#8: The Hollow Route

The recorder in Cassie’s pocket knocked her bike frame with every rise of the pedal.

Last night’s broadcast from The Wireman had left them with a riddle and a warning. “The interference started near the processing plant,” he’d said, voice thin over the hum. “It came as a hum running through the lines.” He’d mentioned outages along Park and Miner, and a long row of incidences that flowed downstream if you knew the ditches, culverts and thin rills that coursed through town, connecting them like an invisible thread. “Stay off the lines if you can.”

“You heard it,” Eli had said when the den fell back into ordinary quiet. Not a question. “We need to go to the processing plant.”

Cassie had nodded. She’d been nodding a lot lately, even when part of her wanted to say no. “Yeah. Guess so. We haven’t checked there yet.”

“We’ll bring chalk to mark our way,” said Noah, trying to sound brave. He suppressed the frown that threatened to creep over his mouth. “And a recorder.”

“And string.” said Eli. He had smiled at this, like an inside joke only he knew, and offered no explanation. Cassie didn’t ask.

Now it was afternoon, released from school and just a few hours before dinner, each of them pedaling through a town that lay still and muted beneath the weight of heavy clouds. The sugar beet processing plant sat on the edge like a squatting thing, its stacks billowing up silent signals, the whole place humming like it had its own pulse.

“We’re not hopping the fence,” said Cassie as they skated off the main road and onto the service lane. “We’re staying public right-of-way.”

Noah pedaled slowly, standing on one pedal, swaying his handlebars back and forth. “Right-of-what?”

“Means we get to walk where everybody gets to walk,” she said, keeping her voice easy. “Nobody can yell at us for that.”

“Mr. Delling yelled at me for walking past his house,” Noah said. “That was the opposite of right-of-way.”

“That was Mr. Delling,” said Eli. “He’s just cranky.” Then Eli pointed to the ditch up ahead. “There. That’s where we’re going.”

The ditch along the main road opened up to a culvert as wide as a truck tire, a circle of concrete gummed with leaves and bottle caps stretched beneath the plant’s entryway drive. The inside was wet dark, fed by drainage. If you crouched and listened you could hear the tick of water falling from somewhere down the line. Cassie shivered and told herself it was the air.

“This?” said Noah, allowing his unease to show a bit more.

Eli stood very still, head cocked. “Yeah. This is it.” Cassie recognized the way his attention went narrow these days, like he’d tuned himself to a note no one else could hear. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” said Cassie, a question so common from her now it tasted stale in her mouth.

“There’s more than one line,” Eli said. “If you listen.”

Cassie squinted past him into the culvert. She didn’t hear lines. She heard dripping. She heard Noah breathing in that way he did when he wanted to look brave. She heard the wind pick up and distant leaves applauding, and, for a second, she thought she heard her own name whispered from around the curve of concrete.

“Fine,” she said, “We go in, but we don’t go all the way. We chalk our turns. We’ll use your string to know our way back.“

The string. Eli’s idea. He had known. Or suspected.

Eli’s hands were already busy spooling out the string, a bright laundry line twenty-five feet long, which he tied with a double knot to Noah’s handle bars. “You’re the anchor.”

Noah pouted. “I’m a post.”

“You’re our path home,” said Cassie. “Our beacon in the dark. You’ll keep us safe.”

Noah warmed to that, as if he liked the idea of being made of brightness and light. “Okay.”

Eli and Cassie went down to their knees and then onto their hands, their elbows nudging leaf mulch aside as their flashlights flickered in fidgety arcs. The culvert breathed cold on their faces. Cassie followed Eli, where she could watch his shoulders and look for his tells. She’d learned his ways when he became off, which is the only way she could describe the effect that came over him ever since Harold’s place.

Eli’s light moved carefully. He slid it along the concrete, tasting the surface with it. The heavy slick gave way to thin condensation and then to dry dust as they climbed the interior curve like the edges of a bowl.

“Recorder on?” he called back.

“On,” said Cassie. The tape rolled. She tried not to scrape it as she navigated the concrete.

“Tell it what we see,” he said. “So we don’t remember wrong later.”

“Culvert,” said Cassie. “South of the service lane.” She paused. “Smells like pennies and grass.”

“And it rings,” said Eli. “Like breath over a bottle.”

Cassie didn’t hear the ringing. She never heard the new sounds that bent Eli’s ear, but she let the recorder capture his words.

They moved forward until the culvert curved and dropped into a rectangular throat with stains creeping along its cracks like veins, thick with air that breathed in and out like an old house’s sigh.

Eli stopped. He tilted his head. Cassie felt the string in her fingers pull an inch tighter as she leaned, then slacken as she checked herself. “You okay?”

Eli put his palm on the concrete. Cassie saw his breath billow and waver, but she didn’t feel any draft. Could she hear a hum, or was she imagining it? “You’re doing the thing,” she said before she could stop herself.

Eli’s shoulders twitched. “What thing?”

“The listening with your bones thing,” she said, trying to make it light. “You do that before school sometimes. Before math quizzes.”

“That’s called thinking,” said Eli. He took his hand back and wiggled his fingers as if they’d gone cold. “Something’s been here.” He aimed his light at the floor. The prints in the silt were smudges more than shapes. They could have been rats. They could have been raccoon. They looked like a kid’s sneaker if you pretended hard enough.

Cassie took her chalk and drew a little arrow pointing the way they came, even though it was just a curve in the pipe. It was something she could do. It made her feel better. She angled her beam further down the rectangular throat.

The rectangular passage was taller as it descended. They could crouch instead of crawl, and then, after ten feet, stand with heads bowed like church. The walls became old brick, rounded by a hundred small floods. Their lights showed spider egg sacs gleaming like pearls and the scaffolding of dead weeds snagged in rusted grates near the floor.

