by B. B. Wurge
“Did she reach the bottom of the hole?” I asked.
“What’s that?” my grandmother said. She had fallen suddenly into a thoughtful silence. Even mentioning the wooly mammoth skeleton seemed to make her sad.
“You don’t have to tell me anymore right now, Grandma,” I said. “You must be tired of talking.”
“Me, tired?” she said, rousing up and smiling at me. “What a silly thought. Of course I’m not tired. No, Billy, she didn’t reach the bottom of the hole. It just kept going and going underneath her. She said that when she loosened bits of rock with her pick, she could hear them rattling down and down, hitting against the sides of the chimney, until the sound faded away in the distance. And she was already hundreds of feet down.”
“Maybe,” I said, “there were lots of other skeletons even further down.”
“That’s very likely,” she said. “Your mother was very excited. But the city officials were not at all happy.”
“Why not?” I said indignantly. “That’s silly. They could have gotten lots of great new skeletons to put in the museum.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But, you see, the workmen were trying to finish a building, and the housing commissioner really wanted it finished on time. It was going to be a row of townhouses. Lots of rich friends of his had already paid to live in them, even though the houses weren’t built yet. When the housing commissioner found out that a scientist had been called in to delay the project, he was very angry. He showed up at the dig and started to shout at everybody. He even yelled at the construction worker who had first discovered the hole, and kicked him in the leg, even though the poor man had only just gotten back to work from his injuries.”
“That’s awful, Grandma!”
“Yes, it was awful. He was an awful man. He still is. His name is Waldo Earpicker and he’s still the housing commissioner. Your mother told him that she would go straight out and publish an article in The New York Times, all about the amazing extinct animals, and then the whole city would be on her side, and the whole building project would have to stop. You should have seen his face. It turned a very unhealthy red.”
“What did he do, Grandma?”
“There wasn’t much he could do, Love. He really wanted the workmen to cover up the hole with cement and build a building on top of it. But he didn’t want it to get into the papers. So he made a deal with your mother. She didn’t tell the newspaper. She kept it a secret. All the construction workers were paid to keep it secret. And when they built the row of houses on the block, they left a secret hole in the basement of one of the houses. That way, your mother could study the extinct animals whenever she wanted.”
“But,” I said, “she would have to go through someone else’s house, and get into that person’s basement.”
“Not necessarily,” my grandmother said with a wink. “Not if she moved into that particular house and lived there.”
I was beginning to understand. “Do you mean,” I said, amazed, “that our house is the one?”
“That’s right,” she said. “We moved in as soon as the row was finished. We got our house for free; that was part of the deal. That Mr. Earpicker, he was furious, I can tell you. I thought he was going to try to push us down the hole and get rid of us, but he had to give in. There was nothing else he could do.”
“Grandma, are you saying that the really, really deep hole is right here in our basement?”
“That’s precisely right,” she said.
“But, that’s amazing, Grandma! I never knew! You never told me!”
“Of course I didn’t,” she said, shortly. “Do you think I wanted you to fall down that great long hole? No!”
I shuddered at the thought.
“But wait a minute,” I said suddenly, looking at her hard. “Grandma, wait. How long ago did you say the hole was found?”
“About ten years. Almost eleven.”
For the first time, I began to get the suspicion that the entire story was made up and was one gigantic joke that she was playing on me. “Grandma, I don’t think our house is only ten years old. Or even eleven. It’s all blackened and stained on the outside. It looks like it’s been here for fifty years, at least.”
“You’re too clever by half, Billy,” she said, sipping her tea serenely. “But houses in New York get very dingy, very quickly. It’s the pollution.”
That made sense to me, so I didn’t worry anymore.
“Yes,” my grandmother continued, “that was almost eleven years ago. We moved in, and there were always six or seven workers and helpers living with us, sleeping on the living room floor. Every day, your mother, or one of her helpers, would get lowered down, down into the hole, and chip away at a specimen. All the specimens had names. I remember the day that R46A finally came loose and was lifted out of the hole by a cable.”
“R46A! Is that really what it was called?”
“He. What he was called. Yes, he was an extinct species of gorilla, only three inches tall.”
“Three inches, Grandma? Are you sure?”
“I suppose I might have the exact measurement wrong. I can’t remember the details too well. But I remember the celebration. Your mother and her head assistant were so happy, they danced around and around the basement together. She married him a few months later.”
I began to get a prickly feeling, and wrapped my arms tightly around my knees. I had never heard anything about my father. I had never even seen a picture of him. All I knew about him was that he must have worn a pair of brown corduroy pants. I had found the brown pants ripped up at the bottom of a bag of cleaning rags. “Was the head assistant my father?” I said.
“Yes, he was,” my grandmother said, but she had a strange closed expression on her face. “I never trusted him,” she added.
