The Hole (30 page)

Elliot looked at her. “You
know
that?”

“This feeling, it’s- Elliot, it’s the weirdest thing ever. I’ve done this before, that’s what it’s like. I’ve seen all this or lived it-dreamed it, maybe. You’re not getting it, too?”

“No.”

“I wonder why not.”

“I don’t know,” Elliot said. He remembered her in the middle of Nahom, standing with the golden box over her head, the crazies dying all around them. He remembered what she’d said and the burst of light that followed. What was she? “Let’s try it, then,” he said and reached for the door.

It fell open at his touch, swinging back on silent hinges. Beyond was a set of stairs leading down.

“Told you,” Evajean said.

“I’ll go first,” Elliot said and started down. Unlike the basement of that terrible house, these stairs were solid, industrial grade. They didn’t squeek and they didn’t give under his weight.

At the bottom, the room opened out onto an expanse of six foot high shelves in rows, filling an area that had to be close to the size of the museum’s entire first floor. On the shelves were cardboard boxes, metal cages, and plastic bins. Stuff between all these were rolls and sheets of paper, some new and others faded and crumbling.

“Storage,” Evajean said, taking a step past him and looking around.

“I hope you know where this thing is.”

“I will,” Evajean said. “I just need to get closer.”

She walked out into the room, along one of the rows of shelves, and Elliot followed. “You think it’s all the stuff they couldn’t fit in the exhibits?” Evajean asked.

“Maybe,” Elliot said. He pulled a bin out from a shelf and looked inside. It was filled with packaged of various sizes, from a small as a golf ball up to perhaps a human skull, all wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. He lifted one and found it heavy. “I bet these are rocks,” he said. “Maybe all this is for research. Palentology, archeology, that sort of thing.”

“There sure is a lot of it.”

Elliot dropped the package and slid the bin back into place. “You getting anything?”

Evajean turned to him and shrugged. “Maybe. It’s hard to tell. I wish I knew what it was, what I was looking for.”

“I don’t think that’d help much,” Elliot said. “Not in all this.”

“Let’s keep going,” Evajean said. “It’s here, I know that.”

They’d made it to the end of that room and two-thirds down the next one when Evajean held up her hand. “We’re close,” she said. “It’s like… a tingle, in my hands and stomach. I know we’re close.” She walked to one of the shelves, stopped, shook her head, and headed to another. “Where are you?” she whispered.

Something crashed upstairs. A bang rattled the ceiling, kicking up dust, and then a tremor went through the room. Evajean stumbled and fell against a shelf before Elliot could catch her. “What the hell was that?” he said when the shaking stopped.

Evajean stared at him, eyes wide. “Was that- Is there someone here?”

“Quiet.”

But there was no further sound. Elliot gave it at least a minute, crouched next to an enormous cardboard box, leaning close to Evajean, a hand on her knee. He tried not to breathe. And he heard nothing. Finally, he said, “It was just an earth-”

“No,” Evajean said. “No, if it was an earthquake, why’d it start upstairs? Why didn’t we feel it and then have the crash, instead of the other way around?”

Elliot shook his head. He had no idea. He stood up. “Let’s find this thing before it happens again. I want to get out of here as soon as possible.”

“We’re close,” Evajean said. She began searching the shelves once more, though faster this time.

A couple minutes later she called out, “It’s here! Elliot, I found it.” He rushed over. She was pulling a box out from a shelf. Like all the rest, it was cardboard, and about the size of thick hardcover book. The box had been sealed with packaging tape, gone yellow and crackly with age.

“Open it,” she said, holding it out to him.

Elliot took it. The box was light and felt slightly damp. He tucked it under his arm. “Outside,” he said. “We’ll open it then. But I want to get out of here, first.”

Evajean looked disappointed, but nodded. “Okay,” she said.

They ran back to the steps and up into the little alcove.

Elliot sat down. “Here,” he said. “I think it’s safe to open it now.”

They’d left the museum without encountering any trouble and come outside to find Cassandra gone, as expected.
That was her mission
, Elliot thought.
She did it but she didn’t stick around to see how it turned out.
 

