by Dan Dillard
***
Albert told Charlotte he was clearing land for a new, larger home, and that was partly true. He did his best to behave in her presence and in the presence of the children. Over time, she warmed to the idea and grew accustomed to his odd schedule. Charlotte was excited at the thought of a new and much larger home.
Albert cleared out some trees to build a scaffold and pulley system so he could more easily get the sand out of the hole and he buried Odette’s body a ways off in the woods so he could take Big Jacques and his oldest boy out to help him with his work. They wouldn’t step into that place either, stopping well outside of the border in protest.
“Something’s wrong with that place,” Big Jacques said. “Something is bad there.”
Albert argued, demanded, threatened and for the first time, Jacques argued back.
“Sir, you can kill me before I’ll go in there, or let any of my children in there. Death is better than what waits in that place. You watch.”
“Fool,” Albert said, spitting out the word. He waved the slave off and Big Jacques put a powerful hand on his son’s shoulder and guided him back to their quarters.
After a few weeks, Albert grew tired of the slow progress he was making, but came to realize he would be alone in his task and he was fine with that. He would dig by himself for a decade if need be. The power he drew from the ground gave him the energy and the ambition. He fished in the mornings and delivered most of his catch to the local markets, keeping enough for himself and his small family. When the fishing was done and the deliveries were made, he dug. No one outside of the Gates family cared because no one saw his land. He wanted to keep it that way. Paranoia and lust for that rush of power had gripped him and he indeed began constructing a home.
With the help of Albert, Jr., now thirteen, he framed up a base around the hole. Father and son scrubbed the logs, rubbed them with linseed oil and turpentine and let them dry prior to adding them to the house. They carved joints into the logs, stacking them and chinking them together with okum, a mixture of pine tar and plant fibers. During the day, they fished and in the afternoons they napped. Big Jacques helped them fell trees from other parts of those woods, but he refused to drag them within fifty yards of the place. Both Albert Sr. and Jr. used horses and mules to pull the felled trees to the home site, but the animals also complained about entering the area. Eventually Jacques refused to help at all. Albert Sr. ignored him, letting him work the rest of the land with his boys. It kept appearances as they should be for the rare visitor or passerby.
When he could afford to do so, Albert Sr. brought in drifters to help him sling the logs into place. He lured them with promises of money or food or booze. When he couldn’t afford to pay them, they ended up dead and rotting inside that infernal hole. Albert Jr. kept his father’s secrets and eventually they became his own.
By the end of the season, they had a massive log frame built which covered the thirty-foot-wide chimney. Multiple layers of structure made up the flooring joists and left them only a small hatch in the back of the house from which they could enter the hole. Albert Jr. read books on engineering and the building of bridges and other large structures. He calculated weights and spans and drove his father mad with the slow pace that was required to get it right.
“You want to appease?” he would ask.
“Of course,” his father would reply.
When the foundation was completed, the walls went up quickly and left a wide porch which wrapped around the home on three sides. Plank-wood floors covered the interior and were sanded by hand to a silky smooth finish and then varnished. The hatch in what would become Albert and Charlotte’s bedroom let him down to the hole so he could dig by lantern light. It was more than fifteen feet deep by then, with scaffolds and pulleys to move the dirt out. When the buckets of dirt filled a wheelbarrow, Albert Jr. hauled the soil away into the woods and dumped it. They worked like drone bees in a hive, around the clock, only sleeping when necessary, only eating when necessary, only seeing Charlotte and Clara on occasion.
Eighteen months and eleven murders were required to get the Gates’s home completed. Once it was done, Charlotte and Clara moved in with Albert Sr. and Albert Jr. During that time, Big Jacques and his wife ran, taking their boys with them. They disappeared into the night and never returned. Not long after, Charlotte and Clara disappeared without explanation. Albert Sr. and Albert Jr. continued to excavate the hole and they continued bringing in vagrants to help.
When the town of Smithville had grown to the edges of its natural boundaries and started to fill in, Albert Sr. parceled out some of his land and sold it off. They used the money to purchase and upgrade equipment for the dig. The hole wasn’t straight down, you see. They had to follow the curves of the strange, stone chimney. It bent and twisted and corkscrewed into the depths of the earth. By the time Albert Jr. was twenty-one years old, it was a quarter mile deep, and it was a long hike to walk to its ever-changing depth, so a system of rails and lifts with pulleys had to be built.
Not long after Albert Jr.’s twenty-first birthday, Albert Sr. disappeared. Albert Jr. took a young wife, fair-haired and homely. She was shy in nature and never questioned her husband. To him, she was perfect. A cook. A warm body when he had physical cravings. A puppet to show face in town and let the world know the Gates family was normal. She was everything he needed and nothing he didn’t. If only she would bear him a son to whom he could pass on the family name and the family project.