#11: Almost Time

The beet plant’s steam drifted like pages torn loose and carried on the wind.

Cassie could feel the damp of it cling to her cheeks and the ends of her hair, even this close to downtown. Lights were coming up in kitchen windows and cars rolled past with whispering tires as Cassie and Eli stepped through town. They walked their bikes so they could talk, but though no one was talking. Noah pedaled idly around them.

Eli had the look he’d had at the culvert, listening to something no one else could hear, except now he kept glancing down, not back, as if the ground were walking a step ahead of him and he was trying to keep its pace.

“So,” said Noah, continuing his circles, occasionally kicking his foot off the curb. “Sooo.” He circled again, hoping his movement might fill the silence. “If we tell my mom we went to the factory, Eli and I will be grounded until next year.”

“We’re not telling your mom,” said Cassie, and then, softer, knowing the edge in her own voice wasn’t for him, “We’re not telling anybody yet.”

“Yet,” Noah echoed, but he meant it as a joke and it fell flat. He stopped circling and rolled beside them, shoulder to shoulder with Eli, who was walking more quickly now. Eli’s ear had a smudge of black where he’d pressed it against the concrete. He’d done that twice, once at the main line that ran up toward the factory and again at the broken grate where the water cut back toward town, where the darkness had looked like it was going somewhere with a purpose.

Eli kept his eyes on the sidewalk as they turned onto Maple, where the old mill’s brick wall ran long and low behind the hardware store like a sleeper train. The town changed there, not in what you could point to, but in the way the air sat on your chest. The storm drains were larger along this stretch, and older, too. Half-moons of concrete gaped in the alley mouth and big square grates cut at the curb, enough to swallow a small dog if it strayed too far.

The sidewalk took them past the hair salon with its closed sign tilted at an angle, its plate glass reflecting the streetlight’s first lemon glow.

That’s where Eli stopped.

He didn’t make a sound when he did it. His arms didn’t lift, his head didn’t tilt. He just… became still, and Cassie, who had never thought of stillness as something you could wear, suddenly saw it as a jacket zipped to the chin. Noah’s tire buzzed loud in the quiet as he kept rolling, and when he realized Eli had halted, he put his foot down with a stumble that made the metal spoke click against the fork.

“What?” he said. “What’d we forget?”

Eli turned half a degree, nothing more, and faced the curb. The grate there was older than the others, Cassie realized, its ironwork thicker and less neat, as if someone had poured the bars in handfuls and called it close enough.

“What do you hear?” said Cassie. She stepped to him.

“They’re calling us.” Eli said it calmly, as if reporting the time.

Cassie peered at the grate. The frost around the bars formed a delicate white lattice that, when she looked long enough, did not look random. Eli had already bent closer.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey, don’t.”

Eli’s mouth was open a fraction, as if words were sitting there like small birds and he didn’t know whether to let them out. Cassie reached for his hood and pulled, and he rocked backward and stood up. His eyes took a moment to find hers. There was something like gratitude in them and something like annoyance, as if she’d interrupted a good song too early. He blinked and looked away, down to the grate again and then past it, down the line of curb, to where Maple shoved its shoulder into the alley that ran behind the hardware store.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s…” He frowned, searching for a word that would make sense to someone who wasn’t him. “It’s close.”

“Close where?” asked Noah. “Like a neighbor close or like a spider close?”

Eli did not respond. He had already begun to walk.

Cassie caught Noah’s sleeve and hauled him with her. She didn’t say “We can’t let him go alone,” because it was already too late for “let.” They were doing it, the three of them walking toward the hardware store, and the alley’s mouth received them. The light at its entrance was sodium orange, and then five steps in it changed. It wasn’t darker so much as flatter, like the colors in an old photograph. The ally’s dumpsters threw shadows that changed the shape of what was true, and somewhere a pipe up on the mill roof let off steam with a fluted trill and then fell silent.

At the end of the alley, the half-moon spillway under the old mill was partially swallowed by dirt. The concrete above it had cracked in a spiderweb pattern, hairline fissures that had accepted decades of dust, leaf bits, and everything else. In the shallow lip at the spillway entrance, soil had recently been pushed out, a little fan of loam at a place where it shouldn’t be. Cassie bent, touched it, and her fingers retained a smear that was damp and faintly fragrant. Dirt didn’t smell good in November. Not here. But this smelled like the first shovel in May.