Evajean had led them down the street to a hotel and Elliot broke the glass front door to let them inside. Only when they’d found an open room and locked themselves in did Elliot feel comfortable taking out the package.

Evajean took it from him and turned it over in her hands. “What do you think it is?”

Elliot shrugged. “Open it.”

She sat down on the bed and began peeling the tape off the box. “Why’s it wet?” she asked.

“Basement damp,” Elliot said. “From being down there so long.”

“But it wasn’t damp down there,” Evajean said. “At least not that I could tell.” She removed the last piece of tape and pulled the box flaps open. She reached inside and took out a black rectangle, a quarter of an inch thick and the size of a paperback book. “It’s a journal,” she said, thumbing back the cover. As she flipped through, a folded paper fell from between the pages, landing by Elliot’s foot. He bent and picked it up, unfolding it across his lap.

The paper was a large square, eighteen inches on a side, and covered, on both sides and except for a slim margin, with tiny, handwritten symbols in narrow rows. Elliot looked at it briefly and then set it aside. “Who’s is it?” he asked Evajean.

She turned to the first page and shrugged. “It doesn’t say.”

“It’s in English, though?”

“Uh huh.”

“What does it say?”

So Evajean read from the small book-and, in the time it took her to do so, many of those questions that had for so long nagged them were horrifyingly answered.

* * *
 

“Your grandfather was the prophet of the one true faith.” That was my esteemed lineage, or so my mother told me time and again, whenever the anniversary of his death brought its day of mourning. “Your grandfather was chosen by God to redeem His church and gather His flock in the name of His only begotten son, Jesus Christ.”

As a child, hearing those words, there was always a degree of disappointment and shame. Why had I not been called to a similar mission. Why did God shower all this attention on my grandfather and none on me? Perhaps it was this resentment that lead me to reject Joseph Smith’s faith, that started me on the path from Mormonism to deism to agnosticism to, eventually, atheism. I admit that as a possibility, but ultimately I must reject it’s truth and hold to the power of my reason. I gave up the faith of my grandfather and of my mother not out of resentment or anger but, rather, because I came to see it as simply false. The fantastic stories they told were just that and the grand cosmology, with it’s three levels of heaven and plethora of gods nothing but flights of the imagination as wonderous as anything from Mr. Wells.

I was excommunicated on my twentieth birthday. No longer a Saint, I left Utah and moved to New York to attend university. Whatever their degree of truth, the stories of the ancients my mother had read to me from the Book of Mormon found lasting influence, and I decided to dedicate my studies to archeology and classical languages. I found I had a knack for it and rose quickly through the ranks of scholars, eventually securing a professorship at one of the major northeastern colleges. It was years later, during a summer sabatical, that I decided to travel to where my grandfather’s legacy began: Palmyra, New York.

I am not sure why I did this. Mormonism itself held little lasting interest for me and any spiritual pull it may have had was long usurped by a rationalist world view. Perhaps it was only that consanguineous call so many of us feel when we reach a certain age, the desire to go back to where we came from and see it through older and, in a way, newer eyes. Whatever the reason, that summer saw me renting a small cabin in the forests of western New York, visiting first my grandfather’s home and then-unfortunately, as events would have it-searching for the mythical Hill Cumorah, where he supposedly found those crucial golden plates.

Knowledge of the location where the untranslated Book of Mormon was dug from the earth died with my grandfather, or at least that was the accepted wisdom of the time. Many argued that there never had been such a place and that the Hill Cumorah was nothing more than another fabrication in a long line by Joseph Smith. This view was the one I held until that summer and it is one I wish I could still hold on to today.

I will not bore the reader with a detailed account of how I began to track down that legendary spot in the hills outside of Palmyra. Suffice it to say that the process entailed numerous conversations with increasingly country-and unsavory-folks who pointed me to further peers, all wanting some kind of compensation, though usually offering me the choice between turning over money or alcohol. The former seemed to be roundly preferred. This process occupied me for weeks, during which time I was able only to work sporadically on my translation duties for the university. It all came to a climax, however, when an old and dirty trapper, who the locals called Bear, informed me of the things he’d seen while making camp one night at a location deep in the forest. He was sure he could direct me and said he would if only I’d listen to his tale and feed him whiskey while he told it.