“Hold up,” called Cassie, but in a hushed sort of way, the way you talk when you don’t want the darkness to turn on you. “I’m at the end of the string.”

Eli looked at his hand, at the fingers that were supposed to be holding the clothes line cord. “I missed that.” He cocked his head and looked around with his flashlight. Straight ahead, the brick passage continued into darkness. “That runs up to the processing plant.” He turned his beam to the right side of the tunnel, where a grate low on the wall had fallen from its rusted frame. Water scumming slow in a shallow channel led away into darkness, through a rectangular hole someone their size might be able to squeeze through if they tried. “That way leads toward town.”

He stared at the wall like that opening had been set out for him. His light was trained upon the muddy slurry beyond it, and his face had gone still, as if even blinking would smudge something he was trying to see.

“We’re at the end of the rope,” said Cassie, hoping pragmatic words might lure him back from whatever edge he stood on.

Eli’s shoulder shifted. He leg twitched. He looked like he might step forward. Cassie’s fear swelled. “Eli…”

Noah’s voice came tinny from the opening behind them, echoing off all the surfaces. “Guys? My butt’s freezing.”

“We’re coming,” Cassie called. She glanced at Eli’s hands to check for shaking. There was none. “Right, Eli? We’re going back.”

Eli considered. He stood very close to the shimmer of water. A bug, perhaps a beetle, drifted toward Eli in the scum and then spun away when his light hit it. Ripples moved outward and didn’t reflect back, which made no sense at all. “Right. We’re going back.”

But he didn’t. Not right away. His hand with the flashlight had gone still. His stare remained fixed. Was he leaning?

“Eli…” she said.

Cassie felt it before she understood it: the way air changes the moment before a storm. The hum under everything picked up, like it had rolled over to face them. The water in the channel went from a drift to a pull, pulling into the hole. Pulling him.

“Eli.” Cassie’s voice snapped like a dry branch breaking free. “Don’t go near that.”

“I’m not,” said Eli automatically, pulling his foot back to where it should have stayed. He turned like a dreamer turns in sheets, and his light walked across the brick and the wet. The pull wasn’t enough to drag his shoes, but it wanted to. Cassie saw that it wanted to. She felt Noah’s string tug in her hand.

“Listen,” said Eli.

“I don’t want to.” Cassie made herself look anyway.

The hole was nothing. It was an absence in the brick, no different from a hundred absences she’d seen since they’d come down here, except that it made noise where air shouldn’t. Not a whisper, exactly. More like when your ear fills with water and the world goes into a soundless roar.

“It knows me,” Eli said, and now there was something like wonder in his voice. “It’s…” He didn’t finish, because he didn’t know the right word.

Cassie breathed deeply, then touched the back of Eli’s neck with two fingers at his hairline, a place that made him laugh whenever she goosed him. He didn’t laugh now, but she felt the tiniest flinch as his body remembered itself.

“Hey,” she said, and she put a whole picture in her voice. She made it the den, the safe pile of blankets, the red tuner stripe, the coffee shop window where they sat and watched steam draw trees on glass. “We found something, right? That’s what we came for.”

Eli tilted his head, as if listening to her and the hole at once.

For a second, she thought he’d step forward anyway. He didn’t. He lifted his chin and moved his shoulder into the pressure of her hand. He took three small steps backward, eyes still on the dark, as if backing away from a stray dog he didn’t want to spook.

“Okay,” he said. Soft. Willing. The quiet pressed in around them and then, strangely, eased.

Noah cheered from the hole. “We retreating? I’m an excellent anchor but my toes are ice.”

Cassie took out the chalk and drew a bigger square on the wall, trying to mark this place with meaning, then they moved back the way they’d come. They followed their string, the chalk marks like breadcrumbs, with Eli going first because he always did, but something in his gait had changed now. The waver was gone. His feet placed themselves exactly where he put them.

When they spilled out into the ditch the cold felt sweet and sincere. Frost had gathered around the culvert edge while they were inside, as if it had been listening.

Noah hopped from foot to foot to get blood in his toes. “Did you find anything?”

“The main line goes under the factory,” said Eli, “but there’s a route that splits off and heads toward town. A dark grate.”

“A hole,” Cassie added.

“A path that pulls.” Eli’s mouth twitched. His eyes were clearer now. “A hollow route.” He wrapped his coil of string around his hand in a practiced figure eight. “We’ll put it in the bulletin.”

“That way The Wireman will get the message,” said Noah, eager to contribute.

Cassie nodded. She put her hand on Eli’ shoulder and left it there, and he didn’t shrug it off. “You okay?”

“I wanted to know,” he said, and then he looked at her so she would see the important part. “I still want to.”

She smiled without meaning to. If Eli could talk about it, he couldn’t be trapped by it. “Tomorrow we draw a map,” she said. “Maybe you can show me this hollow route.”

“Maybe,” he agreed.

They got going, Noah in the lead now that they were safely headed back, and streetlights hummed themselves on with those slow little breaths as the overcast sky brought an early dusk. Behind them, the ditch and the culvert and the rectangular throat went on being old and patient. The pull at the grate was still there. Cassie couldn’t feel it, but she could feel the idea of it, a sympathetic pain to Eli’s haunt.

Eli was here. He had come back when she asked. Tomorrow, there’d be fliers and bikes and the cruelty of pre-dawn morning. Tomorrow there would be the map. Tomorrow there would be the hollow route again, keeping its distance like a shy animal. Tonight would be the hum of the town taking a breath, and Cassie breathing easy with it for one more day.

*** End Transmission ***