All in all, I figured it was a good Saturday afternoon.
Introduction to “Sky in the Ground”
We end with a universe between the earth and the sky.
Rob Vagle has one of the most original voices I’ve ever encountered. His worldview is unique and skewed. Realms of Fantasy and Heliotrope have published his short work, and his young adult novel Justin Time and The Temporal Adventures At Carman High will appear later this year.
Sky in the Ground
Rob Vagle
She said dusk was the best time to see the sky in the ground and Henry went with her, down through the woods on the other side of the tracks out on River Road, the two of them holding hands and kissing, long and hard, frequently, and once, when they cut through the dusty culvert yard, they rubbed up against each other and he caressed her breasts.
Preoccupied with lust, Henry never gave the sky in the ground Sadie had talked about another thought. His senses were full of her—smelling the sweet apple shampoo in her hair, tasting the salt on her tongue, tracing the curve along her hips, pressed against her softness.
He had forgotten about the reason for their destination until she said, “We’re almost there.”
The woods were already getting dark, the trees black like sticks of burnt wood underneath the canopy of dark leaves. Snatches of sky poked between the leaves and the sky was blue-black. They were headed north and Henry glanced west where the sun had sunk low on the horizon, sending shafts of light between the trees. The tree shadows were long, the air cold. The trees looked like jail bars in the dusk, containing them, keeping them away from the sun.
“What are we going to look at?” Henry asked.
“The sky in the ground,” she said. Her amber hair was shoulder length and her blue eyes were black in the diminishing light. She searched his face and added, “Just tell me if I’m crazy or not.”
He was the new kid in school looking to make new friends and be as instantly popular as his older brother, but he wasn’t an athlete and though he was full of grandiose intentions he found himself closed-mouthed around strangers. When he was paired up with Sadie as lab partners in biology class, she said, “The two of us are going on an adventure.” She had him at those first words. He liked the way she moved, like she had electrical current flowing through her. She seemed to be under a steady hum of excitement and he wanted to be a part of it.
After three weeks she leaned close to him and said, “I want to show you something.” He felt tenfold increase in magnetic attraction, his heart pounding against his ribcage as if it were a xylophone. He’d go anywhere with her. She could show him anything.
If anything, he was the one that was crazy.
Before he could reply, something caught Sadie’s attention and she pointed, “Look!”
One beam of sunlight no thicker than a baseball bat shined up from the ground. On first glance, he thought it must be a trick of the light. At the base of an old oak tree, in between two exposed massive roots, light shined. Dust motes floated and insects darted through the beam. The beam stopped abruptly against the underside of a massive limb. The bark was brownish gray in the imperfect circle of light. The light looked natural, not like artificial white light from a bulb.
“See,” she said, whispering.
“Why are you whispering?” he said, feeling dumb as he said it.
“Listen for the crows,” she said.
Besides the crickets chirping, there was a fluttering of wings in the air. Something darted around the massive tree limb with the sunbeam coming from the ground. He assumed those were the crows she was talking about. Then the crows cawed, a cry that raised the hackles on his neck. Crows seemed out of place here. Were they active in the dark? Suddenly all of this seemed peculiar, something off about the whole situation. He looked at her but her face was lost inside the amber hair that framed her face.
“Look,” she said again and pointed.
A bird cut through the shaft of light, its iridescent blue-black feathers blazing for a split second. It circled and descended down to another bird and the two of them poked their heads into the daylight piercing through the hole in the ground. They cawed and they cawed, each cry sending chills up Henry’s back.
“What the hell is that!” Henry said with too much fear to his voice that he didn’t like.
They didn’t move. They stood no more than twenty feet away, night encroaching in on them, the woods robbing them of any dusk light.
“Am I crazy?” she asked.
“Hell no,” he said. “I see it too.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet.”
She stepped forward, a spring to her step, bounding for the light in the ground. Branches snapped under her feet and pebbles and rocks skittered. He chased after her, clawing at the bark of trees to keep his footing. When she reached the light, the birds launched into the air and were lost in the blackness.
“Check this out,” she said.
She got down on her knees and grabbed a tree root with both hands. When she leaned her head forward, the light caught her in the face. Her hair curtained off her face for him again, until he went to the opposite side of the light and saw her face aglow. It was as if she held a flashlight under her face, telling scary stories around the campfire. Only this light wasn’t orange and harsh, it was gentle and soft. The light caught the copper highlights of her hair framing her face. Her lips were scarlet red and her eyes were bright blue. The freckle like a tear on her left cheek was revealed. Her skin looked soft in the light and he remembered the rush of her face pressed up against his.
Her face held him spellbound. She smiled at him as if all this was perfectly normal. And he could believe she was telling him a story with a flashlight beam pointed at her face. He could ignore the daylight coming from the ground.
She looked down into the light. “Come and look.”
