#12: Salt Line

Cal woke on Sharon Halder’s living room floor with soil in his teeth and a pulse beating through the wood beneath his cheek. The house had grown while he slept. A new curtain of runners had laced the entry to the kitchen. The coffee table looked a foot closer to the couch because a mat of green had shoved it there while stretching for a scrap of winter sun by the window. The socket near the television had burst its white faceplate, and a sprig with leaves had unfurled where a plug should be.

He rolled and sat up, then stood. The basement door was closed again. Or had it ever been open? The memory of stepping onto the first stair sat in him like a bruise, painful and indistinct. He would not return to that door. He didn’t need to see Harold’s shape pressed into a knot of earth and root and pipe, those wires that had not been wires, outlining the human shape as veins.

“Sharon?” he called into the leaf-soft room. No answer. He packed his field bag with everything except his flashlight, which must be lying somewhere on the floor of the basement, lost forever, and he went outside before the house could ask him to stay.

The sky said early evening, blanketed with a nickel-colored glow fading to haze at the edges. He hopped into the cab of his van and was greeted with a warm welcome from the familiar smells of stale plastic and sour coffee, and the van gave its typical cough before coming alive with a turn of the key. Cal eased from the curb and turned east, letting the feeling in his bones steer him.

As he rolled toward downtown, he drove through patches of chill and then warmth that had nothing to do with sun or shadow. Manhole covers, too, rippled with the surreal, giving off a vapor that rose in clean threads and dispersed as if stitching into the air. He passed a storm drain that hazed the air above it in slow exhale, and frost laid along the edges of lawns was etched in delicate lines of a frozen signal.

He turned onto Maple. He saw, beneath the orange flicker of street lamps starting to turn on, three familiar kids pushing their bikes with hunched shoulders and shoes that held the asphalt just a moment too long with each step. Did he remember their names? Cassie, Eli, and the little one. Cal slowed and rolled down the window.

“Hey,” he called, softer than he’d meant. “Hey. You seen Officer Halder?”

All three stopped, and the van slid the last three feet to them. As the kids’ eyes adjusted to him, Cal felt the wary attentiveness one gives an adult who appears at the wrong place at the wrong hour. Cal tried to smile and look friendly, which was more off-putting.

“We saw her,” said Cassie, approaching the window the way a person might approach a horse. “Down by Main. She didn’t exactly seem herself.”

“I bet,” said Cal, sharing more than he’d intended to let on. “You kids stay safe.”

Eli, beside Cassie, wasn’t watching Cal. He was looking down the slope of Maple the direction they’d been headed, to the curb, to the square of iron there. His face had the tense, listening quiet of a kid trying to tune a radio with the volume down. The grate wasn’t close, at least a stone’s throw away, but the air that breathed out of it blew Eli’s hair a fraction as if a  crow had just swept past.

Noah’s mouth made an O. “That is not right,” he said, his voice low and metered, the pretense of calm. “That’s definitely… not right.”

A crack opened along the street with a messy shear of pave and grit. The asphalt bulged in one spot as if it were a festering boil of tar ready to pop and spread disease. The frame of Cal’s van trembled against the upheaval.

“Get in,” said Cal. He surprised himself. Calling kids into his van was a line he never imagined crossing, and now, with the road visibly erupting toward them, it still felt wrong. “Get in. Please.”

The three kids looked at each other the way an animal with good sense looks at water you tell it is fine. Then something down their street made a guttural sound, and the lights in the distance went out in a neat sequence and came back in a different order, as if the town were breathing on a count.

Cassie made a decision with her whole body. “Okay,” she said, as if she’d just set down something heavy. “Noah. Eli. In.”

Cal popped the rear doors, and a trio of bikes and their owners clattered into the back like deafening applause. Cal shoved his gear aside to make room, made a point to call out the battery crate and say “don’t touch this,” then slammed the door like he’d been asked to escape worse scrapes than this in his life.

Cassie climbed into the passenger seat, and Eli climbed into the middle bench. Noah, incapable of not looking at everything, crawled into the back facing forward between the gear, looking like a kid being brave on a roller coaster as the van pulled away and headed toward Main. “What is all this?” he asked, tapping the battery crate Cal had told him not to touch. “What is this? And this?” He pointed at the loop assembly in its sad folded dignity, then his arm knocked a sack of rock salt and a dash of the stuff sprayed across the metal floor. “Oh, sorry…”

“That’s for the lousy winters,” said Cal. “The rest of the gear is mostly junk.” This was generally true. He’d scrounged half of it together himself. “Power. Antennas. Tools. A coil I built that runs too hot. A field tracer that’s finicky. Just… junk.”

