to help them. That seemed good, of course, because the carnage of last night had been so terrible, and the carnage that lay ahead? The great city gone dry? It was hard to imagine.
And yet…
Sometimes a wake-up call is needed, Gillian. A reminder of the past. A voice from the land, the water, the rocks. The bones and the blood. Without us, without our service, they’ll all forget. That’s worse.
Was it so wrong? So crazy? They’d asked for so little. Just for the right to keep the land they’d fought for, land they’d cleared with their own hands and their own aching backs, land they’d then planted and harvested. Land where they’d dug deep wells for cool, clean water. All they’d asked was for the right to keep a pocket of sacred earth. They’d been denied that right in the interest of the greater good. The city wanted the water, and so the city would have it. End of story.
But not quite. Not in Galesburg. The city could take the land but not the knowledge. Not the memories and magic. And so what if Galesburg struck back? There was a greater good in play then, too. A reminder to a disinterested society. An alarm about the price of forgetting. It wasn’t all vengeance. It was… balance.
“I don’t know if it’s good or bad that he’s taking so long,” her father said, and she was annoyed that he was intruding on her thoughts, her memories. He was looking at the water again, not at the widening gap in the wall. She didn’t understand that. How could you possibly take your eyes off what was happening there?
Because he always did, she thought. He always turned away from the magic of this place.
“Gillian,” he said, “how long do you think we should wait?”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know. Calling for help. Anyone can see what’s happening now. It doesn’t require a story or even an explanation. The wall is coming down.”
As if on cue:
CRACK, scrape, splash.
She watched the stone fall free. Was that the flicker of a pale figure in the blackness beyond? A flash of white?
“They’re in there,” she said. “I think I can see them.”
“Then it’s time for you to go. With or without Aaron. I don’t think this is a good spot for you. Go for help. Leave me to wait on him.”
She didn’t answer.
CRACK, scrape, splash. Stone falling. Blackness widening.
“Call it in,” he told her. “Get help down here.”
Gillian reached for her belt. The radio was clipped on the left side. Her fingers drifted over it… and slid right.
CRACK, scrape, splash.
She drew her duty pistol. Her father said, “Babe, you can’t kill them. They’re already dead.”
“Do you remember how I used to scare you?” she said.
“Gillian…”
“Do you? When I was little, you’d look at me, and you’d be afraid of me. Afraid of a child. Do you remember that?”
He hesitated. Behind her, another stone split free and sank. Finally he nodded.
“I do. And I’m sorry. I didn’t understand this place, and I didn’t believe what I’d heard, and I—”
“Was right.”
“You were right to be afraid,” Gillian said, and pointed the gun at him.
He stared at her. His mouth was hanging open in a half smile, as if he’d been listening to a joke and was still waiting on the punch line. His teeth were white against his dark face, his eyes kind. They’d always been kind. Even when he was afraid of her.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said.
67
The ghosts let Aaron pass.
There were more of them now, five men standing beside the woman who’d swung the pick at him, and he could see the shifting shapes of a half dozen more in the depths beyond, but he swam through the ever-widening hole in the wall and they did not move to stop him. They just watched. Pale faces, but not translucent, just a washed-out gray, bones pushing at their flesh, all of them gaunt, all of them tired.
And all of them working. As he swam toward them he saw the flurry of swinging picks and shovels, blades whipping through the water without any trace of the resistance he felt from it. They watched him as he went, but they didn’t move to stop him. He had the sense that their level of urgency was equal to his own, just headed in the opposite direction.
He swam on through the tunnel, ghosts all around him, flickering faces and sparkling steel tools, and he remembered Deshawn’s advice: just pass on by.
That was easy enough to do, because stopping would be suicide. When he’d passed through the wall he was moving with a strong stroke, had plenty of air in his lungs, and felt good about making it to the air on the other side.
There wasn’t any, though. The water went on and on.
In the light of his headlamp, muted by the dark water and wavering in the shadows of his hands passing in front of the beam, he could see the tunnel floor angling up. This was what he’d been counting on: the tunnel would rise and take him out of the water.
As he chased it, though, the water remained. Higher and higher he rose, and still he was underwater.
Now his lungs were burning and his muscles were threatening to cramp.
Panic in the water, his instructors had said, is a different breed of panic than what you’ve seen on dry land, boys. It’s one hell of a lot different.