He gripped the tree root on his side and leaned forward until he was almost cheek to cheek with her, strands of hair tickling his skin. He looked down in the hole and for a moment he couldn’t make sense out of what he was seeing. The hole was lined with soil and grass roots, the daylight highlighting crawling bugs. The hole was only a foot deep and then there was a plunge, open space, nothing but the great wide open. Far, far down lay patchwork earth—rich brown squares of dirt and green splotches of trees. A wide dark blue river meandered across the land. He thought he was viewing the ground from an airplane. The saying “Seeing is believing” was a lie because he could not wrap his head around the fact that the ground they walked on was just a shell over another atmosphere, the atmosphere surrounding another land.
“You can’t believe it, huh?” she said.
He pushed himself away, let himself fall back on his ass where he sat in the dirt. He brushed his hands together, wiping the grit that covered his hands.
“That’s not right,” he said.
She leaned back and looked at him through the beam of light. Her face was gray filtered through the dust and particles floating in the light.
“I thought so too when I first found it,” she said.
He said nothing, only stared at her face, her pleading eyes.
“Whatever that place is down there,” she said. “I’m going.”
What Henry knew about Sadie was this: she was an only child living in a house with a mother (always ill-tempered) who screamed at her at the top of her lungs, her father was cold and distant and frequently away from the home. Henry immediately understood her need to run to the place underground. Her home life swung between anger and neglect. It was a place with very little hope, while there was a whole new world underneath them. One place dark, another place light.
“How?” he said and the word croaked out of his mouth. He couldn’t determine which “how” he referred to—how could a world lay below the ground or how do they get down there, or both?
He didn’t want to leave, but he didn’t want to let her go. Just a moment ago he was feeling like he’d follow her anywhere�
��he looked at the beam of daylight pouring out of the ground—but this?
The birds began crying again, circling above them, their feathers rustling louder than the wind through the leaves.
“I don’t think those are crows,” he said.
Their cries spoke to him, the words sinking in his head like thoughts of his own making.
Sadie has chosen this place and we have chosen her.
Sadie looked away from the birds and said to him, “I have to go.”
“Did you just hear them say that?” he asked.
“You heard them too,” she said.
Her lips curled into a smile and then her face was gone, lost in the dark, when the shaft of light vanished. Henry scrambled to his feet, blind as his eyes grew used to the dark. He grabbed onto the nearest tree and listened to the rustling sounds coming from the ground and growing louder, until air exploded into a fluttering of wings. Wings batted at his arm and high-pitched cries of birds pierced the night. Their wings rushed wind across his skin. He threw his hands up to his face, afraid a bird might ram him in the eye.
“The birds are here!” Sadie said.
But Henry couldn’t see her. “Where are you?”
Wings flapped around his ears and he tripped on an exposed tree root and fell to the ground. Sadie was there, next to him, grabbing his hand and her other hand at his back. He could barely make out her crouching form.
Trembling beneath the earth sent vibrations through him. Under that oak tree came a knocking sound, a rapid pounding. Pockets of ground in front of the oak tree fell away and bright slivers of daylight poured through, cutting the night before them. Henry saw the silhouettes of birds at the base of the tree, pecking at the tree roots, their heads rocking back and forth like trigger hammers, their beaks stabbing the roots and dirt. Other quick flying birds tore away at the soil where it crumbled away and fell to the world below. The maw at the base of the tree was at least two feet wide and growing wider with each tear of a sharp beak.
“Those birds aren’t of this world,” he said.
“No, they’re of my world,” she said.
“Sadie, what are you talking about?”
The daylight coming from the growing hole in the ground illuminated a large area of the woods like a campfire. Dozens of birds worked at the hole, their wings fluttering as fast as hummingbirds. All other birds flew above them, their screeching cries like seagulls waiting to eat.
Sadie didn’t answer him. He pushed himself up from the ground, grabbed her hand and pulled her. “We’re getting out of here,” he said.
She dragged her heels and pulled away from him. He worked at pulling and couldn’t move his feet fast enough. He felt the birds behind him, their wings fluttering and their chirps sounded like nails being pulled from a two by four.
“You asshole, I didn’t show you this for you to save me,” she said.
“I don’t care what your intentions were. This is freaking me out.”
Dozens of feathers brushed at his back and the birds screeched in his ears.
He shouted over the birds squawking, “Sadie, why did you bring me here? Did you actually think I’d go down there?”
She grabbed at his arms, pulled close and shouted in his ear, “I’m choosing you.”
Her face held a serious expression, her eyes wide and daring him to laugh or scoff. He couldn’t laugh, nor could he be flippant. Fear sat in the pit of his stomach, dark and heavy. He’d throw up before he could ever laugh. Since they arrived here at that hole in the ground, his world and the way things worked had been turned inside out. Half an hour ago he had Sadie’s tongue in his mouth. Now the world had tilted and spun. He wanted it to stop.
“You’re choosing me to do what?” he asked.
“Bear witness,” she said. “Watch me leave this world for another and I don’t mean to be all hokey, Henry, but we’ll have a bond made from this secret. For this to work, someone I’ve chosen needs to know.”