“What was wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing yet, anyway. He was a good assistant. They got seven skeletons out of that hole. Eight, if you count the mouse skeleton on the first day. But the real prize, the real Rolls Royce of extinct animals, was the wooly mammoth. T29. For years, your mother dreamed about T29, but she was afraid of ruining him if she worked on him in too much of a rush. She waited patiently, and finally got to that deep, deep part of the tunnel and began to pick away the rock and dirt around T29.”
“But how could she get a wooly mammoth out of a skinny hole?”
“That is a good question,” my grandmother said. “They planned on taking him out one bone at a time. They were able to get out three of his tailbones. That alone took half a year.”
“No! Is that true? Half a year for three tailbones?”
“That’s what happened. It was very slow work, because the stone was especially hard at that place in the tunnel. And then . . . then something awful happened.”
“What, Grandma? What happened?”
Her face had turned white and her expression was sad. She looked especially old, and her skin sagged under her eyes more than usual.
“I don’t know if I can tell you,” she said.
“You have to now, Grandma. You’ve told me so much already.”
“Let me get another cup of tea, and we’ll go sit in the living room. It’s more comfortable. These kitchen chairs give me a back ache after a while.”
Chapter 4
The Cable Breaks
Whenever my grandmother made tea, she did it the same way. First she would get a tea bag out of a metal tin and put it in her cup. Then she would put in a spoonful of peanut butter. Then she would pour in a little bit of brandy, just enough to fill up the bottom of the cup and slosh around the lump of peanut butter. Then she would fill up the cup with apple juice, and put it in the microwave for one minute. Her tea had a very strong smell that filled up the whole house. Even if I was on the fourth floor in
my bedroom, I could smell if she had made tea. I liked how it smelled. Sometimes she let me try a sip, but I didn’t like the taste. It was too strong for me.
This time, after she had made her special tea she seemed calmer, and she smiled as she sat on her usual end of the living room couch and pulled her hand-knitted blanket around her. I sat at the other end of the couch, facing her and hugging one of the couch pillows. I didn’t feel cold, but I was finding out about so many strange new things that I wanted to hold onto something familiar and soft.
“I told her,” my grandmother said, continuing her story, “that it was dangerous down there. I told her over and over. She never listened to me. She was very intense about her work. She’d go down the shaft and start to work on a fossil, and forget about everything else in the world. Time didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to the rest of us. Hours would go by, and somebody would have to shout down the hole to remind her to come up for dinner. Once she stayed down all night without even noticing. She thought it was only a few minutes. Five years ago (you were only a year old) she went down to work on T29’s skull. A wooly mammoth skull is very big, and very heavy, especially if it’s filled up with solid rock instead of brains. She went down on the end of that cable with her pick tied to her wrist. Her team stayed at the top of the hole. I bet she was so focused on one little piece of bone under her pick that she wasn’t paying attention to the rest of the skull, to the balance of the whole thing. After about three hours, her team up top heard a sudden terrible crashing sound, and the floor shook under their feet. Something yanked sharply on the cable. And when they pulled it up, she wasn’t attached to it anymore. It was broken off. The end was crushed and frayed, and it was covered with . . . with blood.”
I stared at my grandmother in horror, and neither of us said anything for a moment.
“Did anyone go down to try and find her, Grandma?” I said, finally, in a small voice.
“Too dangerous,” she said. I could see that her hand was shaking as she lifted her tea mug to her lips. “It was too dangerous, because the whole thing might collapse. They called down for her, and shined their flashlights, and never heard any sound at all. She was gone.”
“But Grandma, somebody must have gone down to look.”
“Why do you think that?” my grandmother said, looking at me sharply. “Why would anyone risk getting crushed?”
“I would have gone down!” I said indignantly. “I would have wanted to see if she was okay. Maybe all she needed was the wooly mammoth skull lifted up a little bit. Maybe she was just knocked out and she could have been pulled out and saved.”
“You’re a wonderful boy, Love. You are right. That was the right thing to do. That’s what I thought her husband would do. But he was too scared. He thought she was dead, and in a panic he ran out of the house and never came back again.”
“He didn’t!”
“I tell you, I never saw him again. I heard he went to work in a circus in Alabama. He had developed such a terrible fear of depths, that he got a job as an acrobat on a high wire.”
“That’s not true, Grandma! He wouldn’t do that!”
“Well, okay, I made up the part about the circus. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t care.”
“Then nobody went down to try and rescue my mother?”
“Somebody did, yes.”
“It was you, Grandma, wasn’t it?”
“The rest of the staff didn’t want me to. They were afraid I would get killed. But I strapped on that belt, hooked the cable to it, and insisted that they lower me down. It wasn’t my first time down. I had gone down once or twice before, just for fun. But this time it was no fun at all. I thought I would get crushed to death any second by a falling stone. The whole tunnel was full of a choking dust. After about three hundred feet I reached a blocked part of the shaft. A solid mass of rubble. It couldn’t be moved. I shouted and stamped, but there was no answer. Just a little bit of blood on the rocky wall of the tunnel. There was nothing anybody could do, so I had them pull me back up again.
