I stopped and looked back over my shoulder, back the way I’d come, aiming the flashlight towards the brick archway and the chifforobe. But the beam revealed nothing behind me now except the otherwise featureless plain of mud and stones and pools of stagnant water. I’ll admit, it isn’t much of a flashlight, but I knew I couldn’t possibly have gone more than twenty or thirty yards past the slate threshold. Thirty yards at the most. And that was the last straw, I suppose, not being able to see the archway, and the panic I’d managed to keep at bay since descending the stairs started closing in on me.
I dug the cell phone out of my jeans and flipped it open. It chirped at me, just the silly little tone it makes when opened or closed, but, in the darkness, the sound was loud and unexpecteded, and it startled me. I almost dropped the flashlight. The phone’s colorful display screen glowed cheerfully in my hand, informing me that it was 2:23 p.m., and I cursed myself for not having noted the time before entering the cellar. The phone was showing two bars, so I figured I could at least get a call out, if it came to that. I saw the battery was low, so I closed the phone and put it back into my pocket, then pointed the flashlight north again. The mud and darkness seemed to go on that way forever, sloping very gradually, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of the red tree and Ramswool Pond.
For the first time, I shone the flashlight up, sweeping the beam along the ceiling of the chamber, the space, the cavern — whatever I should call it. The word abscess comes to mind, with all its various connotations. At any rate, the ceiling was maybe fifteen feet above me, and, near as I could tell, appeared to be composed mostly of stone, though I noted that, in places, the roots of trees and smaller plants had broken through. Which got me to thinking — if I had found a cavern exposed when the foundation was dug back in the 1700s, such a broad hollow at such a shallow depth, what the fuck was keeping it from simply collapsing in upon itself and creating a huge sinkhole behind the farmhouse? I shone the light to my left and right, but still saw no evidence of a wall to either my west or east, respectively. It seemed impossible to me, and still seems so now, that the ceiling could have supported its own weight (not even taking into account the trees and such). I tried not to dwell on it. At least, I thought, I could easily follow my muddy footprints back to the archway and the cellar proper, and took all the solace in that thought that I could scrounge.
Belatedly, I began to count off my steps, and, probably, it was more to have something to occupy my mind than anything else. I kept walking north, towards the place where the pond and the red tree waited, shining the flashlight ahead of me, occasionally calling out to Constance. I’d not heard her since entering the cellar. My shouts echoed down there, the way voices echo in empty buildings, or large enclosed spaces. The way voices echo inside abandoned warehouses, or in cathedrals, for example.
When I’d counted thirty or so steps — counting silently to myself to avoid that unnerving echo — I stopped again, and, again, I shouted for Constance. The gradient was becoming steeper, and another odor had been added to the dank stink of the place, the smell not of rotting plants and not of mildew, but of rotting flesh. I suppose it might well have been nothing more than my imagination grinding away in the darkness. As it was, I was trying hard not to consider the possibility that the same bizarre violation of physics that had plagued our “lost picnic” was now at work, belowground, the same warping of distance and time that Olivia Burgess claimed to have experienced when she visited the tree in October 1957. That possibility was plenty enough morbid without adding to it the faint reek of death. And the air was growing noticeably colder. My breath had begun to fog. Of course, it was so awfully humid down there — the dew point would have been so high — it would not have had to have been that cold in order to see my breath. Unless I’m misremembering the science about relative humidity and dew point and the condensation of moisture, which is always a distinct possibility.
Regardless, for whatever reason, I found this is where I was unwilling to go any farther. Thirty or so paces past where I’d begun counting my footsteps. I’m not even sure it was any sort of conscious decision; I simply could not bring myself to go any deeper into that place. I stopped and shouted for Constance, and my voice sounded enormous. But, when I once again shone the flashlight to my left and right, I found rough granite walls only ten or fifteen feet away on either side of me, and when I pointed the beam at the ceiling, it was near enough that I could have reached out and touched it, despite my strong impression that the northward slope here was, if anything, a few degrees more acute than when I’d first noticed it. I stared at the walls a moment, and then at that ceiling. The stone did not look like the stone of a natural cavern, but appeared to have been hewn with picks and chisels. Quite some time ago, by the look of it, as the marks left on the granite by iron tools were faint, faded by time and erosion. But they were unmistakable. Some one made that passageway.
That’s when I heard something behind me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I almost screamed. I turned quickly around, expecting anything at all, but there was only Constance, standing a scant few yards away. She was naked, though almost every inch of her bare skin was smeared with the ocher mud, a yellowish shade of ocher leached, I guess, from the minerals in the gneiss or granite. Her long hair was matted with mud, tangled with it, and, by the flashlight — if only for an instant — her eyes seemed to glimmer iridescently, the sort of predatory eye shine I would have seen, say, from that cougar at the Birmingham Zoo, or from a coyote or feral dog prowling about our garbage cans. She said something then, though I honestly have no idea what. It was barely more than a whisper.
I said something, as well, but it wasn’t a reply. I think it was only her name. I must have sounded relieved, and perhaps surprised, as well. I must have sounded breathless. I remember realizing that I was sweating, despite the chilly air.“
I got lost,” she said, speaking louder now, but only slightly louder. I am sure that is what she said, but the next part was, I am equally sure, not in English. At the time, it sounded to me like German or Dutch, or even a mix of the two. She said it twice, seeming to take special care to enunciate unfamiliar syllables. Later, trying to recall the details before I sat down to write this, I became convinced it was German that she’d spoken to me, and that what she’d said was something close to“Irgendwo in dieser bodenlosen Nacht gibt es ein Licht.”Or, if it was Dutch, instead—“Ergens in deze bodemloze nacht is er een licht.”Both would translate the same—“Somewhere in this bottomless [or unending] night there is a light.”
Constance has since told me that she neither speaks nor understands German (or Dutch). Moreover, she has no memory of my having found her down there, much less anything she may have said. She tells me she remembers going down the stairs, and that she remembers finding the fieldstone archway and the chifforobe, before she became disoriented.
Anyway, I think I said something about the cold, then, that she must be freezing, that we had to get her back upstairs, something of the sort. I won’t even pretend to know precisely. I expect I said the sort of thing one says after finding a lost friend underground. And Constance shook her head and frowned, like there was something she needed me to understand, and I wasn’t listening. Or I was too thick to grasp her meaning. And that’s when she raised both her arms, which had been hanging limply at her sides. And I saw the leaves she was clutching. They were green, and not the least bit wilted. She might have picked them from the boughs of the red oak only moments before.