by Hugh Howey
“You? Oh, no, you were fine. I was just concerned about the men up in the attic with us today. You know who they are—they look like us, but they aren’t us.”
… And Grandma Naomi is gone again.
“Uh, Grandma? I don’t remember seeing any men in the attic today.”
“Of course you don’t. They’re clever. They wouldn’t want you to see them. They’re very good at hiding, after all. They’re best, though, when they hide in plain sight.”
“Mom,” Allen said, “You’re scaring Rachel. There weren’t any men in the attic. I stopped by, too. I would have seen them if they were really there.”
Rachel took a bite of her pie, but suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore. Between the diary pages, the mysterious key, and her grandma’s crazy talk, it was a bit much for her. “Maybe you’re thinking of a different day, Grandma,” Rachel offered. “I don’t remember seeing them, but I guess that doesn’t mean they weren’t here. I did step out from the attic for a few moments.”
“Yes, dear, that must be it,” Naomi said, again closing the door on the topic.
Somehow, though, Rachel suspected the conversation was far from over.
* * *
Sleep was elusive. Just as the lack of blinds on her mother’s window allowed sunlight to stream in unfettered in the morning, it also allowed in the bold moonlight at night. And if it wasn’t a full moon, it was close. As Rachel lay in bed, she thought that she should appreciate this chance to really view the night sky; back home in Indianapolis, the light pollution virtually hid the stars from view. But right now, she really just wanted to sleep.
After several minutes of wrestling with the brightness, Rachel finally went to the closet and found a quilt to drape over the window. But as soon as the quilt went over the window’s opening, Rachel realized that not all the light in the room had been due to the moon. On the corner of the dresser, where Rachel had emptied her pockets from earlier in the day, the key from the attic was shining like a beacon in the darkness.
“What the…?” Rachel asked the empty room around her. But there were no answers here. All she had was the strange key and the diary pages.
Acting on a sudden impulse, Rachel opened the dresser and withdrew the aged papers. She didn’t know why she thought there might be something new, but she shuffled through the pages again, examining them in the light cast by the key. And when she lined up the pages on her bed, her hunch was proven correct: what had appeared to be mere smudges on the blank pages came together to spell out a phrase. Perhaps it had been harder to see before because the pages weren’t fully dried; or perhaps the pages only showed their secret in the eerie glow of the key. Either way, the hidden message created a new mystery:
“I’ll bury it in the second hole.”
The second hole? What did that mean? Rachel sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to figure it out, but her mind couldn’t put the puzzle together. Even if she had all the pieces, which she was sure she didn’t, Rachel acknowledged to herself that there might not even be much to the mystery before her.
And was this really something Rachel should be digging into? Didn’t Grandma Naomi say every family had their secrets? Was this a secret that should stay hidden?
Before she knew what she was doing, Rachel had changed back into her T-shirt and jeans from earlier in the day and was slipping on a pair of tennis shoes. The diary pages went into her back pocket, along with her cell phone, but she kept the key in her hand to light her way.
The house was dark and Rachel was afraid the light from the key would wake her grandmother, but when she passed her grandmother’s bedroom on the first floor, the door was closed. She kept her hand over the key to dampen the light. For whatever reason, Rachel felt herself being led out of the house and into the back yard.
When she turned left out of the garage door, she found herself face to face with Uncle Allen.
* * *
“What—what are you doing out here?” Rachel asked.
“I might ask you the same thing young lady,” Allen said. “But since you asked, I ran out of gas on my way home. I knew there was a spare can in the barn here, so I was heading over that way when I saw a light coming from your mom’s—I mean, your bedroom.”
“So? Girl can read a book if she wants, right?”
“Is that what you’re doing out here? Reading?”
Rachel put her head down. “No.”
“All right. Let’s hear it. I saw how you were looking at me at supper. Rather, how you were avoiding me. What’s up? Did you find something in the attic? My fifth-grade report card? Worse yet, my fifth-grade school picture?” Allen chuckled.
Rachel opened her hand to reveal the key. “I found this.”
“Whoa.”
“Grandma said it was yours. She said you played with it all the time when you were a kid.”
Rachel saw the look in Allen’s eyes go from confusion to recognition. “Yeah. I mean, it’s been almost fifty years, but I do remember this. I didn’t play with toy guns and action figures when I was a kid. I played with this key. But it’s one of those memories that comes and goes—in fact, for a long time, I thought I might have imagined this. I don’t remember it ever glowing, though.”
“Well, that wasn’t all. I also found some diary pages written by Grandpa,” Rachel said, pulling the pages out of her pocket. She handed them over and used the key to help Allen read the pages for himself.
“Okay, but this doesn’t tell me why you’re outside at midnight,” Allen said.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. She was beginning to wonder about that herself. “Maybe I let my mind get carried away with everything, but with the key and the diary pages, along with everything Grandma Naomi is saying…”
“Rachel. You know she’s lost it, right?”
