The Hollow Beneath the Pines: Mire in The Cellar

The hinge screamed before the door finished swinging inward.

Caleb Marsh stepped down onto warped boards and felt the cold climb his boots like something patient and sure. The cellar door had resisted him at first, swollen in its frame, until he put his shoulder to it and the wood gave with the sound of an old man exhaling. Now the space opened before him, darker than the cabin above, darker than anything in his memory of this place. He clicked his flashlight twice and the beam came back thin and yellow, cutting through dust that moved when he breathed.

The cabin had belonged to his grandmother. It belonged to no one now, the county records said, but that was not why he had driven the nine hours from his post outside Coeur d'Alene. He had come because the box under Mira Hollis's bed had contained a deed with her name on it and his, the names written in the same careful hand that had signed her letters. The deed was dated 1969. The cabin was older than that. The cellar was older than the cabin.

He swept the light across low rafters hung with cobwebs that had the thickness of twine. A shelf held rusted canning lids, a coil of wire, a Mason jar half-full of something he chose not to identify. The stairs beneath him groaned and he kept his weight on the edges where the treads met the stringers, an old habit from checking traplines in the Selkirks when he was young. The air tasted of damp earth and iron.

He had expected dirt floor.

What he found was stone.

Slabs of gray fieldstone, fitted rough and tight, ran the length of the cellar. Against the far wall, beneath a window boarded over with plywood, a stack of firewood had been arranged with a precision that felt deliberate. Beside it, an old oak crate held bottles, the glass clouded, the corks missing. He counted nine. The tenth lay broken on the floor, its contents long since spilled or drunk.

Caleb moved the light slowly, mapping the room. The walls were stacked stone too, mortared in places, dry-laid in others. The ceiling above his head was the underside of the cabin's floor, boards that had been planed by hand. He could see the nail holes, old square-cut nails that had left dark stars in the wood. The cellar smelled of river clay and rot, but the rot was old, deep, worked into the stone itself.

He reached the center of the room and stopped.

The stone here was different. Not in color. In sheen.

A patch of floor, roughly four feet across, glistened under his flashlight. The surface of the stone there looked wet, but when he crouched and held his palm an inch above it, the air was cool, not warm. He lowered his hand. The wetness was not water. It held the light the way oil does, in dark rainbows at the edges where the fluid had crept between stones and pooled in the grout lines.

He brought his face closer. The smell thickened, turned organic, a sweetness underneath the clay. He recognized the sweetness. He had smelled it on deer carcasses in the fall, when the gut pile had sat for a week and the maggots had done their work. He had smelled it on a drowned cow pulled from the St. Joe River in May. The sweetness came from things that had stopped being what they were.

Caleb stood and took a half-step back. His boot came down on a board that was not stone.

He looked down. The trapdoor.

The hatch was flush with the floor, its edges hidden beneath a rectangle of carpet that had been nailed down. The carpet was old, a maroon pattern gone to gray, and the smell here was stronger, rising through the weave as if the carpet were a lid over a pot. He crouched again and pressed his palm flat to the fabric. Cold. Not wet. Cold the way a well is cold, the kind of cold that has weight.

He pulled at the carpet's corner. The tacks held, then gave, and the fabric peeled back with a sound like adhesive tape pulled from skin. Beneath it, the trapdoor was a sheet of plywood painted black, set into a frame of two-by-fours. A pull-ring of bent iron sat at the center. The iron had rusted to a deep, almost black red.

He did not open it yet.

Instead, he crouched over the slick patch and studied it. The fluid had crept in a slow arc from the trapdoor's edge toward the far wall, where it had collected in the joints of the stonework and begun to climb. A thin capillary line, no thicker than a pencil lead, ran up between two stones and disappeared into the mortar. He followed it with the flashlight. It reappeared higher, thinner, ran sideways, and vanished again behind a beam. The pattern looked organic. The pattern looked like the path of water seeking its way through a wound.

He took the pocket knife from his belt and opened the longest blade. He held the steel an inch above the slick and waited. The blade did not fog. The blade did not drip. Whatever the fluid was, it did not behave the way water does. He lowered the blade until its tip touched the surface. The fluid parted cleanly, without the meniscus he expected. The blade went in to its first joint and came out clean. No residue. No clinging. The slick closed behind the blade as if he had never disturbed it.

Caleb stood and wiped the knife on his thigh. His hand was steady. His breathing was not.