“You’re The Wireman,” said Eli quietly from the bench, as if saying it louder might leak the secret to the world. He didn’t look at Cal when he said it. He looked at the loop antenna. His hands were on his knees, knuckles pale. “It’s your voice on the radio.“

Cal’s mouth drew into a line. The truth, spoken aloud, made him sound like a child playing adult. He settled for neither denial nor confession and chose a thing he could live with later. “I’m just trying to help.”

They reached Main and the place the kids pointed, a corner by the hardware store where the sidewalk L’d into a short alley. Cal’s bones recognized it before his eyes did, a pressure point where the town’s runoff and linework and roots had come to an agreement long before men with clipboards had walked it. He braked, set the van in park.

“Stay in the van,” he said, although his words lacked the proper tone of a practiced parent. “Whatever happens. Doors locked.”

Cassie looked about to say something, but then didn’t because something at street level exhaled and she saw her breath moved inside the van as if it wasn’t her own.

Sharon stood under the streetlight at the corner, exactly where a person might stand if she were deciding whether to cross, hands loose at her sides. She wore her coat. Her hair lay along her jaw like she’d walked through steam and it hadn’t had time to dry. In the orange lightpool she looked perfectly normal until you looked directly at her and saw that nothing at all about her was normal. Cal got out anyway.

Sharon smiled with the softness people reserve for children holding scissors. “You came back,” she said. “Good.”

“What happened to you, Sharon?” said Cal, stopping a car’s length from her. He tried, without being obvious, to place his body between Sharon and the van, which felt like something they’d do in the movies. “What’s in your basement?”

Sharon turned her head and looked toward the van. Her eyes flicked to the grate at her feet, then back to him, the way a nurse checks a clock and then your face to be kind. “Nothing happened to me. I simply received an invitation.”

“Sharon,” he said, as if names could anchor a person. He took a step. Something rose behind Sharon in the alley’s seam of shadow. A man’s figure, shifting in the light as if deciding what to show. Then the posture resolved. Harold Wicks of Harold’s Electronics with the kind eyes and the sour frown. Harold who, the last time Cal had stood in a room with him, had been sixteen different lengths of wire braided into an almost-recognizable shape of a man. Harold stepped into the light behind Sharon and turned his face to Cal as if to say hello without moving his mouth.

Cal slid another half-step forward and felt the grate nearest him get warm. He lifted his boot without thinking as hot air exhaled in a steady rhythm, fog rising not like steam from a crack but like breath from a throat. Frost along its edge broke and rearranged itself, and he saw the pattern he hated, a little drumbeat drawn in winter.

“Don’t,” said Sharon when he moved again, but it wasn’t a warning. It sounded like kindness.

She reached out and took his wrist. He expected human heat and got something else, a pressure that felt like the muscle of a vine across his skin, not tight but absolute. He tried to pull back and couldn’t. He didn’t want to know whether she would hurt him. He could smell the scent she’d picked up off the house, wet leaf and clean dirt.

From the van, behind him, a small commotion of elbows and knees knocked against his gear. He didn’t take his eyes off Sharon. “Stay there,” he called. God bless it, he heard the locks click shut.

The grate two feet from Sharon snapped up, thrown by something beneath. The iron banged against the brick with a scuffle of sparks and toppled. Warm vapor belched up, carrying with it a churn of soil that wasn’t soil any more. Cal saw the color of it, too dark and too alive, and saw it swelling as if under a membrane, and underneath the smear of vapor he saw lines inside it. Threads, cords, and roots, but also coax and old cable and a length of something that had once been a pipe and was now bent like a vein.

Harold moved in tandem with the pulse. He raised his arm like a schoolmaster ready to teach a violent lesson, and he took one step toward the van. Cal moved to cut him off but Sharon did not let him. Her hand on his wrist had the patient force of a road-wide tree root planting him to his spot.

Behind him, Cassie shouted his name, a bright flare of sound. The membrane bulging through the street hole heaved and then, with the slow pride of a thing that has pushed through and now means to claim fresh air, it rose.

Cal heard the creak and groan of his van door behind him, and the clap of rubber soles against concrete. “Stay back,” he said, already certain the words would be ineffective.

Cassie’s voice came next, calling out with equal warning, equal ineffectiveness. “Noah!” she shouted, using the tone a babysitter saves for difficult children.

