by Joe Hill
“Thanks, Morris,” I said. “You’re a good kid. You just need to stay out of my room.”
He nodded, but he was still frowning to himself when he slipped around me and went out into the hall. I watched him walk away from me down the stairs, his scarecrow’s shadow lunging and swaying across the wall, growing larger with every step he took towards the light below and some future that would be built one box at a time.
MORRIS WAS IN the basement until dinner—mother had to yell for him three times before he came upstairs—and when he sat at the table his hands had a white, plaster-like powder on them. He returned to the basement as soon as our dinner plates were parked in the soapy water filling the sink. He stayed down there until it was almost nine in the evening, and only quit when my mother hollered that it was time for bed.
I went by the open door to the cellar once, not long before I went to bed myself, and paused there. I had caught a whiff of something that at first I couldn’t identify—it was like glue, or fresh paint, or plaster, or some combination of the three.
My father came into the mudroom, stamping his feet. There had been a little dusting of snow, and he had been outside, sweeping it off the steps.
“What’s that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.
He came to the top of the basement stairs, and sniffed.
“Oh,” my father said. “Morris mentioned he was going to do some work with papier-mâché. There’s no telling what that kid will play with to get his kicks, is there?”
MY MOTHER VOLUNTEERED at an old folks’ home every Thursday, where she read letters to people with bad eyes and played piano in the rec room, banging on the keys so the half-deaf could hear her, and on those afternoons, I was left in sole charge of the house and my little brother. When the next Thursday rolled around, she wasn’t out of the house more than ten minutes when Eddie banged his fist on the side door.
“Hey, partner,” Eddie said. “Guess what? Mindy Ackers just fed me my ass in five straight games. I have to give her back that picture. You have it, don’t you? I hope you been taking good care of it for me.”
“You’re welcome to the nasty fucking thing,” I said, a little relieved that he was obviously only stopping by for a minute. It was rare to be able to get rid of him so quickly. He kicked off his boots and followed me into the kitchen. “Let me go get it. It’s in my room.”
“Probably on your night-table, you sick fuck,” Eddie said, and laughed.
“Are you talking about Eddie’s photograph?” Morris asked, his voice floating up from the bottom of the basement stairs. “I’ve got it. I was looking at it. It’s down here.”
I was probably quite a bit more surprised by this statement than Eddie was. I had made it clear to Morris that I wanted him to leave it alone, and it was unlike him to disregard a direct order.
“Morris, I told you to stay out of my stuff,” I yelled.
Eddie stood at the top of the steps, leering down into the basement.
“What are you doin with it, you little masturbator?” he called down to Morris.
Morris didn’t reply and Eddie tromped down the staircase, with me right behind him.
Eddie stopped three steps from the bottom and put his fists on his hips, stared out across the expanse of the basement.
“Whoa,” he said. “Cool.”
The cellar was filled, from end to end, with a great labyrinth of cardboard boxes. Morris had repainted them, all of them. The boxes closest to the foot of the stairs were the creamy white of whole milk, but as the network of tunnels spread out into the rest of the room, the boxes darkened to a shade of pale blue, then to violet, then to cobalt. The boxes at the furthest edge of the room were entirely black, limning a horizon of artificial night.
I saw crate-size boxes with passageways leading from every side. I saw windows, cut in the shapes of stars and stylized suns. At first I thought these windows had sheets of weirdly shining orange plastic taped into them. But then I saw how they pulsed and flickered softly, and realized that they were actually sheets of clear plastic, lit from within by some unsteady source of orange light—Morris’s lava lamp, no doubt. But most of the boxes didn’t have windows at all, especially as you got out away from the bottom of the staircase and moved towards the far walls of the basement. It would be dark in there.