He moved to the stack of firewood and crouched behind it, out of sight of the trapdoor and the slick, and let his back rest against the stacked wall. He took out the photograph he had carried from the town archives. The paper was soft at the edges, yellowed in a way that spoke of decades in a filing cabinet. He had looked at it three times already that day. He looked at it now.

The photograph showed Ezra Hollis, the schoolteacher, standing on the porch of a building he did not recognize. Behind Ezra, a window reflected a treeline that looked like the pines south of town. Ezra's face was thin, serious, his mouth set in a line that was not quite a smile and not quite a frown. His eyes were the part Caleb kept returning to. In the dim of the cellar, the photograph's contrast had shifted, or seemed to have shifted, and Ezra's eyes looked wet, as if the man in the image had been caught mid-blink, or mid-tear. Caleb turned the photograph toward the flashlight. The wetness in the eyes was still there. He angled the photograph. The wetness followed the angle. He angled it back. The wetness followed.

He put the photograph away.

Mira Hollis appeared in a second photograph, smaller, tucked into the same manila sleeve at the archives. Caleb had taken it too. He unfolded it now. Mira sat on a porch railing, a wren perched on her finger, her face turned toward someone out of frame. Her smile was the kind that arrived before the mouth finished deciding to make it. She looked like someone waiting for good news.

Caleb folded the photograph and slid it into his shirt pocket, against his chest. He could feel the paper's edge through the flannel. He could feel, or thought he could feel, the faint vibration of a small body held still, of a wren's heartbeat against a child's finger.

He stood and turned back to the slick.

The slick had changed.

The patch of viscous black was no longer four feet across. It was closer to five, and the capillary line that had run up the wall had thickened. Another line had joined it, climbing from a different joint, and where the two lines met, the mortar had darkened. The darkness was not shadow. The darkness was wet.

Caleb took a step toward the slick and stopped. His boot had been on stone. Now, where his boot had rested, the stone glistened. He lifted his foot. Beneath it, the floor had the same sheen as the patch. He lifted his other foot. Same. He had not stood in the slick. He had not touched it.

The slick had come to him.

He backed toward the stairs. The slick followed, not fast, not in the dramatic lunge of something predatory, but the way frost comes, the way water rises in a capillary tube, the way rot spreads through wet wood. By the time his heel touched the first stair, the glistening patch covered most of the cellar's floor, and the smell of rot had thickened into something he could taste.

He did not go for the trapdoor.

He went for the stairs.

At the top, he pulled the cellar door shut and held it. The wood settled into its frame with a sound like a mouth closing. He stood in the kitchen with his hand on the door and listened. Below him, through two inches of plank, he heard nothing. He heard nothing for a long time. Then, just as he was about to step away, he heard a sound like a slow exhale, like a chest settling after a long cry, like something at last letting go.

He turned the lock. The bolt was stiff. He forced it home.

The cabin was quiet. The afternoon light came through the kitchen window in a slant that picked up every mote of dust in the room. On the table, the deed he had come for sat under a coffee can full of nails. He picked it up. He read the names again. Mira Hollis. Caleb Marsh. The handwriting was his sister's.

He folded the deed and put it in his pocket beside the photograph.

Then he sat down at the table, set his flashlight on the wood, and began to write in the field notebook he had carried since the first day of the search. The pencil moved across the page in a hand that was steady because he willed it to be. He wrote the time. He wrote the address. He wrote the words slick, viscous, black, capillary, trapdoor, photograph, Mira. He wrote the words and he did not look toward the cellar door.

Somewhere below him, in the dark, something that was not water continued its quiet, patient climb.

He stayed at the table until the slant of light moved three inches across the floorboards, then stood and pocketed the notebook. The lock on the cellar door held. He told himself it would hold. He told himself the sound he had heard below was nothing more than a house breathing, the way old houses do, the way timbers settle, the way pipes exhale when the temperature drops.

He did not believe himself.

He crossed to the workbench in the corner. It had been his father's first, a heavy oak slab scarred with decades of small repairs, the surface darkened where turpentine and linseed oil had soaked in over the years. On it sat a row of hand tools: a hand drill with a wooden grip, its bit long gone; a claw hammer with a head spotted with rust; a coping saw missing half its teeth; a pair of pliers locked shut with corrosion. They were arranged with the care of a man who had stopped using them but could not bring himself to throw them away. A small glass jar held wood screws in three sizes, their slots dulled from use. A square of beeswax sat beside them, dried to a pale amber, its surface printed with the ghost of a thumbprint.

He touched the wax. It was cold. The print meant nothing. He turned his hand over and looked at his own thumb and felt, for a moment, that the print on the wax was his.