Noah didn’t answer. He had carved a wide arc toward the hardware store. Good, thought Cal. Get to safety. But nothing about Noah’s fidgety behavior suggested safety. His arms were wrapped around that sack of rock salt, the salt Cal used when frozen chill mixed with dreary sleet to make the walkways impassible, or when his van needed extra grit to get out of a slick spot. Noah tripped and stumbled within a foot of Harold, who turned his head in a slow, ruined curiosity that made Cal’s throat close. Noah’s knees kissed asphalt with a skid, and the contents of that sack, ancient and raw and born of the earth, poured itself into the hole in the street.

The effect was wrong and perfect. The pulsing soil took the salt like an insult, its top collapsing inward as if someone had kicked the side of a soufflé. The root bundle recoiled as an involuntary muscle twitch. The rhythm that had been so proud hiccupped. The entire street made a low animal noise, not air moving, not voice, but the complaint of a large thing held back an inch.

Sharon flinched. Not a shudder of fear, but something like a misstep, like a dancer catching a beat half a second too late. Her hand lost its absolute strength and Cal pulled free as if he’d been holding his breath underwater and finally, finally had surfaced. He grabbed Noah by the collar and put him behind his own body without thinking. In the same motion he swung his free hand and hit Harold’s shoulder with the heel of his palm, a move so old and simple from childhood scuffles that it embarrassed him. Harold did not break. He simply… bent wrong, folded against the hardware store’s brick with a hang of limbs like a puppet set down between shows. His eyes were open. Cal could not stand to look at them.

“Van,” Cal said. “Now.”

Noah sprinted away with the breathless sound of a boy who had just gotten away with something incredible. Cal was close behind. Cassie had the passenger door open and then shut and locked again with brilliant speed, while Eli stared out his window at the hole in the street with his mouth parted. The membrane inside the soil shivered, reorganized, decided.

The van’s engine had never sounded so willing. Cal dove into the driver’s seat, yanked the door shut, put the van in drive and peeled away, tires making the ugly squeal he hated. In the rearview the street behind them did not explode or collapse; it breathed. He saw Sharon stand in the steam like a person on a dock in fog and simply watch them go.

Cal didn’t drive far. He pulled into the narrow space behind the gas station where the ice machine lived, backed into a cove. He turned the engine off and the four of them sat in obscene silence.

He took inventory. Cassie breathed like she had been practicing and was now ready to try for real. Noah had his head down and his hands open and white with salt; he laughed once without humor and then started to cry, quietly. Eli pressed his fingertips to his temples and stared at the glove box as if something in its contents might silence whatever signal still pulsed in his mind.

“You saved us,” Cassie told Noah, and hit him on the shoulder. “You saved us, you idiot.”

Noah laughed, but only a little. He wiped his face with the heel of his palm. “Salt,” he said, wincing at how obvious it sounded now that it was over. “Like… like my grandpa used to say. Salting the earth. You do that, nothing grows. I just…” He shrugged, a hard little movement. “I didn’t think. I just thought.”

“It made sense,” said Cal. “You did good.”

Under the van, through the concrete, the town shifted. Cal could feel it even here, the new line laid under the old, the schoolhouse rhythm, the practice count before the real music. In the distance, toward the beet plant, a plume of steam rose and then held in the air as if someone had ordered wind to be still by name. A telephone pole at the edge of the lot vibrated faintly, guy wires humming. The big light over the ice machine flickered and then steadied, not because it was safe but because someone had decided the practice was over.

Eli looked at him. “What do we do?” he asked, with the quiet of someone who will do it even if the answer is stupid and dangerous.

Cal could still feel the rhythm from the street through the van’s floor, extremely faint now that they were away from the intersection but still there, pulsing. “We plan,” he said, using his radio voice, which somehow felt right. “We find where it touches. We make it hard to come up. We buy time. We find the right people to talk to, and find the right story to tell them.”

Cassie snorted, a strangled sort of laugh. “We have school tomorrow.” The absurdity of anything mundane or routine settled in her words.

“I’ll keep The Wireman live,” said Cal. That was his own routine, and a less absurd one.

No one spoke. They listened, the four of them, to the silence that followed and to the small noises a town makes to excuse itself from unnameable terror. And in the ruined quiet Cal let himself think about the lines. Salt lines and signal lines and the old feedlines that connected it all.

Back at the corner by the hardware store, where the soil churned and the asphalt boil throbbed, the air cleared. Sharon stood alone, patient in the lamp’s small circle, her hands arranged exactly where you would place them if you were waiting for a bus that always came on time. She turned her head toward the beet plant, where drains led to roots. Roots to wires. Wires to pipes. Pipes to people. And beneath it all, something smiling without a mouth, happy with its rehearsal, satisfied with the way the town had taken the note.

*** End Transmission ***