In the northwestern corner of the basement, rising above all the other boxes, was an enormous crescent moon, made out of papier-mâché and painted a waxy, faintly luminescent white. The moon had thin pinched lips and a single sad, drooping eye that seemed to regard us with an expression of unfocused disappointment. I was so unprepared for the sight of it, so stunned—it was truly immense—that it took me a minute to realize I was looking at the giant box that had once been at the center of Morris’s octopus. Back then, it had been encased in a mesh of chicken-wire, shaped into two points like lopsided horns. I remembered thinking that Morris’s massive, misshapen chicken-wire sculpture was irrefutable proof that my brother’s already soft brains were deteriorating. Now I saw that it had always been a moon; anyone with eyes could’ve seen it for what it was…just not me. I think this was always one of my critical failings. If something didn’t make sense to me right away, I could never manage to look past what confused me to see a larger design or pattern, either in a structure or in the shape of my own life.
At the very foot of the stairs was an entrance to Morris’s cardboard catacombs. It was a tall box, about four feet high, stood on its side, with two flaps pulled open like a pair of double doors. A black sheet of muslin had been stapled up inside, blocking my view of the tunnel leading out of the box and into the maze. I heard distant, echoing music from somewhere, a low, reverberating, trance-inducing melody. A deep baritone sang, “The ants go marching one-by-one, hurrah! Hurrah!” It took me a moment to realize that the music was coming from somewhere within the system of tunnels.
I was so astonished I couldn’t stay angry with Morris for swiping the picture of Mindy Ackers. I was so astonished I couldn’t even speak. It was Eddie who spoke first.
“I don’t believe that moon,” he said, to no one in particular. He sounded like I felt—a little winded by surprise. “Morris, you’re a fucking genius.”
Morris stood to the right, his face bland, his gaze directed out across the vast sprawl. “I stuck your picture up inside my new fort. I hung it in the gallery. I didn’t know you’d want it back. You can go get it if you want.”
Eddie flicked a sideways look at Morris, and his grin broadened. “You hid it in there and you want me to find it. Boy, you are a weird shit, you know that, Morrie?” He bounded down the last three steps, almost did a Gene Kelly dance down them. “Where’s the gallery? Way out there, inside that moon?”
“No,” Morris said. “Don’t head that way.”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, and laughed. “Right. What other pictures do you have hanging up in there? Bunch of centerfolds? You got your own little private room in there for spankin it?”
“I don’t want to say anything more. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. You should just go in and see.”
Eddie shot me a look. I didn’t know what to say, but I was surprised to feel a tremulous kind of anticipation, with a white thread of unease stitched through it. I both wanted and dreaded to see him disappear into Morris’s confused, brilliant fortress. Eddie shook his head—Do you believe this shit?—and got down on all fours. He started to crawl into the entrance, then glanced back at me once again. I was surprised to see a flush of almost childlike eagerness on his face. It was a look that unsettled me for some reason. I myself felt no eagerness whatsoever to squirm around in the dark, cramped interior of Morris’s immense maze.
“You ought to come,” Eddie said. “We ought to check this out together.”
I nodded, feeling a little weak—there were no words in the language of our friendship for saying no—and started down the last few basement stairs. Eddie pushed aside the flap of black muslin, and the music echoed out from within a large circul
ar tunnel, a cardboard pipe almost three feet in diameter. “The ants go marching three-by-three, hurrah! Hurrah!” I came down off the last step, started to duck down to climb in after Eddie—and Morris came up beside me and seized my arm, his grip unaccountably tight.
Eddie didn’t glance back, didn’t see us standing together that way. He said, “Ke-rist. Any hints?”
“Go towards the music,” Morris said.
Eddie’s head moved up and down in a slow nod, as if this should’ve been obvious. He stared into the long, dark, circular tunnel ahead of him.
In a perfectly normal tone of voice, Morris said to me, “Don’t go. Don’t follow him.”
Eddie started worming his way into the tunnel.
“Eddie!” I said, feeling a sudden, inexplicable burst of alarm. “Eddie, wait a minute! Come back out.”