“Well…”
“No, Rachel. She’s been my mother longer than she’s been your grandmother. I’ve seen her descent, and it’s a sad thing to see, but she isn’t anything like she was when I was a little boy,” Allen said, scratching his beard. “And the things she says… You know, you get a moment like what we had at supper tonight where she remembers who we are and remembers what really happened in her life. But then something happens. I wish I knew what it was, but she changes. Her memories become fiction. It isn’t even that she goes back to her youth—her mind just goes someplace else and the words that come out of her mouth…” He shrugged. “You just can’t trust anything she says.”
“Even what she said about you being stillborn?”
“Even that. I’ve never heard that before. Don’t you think I would have heard that some time in the last fifty-three years?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“But these diary pages are interesting. My dad always refused to talk to me about when I was born. Maybe there are some answers in the rest of his diary. If it even exists,” he said, thumbing through the pages again.
“Do you have any idea what the secret message means?” Rachel prompted, showing Allen the message hidden in the smudges.
Allen considered. “Hmm… in the second hole.”
“Yeah, I don’t have any idea what it means, either,” Rachel confessed, her shoulders slumping.
Allen looked up with a wry grin. “I didn’t say I don’t know what it means. I actually think I may know exactly what it means.”
Rachel stopped. “You do?”
“Yeah. At least, I hope it means what I think it means. If it doesn’t, it could be pretty unpleasant.”
“What do you mean?”
Allen looked around, then turned toward the woods behind the house. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”
* * *
As they plunged into the wooded area, Rachel was extremely grateful for the glowing key. The strange object illuminated the entire area under the canopy, showing Rachel and her uncle where they could place their steps in the blackness of night. Even with a nearly full moon, navigating in the woods would have been tricky without some sort of flashl
ight.
“Where are we going?” Rachel asked. For some reason she felt compelled to keep her voice at a whisper.
“The only place I know of with two holes,” Uncle Allen called back, apparently not concerned about making noise.
Rachel kept her mouth shut as she followed Allen the rest of the way. The two of them had to dodge low-hanging tree limbs and weave in and out of thick brush and undergrowth. Eventually they stood before a small wooden building, its boards rotting. It had been built for a purpose, and when it had outlived its usefulness, it was forgotten.
“The outhouse.”
Rachel was dumbfounded. “Seriously?”
Allen chuckled as he lifted a few boards that had fallen across the long-forgotten door. “I guess you don’t remember much about your Grandpa Henry, but he always had a bit of a sense of humor. And I imagine he never expected anyone would come looking for anything in the ol’ outhouse, so this may have been the best place to put something he wanted to keep hidden.”
Rachel caught a glimpse of Allen’s face under the moonlight. He was grinning, as if he hadn’t had this much fun in years.
“Okay. I guess. But what about this ‘second hole’?”
“I guess you never used the outhouse, did you?” Allen asked, not waiting for an answer. “Dad built this well before I was even a glimmer in his eye. And for whatever reason, he built it with two toilets. We used to call an outhouse like this a ‘two-holer.’”
“Clever.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I know. But the thing is, while there were two holes, Dad never got around to cutting the second hole. If the message means something, maybe it’s that he hid something here.”
By now, he had cleared the door of rotten lumber and debris, and the two of them stumbled into the outhouse. Sure enough, they were staring at a room with a wide bench across the long end. There was a hole on the right side of the bench, and more than enough room for a second hole on the left.
Allen went straight toward the void on the left. “We always used the one over on the right, so this,” he said, prying up a loose board, “should hold whatever we’re looking for.”
With a crack, the old board came loose. Rachel held the glowing key next to the hole and peered inside.
Underneath the bench was a marble slab—a headstone. Rachel gasped.
Carved into the stone were a name and a date.
Henry, Jr.
Oct. 19, 1959
Rachel turned to look at her uncle. It was difficult to tell in the eerie glow from the key, but he seemed to have lost some of his color.
“What…?”
“I don’t know, Rachel. Mom said they were originally going to name me Henry, Jr. Did they have this made, thinking I was dead?” Allen asked.
A few moments passed silently between them. Then Allen reached down, grabbed the edges of the marble slab, and lifted it aside. Rachel gasped, but Allen wasn’t listening.
“Time for some answers. If Mom can’t tell me, I’m going to find out for myself.”
Underneath the marble was a metal box. Gingerly, Allen reached in and pulled it out. It was big enough to be a makeshift casket for a baby.
“This is awful heavy to have only a dead infant inside,” Allen said. “I’m not sure, but I think this box is made of lead. Should we open it?”
Rachel briefly thought of every horror movie she’d ever watched, of how she would scream at the protagonists to not open such a box, but she couldn’t help herself. She had to know what was inside. She needed to unravel the half-century-old mystery.
“Yes.”
Allen must have felt the same way, as he immediately placed the box on the ground and crouched down to examine it. A simple latch on the front popped open with a little pressure, and Allen flipped up the lid.
Instantly, the contents of the box illuminated the entire woods, just as the key had lit up Rachel’s room back at the house. But this was no subtle glow—it was a ferocity of brilliance that made the night seem like day. Both Allen and Rachel put their arms up to shield their eyes from the intense light.