Above the bench, a shelf. On the shelf, a row of jars that had once held nails and now held dust, a coil of picture wire gone slack with age, a tin of pipe tobacco with the lid soldered shut by humidity, a folded square of blue shop cloth stiff as leather. And, leaning against the wall at the back of the shelf, a photograph in a frame of blackened oak.

He reached for it.

His fingers touched the glass first. The glass was cooler than the room. He drew the frame forward and held it where the light from the window could reach it, and for a moment he thought his father had only put it there because there was nowhere else to put it, because the cabin had always been a place where things were kept, not displayed.

Then he looked at the photograph.

Two figures. A man and a girl. The man was tall and thin in the way of men who have never quite filled out, his shoulders narrow, his hair combed flat and parted on the side, his mouth set in the faint, private line of a person not accustomed to being photographed. He wore a white shirt with the collar buttoned, no tie, and his hands were folded in front of him at the waist in a posture that suggested stillness rather than ease. His eyes were the lightest grey Caleb had ever seen. In the photograph, those eyes had been scratched out. Two clean gouges in the emulsion, the paper beneath showing through as pale crescents, the lashes and brow intact but the iris and pupil obliterated.

He knew the man. Ezra Hollis. The schoolteacher. The man who had inherited the cabin. The man who had left it to his sister.

The girl was younger. Twelve, perhaps thirteen, in a dark dress with a white collar, her hair pulled back from her face. She stood slightly in front of Ezra, half a pace ahead, as though she had stepped into position first and he had stepped in after. Her hands hung at her sides. Her expression was not the careful blank of a child told to hold still. It was something else. It was the look of a child who had decided, early, to expect little and was prepared to be proved right.

Her eyes had been scratched out too. Two parallel scores, each the length of a thumbnail, the same depth as her brother's.

He held the frame at arm's length. The scratches did not move. The room did not move. The light did not move. Only his hands moved, faintly, with the pulse in his wrists.

He had seen the same marks, or marks like them, on other photographs in the house. The family portrait on the parlor wall had eyes intact but mouths gone, every mouth in the row scored through with a single straight line. The photograph of his parents on their wedding day had no marks at all but had been slid behind a smaller picture of a church steeple in a snowstorm, so that only the steeple was visible. The photograph of Mira as a baby, taken at the hospital, had been removed from its frame entirely; the frame stood empty on the mantel, and the photograph itself he had not yet found.

He set the frame on the bench and studied it.

The girl in the photograph was not his sister. He knew that. The girl in the photograph was Mira Hollis, Ezra's younger sister, the girl who had walked into the pines and not come back. He knew her face from the missing poster in the post office, from the yearbook photograph in the school archives, from the small square of newsprint he had carried in his wallet since the second week of the search. He knew her face better than he knew his own.

But the girl in the photograph was standing in front of Ezra. And Ezra's hand, in the photograph, was resting on the girl's shoulder. And the girl's hand, in the photograph, was resting on top of his. And the scratches, when he looked again, had not been made from the front of the photograph. They had been made from behind. The emulsion on the glass side was smooth and undisturbed. The paper side was torn through to the backing card.

He turned the frame over. The backing card was held in place by four small brads, one in each corner, all driven flush. He worked a thumbnail under one and pried it up. The brad resisted. He used the rusted claw hammer from the bench, hooking the claw under the head and levering it free. The brad came out with a faint squeak. He pried the second. The third. The fourth.

The backing card came away in his hand. Beneath it, on the back of the photograph itself, someone had written in pencil, in a small, careful hand:

For E. and M. May they not see what I have seen.

He read it twice. He read it three times.

The handwriting was not his sister's. He had spent enough years studying her handwriting to know the loops and slants of it, the way she crossed her t's high on the stem, the way she dotted her i's with a small press rather than a tap. This was someone else's. The letters were evenly weighted, the spacing deliberate, the pressure constant. It was the hand of someone who wrote carefully because the words mattered, not because the writer was unsure.

He set the backing card on the bench and turned the photograph over.

The faces looked up at him. The scratched eyes, the set mouth of the man, the patient mouth of the girl. He studied the man's hand on the girl's shoulder. He studied the girl's hand on the man's. He studied the dress the girl wore, the pattern of small white flowers on dark cloth, a pattern he thought he had seen somewhere in the house but could not place.

Then he noticed the background.