“Holy shit, it’s dark in here,” Eddie said, as if he hadn’t heard me. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t hear me—had stopped being able to hear me almost as soon as he entered Morris’s labyrinth.
“Eddie!” I shouted. “Don’t go in there!”
“There better be some windows up ahead,” Eddie murmured…talking to himself. “If I start getting claustrophobic, I’ll just stand up and tear this motherfucker apart.” He inhaled deeply, let it out. “Okay. Let’s go.”
The curtain flapped down across his feet and Eddie disappeared.
Morris let go of my arm. I looked over at him, but his stare was directed towards his sprawling fortress, towards the cardboard tube into which Eddie had climbed. I could hear Eddie clunking through it, away from us; I heard him come out the other end, into a large box, about four feet tall and a couple feet across. He bumped into it—knocked one of the walls with a shoulder maybe—and it shifted slightly. A cardboard tunnel led to the right, another to the left. He picked the one that pointed in the general direction of the moon. From the bottom of the basement steps I could follow his progress, could see boxes shaking slightly as he passed through them, could hear the muffled thump of his body striking the walls now and then. Then I lost track of him for a moment or two, couldn’t locate him until I heard his voice.
“I see you guys,” he crooned, and I heard him tapping against thick plastic.
I looked around and saw his face behind a star-shaped window. He was grinning in a way that showed the David Letterman gap between his front teeth. He gave me the finger. The red furnace light of Morris’s lava lamp surged and faded around him. Then he crawled on. I never saw him again.
But I heard him. For a while longer I could hear him making his way along, moving in the rough direction of the moon, away into the far reaches of our basement. Over the muffled warble of the music—“down, in the ground, to get out of the rain”—I could still hear him bumping into the walls of the maze. I saw a box tremble. Once I heard him pass over a strip of bubble wrap that must’ve been stapled to the floor in one of the tunnels. A cluster of plastic blisters popped with sharp, flat reports, like a string of penny firecrackers going off, and I heard him say, “Fuck!”
After that I lost track of him again. Then his voice came once more—off to my right, all the way across the room from where I had heard him last.
“Shit,” was all he said. For the first time I thought I heard in his tone an undercurrent of irritation, a shortness of breath.
An instant later, he spoke again, and a flash of light-headed disorientation passed over me, left me weak in the knees. Now his voice seemed to come impossibly from the left, as if he had traveled a hundred feet in the space of a breath.
“Dead fucking end,” he said, and a tunnel off to the left shook as he scrambled through it.
Then I wasn’t sure where he was. Most of a minute ticked by, and I noticed that my hands were clenched in sweaty fists, and that I was almost holding my breath.
“Hey,” Eddie said from somewhere, and I thought I heard a warble of unease in his voice. “Is someone else crawling around in here?” He was a good distance off from me. I thought the sound of his voice seemed to come from one of the boxes close to the moon.
A long silence followed. By now the music had wrapped all the way around and the song was playing again from the beginning. For the first time I found myself listening to it, really listening. The lyrics weren’t like I remembered them from summer camp sing-a-longs. At one point, the low singing voice cried:
“The ants go marching two-by-two, Hurrah! Hurrah!
The ants go marching two-by-two, Hurrah! Hurrah!
The ants go marching two-by-two,
They walked across the Leng plateau
And they all went marching down!”
Whereas in the version I remembered, it seemed to me there had been something about a little one stopping to pick a rock out of his shoe. Also it made me antsy, the way the song just kept looping around and around.
“What’s up with this tape?” I said to Morris. “How come it only plays this one song?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The music started playing this morning. It hasn’t stopped since. It’s been playing all day.”
I turned my head and stared, a feeling of cool, tingling fright prickling through my chest.
“What do you mean, it hasn’t stopped?”
“I don’t even know where it’s coming from,” Morris said. “It isn’t anything I did.”
“Isn’t there a tape deck?”
Morris shook his head, and for the first time I felt panic.
“Eddie!” I shouted.