He’d run if he didn’t feel the wings fluttering at his back. The hole in the ground had inched wider, chunks of tree roots plummeting below. Air rushed passed him and pulled him toward the hole. He felt it in the lean, his heels off the ground and Sadie also leaned back as if she may fall over if they weren’t holding onto each others arms. Leaves and sticks scurried across the ground and swept through the air, falling into that hole and away. It was as if his world had depressurized, its fuselage punctured, and the air rushed out into the vacuum.
He wanted to be as far away from these woods as he could get. Sadie needed help, plain and simple. If he got her away from here, she could get help, and this hole in the ground would cease to exist. This was as illogical as everything else in the woods, but he had hope. Hope that life would be real again, a world that made sense. He wanted to flee, but he couldn’t just leave her.
Then the birds spoke inside his head again: She’s not crazy.
That spooked him into action.
He pulled her along by an arm and plowed through a dark curtain of wings, the feathers dusting his face, their sharp feet scratching at his skin and clawing his hair. The earth beneath his feet trembled, the tremors running up his legs. Sadie gripped his arm, pulling him back. The light in the woods shimmered on the trees. It was as if things had gotten brighter. He could see where he stepped.
Then he heard Sadie say, “You can’t leave here, Henry, and take me with you. We can’t get away from it. It will follow.”
He stopped and she knocked into him. His breath caught in his throat when he looked behind them. A fissure had opened up from the hole—one thin line of daylight followed, stopping a few feet behind Sadie. The leaves in the trees flickered, reflecting the light.
Sadie slipped from his grasp. “Dude,” she said, “it’s me or the whole world.”
“What?” He couldn’t keep his eyes off the fissure. He expected it to move again.
She slapped him and his right cheek burned. “This is serious, Henry. Either I go down there or the whole world does. One or other. No other choice.”
“I have to let you go?” he asked.
She smirked. “Come on, Henry. We were only lab partners and we groped each other on the way out here. It’s not like we had a serious relationship.”
But he had hoped.
She turned and walked back to the hole, the daylight fissure shrinking in front of her. The birds were quiet except for a few wings fluttering in the air. He could feel the birds watching him in the trees, lined up along branches, oh so many of them. The earth no longer trembled and the hole was now a gaping maw of six feet. Big enough for anyone to jump through.
“Is that all I am to you?” he asked, finding his feet shuffling forward to join her. “Someone to ‘bear witness.’?”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “This isn’t some little deal. This is important, my secret place I’m going to. You’re going to carry that secret.”
“For how long?”
“Forever if need be.” She sighed. “I didn’t just pick anyone, Henry. I picked someone I trusted. Someone I liked, a new friend I connected with.”
He felt calm about the birds and the hole in the ground, because those things were chilling. For the moment. His stomach settled but he was a little heartsick. He ran his hands through his hair. “Okay, it’s you or the whole world. That’s a lot of pressure for anybody, but you’re all cranked up on leaving. Fine. But I don’t think I can watch you go down that hole.”
“I’ll be quick,” she said.
With that, she scampered towards the hole, her body silhouetted against the daylight flooding up. Henry opened his mouth but no words were needed. She dropped through the hole without a look back. The image of her falling burned into his mind—it was more like the world below sucked her in, and her hair flew up above her shoulders.
Astounded, he froze there. Then the birds rushed out of the trees and plummeted down the hole, their blue-black wings glistening like a river of feathers. They flew as fast as arrows shot
from bows and in an instant, like Sadie, they were gone.
The hole went dark like someone had hit the light switch. He stood in the night woods and turning his head saw the street lights in town. He wished he’d brought a flashlight because he thought the hole was still there at the base of the tree. When the light had gone out, it stopped flowing from the hole, not like it had closed up on its own.
He crouched down and crawled on his hands and knees toward the tree, feeling ahead, trying to find the edge of that hole. When he brushed the edge, he knocked a rock inside and it made a soft thud. The hole was there and it had a bottom. The hole looked like an oil spot in the dark but he didn’t know how deep it went. Was it night down below? He felt around, looking for a stick and found a branch. He got on his knees and stabbed the branch into the hole and felt it stick into the ground. Still not satisfied that it was gone, he kicked his legs over the edge of the hole and dropped his feet where they landed in hard packed dirt. When he stood, he realized the hole was no deeper than the height of his knees.
“You are crazy,” he said and he didn’t know if he was talking about himself or Sadie.
He still expected to see her in school the next day—he wanted to—but he knew what he had seen.
Would her parents notice she was missing? Of course they would, her mother would probably be even more angry, lost in her own broiling fire. He wondered if her father would realize he kept his daughter so far out of arms reach that she had fallen into a hole. He couldn’t and wouldn’t tell them. His parents would listen: his mother, the psychiatrist; his father, the artist who painted prairie landscapes and wildlife. But would they believe? Their youngest son had a crush on a girl they never met and now they’re supposed to believe she vanished into another world. Telling them would lead to confusion and he should think twice about telling his mother, the shrink. Nobody would believe him if he told them, and he would be a suspect in her disappearance, which meant the secret was indeed between him and Sadie.
Universe Between Page 24