Eli passed a hand lightly over the lip of the spillway, as if he were greeting it. He ducked his head and stepped inside.

“Dude,” said Noah, but quietly and without conviction, like he had already decided he would go too.

Cassie swore once, softly, then motioned Noah in front of her. She crouched and followed, her knees immediately damp from the concrete where moisture had beaded up invisible and then announced itself in a chill.

Inside, it could have been midnight. They pulled out their flashlights, which made little coins of light that fell onto the floor and did not go far. The passage went a short way and then kinked, the way old drains do to discourage animals from treating them like highways. Behind them, the last glimmer from the alley winked out. The air here didn’t have the sharp sting of outside. It had a different weight. Cassie breathed in and felt it settle into her lungs with too much ease, as if it had been waiting for something like her.

“Not far,” said Eli. He kept going.

They moved in a crouch. Noah’s sneaker scuffed and squeaked in small panics. Cassie’s light found the walls, which had the smears and scrapes of flood and silt, but also a filigree of fine roots that had pushed through hairline cracks and then laced themselves together into nets. In two places, rusted pipes had split open like old bread and offered the same dark soil Cassie had touched at the entrance. Her beam found, briefly, the wobble of tiny, translucent pill bugs making sick little commas on that dirt, then curling away from light. In one shallow spot, something green had begun. Not moss. Something with structure, a plant with a first leaf, pallid for lack of sun but alive as an injury.

Noah’s voice came back to her in pieces over the clatter of her heartbeat. “Okay,” he said, “so the town is, uh, gardening underground. That’s a normal hobby.”

“Shh,” said Eli, but not rudely. He was trying to hear beneath their noise. “Do you hear that?”

Cassie turned her flashlight, and the beam landed on a section of wall where the concrete had slumped and been patched unevenly. On that face, frost had formed in a delicate wafer, and in that wafer the same not-random pattern she had seen on the grate, a repeated shape of rises and falls that was neither music nor language but a cousin to both.

“Eli,” she said, speaking low, as if the tunnel hated loud things. “What are they saying?”

“Not words,” Eli murmured. “Not… like us. But it’s… moving. Like…” He put his hand out, hovered it above the frost, and drew a rhythm in the air. “Like a drum under a floor.”

Noah swallowed so hard Cassie heard it. “It’s weird that it’s warm, right?”

The warm air rose against their faces as if something in the concrete had expanded and contracted. Eli’s pupils were huge, his eyes reflecting her light like a fox in a field. He leaned, just a fraction, into that breath.

Cassie put her hands on either side of Eli’s face. “Hey,” she said, trying to get her own voice out of the place in her throat where it had lodged. “Over here.”

It took a second. Then he blinked, as if surfacing. She felt the tension under her fingers go from a drawn wire to something human again.

“Sorry,” he said, as if late to dinner.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Be careful.” She hoped that by saying it in a steady way she could take the sting out of the fear that had already built its nest behind her eyes.

Something far down the passage shifted. The sound it made was not footsteps, and it wasn’t any kind of animal Cassie knew. If the beet factory’s gears had decided, somewhere deep where no one could see, to roll slowly through soil, it might have sounded like that. The floor under her palms trembled. Very small pieces of concrete trembled loose from the ceiling and ticked against Noah’s jacket. He flinched and then whispered, too loudly, “I think we should go.”

They went. Not in a blind scramble, but quickly enough to bump into each other. As they reached the bend where the fading daylight appeared up ahead, the tunnel inhaled again. Warm air reversed and fell across their backs like someone’s breath at their napes. Noah made a muffled noise.

They squirmed through the last few feet and unfolded like pocketknives into the alley. The first real air slapped Cassie’s face, clean and sharp. Eli put a hand to his temple and stood with his eyes closed as if steadying. Noah turned a circle on the asphalt like a dog about to lie down, but he didn’t lie down, he grabbed his handlebars and rested his forehead on the seat as if the bike were a friend who’d waited for him.

“We’re obviously never doing that again,” he said into the worn vinyl. “Let’s just go home.”

Cassie tried to smile. The pieces arranged themselves obediently on her face but didn’t stick. She put a hand on Eli’s shoulder. He looked pale, but not sick. He looked like someone who had been shown a map and now knew exactly where he stood on it.

