As James watched, the right side of the piled dirt collapsed, and that triggered something in his mind. He suddenly remembered a dream he’d had the other night. He’d been in a hole, or, more accurately, a tunnel, a tunnel he had dug in the dirt. He was sliding through this tunnel on his stomach and eating the dirt in front of him. It was a crazy dream, but the craziest thing about it was that the dirt tasted great. He’d never encountered anything like it, and he found that he not only loved the taste but the texture. Everything about the dirt was amazing. It was the most exquisite flavor he had ever come across, and he wanted more, he wanted all of it, and seconds later he was creating a new tunnel as he ate through the wall to his left.
Now, curious, James reached into the compartment and picked up a small sample of the dirt in front of him, putting it to his lips. On his tongue, the granules felt odd, rough, dry, not enticing at all, but the flavor …
Was good.
“What are you doing?” Robbie stared at him, shocked, and James suddenly realized how completely whacked-out this must seem.
Seem?
It was completely whacked-out, and he didn’t know what had come over him, why he’d done it. It was as though he’d been hypnotized or was in a trance, and he spit out the dirt in his mouth, grimacing as he wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve. Standing up, he hurried over to the bookcase, grabbed one of the Capri Sun pouches, yanked off the straw, shoved it in the hole and drank. He finished the whole pouch, but he could still taste the dirt, and it—
It still tasted good.
No! He shouldn’t be thinking that, didn’t want to think that, and he tried to force his brain to concentrate on something else.
But the mood in the loft had shifted. Robbie was looking around the room as though he didn’t recognize it, as though he was a little bit afraid of it, and James, too, felt slightly spooked. He glanced toward that open hole in the wall, and it seemed somehow darker than before. Why had someone made that secret compartment? he wondered, and none of the answers he came up with were good.
Reaching for the board, he quickly covered up the space.
And everything shifted back.
The uneasiness he had felt only seconds before, the air of dread that had seemed to hang over their headquarters, disappeared. All was back to normal, and it was hard to imagine that it had ever been different. He and Robbie looked at each other.
“Who do you think made that secret compartment?” Robbie asked. “And what do you think they used it for?”
“I have no idea,” James admitted.
They were both silent after that, neither of them knowing what to say, both of them embarrassed by what James, for some inexplicable reason, had done. Robbie walked over to the bookcase, opened the can of Pringles and pulled out a handful of stacked chips. James stood awkwardly in the center of the room, trying to think of something to do. Finally, he walked over to the window and looked down at the backyard, wondering whether they could put some sort of screen or shade over the glass that would allow them to see out but keep others from looking in. That way, they could spy on anyone planning to approach the headquarters.
His eye took in the grass, the bushes, the house. His gaze traveled up the side of the house to the window of his father’s office on the second floor—
And he quickly sucked in his breath.
Standing in the window, staring out at him, was a dirty man wearing tattered clothes.
Grinning.
It was the man from his dream, the man from the basement, and even from here, James could see the unnatural whiteness of the teeth, the odd musculature of the not-quite-human face.
Where was his dad? James wondered. The idea that his father was also in the office, with this … thing, made James’s blood run cold. “Robbie?” he said, but his voice came out a whispered croak. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Robbie?”
“What?”
James heard his friend walking over, but he refused to look, keeping his full attention on the figure in the window. A split-second before Robbie drew close enough to see him, the man disappeared, winking out of existence as though shut off by a switch.
“You just missed it!” James pointed. “There was a man standing in that window.”
“Your dad?”
“No. The man who I dreamed was in the basement.”
Robbie said nothing, but his face was pale.
“He was there. I saw him. He was looking at me.”
Robbie didn’t argue, and James knew that his friend believed him.
He didn’t want Robbie to believe him, James suddenly realized. He wanted to be talked out of what he’d seen, wanted to be faced with a perfectly reasonable, rational explanation that was so airtight and all-encompassing he could not deny its truth. He didn’t want to be left with this confusion. And fear.
But he said nothing to Robbie, and the two of them worked in silence as once more they rearranged their scavenged furniture.
The next morning, James found a bobcat skeleton in the dirt.
He wasn’t even sure why he decided to dig the hole when there was still so much work to do on their headquarters, but after breakfast there remained two hours until Robbie came over, and James went outside, took a shovel out of the storage shed and shoved its pointed end into the hard-packed earth of the backyard, using his foot to press it in more deeply, piling the loosened dirt into a mound next to one of the rosebushes. In his mind was some vague notion of making a secret tunnel, or perhaps an underground space where he could hide things, but, in truth, he had no plan, no real reason for doing what he was doing. He just … felt like digging.
And dig he did. Beneath the hard layer of topsoil, the dirt became looser, easier to shovel out, and he worked with increasing focus and dedication until, about three feet down, he came to the skeleton.
It was complete and unwrapped, and he didn’t know how he knew it was that of a bobcat, but he did. The dirt here had started to become a little harder, firmer, and he was easily able to dig around and under the bones, removing the skeleton intact. Placing it on the ground, he studied it, wondering how it had gotten there and what had happened to the animal, what had killed it. If he could clean off the skeleton and keep it together, they could put it in the headquarters along with the puppy. The place would look like a real crime lab.
But he didn’t try to clean it off now. He picked up the shovel, stepped back into the hole, and once again started digging. There were other skeletons beneath and around the bobcat: a squirrel, a rat, a rabbit. It was an odd coincidence that he’d started digging at the very spot where all of these animals had been buried, but James didn’t really think about that, didn’t really think about anything, just kept shoveling, placing the bones on the flat ground next to the growing mound of dirt.
He was sweating from exertion, but he didn’t stop, didn’t slow, in fact picked up the pace. He kept looking over his shoulder at the back door of the house, wondering whether—
hoping
—his mom or dad would see him, come out and make him stop digging.
But they didn’t, and he kept on. As the bottom of the hole grew deeper, narrower, he started thinking about what it would be like to tunnel into the earth headfirst, not using the shovel but using his mouth, eating his way through the soil, carving out a smooth passageway with his body. Although he made no conscious decision to do so, James scraped out an alcove that slanted away from the main body of the hole, then tossed the shovel onto the ground above. Dropping to his knees, he placed his head into the recessed cavity. The dirt smelled good, fresh, sweet.