Once her brain was able to cope with the brightness, Rachel realized her hand was vibrating. Or more accurately, the key in her hand was vibrating. She squinted and examined the key closer.
“Uncle Allen, the key…”
“Yeah, I was just wondering the same thing,” he said.
Allen shut his eyes tightly and began exploring the object in the box with his hands. Though the glare was blinding, Rachel chanced a quick glance down, and saw that the object was a case of some kind, and seemed to be made of the same material as the key. It was like a large tube, almost like a small keg of the kind Rachel had seen at parties when she was in college. Allen’s fingers were probing a small hole.
“Hand me the key,” he said.
With one arm still covering her eyes, Rachel put the key in Uncle Allen’s hand. And then she chanced another peek into the brightness. She needed to see Allen open the container.
Allen inserted the key into the hole and turned. The tube opened. Immediately the light began to wane, and their eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness once again.
The outside of the tube had rotated back, revealing a few items inside. But the thing that Rachel noticed first wasn’t what was there, but what wasn’t. There were no bones.
Allen moved aside some official-looking papers and uncovered what looked something like a modern-day iPad. “Holy cow,” he whispered. He picked up the tablet as Rachel leaned over to see what he held.
“Stop!”
Rachel and her uncle swiveled around to find Grandma Naomi staring them down, an old Rayovac flashlight in her hands, her cotton nightgown fluttering in the evening breeze. Her usually perfect perm was unkempt, and she had a wild look in her eyes.
“Grandma?” “Mom?” Rachel and Allen both exclaimed simultaneously.
“You two have no idea what you’re doing. You need to stop. Put it all back and forget you ever found it,” Naomi said, approaching them slowly and determinedly.
Rachel looked over at Allen. Was this a new side of her grandmother? Had she known about this all along?
Allen was apparently having none of it. “I’m not going to do that, Mom. All this—Dad’s diary, this creepy headstone—it’s about me. Me! I have a right to know what it’s all about,” he said defiantly. “And if you can’t tell me, I’m going to dig until I can’t dig any more.”
“Son, listen to me. I know I’m not always myself. The moments when I’m in the present are becoming fewer and fewer, but I do know this: some secrets are best left buried. Leave it be.”
Rachel knew they could never do that, not now. Too much of the past had been exposed for them to simply tuck it away and pretend they never saw it. Allen deserved to know the truth about himself. Everyone deserved that much.
“For the last time, you tell me, or I’ll read the diary myself,” Allen said.
Even in the semidarkness, Rachel could see the rage and frustration boiling up within her uncle. She looked back at her grandmother and felt something new toward this old woman. Respect? Anger? Fear? The grandmother she had always known, who had always been a source of strength and comfort, was not who she appeared to be. And apparently never had been.
The look on Grandma Naomi’s face would have sent Rachel running for cover when she was little. Now, though, Grandma was frail, no match for her son, who faced her in a silent standoff. In an instant, her hard visage crumbled and her shoulders slumped.
“Fine. I never thought I would be alive for this, but I suppose you deserve the truth.”
“And what’s that?” Allen asked, his voice still sharp. “Did I have a twin? Did he die?”
Laughing strangely, Naomi shook her head. “Nothing as simple as that, I’m afraid.” She sat down on a log and took a deep breath, as if steeling herself. “You see, in 1959, this farm was visited by aliens,” she said.
Rachel and Allen exchanged a look, unsure what to think.
&nbs
p; “Aliens. You mean illegal immigrants?” Rachel asked. These days migrant workers came north to work on farms throughout the Midwest. She hoped that was all that Naomi had meant. Although she was sure it wasn’t.
“No, Rachel. I mean aliens. Extra-terrestrials. From another planet,” Naomi said, sighing. In spite of her resistance to telling the truth, doing so was clearly lifting a burden from her. “The first day they came was the day Allen was born. I gave birth at home, and he wasn’t well. They came to our door, offering help.”
“Help? Why didn’t you take me to the hospital?” Allen asked.
“We did, actually. Your father was at his wit’s end trying to figure out what to do. We ended up taking the farm truck to the hospital, but you’ve got to realize this was the 1950s. Technology wasn’t what it is today. The doctor took one look at the baby and told us to go home, hold our son, and wait for him to die.”
“How horrible,” Rachel whispered. She looked back to Allen and found him held rapt by his mother’s tale. Grandma Naomi, on the other hand, was fighting tears, reliving one of the worst days of her life.
“So we came home and there were… people here. I’d call them men, but they weren’t. It was almost like something out of a half-remembered dream; they appeared human, but there was just something… off. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.”
“And you let them help me. That’s the big secret? I was cured by aliens?” Allen asked quietly.
“No. Your father wouldn’t let them help.”
“Then how…?”
“Henry would have let you die, out of stubbornness, but I snuck out of the house and they met me out here in the woods. I gave you to them. And they cured you—in a way,” Naomi said, her eyes shut to the world around her. “Then they took you away.”
Rachel was speechless. Was Grandma losing it again?
“I’m not crazy,” she said, as if reading Rachel’s mind. “All those things I say… they’re real. Or they were real. Just let me finish my story, and then you can decide.”