There was no response.
“Eddie!” I called again, and started walking across the room, stepping over and around boxes, moving towards the moon and where I had last heard Eddie’s voice. “Eddie, answer me!”
From an impossibly long distance off, I heard something, part of a sentence: “Trail of bread crumbs.” It didn’t even sound like Eddie’s voice—the words were spoken in a clipped, supercilious tone, sounded almost like one of the overlapping voices you hear in that crazy nonsense song by the Beatles, Revolution #9—and I couldn’t pinpoint where it came from, wasn’t sure if its origin was ahead of or behind me. I turned around and around, trying to figure where the voice had come from, when the music abruptly switched off, with the ants marching nine. I cried out in surprise, and looked to Morris.
He held his X-acto knife—loaded with a blade swiped from my dresser, no doubt—and was on his knees, cutting the tape that attached the first box in the maze to the second.
“There. He’s gone,” Morris said. “All done.” He pulled the entrance to the maze free, neatly flattened the box and set it aside.
“What are you talking about?”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was methodically beginning to take it all apart, severing tape, pressing boxes flat, piling them next to the stairs. He went on, “I wanted to help. You said he wouldn’t go away, so I made him go away.” He lifted his gaze for a moment, and stared at me with those eyes that always seemed to look right through me. “He had to go away. He wasn’t ever going to leave you alone.”
“Jesus,” I breathed. “I knew you were crazy, but I didn’t know you were a total shithouse rat. What do you mean, he’s gone? He’s right here. He’s got to be right here. He’s still in the boxes. Eddie!” Shouting his name, my voice a little hysterical. “Eddie!”
But he was gone, and I knew it. Knew that he had gone into Morris’s boxes and crawled right through them into someplace else, someplace not our basement. I started moving across the fort, looking into windows, kicking boxes. I began pulling the catacombs apart, ripping tape away with my hands, flipping boxes over to look inside them. I stumbled this way and that, tripping once, half-crushing a tunnel.
Inside one box, the walls were covered with a photo collage, pictures of the blind: old people with milky white eyes staring out of their carved-from-wood faces, a black man with a slide guitar across his knees and round black sunglasses pushed up the bridge of his nose, Cambodian children with scarves wrapped over their eyes. Since there
were no windows cut into the box, the collage would’ve been invisible to anyone crawling through it. In another box, pink strips of flypaper—they looked like dusty strings of salt-water taffy—hung from the ceiling, but there weren’t any flies stuck to them. Instead there were several lightning bugs, still alive, blinking yellow-green for an instant and then fading out. I did not think, at the time, that it was March, and lightning bugs impossible to come by. The interior of a third box had been painted a pale sky blue, with flocks of childish blackbirds drawn against it. In the corner of the box was what I at first took to be a cat’s toy, a mass of faded dark feathers with dust bunnies clinging to it. When I tipped the box on its side, though, a dead bird slid out. The body was dried out and desiccated, and its eyes had fallen back into its head, leaving little black sockets that looked like cigarette burns. I almost screamed at the sight of it. My stomach rioted; I tasted bile in the back of my throat.
Then Morris had me by the elbow, and was steering me towards the steps.
“You won’t find him like that,” he said. “Please sit down, Nolan.”
I sat on the bottom step. By then I was fighting not to cry. I kept waiting for Eddie to jump out laughing from somewhere—Oh man, I fooled you—and at the same time some part of me knew he never would.
It was a while before I realized Morris had lowered himself to his knees in front of me, like a man preparing to propose to his bride. He regarded me steadily.
“Maybe if I put it back together the music will start again. And you can go in and look for him,” he said. “But I don’t think you can come back out. There’s doors in there that only swing one way. Do you understand, Nolan? It’s bigger inside than it looks.” He stared at me steadily, with his oddly bright, saucer eyes, and then said, in a tone of quiet force, “I don’t want you to go in, but I’ll put it back together if you tell me to.”