Everyone knows it: children are not to be believed.
Tuesday after school I returned to Ian’s house. Each step in the grimy snow seemed an open invitation to turn around, and yet I moved forward. I couldn’t help but be reminded of when Elsie went missing.
“Please, let me help,” I had begged my parents.
“No, Ingrid,” they had said, “you must stay here with your Nan….” I had listened, and poor Elsie had remained good and gone. The world needed adults, surely, but perhaps these were the wrong ones. Our generation needed to grow up and take over, if the prior generations didn’t manage to kill us all off, first.
Another thought I struggled to suppress was this: what if I had looked for Elsie in that first week, while she was still alive? What if I had insisted on searching? Maybe, just maybe…
I rang the doorbell with a numb pointer finger, as I had forgotten my gloves. Five, then ten seconds passed with no answer. I had assumed the driveway would be filled with police cruisers and media vans, but the perimeter of the house was still, peaceful even. It was nothing like when Elsie vanished.
Was there no end to the intangibles that money could buy?
I was about to turn away when the front door haltingly scraped open, the way the lid slides from a coffin in a scary movie. A tall, red-haired woman stared down at me. She had the same aquiline nose as Ian, the same piercing coal eyes—though these were red-rimmed and raw.
“You Ian’s mum?”
“Look, now’s really not a good time—”
“But I think I know where he is….”
The screen door caught. “Please don’t tease me, dear.”
“I—”
“Fine. Come in, come in….”
The same smells as before, only now a darkness had crept over the house. It now appeared to be the haunted place Ian had insisted it was. Something acrid, as well as mysterious had now settled about the place. The basement seemed to whisper. Longing words, some dark melody.
In-grid, In-grid.
Again, no dog. I followed Ian’s mum into her kitchen. From somewhere deep in the bones of the house came a sharp hammering sound. I sat on a stool Ian’s mum directed me to and we both had to shout to be understood over the thuds from the basement.
“I’m sorry about just now,” Ian’s mum started. “I just don’t have the faintest notion of how to function anymore. My Ian…”
“I understand how scared you must feel. My sister went missing…once.”
“That’s awful, dear.”
I suddenly wanted to tell her all about Elsie, wanted to spill my guts about how Elsie went missing on a Tuesday in London and was found six weeks later in the Bavarian woods. A shallow grave happened upon by hikers. But of course, Ian’s mum only cared about finding her son. It seemed adults only ever cared about something if it affected them personally.
“So…out with it then,” Ian’s mum demanded. “Where do you think my son has gotten off to?”
“This might sound strange,” I tried to explain. “But I have reason to believe he’s…in a tunnel in your basement.”
“Excuse me?” Ian’s mum said, standing up.
“He—he took me there last week.”
“Don’t mock me,” the woman growled, turning on me with unexpected ferocity. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? What is this, some cruel prank?”
“Yes, did the other kids at school put you up to this,” said a harsh male voice from behind us. I turned and there stood a tall, bald man. He was fifty or sixty years old, his skin a grayish pink. No facial hair covered his pumpkin-shaped head. Ian’s stepfather, Aldous. I hadn’t known he was there.
“It’s your tunnel” I gasped. “Ian said you’re the one who created it!”
“I’ve checked every crawl space already,” Aldous said without inflection.
“But it’s not just a crawl space,” I blurted out, standing up and backing away from him as though I were Dracula and he the light. “As you know, sir, the crawl space leads to this…this tunnel. This dark tunnel that can take you anywhere in the world, and somehow you have control of it. Ian said he was afraid of—”
“This is preposterous,” Aldous said, whilst straightening his solid navy tie. “I have a mind to call the police. Are you on drugs? Are you some tweaker or something? How dare you come here and mock our loss!”
“Let me show you,” I pleaded to Ian’s mum. “It’s in the basement….”
The two adults stared at each other from across the kitchen island. “I mean, it couldn’t hurt, right?” the woman whispered.
“Very well,” the man groused. “But be careful this doesn’t set you off again, Marie. You know that with your issues you’re always walking a very thin trail. The last thing we need is for you to be back in the wilderness.”
“I know it’s crazy, Aldous. There, I admitted it. But—”
He waved her away, this curious Aldous, and took a seat at the kitchen table. “I’ll be here if you need me,” he rasped, “here in the land of the sane.”
I followed Ian’s mum down the gray steps. At the now familiar landing I turned and made my way across the basement. When I arrived at where the crawl space had been, I couldn’t believe it: a thick, white wall greeted us.
“I mean, clearly he did something to cover it up. Look how fresh the paint is!”