In the photograph, behind the two figures, there was a window. Through the window, a stand of pines, and through the pines, a faint shape that he had taken, at first glance, for the slope of a hill or the roof of a distant building. He looked at it now. The shape was not a hill. The shape was not a roof. The shape was a figure. A figure standing among the pines, half turned away, its outline blurred by distance and the imperfect focus of the camera. The figure was wearing a dark coat. The figure was looking toward the camera.

He could not see its eyes. It was too far away. But he could see, in the blur of its face, the suggestion of two small pale shapes where the eyes should have been.

He set the photograph down on the bench, face up, and stepped back. The figure in the background did not move. The scratched eyes did not move. The hands did not move. The cabin settled around him with a sound like a long breath drawn in through teeth.

He thought of his sister in the parlor, writing her name on the deed. He thought of the slick black surface on the cellar stairs. He thought of the slow exhale he had heard through the cellar door. He thought of the figure in the pines behind two people who could no longer see.

He picked up the photograph and slid it into his pocket beside the deed.

The workbench held nothing else of interest. He made a note in the field notebook: workbench, tools rusted but arranged, photograph Ezra and Mira, eyes scratched out, figure in background, inscription on back. He did not write down what he thought the inscription meant. He would not write that down anywhere. He would carry it in his head, where the writing could not be found.

He crossed to the kitchen door and looked back at the cabin. The afternoon light had moved. The slant that had crossed the floorboards now lay across the workbench, picking out the squares of dust the photograph had covered, the pale rectangles where the frame had stood for years. The lock on the cellar door held. The bolt was stiff. He had forced it home.

He stepped out onto the porch. The pines stood in a long rank to the west, and the wind moved through them with a sound like a hand drawn slowly across a comb. He closed the door behind him. He did not lock it. There was no lock on the front door. There had never been a lock on the front door.

He stood on the porch for a long time, listening.

The cabin settled around him as the light failed.

He counted the hours the way his father had taught him, by the slant of the shadows through the porch slats. When the rectangles of amber reached the second upright he went inside. When they left the third upright entirely, he lit the lamp. The wick sputtered, steadied, threw a yellow circle across the kitchen table that did not reach the cellar door.

He ate from a tin of beans he had found on the shelf, cold, with a fork from the same drawer. The taste was metallic, oily, faintly sweet in the way of food that had been canned before he was born. He chewed slowly and listened to the cabin. The wind pressed against the east wall in slow, irregular gusts. Somewhere in the roof a loose shingle ticked against its neighbor. The floorboards under his boots creaked when he shifted his weight, and once, when he stood to wash the fork in the basin, a different board spoke, lower in pitch, from a place he had not stepped.

He set the fork on the counter and looked at the floor.

The board lay flush with its neighbors. The seam between it and the next was dark with age, the same darkness that ran between every plank in the cabin. He could not tell, in the lamplight, if it was wet. He did not crouch to touch it. He turned off the lamp, climbed the stairs to the loft, and lay down on the bed his sister had slept in.

The mattress was thin. The straw inside it rustled when he turned. He could smell the dust of it, and beneath that the older smell of the cabin itself, cedar and ash and something faintly mineral, like the smell of water on stone.

He slept. He dreamed, and in the dream he was standing at the edge of the pines behind his sister's house, and the trees were leaning toward him, and a voice he almost recognized was saying his name from very far away.

He woke to cold.

The loft window showed a sky without stars. The air in the room had dropped. His breath did not show, but the hair on his forearms had risen, and when he pulled the blanket higher he felt the fabric resist him, as though something beneath it had dampened.

He lay still. He listened. The cabin was silent. The wind had died. Even the shingle in the roof had stopped its ticking. In the silence he became aware of a sound he had been hearing for some time without recognizing it, a sound so low it was almost not a sound at all, a vibration in the boards beneath the mattress, a frequency he felt in the small bones of his ear rather than heard with them.

He swung his legs off the bed. His boots found the floor. The wood was cold, colder than the air, and when he shifted his weight to stand he felt the floor give, not visibly, not audibly, but in the way a man feels a thing he has stepped on shift beneath him.

He went down the ladder slowly. Each rung was colder than the last. The kitchen was dark. He did not light the lamp. He crossed to the counter where the matches sat and struck one, and the small flare showed him the cellar door.

The bolt was still thrown. The wood around it was dark. He could not, in the wavering light of the match, tell if it was wet.

He set the match to the lamp and turned up the wick and the kitchen filled with yellow light, and he saw the floor.