“It goes… everywhere,” he said. “Underground. The drains. The old lines. The pipes. The tree roots. It finds where all the things touch.”

She didn’t know if he meant the same it from Harold’s house, the one that had seized him and tried to make him part of its whole. She didn’t ask.

They crossed the alley and came back out onto Maple, then turned toward Main, the town opening itself like a book with a cracked spine. The coffee shop lights were still on, with Missy bustling between customers on the other side of the window. The sky had flattened completely, but the first stars were not visible yet. There was a glassy look to each of the storefronts, like you could push your hand through to the displays and they might not remain solid.

Eli slowed when they reached the corner, and Cassie caught up to him. She stopped, not because of Eli, but because she had the absolute sensation of being watched. It wasn’t by something behind them, not by the tunnel or its gaping mouth, but by something level with her eyes.

A person stood very still across the street, hands loose at her sides as if she had just finished drying them. Sharon Halder. She did not look lost. She was coming from somewhere or going anywhere. She was standing exactly where she meant to be.

Sharon’s hair looked damp and her clothes were wrong, too exact, the edges of cuffs crisp in a way clothes didn’t look at the end of a day.

Eli noticed her, too. The little sound he made was not fear. It was the sound he makes when he’s found the right frequency on the old radio in the den and The Wireman’s voice slides in so clean. It was recognition, as if something in his bones felt a familiar signal.

Sharon lifted her head and looked at them.

“Officer Halder?” Cassie called.

Sharon did not move. When she spoke, she did it softly, as if she’d been speaking to them already for a while and had waited to make sure she would not be interrupting. “You should go home now,” she said. “It’s almost time.”

Noah looked at Cassie like he was ready to immediately take this advice. Cassie’s body prepared itself to run, but she did not move her legs. “Time for what?” she asked.

Sharon did not answer. She did a small thing instead, and it was worse. She lowered her eyes to the curb right in front of the kids, to where a different grate cut a square from the concrete. She watched it the way a person watches a sleeping thing for its moving breath. Then she looked up again and smiled. It wasn’t a bad smile. If Cassie had never seen any of what she had seen today, if the drains were only drains and the frost was only frost, she would have said Sharon had given her a gentle, patient look like those reserved for children who are playing too close to the stairs. But the smile now felt like a ribbon tied in the wrong place.

From somewhere behind Sharon, down the street but far too close, came the sigh of warm air as if expelled from a throat. Cassie felt it on her face, and the hair at the back of her neck rose in a line. She took Eli’s hand and found Noah’s jacket with her other and pulled them both the tiniest degree nearer to her. “What are you doing out here, Officer?” she asked.

Sharon’s expression smoothed. She lifted her head, inclined it east, toward downtown, not like a person listening for sirens, but like someone who knows exactly when a bus will arrive and is checking her watch only to be polite.

“You should go home,” she said again, and there was no malice in it. There was kindness and there was something else, the way the sun is kind to a field but also burns it when it needs to make room. “It’s almost time.”

Sharon turned. Not abruptly, not with a start like someone who hears their name. She turned as if this were the next step in a series of steps and she had not missed a one. She faced east and began to walk. Her arms swung with human economy. Her shoes made the regular, small sounds shoes make. She did not look back at them because she had already told them what they needed to know.

Eli exhaled, a soft, ragged thing. “We should go home.”

“Thank God,” said Noah, his voice paper-thin.

Cassie watched Sharon’s back until it turned the corner past the barber shop and disappeared. The air where she had stood felt warmer by a degree, as if something had just opened a door and then shut it. The grate at their feet looked like any other square of iron. The frost on its edges looked like frost.

She thought of The Wireman’s voice a few nights ago, speaking carefully of the beet plant’s steam that had followed them from one end of town to the other, carrying with it a smell that belonged to neither kitchen nor field. She thought of the map Eli had seen in the dark, perceiving or feeling what she could not in the things that connected. She thought of Harold’s front yard, cold and electrifying.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go home.” Cassie kept her voice even. She let go of Noah’s jacket but did not let go of Eli’s hand until they had crossed the street and were past the coffee shop window and could see the corner where their road began. They didn’t look back. Looking back felt like a promise to return.

Behind them, somewhere under the concrete they had not looked at, something took a breath and held it. And then the town did what towns do, standing patient and unblinking, pretending it had not heard a thing.

*** End Transmission ***