“Honey…”
“Oh my God, Ian’s mum! Don’t you smell the fresh paint?” I touched the area where the crawl space had been, held up my mottled white hand to show the wet paint.
“Look! For Fuck’s sake.”
“I think you’d better leave. Now.” Ian’s mum’s tone registered somewhere between annoyance and alarm.
“No! There was an opening here, a crawl space! It led to the tunnel.” I knocked my fist against the white wall and was met with the solid slap of concrete.
“Don’t you recall a crawl space here? Haven’t you ever noticed it? I mean, seriously, do you even live here?”
“I don’t know what to say…” Ian’s mum said, her voice barely a whisper. “Aldous maintains his office downstairs, and I don’t really come here often.” Her voice trailed off. “But I must insist you leave.”
Back in the kitchen, Aldous sat methodically stirring a white mug of herbal tea. He refused to acknowledge our presence as I made my way to the front door, led by the firm grip of Ian’s mum about my wrist.
After what my family had been through—after all I had been through, I understood that any discussion of the ‘tunnel’ with my parents would end in yet another trip to the psychologist, if not the hospital.
No bother, I was leaving the age where parental assistance was the first selection on the decision tree. I spent part of the next evening camped out in a sycamore across from Ian’s home, waiting for the driveway to clear so I could attempt to bash down the concrete wall Aldous had erected. But would I have the strength? The opportunity never presented itself, the cars remained stationary in the large concrete driveway. I remained waylaid and Ian lost.
I imagined Aldous sitting in his basement office, waiting like a spider in its nest. If I did nothing, would he come for me anyway? There was nothing more I could do, it was too late and I was too cold.
Aldous was an adult, respected in the community. He was smart, presumably, or at the very least, crafty. Crafty and super mega wealthy.
He also apparently had access to a magical tunnel. Or he did, anyway, before he filled it in. I knew that if I was going to beat him at his own game, I would have to do something unexpected.
The more I considered the situation, the more I realized that at some point Aldous would try to access the tunnel again, and that he would probably be too nervous to tear down the concrete wall he had erected in his home. Surely there had to be limits to even Ian’s mum’s state of denial.
I was too young to drive, so I did the next best thing: I waited until I was able to sneak into the boot of Aldous’s Audi SUV. Now I was really defying my parents! I acted anyway, and all without a mobile device.
Every morning that week I had waited in the tree with my binoculars, waiting for a sign of life from the vehicle. I discovered that Aldous left every day at six on the dot, and that he heated his car for ten to fifteen minutes before he entered. There were many times I wanted to give up the pursuit, but then I remembered how I hadn’t helped search for my sister.
Maybe Ian wouldn’t have gone to these lengths for me, but perhaps that was besides the point.
It was early in the morning, still dark, when Aldous finally climbed into the driver’s seat that Friday. I lay in the trunk, covered in cloth blankets and stained clothing. Trying not to make any noise, barely daring to breathe.
He turned on a classical music station, and hummed along in a surprisingly strong baritone voice, adding to the orchestral flourishes. The vehicle slid into reverse, backed out of the driveway, and then I was officially a mobile stowaway heading to points unknown. Perhaps he’s just heading to work. Perhaps I have everything wrong. Perhaps, perhaps…
(Or maybe he killed Ian. And if he found me in his trunk, he would kill me too!)
What seemed like hours later Aldous parked outside a secluded farmhouse. I listened as his dress shoes nipped at gravel, and then I waited a solid ten minutes before I deposited my weary body outside the vehicle. As I approached the owl-faced home, I imagined meat hooks and dead moths behind screen doors. I hid amongst stalks of rotten corn.
It surprised me that the barn was freshly painted, that the front lawn of crimson clover was well trimmed, that there was a rubber ‘welcome’ mat on the front stoop. I crawled to the right side of the house, where peeled paint drained into a lazily designed rock garden. Somehow, I just knew that the back of the house would be overgrown, dilapidated.
I tried to be mindful of windows, of angles of reflection and refraction, which I had recently learned in trigonometry class. My stomach roiled as the faces of my worried parents flashed through my fluttering mind. I knew they would be worried sick if I didn’t return ‘from school’ on time, but I also understood that somebody had to act.
I surveyed the property for an opening to a tunnel, sensing somehow, someway that a portal was nearby. I crept through a cracked storm window into the basement, dragging my pink knees against the paper blinds of an old wasp nest. Mice scurried in that dark, unfinished space. An old oil furnace, perhaps original to the home, huffed and sputtered.
