Black hole.
He thought of the tunnel under the house. The one thing she didn't know about. The one place she couldn't see.
15
Tunnel
"Okay, look, I'm not doubting you now," he said quietly. "I think this house does some weird things. OK? And you have this sense of the house, right? Like—what, like it's part of you, right? Or you're part of it."
She nodded.
"But you really didn't know where my wrecking bar was, did you?"
She shook her head.
"The stuff high in that cupboard over the fridge, you knew about that. It sort of washed up there. Washed to shore, so to speak."
She nodded.
"So why couldn't you see behind the furnace?"
No answer. No movement.
He'd have to try another tack. "Why didn't you ever get to that job in Rhode Island? Why didn't you go? You were so close."
Still no answer.
"And you never got your degree. After working on it for so many years."
"Some of us don't suffer from completion anxiety."
Good. She was talking. She was joking a little. "What held you here, Sylvie? There were other people living in this house that last year before the landlord closed it down. I bet some of them even lived here longer than you. They were able to leave. The house didn't hold them. Your roommate, Lissy. She left, right? Got her degree?"
Sylvie shrugged.
"But you stayed."
"I guess I washed up here." She wasn't crying anymore. That was good, too.
"The whole house, you feel it, the shape of it, the strong points, the weak points. All the... moods. Of the house."
"Maybe. I feel things, anyway. Nobody knows everything about anything."
"Why not that tunnel in the basement?"
"I don't like the cellar," she said. "So sue me."
"It's more than that, Sylvie," he said.
"The house wants to be beautiful again. The tunnel doesn't have a thing to do with that."
But it did. He knew that. Whatever was holding her here had something to do with that tunnel. She couldn't go near it, but she couldn't get too far from it, either. He thought of how the tunnel had been closed off. The rocks piled up, yes, but placed lightly, balanced, not a solid barrier, not enough to contain anything large or strong. Just enough to keep from having to see what was down there. Or to keep something down there from seeing in.
"I thought for a while you were getting in and out of the house through that tunnel."
She shook her head. "Please just forget about that. It's nothing."
Forgetting it was the one thing he couldn't do. He was already filthy from plaster, from the dust of the rubble. He might as well do it now. He was going to have to do it eventually. "Look, just stay up here, OK? Nothing down there can hurt you." He got up from the bench and stepped through the newly disarranged piles of his tools until he found the pick.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Like you said, it has nothing to do with you. I'm going to walk the tunnel, see if it's caved in. See if it's a hazard. If it is, I have to seal it off for real."
"It's no hazard."
"Forget about it. It's nothing. Like you said." He grabbed his flashlight and headed down the hall for the cellar stairs.
She ran after him down the hall. "Please," she said. "Leave the tunnel alone."
He didn't pause in his stride. "I have a feeling that tunnel's the most interesting feature of this house."
"It's not. It's just damp and dirty."
"So you have been down there." He jogged down the basement stairs.
"Yes. But I stopped going because it isn't safe, it could cave in on you."
Don reached up and switched on the basement worklight. "Fess up, Sylvie. What are you hiding down there? You keep your stash down there?"
He meant it as a joke, but she wasn't laughing. "There's nothing down there that belongs to me," she said.
"Then stand back and watch the rubble fly."
Now, with a light, he could see how much the barrier had collapsed from his previous foray here, searching for the wrecking bar. The gap at the top was now several feet high. He could crawl over. But he didn't want to do that. He'd have to clear the rubble away to seal up the gap or to open it permanently. Either way, the job needed doing.
He set to work with the pick. Mostly he just used it like a scraper, drawing the stones away from behind the furnace. As he cleared them away, more fell from the barrier. "Look at this," he said. "Easy. Not much of a barrier at all."
He turned to face her. She stood half-hiding behind the furnace.
"Flimsy," he said. "Like it was built by somebody little and not very strong."
Finally it had collapsed as much as it was going to. Then the work got tedious and slow as he bent over and picked up the stones and pitched them or hiked them across the cellar out of the way. Sylvie backed out of range. He was vaguely aware of her waiting by the stairs.
By the time the job was done, his back was aching from holding that bent-over pose. But the door into the tunnel was clear. Taking up the flashlight, he took a couple of steps into the tunnel.
"Wait!" Sylvie called from behind him.
He turned back, found her standing between the furnace and the foundation.
"I'm begging," she said. "Don't go." She looked almost frantic, and yet she spoke quietly.
"Tell me why not," he said.
"Because I like you."
"What, there's something terrible down there?"
"Yes."
"Some kind of monster?" He said it mockingly. "I'm not much afraid of a monster that couldn't get through that barricade."
"There's no monster now."
His patience was wearing thin. "Stop the mysteries and tell me!"
Sylvie started crying and leaned against the furnace, her head bowed.
This again, thought Don, too tired now to be sympathetic.
"I'm going, OK? I'll be fine."
"I know you'll be fine," she said, trying to control her crying. "My roommate's down there, all right? Lissy's down there."
If there was one thing Don didn't expect, it was that. And yet it fit. Why she couldn't leave. Why she hated the tunnel. "I don't think you mean she's living there."
"She was cheating," said Sylvie. "She spent all her time that last semester with her stupid boyfriend, she was going to flunk out. So she started stealing my work and copying it to write papers for her own classes. If she got caught we'd both be kicked out! Nobody would believe I wasn't helping her cheat."
"You killed her for cheating?"
"I didn't mean to!" Sylvie turned to face him. "You think I'd plan something like that? She was always in the tunnel. Our apartment was the only one with access to the basement. So she did keep her stash there, her stash, I never used that stuff. But she had pot, sometimes coke, and she and her boyfriend would go down there to get high and... so I knew where she was. I was just going to talk to her. Lay it on the line. She had to stop or I was going to the dean with it."
Sylvie didn't like to go down the tunnel when she knew Lissy was there, mostly because she could never be sure Lanny wasn't there too. He often came up the tunnel the other way to join Lissy there, so Sylvie had no way of knowing if they were together or not. That was a scene she didn't want to walk in on. Sex didn't bother her, or even the idea of seeing people doing it—you don't go to college for this many years without getting an eyeful now and then. What she didn't like was to see Lanny and Lissy doing it. She'd heard it often enough in the next bedroom. Lissy was a squealer and Lanny was a grunter. It sounded like a pig farm and it nauseated her. She couldn't shake the memory of Grandpa's pig farm, back when she still had family. She stood on the second rail from the top, with her daddy holding her up to make sure she didn't fall into or out of the sty. She must have been all of four years old. The pigs were all bigger than her. Like elephants, that's how they seemed. Huge fat muddy pink backs lurching and trotting around in the mud, muzzling the trough, making hideous noises, grunts and squeals. And there was Papaw, teasing her by telling her not to fall in, those pigs would be just as happy to eat little girl as slops. In memory she knew he meant well enough. He'd forgotten the terrors of childhood, the credulity. But at the time she had no perspective. She believed in the danger, and for weeks after that she had nightmares about the pigs looming and grunting over her. They'd be trotting past, back and forth, and then all of a sudden one would notice her and start to squeal. Mud sharks, that's what pigs seemed like to her. So the sounds she heard from Lissy and Lanny, they weren't erotic, they were disgusting and, when she admitted it to herself, terrifying.