It was the smell of gasoline that first woke me up. I jerked at the twisting smell of future fire in my nostrils and blinked against the dark of my bedroom. I was still in my house, in my bed. But unlike when I’d gone to sleep, I was no longer alone.
“I’m sorry to wake you, Mischa. But you have to see it.”
My heart was pounding, but the sharp fear that had come with being startled by the looming shadow next to my bed was dulled now by familiarity and confusion.
“Rollo? Is that you?” I saw the shadow’s shoulders give a shudder, but that was all. “What’re you doing here? Is something wrong? Why do you smell like petrol?”
His voice was rough with emotion when he spoke, and I had a moment where I thought he might’ve been drinking. But his words weren’t slurred or imprecise, just thick with a kind of dread and sadness that made my pulse quicken as I reached for my bedside lamp. His hand caught my gesture, wet and slick and cold against my wrist, and I gave a small yelp despite myself.
“I’m sorry, little bell. You should not see until you must. It would only make it worse for both of us.” He let go of my wrist and I instinctively pulled it against my chest rubbing away some foul-smelling residue on my sleep shirt while trying to make sense of what was happening.
“Are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?”
“No. There’s no help for it.” He was silent for a moment, and I almost tried to get up and move past him. I trusted my brother, but he was acting very strange, and I didn’t know if he was in his right mind. Besides, the fumes were making my eyes water and I just…
“I went back down in the tunnels this afternoon.”
I started at that. Last week, Rollo and our father had been out hunting in the woods behind our parents’ house when Father fell into what they first thought was a small sinkhole or crumbling bit of limestone shelf. When they looked closer, they saw it was a portion of collapsed tunnel—tunnel that looked very old and man-made. Rollo had carefully climbed down to join Father, and between the meager afternoon light of the forest and the small light Rollo always carried, they could see that the tunnel wasn’t as closed as the shadows had made it appear. In one direction there was a two-foot gap above a pile of rock and tangled roots, and in the other it seemed a grown man could walk freely if he stooped.
Father tried to stop him when he moved to explore it, but he’d ignored him at first, moving forward in the strangely thick and hot air. Rollo thought he could see something just ahead, a new tunnel or perhaps a room. As he walked closer, he saw he was right. The tunnel opened up into a room of some kind.
He stood at a roughly carved, asymmetrical doorway, shining his light into a narrow, rectangular room filled with a shadowy landscape of stone plinths and stalactite carvings that looked like questing hands reaching down in the dancing dark. He gave a nervous laugh when he was telling this part to me, his gaze shifting this way and that as though not sure where to light. I knew he was remembering being down in that strange and hidden place, and that the memory still made him afraid, even if he would never admit it. Instead, he talked about be startled by Father’s hand on his shoulder, telling him they needed to get out, that it wasn’t safe, that they needed to call the authorities. Rollo had looked funny, almost as though he was going to tell me something more, but then he just shrugged and said he’d obeyed and they’d crawled back out the way they’d come. That once they reached home, Father had called the university and told them about what they had found.
It was bad timing, what with summer break and everything else going on, but after a few calls he got a professor in the archeology department to agree to come out later in the month. He asked Father to not let anyone else go down there and to put up a warning sign and a string cordon if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. Father, who had always been a little in awe of the academics of the world, proudly and quickly agreed.
I hadn’t seen the place myself, not even the cordon, and I only had the vaguest ideas of what part of the wood they’d been in when Father had fallen through. To me it was an interesting story made more interesting by the involvement of my family and our land, but nothing more. Since the day Rollo told me about it over lunch, I hadn’t given it another thought.
“Rollo, why? Papa said not to. Did you take something from down there?”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh, and a new wave of fetid, corkscrew smell found its way into my nose. “I suppose so. I haven’t slept in days. I kept dreaming of it. And then last night, I realized I was walking towards it. I was barefoot and half-dressed, moving through the woods like a zombie. Maybe I could have stopped myself, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to see it again. To hear that voice again.”
I frowned in his direction. “Voice? What voice?”
His words were flat, black stones skipping across the darkness between us. “You’ll see soon enough, Mischa.” I could sense more than see him reaching into his pocket as he went on. “I’m not right for what it wants. It tried to change me, but I’m not strong enough. When it asked me who was the strongest, best person I know…” his voice broke a little, becoming wet and raw, “…the first thought I had was of you. God help me, I couldn’t help but think of my brave little bell, and it saw you. And once it saw you, it wanted you. For that, it says you must see this.”
I could hardly breathe I was so afraid. I should have been trying to get past him and out of the room—that had been my thought for the past several seconds as he spoke again—but instead I heard myself asking what? What must I see?
The raspy click of the lighter answered for him. The tongue of flame was impossibly bright in the midnight murk of my room, stunning me for a moment as he touched it to his arm. The fire ate him hungrily as he wheeled backward, slamming against the far wall and catching it alight. He never screamed or said anything, just flailed and twisted as the heat made his muscles and ligaments jerk and snap tight before being consumed.
I was silent too—staring in mute horror at what was happening to my brother. And at what I could see of him in the flames. I try to lie to myself. Tell myself that what I saw was from the fire or my terrified and addled brain. That Rollo hadn’t looked like that before setting himself afire.
But it’s a hollow lie. Even in the moment, as I watched my brother slide down the burning wall and shudder his last, the lie held no real weight or power or reality. I was already sensing some other truth as the rotten smell I’d noticed before came back stronger. Sliding out of bed, I looked around in the shifting firelight but saw nothing.
Then there was a hand on my shoulder.
And a voice speaking to me.
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