There was nothing personal in that cellar, no bric-a-bracs, no filaments of personality. It was cold, airy, lifeless. It was, after all, a farmhouse cellar. I crept like the mice, keeping my body tightly tethered to the skeletal perimeter, crawling in the very trench of a French drain. Bloody hell, I thought, I should be in art class right now…
At first, I wasn’t certain where to look for the tunnel. From my limited experience, the dimensions collided in disparate places: a pool, a leaky crawl space. What was it that tied everything together? Water, perhaps…but that was just an educated guess. It’s not as though there were many data-points to go by.
Searching the creaking old house, gaining confidence it was empty of portals, losing further hope with each passing moment. There were nooks and crannies and crags, but nothing that appeared touched by magic.
At no point in time did I sense Aldous’s presence, yet I couldn’t ignore the fear that he was there somewhere, watching me, waiting for me to step into his trap like the spider he was. I tried the upstairs, then the pull-down attic, and finally the bright red barn filled with tools and dried blood.
I sensed I was closing in on something but could not determine if it was a new beginning or my end. I was about to give up and punch my own ticket back home when I stumbled upon an old well.
The well was situated between the barn and the farmhouse, sequestered by the old corn stalks. It smelled vaguely of distant lands.
I peered in, taking care to steady my body against its loose brick casings. It was an old-fashioned well, ornamental perhaps. Like something from a fairy tale my mum used to read Elsie and me at bedtime, in the part of my life I could only define as the BEFORE.
Staring down ten, twenty feet, I could see nothing but a beetle-black abyss. I leapt in anyway. There was a sharp, momentary pain as my knees buckled against the shallow skin of water. Soon enough I was sinking, but slowly, the way one might move through gelatin.
When I dared to open my eyes, I was lying in a crumpled ball, greeted on all sides by the phosphorescent glow of the magical doors, which twinkled about me like so many fairies. My nervous system calculated the pain, and to my surprise there was no serious damage. I paused for a moment as my eyes dilated. I was in the green section of portal doors.
“Ian,” I called out.
“Down here!” came a voice from ahead.
I rushed toward the voice, the laser-like specks of colors darting through the corners of my periphery. I eventually came upon…Ian, sitting on the damp rim of the tunnel.
“You came for me,” he gasped. He was crouched down but appeared untethered.
“My God, Ian. What did he do to you? Are you ok?”
“Old Steppy was pissed that I showed you this place, so he locked me in here.” He coughed into his torn sleeve. His clothes looked huge on him, as though he were wearing a burlap sack. His dark hair was dirty, and there was a shallow cut above his right brow.
“I’m so afraid,” I admitted. “I don’t know what to do. Your stepfather’s insane!”
“Help me up,” Ian wheezed. “Please.”
I walked over to him, bent down, and lent him my hand. At that moment, he grabbed me by the wrist, twisted it until it almost snapped.
When I looked at him again, it was Aldous.
“So, you think you know all of my little secrets, do you?”
“How? How are you and Ian the same person?”
He towered over me now, well over six-feet of menacing hate. “Do you think my power so weak? Whose tunnel do you think you’re in, anyway?”
He smiled, a surprisingly earnest expression. Just a dog’s hair away from sincere, yet absent of all light, or true life. “Ian’s destroyed. I just use him for scraps now, as I do with the others.”
“Why?” I demanded to know. “Why did you create this place?”
He shook like someone walking through cobwebs. When he spoke next, it was with a snarl. “Do you have any idea how easy it is to get away with things, when you can be anywhere in just a matter of minutes? That’s why I destroyed the original Aldous, to assume the form of someone with many properties.
“Just imagine the alibi possibilities, little Ingrid. You could be, oh I don’t know, taking a distraught teenager’s life on Pickney Street, London, and dumping her body in Bavarian forest just a few moments later!”
“Elsie!” I screamed, for our family had lived on Pickney Street.
Aldous maintained his firm grip, shoved me forward through the tunnel, back in the direction I had come. “There are no coincidences,” he said with a fulsome grin, “just…happy opportunities. Now it’s time for you to join your sister.”
“What did you do with Ian?” I said, desperate to buy time.
“That boy’s none of your business,” Aldous hissed. The monster’s clothing fit him perfectly now, although his dress shirt was torn at its seams.
“So, what, you’re a wizard or something?”
“More like a demon, but what does it matter? Wizard, witch, demon…those are just names! Aren’t we all, ultimately, defined by our actions?”
“Why! Why do you kill people?”
“Because every power comes with a price, or because I enjoy it, or because it’s simply how I’m built. Now stop your wasteful questions and walk.”