The black had come up through the seams. It lay in thin lines along the joints between the boards, glistening faintly in the lamplight, and where the boards met most tightly it had beaded and pooled, a dark syrup that did not run but sat, catching the flame in small dim mirrors. The line of it ran from the cellar door across the kitchen and stopped at the foot of the stairs, and from the foot of the stairs it turned and ran along the base of the counter and stopped beneath the basin.

It had not reached the table. It had not reached his chair. It had stopped, as though it knew where he had been sitting, as though it had a memory of the shape of his absence and had filled only the space he had not occupied.

He set the lamp on the counter and stood very still.

The fluid did not move. The lamplight held it in place. He could see, now that he was looking, that the lines along the seams were not uniform. They pulsed. They pulsed so slowly that the eye did not register it as motion, but only as a quality of the surface, a wetness that waxed and waned in a rhythm he felt again in the small bones of his ear, the same frequency the floor had carried when he lay above it.

He took a step toward the cellar door. The board he set his boot on spoke, low and long, and the line of black along the seam beside his foot thickened, swelled, pushed up between the planks by a pressure he could see but not account for. He lifted his foot. The board beside the one he had stepped on was wet. The fluid beaded along its seam and held, a dark row of drops that did not run, that waited.

He understood, then, that the cabin had been keeping him above. That the floor had been a membrane, and that the membrane had given. That whatever was below had risen to the level of the planks and was finding the seams, the way water finds the cracks in a roof, the way a root finds the soft place in a foundation.

He crossed to the basin. The water in it was black. He had not seen it black when he had washed the fork. He had seen it clear and cold, with a single leaf of dust at the bottom. Now it was the color of the fluid on the floor, and it did not reflect the lamplight. It absorbed it. The surface of it was perfectly still.

He did not touch it. He stepped back.

The line of black along the counter's base was wider than it had been a moment before. He could see the leading edge of it, a slow front advancing by fractions of an inch, a tide measured in heartbeats. Where it touched the leg of the counter it climbed the wood in a thin film, darkening the grain, and the wood beneath it did not swell or rot. The wood looked, if anything, more itself, the grain sharpened, the color brought up, as though the fluid were less a stain than a developing agent, a way of showing the wood what it truly was.

He thought of the photograph in his pocket. He thought of the figure in the background. He thought of the way the eyes had been scratched from the faces of the people he had loved, and of the way the eyes of the figure behind them had not been touched.

He went to the table and pulled out the chair and sat down.

The black tide reached the foot of the table leg and held. It did not advance. It did not retreat. It lay against the wood in a slow, patient crescent, and the lamplight caught it, and it was not the color of oil or water or any fluid he had a name for. It was the color of the inside of a closed eye. It was the color of the space between the pines when the wind died and the light failed and the air itself seemed to thicken into something that could be stood in.

He sat in the chair and did not move.

The cabin settled around him. The lamp burned. The black tide held its crescent at the foot of the table and did not advance, and did not retreat, and the silence in the room was not the silence of an empty place but the silence of a place that was listening.

From somewhere below the floor, below the cellar, below whatever the cellar was built over, he heard again the sound he had heard through the cellar door the night he arrived, the long slow exhale, the breath drawn in through teeth, and this time it did not stop. It went on. It filled the cabin the way water fills a glass, rising from the floor, rising from the walls, a sound without a source, a breath without a body, and the lamp flame bent sideways toward the cellar door and held there, and the black tide at the foot of the table leg began, very slowly, to climb.

He did not run. He did not call out. He sat in his sister's chair, in his sister's house, with the deed and the photograph in his pocket, and he watched the dark come up out of the floor the way a man watches the tide come in across a flat shore, knowing there is no high ground, knowing the water will reach him, knowing the only question is what he will do in the time that remains.

The flame bent. The dark climbed. The breath went on.

He reached into his pocket and took out the photograph and set it on the table in front of him, face up, and in the lamplight the scratched eyes of his sister and the schoolteacher were hollow and dark, and the figure behind them stood in the pines with its face half turned and its hand raised, and the hand was no longer a blur.

The hand was open. The fingers were spread. The palm was turned toward him, and the palm was the color of the tide on the floor, and the tide on the floor was the color of the palm, and the breath in the room was the breath of whatever stood in the pines behind the people he had failed, and it went on, and it did not stop, and the dark climbed the leg of the table and reached the edge of the photograph and held there, patient, waiting, as though it had always been waiting, as though it had been waiting since before he came home, since before his sister vanished, since before the schoolteacher walked into the pines and did not walk out, since before the town was a town, since before the pines were pines, and the lamp burned, and the dark climbed, and he sat in the chair and did not look away.