“Her helpers eventually left, of course. We lived here by ourselves after that. Just you and me. Sometimes I’d go down into the basement and look into that hole.”
We were both quiet while my grandmother sipped her tea. I thought the story was over. It had been a horrible story, but in a strange way I was happy because I had found out about my parents. Now I knew why I lived alone with my grandmother.
But then my grandmother fixed me with a piercing look and continued. “After about two years, I started to hear sounds from down the hole.”
I stared at her. “What kind of sounds?” I asked. “Not . . . not like a ghost?”
Chapter 5
The Birdfrogs Emerge
“It wasn’t a ghost,” my grandmother said. “Don‘t be silly. It was the sound of rocks and pebbles shifting. Very quiet sounds. I thought maybe the tunnel was opening up again. All that loose rubble was filtering down and falling. But I wasn’t sure. Sometimes, Billy, sometimes I thought I heard tapping sounds, like a hammer, from very, very far down.”
A chill went up my spine, and my whole body started to tingle. “Maybe it was the ghost of her pick!”
“I told you not to be silly, Love. It wasn’t a ghost. Metal tools don’t have ghosts. Something was down there, but I didn’t know what.”
“Maybe, Grandma, maybe it was her, for real. Not a ghost, but her real, live self. Maybe she was trapped all that time and was slowly picking her way out.”
“I thought of that,” my grandmother said. “But I asked myself: how could she have lasted so many years? I suppose it depends on where she ended up. If she was trapped in a cave with bats in it, she could have eaten the bats.”
“Ugh! Grandma, she wouldn’t have done that, would she?”
“Why not? I’ve had bat. It’s very good, if you grill it with barbecue sauce. But she would have had to eat them raw. Bite off their heads and—”
“Stop! Grandma, I don’t believe it. Nobody would eat raw bats like that.”
“Well, then, she might have gotten trapped in a cavern with fungus on the walls. Big slimy funguses that—”
“Okay, Grandma, the funguses are better than the bats, but I still wouldn’t like to eat them.”
“Don’t be so squeamish. I love a good cave fungus now and then. The slimier the better. Of course there’s often water down a cave, so she might have been able to drink enough. But no, I knew it wasn’t her because . . . because the things that were making the noises finally came up out of the hole.”
Another chill went up my spine. “What were they?” I whispered.
She let out a long breath and put her empty tea mug on the end table. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “That’s the heck of it, Love, I never saw them.”
“Then, Grandma, how do you know they came out of the hole?”
“At first,” she said, “I thought I just hadn’t covered the hole tightly. I had put a plastic tarp over the opening to keep the damp out of our house, and one day it wasn’t closed tightly. Then, the next time, the tarp was propped up like a tent on an old bicycle pump that I had left down in the basement. That’s odd, I thought. I would never do that. I put the cover back on and wired it around the edge, good and tight. That night, whatever was down there made a hole right through the plastic cover. What do you think of that?”
“I think it’s scary,” I said. “It must have been a person.”
“Why do you say that?” She looked at me curiously.
“Because the cover was propped up on the bicycle pump. Only a person would think to do something like that.”
“Well,” she said, “it might have been a person. But if so, it was a very small one. The hole in the plastic was only three inches wide. And around the hole, in all the rock dust, I could see litt
le tiny footprints.”
I was staring at my grandmother now in horrified fascination. “What did the footprints look like?” I asked.
“They were hard to figure out. They were all on top of each other, so I spread some wet paint on the floor around the hole and left it overnight. The next day, the whole basement was covered with little white footprints everywhere.”
“That was smart, Grandma.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Those footprints, they were strange. I believe it was some kind of bird. Or some kind of frog. A birdfrog. And it had three legs.”
“No! That can’t be right. You must have made a mistake.”
“I checked very carefully,” she said, “and I’m sure I didn’t make a mistake. The birdfrogs had three legs. They could stand on them, like on a tripod. Or like a tiny little kangaroo, which can stand on its two hind legs and its tail. But they weren’t kangaroos because all three of the legs had a foot with toes. No, they were little tiny birdfrogs, or frogbirds, with three legs. They must have had hands too, but I don’t know how many. I suppose they might have been very large, mutated cockroaches. But then they wouldn’t have had toes on their feet.”
“This is creepy, Grandma. Do you think they lived in the ground?”
“Obviously,” she said. “I wished more than ever that your mother was still with us. She would have known. She would have studied them and figured them out. But the best I could figure, they were living deep, deep in the ground. The rock-fall, the one that had blocked up the tunnel, must have made so much noise that it attracted their attention. They crawled up the shaft and began to clear away the blockage, and finally crawled up into our basement. That’s my theory, anyway.”