At first I buckled, but his physical strength overpowered me. He marched me back, away from the concrete wall of Ian’s family home, past the farmhouse that had snared me, and into a grove of green and blue doors.
“You can be literally anyone?” I asked.
“There are some limitations there,” he admitted. “I can only become those I have destroyed…”
“So…Ian’s dead?”
“You tell me. What does that tiny brain of yours suggest?”
“Can you become my sister?”
“Of course I can. I can become anyone I’ve destroyed.”
“Then prove it.”
The hand gripped tighter. “I don’t play others’ games, child. They play mine.”
“So you can’t do it…got it….”
He was about to respond when I brought his arm up to my mouth and bit a chunk out of his forearm.
“Bitch,” he gasped, but for a moment he lost his grip. I slid away, sprinting toward the familiar cyan door, where I had once swum with Ian, and when I leapt into it, I was already primed to freestyle.
Moving up toward the surface, my heart raced as my cupped hands tore through the thick water. Already, I could sense movement below me as I came to the ledge. A hand tried to grip, but then slid off of me as I made my way up, out of the water and to the bar, searching for a paring knife or other weapon. Finding none, I came upon the toaster, which was plugged in.
I rushed to the side of the pool, the weight of the metal toaster slowing me down as Aldous drew to the ledge. I had bit him something fierce; his blood was already staining the rim of the pool red around him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he raged. Then, as if sensing the damage and the coldness of my own heart, he turned into Elsie.
“Ingrid, what are you doing?” the false Elsie said, her dainty hands pleading above the water. “You’re…having some sort of episode. Please, don’t hurt me, sister!”
For a moment, the illusion almost worked. But then I remembered the cold truth. My sister was dead, and she was now but a mask worn by a demon.
I heaved the oversized toaster into the pool, with a silent prayer there would be cord enough to kiss the water.
There was—the toaster plopped into the shallow end of the pool, only half a foot beyond the lip of the concrete. It had fluttered and landed like a fishing rod cast by a small child, but it had reached its target.
In that moment the demon zipped in electric shock, turning with each passing moment into a new person, a new face, each apparently a past victim of his bloodlust. There must have been fifty in all.
First he was his preferred form, then he was Ian, then Elsie, and finally dozens of other faces I did not recognize, and yet I knew they were the names of the missing and lost. This went on for what felt like forever, until the lights in the house cut out, and his body leeched away and floated, face-down toward the center of the pool. It was now in its original form: bloody horns and henpecked reptilian skin the bluish red of untapped veins.
The rest of the day seemed to me but movement. Days later I could barely recall using rubber gloves to unplug the toaster, could only access the slightest vagaries of dragging the demon, which was tinier than a human, back through the bottom of the pool and into the tunnel, the nebulous world he had built or stolen. Not knowing the limits of its magic, I treated the body as though it were a radioactive fuel rod.
Before I returned home, I entered a portal into gray London and visited Elsie’s grave. Just one browning stone of many behind a tiny church along the outskirts of Shoreditch. By then I had purchased myself a mobile phone, and had called my relieved parents to let them know I was in fit enough shape, all things considered, but would be just a bit late for dinner…
“Maybe I could make use of the tunnels for good,” I told Elsie’s stone.
“No,” came some voice from inside me, or was it outside? Was it her soul? “You must close them off, shut them down forever. You must find a way to stop the tunnels, so they can never use them again.”
“But who are ‘they’? Other demons? And how do I shut off the tunnels?” I demanded to know. This time there was no response. I sat in the permanent silence of my sister’s final resting place, staining the ground wet with years of repressed grief.
Later, as I rode home on a bus, smelling of chlorine and sweat and anxiety, I knew that the spirit of my sister was right. If this was indeed a world capable of being inhabited by one demon, then surely there must be others.
There must be five or ten or many other evil witches, wizards, demons, humans! looking for any tool they can to harm those of a softer nature.
I promised Elsie’s spirit that I would return over the years to fight evil in all its forms, and that I would find and close off all the portals one by one, decommissioning them like I was on some lunatic treasure hunt.
If the world leaned toward evil, then it also required those willing to fight for good. I knew then that I would no longer force Elsie from my mind, wouldn’t deny the pain that I was too late to save Ian. The world would someday require adults who hadn’t forgotten the wisdom of children.
It was time to be the hunter, rather than the prey. To become the monster hunter I was somehow fated to be. I was born into chaos and raised on pain, but now I knew that only made me stronger.
I would no longer deny the pain of this world, because that is what they want.