“You can pass down the axe and shovel when I get to the bottom,” she said, and then her head was below the ground. Judith swallowed with a dry click and shut her eyes.
“All right,” Mrs. Sloan finally called, her voice improbably small. “It’s too far down here for you to pass the tools to me by hand. I’ll stand back — drop them both through the hole then come down yourself.”
Judith did as she was told. At the bottom of the darkness she could make out a flickering of light, just bright enough for her to see where the axe and shovel fell. They were very tiny at the bottom of the hole. Holding her breath, Judith mounted the top rung of the ladder and began her own descent.
Despite its depth, the root cellar was warm. And the smell was overpowering. Judith took only a moment to identify it. It was Herman’s smell, but magnified a thousandfold — and exuding from the very walls of this place.
Mrs. Sloan had thoroughly explored the area at the base of the ladder by the time Judith reached her.
“The walls are earthen, shorn up with bare timber,” she said, shining the light along the nearest wall to illustrate. “The ceiling here tapers up along the length of the ladder — I’d guess we’re nearly forty feet underground.”
Judith picked up the shovel, trying not to imagine the weight of the earth above them.
“There’s another chamber, through that tunnel.” Mrs. Sloan swung the flashlight beam down and to their right. The light extended into a dark hole in the wall, not more than five feet in diameter and rimmed with fieldstone. “That’s where the smell is strongest.”
Mrs. Sloan stooped and grabbed the axe in her good hand. Still bent over, she approached the hole and shone the light inside.
“The end’s still farther than the flashlight beam will carry,” she called over her shoulder. “I think that’s where we’ll have to go.”
Judith noticed then that the tremor was gone from Mrs. Sloan’s voice. Far from sounding frightened, Herman’s mother actually seemed excited. It wasn’t hard to see why — this day might finish with the spell broken, with their freedom assured. Why wouldn’t she be excited?
But Judith couldn’t shake her own sense of foreboding so easily. She wondered where Herman was now, what he would be thinking. And what was Judith thinking, on the verge of her freedom? Judith couldn’t put it to words, but the thought twisted through her stomach and made her stop in the dark chamber behind Mrs. Sloan. A little whore, her father had called her. Then he’d hit her, hard enough to bring up a swelling. Right in front of Herman, like he wasn’t even there! Judith clenched her jaw around a rage that was maddeningly faceless.
“I’m not a whore,” she whispered through her teeth.
Mrs. Sloan disappeared into the hole, and it was only when the chamber was dark that Judith followed.
The tunnel widened as they went, its walls changing from wood-shorn earth to fieldstone and finally to actual rock. Within sixty feet the tunnel ended, and Mrs. Sloan began to laugh. Judith felt ill — the smell was so strong she could barely breath. Even as she stepped into the second chamber of the root cellar, the last thing she wanted to do was laugh.
“Roots!” gasped Mrs. Sloan, her voice shrill and echoing in the dark. “Of course there would be—” she broke into another fit of giggles “—roots, here in the root cellar!” The light jagged across the cellar’s surfaces as Mrs. Sloan slipped to the floor and fell into another fit of laughter.
Judith bent down and pried the flashlight from Mrs. Sloan’s hand — she made a face as she brushed the scratchy tips of the two bare finger-bones. She swept the beam slowly across the ceiling.
It was a living thing. Pulsing intestinal ropes drooped from huge bulbs and broad orange phalluses clotted with earth and juices thick as semen. Between them, fingerlike tree roots bent and groped in knotted black lines. One actually penetrated a bulb, as though to feed on the sticky yellow water inside. Silvery droplets formed like beading mercury on the surface of an ample, purple sac directly above the chamber’s centre.
Mrs. Sloan’s laughter began to slow. “Oh my,” she finally chuckled, sniffing loudly, “I don’t know what came over me.”
“This is the place.” Judith had intended it as a question, but it came out as a statement of fact. This was the place. She could feel Herman, his father, God knew how many others like them — all of them here, an indisputable presence.
Mrs. Sloan stood, using the axe-handle as a support. “It is,” she agreed. “We’d better get to work on it.”
Mrs. Sloan hefted the axe in both hands and swung it around her shoulders. Judith stood back and watched as the blade bit into one of the drooping ropes, not quite severing it but sending a spray of green sap down on Mrs. Sloan’s shoulders. She pulled the axe out and swung again. This time the tube broke. Its two ends twitched like live electrical wires; its sap spewed like bile. Droplets struck Judith, and where they touched skin they burned like vinegar.
“Doesn’t it feel better?” shouted Mrs. Sloan, grinning fiercely at Judith through the wash of slime on her face. “Don’t you feel free? Put down the flashlight, girl, pick up the shovel! There’s work to be done!”
Judith set the flashlight down on its end, so that it illuminated the roots in a wide yellow circle. She hefted the shovel and, picking the nearest bulb, swung it up with all her strength. The yellow juices sprayed out in an umbrella over Judith, soaking her. She began to laugh.
It does feel better, she thought. A lot better. Judith swung the shovel up again and again. The blade cut through tubes, burst bulbs, lodged in the thick round carrot-roots deep enough so Judith could pry them apart with only a savage little twist of her shoulders. The mess of her destruction was everywhere. She could taste it every time she grinned.
After a time, she noticed that Mrs. Sloan had stopped and was leaning on the axe-handle, watching her. Judith yanked the shovel from a root. Brown milk splattered across her back.
“What are you stopping for?” she asked. “There’s still more to cut!”
Mrs. Sloan smiled in the dimming light — the flashlight, miraculously enough, was still working, but its light now had to fight its way through several layers of ooze.
“I was just watching you, dear,” she said softly.
Judith turned her ankle impatiently. The chamber was suddenly very quiet. “Come on,” said Judith. “We can’t stop until we’re finished.”
“Of course.” Mrs. Sloan stood straight and swung the axe up again. It crunched into a wooden root very near the ceiling, and Mrs. Sloan pried it loose. “I think that we’re very nearly done, though. At least, that’s the feeling I get.”
Judith didn’t smile — she suddenly felt very cold inside.
“No, we’re not,” she said in a low voice, “we’re not done for a long time yet. Keep working.”
Mrs. Sloan had been right, though. There were only a half-dozen intact roots on the cellar ceiling, and it took less than a minute for the two women to cut them down. When they stopped, the mess was up to their ankles and neither felt like laughing. Judith shivered, the juices at once burning and chilling against her skin.
“Let’s get out of this place,” said Mrs. Sloan. “There’s dry clothes back at the house.”
The flashlight died at the base of the ladder, its beam flickering out like a dampened candle flame. It didn’t matter, though. The sky was a square of deepening purple above them, and while they might finish the walk back in the dark they came out of the root cellar in time to bask in at least a sliver of the remaining daylight. The weeds atop the mound were still as the first evening stars emerged and the line of orange to the west sucked itself back over the treetops.