We met on a Thursday evening in an empty farm house Bear claimed was owned by his brother. The house appeared to have not seen use in some time, though. Dust coated the furniture, what little there was, and all of the ground floor windows were cracked or broken. I smiled at Bear and let him seat us at the small table by a cold and empty stove and decided not to press him on the actual owner of this sad dwelling.

After he’d finished three shots of the relatively cheap drink I’d brought with me, Bear began. “It’s a right nasty thing,” he said, “to see something so awful when you’re all alone.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

He leaned toward me, his breath harsh with my whiskey. “Nature. That bloody mother bitch. Horrible, it is, when she tears herself from the earth to hunt.

This was not the strangest thing I’d heard uttered during my search for the hill Cumorah. Quite the opposite, in fact. But it was said with an an earnestness that made the remark impossible to brush aside as the simple, drunken ravings of a country bumpkin. I asked him to repeat what he’d said and he did, without a change in either the words or tone.

“Can you describe it?” I asked him. “Tell me in as much detail as you can remember.”

The story he told was horrific indeed and, as I listened, I was dismayed to find myself believing him.

Bear routinely spent a large portion of each year living in these forested hills, hunting and trapping, feeding himself from the spoils and selling what remained to the locals in exchange for occasional shelter and frequent drink. Two years ago had been a particularly warm and plentiful summer and Bear had been living without human contact for nearly a month.

He’d made camp at the center of a circle of low hills, a place he’d used before since it was sheltered from the wind and fed by a small stream of clear spring water. The sun had just gone down and he was drinking the last of his whiskey before turning in for the night when he heard a terrific cracking sound close by.

Knowing the danger of falling trees, Bear hauled himself up from his sleeping furs, lit a torch on his campfire, and set out to investigate. Over one low ridge, he thought he could make out a glow of sorts, a pale yellow light defusing through the mist.

“It could’ve been fire, is what I was thinking,” Bear said. “Fire like that it’d easily bring down trees and be mighty dangerous to a fool like me camping right near it.” He said this with the awareness of one who recognizes his own propensity towards unjustified risk and his eyes flashed at the excitement of the memory. “Times like that,” he said, “I wish I kept a dog. Animals can smell a fire before we can.”

I poured him another drink. “What did you see when you looked over the crest of the hill?” I asked.

That glitter of remembrance disappeared from his eyes, which now went hard and cold. “Not a fire,” he said. “It was a pit, you’d probably call it, but to me that thing was nothing but a huge mouth, opening in the dirt. It had teeth of roots and broken logs, lips of moss. It opened-I watched it do that. Wider and wider. And that glow, what was fire when I was in my tent, wasn’t fire but the stuff on it’s tongue. Spit, I guess it was. The tongue licked out of that mouth and it shone like the forges of hell.” He reached for the glass and drank its contents in a single swallow. “That’s not the worst,” he said. “No, it only gets more awful after that.”

The mouth, as it turned out, was only a portal through which something else came into this world. Bear stayed low along the ridge of the hill, shivering in the wet grass, his torch dropped and forgotten, as the maw continued to expand. The tongue, a fat appendage writhing like some injured beast, lashed at the lips, teeth, and the earth beyond, spreading its luminescent saliva in pools and spatters. After several minutes, this conflagration ceased and the mouth was still. The tongue pulled back inside and the glow began to fade. Bear, focusing whatever nerve he had left, crept closer. He had heard tales of mysterious occurrences in these woods between Palmyra and Manchester, stories of phantom lights and voices, or ten foot tall men walking among the trees. Most of these he never doubted, raised as he was in the backwoods superstition of this burned over district, but even for his decidedly credulous mind, the spectacle he now witnessed was very nearly maddening. The tongue was only gone a short while. The yellow glow dimmed just noticeably before it reappeared, climbing out of the throat, carrying its horrific passenger.