Loophole.
Looking up from where I had been crouching on the damp basement floor, I watched as Wes slammed the pickax down again, again. Little bits of concrete shot through the air and all the dust had formed a cloud that swallowed us. He stopped suddenly, throwing off his gloves and pulling down the bandanna that had been hanging off his nose. Wiping his sweaty, dirt-caked forehead with the back of his hand, he looked at me with red eyes. Not just from lack of sleep, either. Only half-joking but still obviously embittered, Wes said, "I'm telling you, Troy, after all this shit there had better be buried fucking treasure under here."
Looking to where he was pointing, I saw the manhole. Laughing to myself, shaking my head, I bounced my purple tennis ball and caught it in a fist. I smiled and looked behind me, where Professor Riemann stood. His hands were deep in the pocket of his jeans and his eyes looked huge behind his thick-rimmed glasses. It was almost ominous, the way they seemed to bulge out of his face, hidden beneath his beard and his ball cap. "Well," Riemann said, "let's open her up and have a look."
"And hope to hell we're not pulling a Pandora," I added under my breath as I stood up.
Riemann placed the crowbar at the corner of the cover and pushed down with a manly grunt, raising it just enough that Wes and I could push it aside. It fell on the chunks of concrete beside us with a loud clang and, as Riemann knelt carefully to look down the hole, he confirmed, "Yeah, seems to be a room all right. Looks like its about a twelve foot drop."
Directly below the hole we could all see a mound of concrete. Wes handed Riemann the bungee and, nodding in thanks, the old man was readying to ease himself down. That's when I held out my arm, blocking his path. "Wait," I said, and I could hear the hesitance in my own voice. "Just hold on. Maybe we should take our time with this. We don't know what could be down there."
Wes just laughed, shaking his head dismissively. He threw me a look and it seemed he was embarrassed by me, perhaps even a little annoyed with me. I turned and saw that Riemann was getting curious, and my heart sank when he asked, "Well, what do you think is down there?"
"Go ahead," Wes urged teasingly, with more than a hint of annoyance in his voice, "tell him, Troy. Tell him all about the spooky Dr. Hinton."
With that, my head fell and I turned away from both of them, frustrated. Riemann had to know what all this was about now. There wasn't a soul that had grown up in this town who had not heard the tale about Dr. Hinton and his crew of seven.
"Let's not get into this now," I said.
"No," Wes said. "Let's."
Kids had been getting drunk and stoned in this house since I was in junior high, but no one ever knew about this basement till Wes found it last week. When he told me about it the day after he'd found it, I didn't catch on at first. He was stoned out of his gourd as he so often was, so I figured maybe it was all aimless babble.
"You found it, damn it," I yelled at him. "You're the one that found the damn mound."
Then he had told me about the mound he had found in the basement, however. How it had the name Hinton etched into it, and we knew what that meant. Those stories we heard when we were kids about the mad scientists in the woods who'd found that underground structure. Some said it was a crashed flying saucer they found, but we both felt too old to believe in that stuff anymore. But the story went that the government scientists built a house and a basement atop it. That they tinkered around with the machine and that it could do amazing things. Then the government closed the program. When the scientists refused to leave, they buried them alive in concrete. None of that made sense, though. Why would they just leave the house here, abandoned in the woods?
"Just knock it off, you two," Riemann said calmly. "We've come this far, we dug up the manhole. At this point it won't hurt to drop down and take a peek at whatever it is that's down there."
"Sure, man," Wes said, holding his hand out to the hole, "sure. You first."
"Afraid?" Wes glared at me for a moment, and I cursed myself for yet again forgetting how damned sensitive he could be about such accusations, even if they were in jest. All seemed to be silent and I quickly realized I'd stepped over the line by saying that. I couldn't find anything really good to say to manage the damage, so I just shrugged and said, "I mean, curiosity killed the cat."
It was lame, and the fact that he didn't point it out revealed that he'd forgiven me for questioning his masculinity. "Yeah," he said after a moment, relaxing a bit and laughing. "Well, I ain't no pussy."
Riemann eased himself down with the help of the bungee and I quickly followed after him. Once my feet touched ground, I turned on my flashlight, looking up. The hole we'd come down from was at the center of four curved beams of a dome ceiling. Between them there was a jagged crystal of an eerie purple hue.
Wes peered down from the hole above. "Any gold?"
Looking around me, I saw an ovular room of stainless steel. There were portholes in a column at the center of the walls and most seemed sealed off. Welded shut with metal, splattered with concrete.
"Tons," I said.
Wes made his way down the bungee, his backpack and a large, battery-powered lamp slung over on his back. As soon as he got to the ground, he turned on the lamp, bathing the entire room in light.
"Liar," Wes said.
I stepped towards the stainless-steel walls in wonder. "This one's still open," I said, and Riemann approached me, shining his flashlight into it. We both peered in and across the dark gap, which seemed to be the interior of a cave, he could see another sealed porthole in a wall of rock that stretched as high and wide as his flashlight could reach.
"That's weird," is all Riemann could find to say, but there was a significant uneasiness in his voice that didn't escape my attention. I looked away from him and the hole and back at Wes, who seemed eternally unimpressed with anything. He was leaning on the wall behind us, against a sealed-off-porthole. Sighing, he threw his navy green backpack to his feet.
"What do you suppose this is?" Riemann said. He was holding a star-shaped stone that protruded from below the manhole. It had a small rivet on top. On the wall beside each of the five points were etched figures. The side with the small rivet, it was aligned with a simple circle. Then there was a dough nut-shaped symbol, then a sideways figure eight. Then there were two vertical lines connected by two horizontal lines, curved inward towards one another. And then there were two horizontal lines connected to two overlapping arrows pointing to the right, and Riemann brushed his fingers against that one.
I laughed. "Looks like some mixture of the pause and play buttons on a DVD player," I said.
He didn't seem to hear me over the volume of his own thoughts. He just stood there, shaking his head. "What is[i/] this place?" Riemann said, mostly to himself.
Looking across the cave inside the porthole, I could see a small hole in the seal of the porthole on the other side. A bit of light escaped through it and for a second I could've sworn that I'd seen some movement. Were my eyes playing tricks on me? I held my ball in consideration until, with a shrug of indifference, I threw the ball with all his might into the porthole and across to the other one. I watched it hit the dead center of the porthole and then moved quickly out of the way, because it looked as though the ball was going to bounce back out of the porthole and I didn't want it to hit me in the face. Before it even shot back out of the porthole, however, I heard Wes gasp, "Fuck!" from behind me. Quickly swinging around, I found that Wes had dropped to his knees below the sealed-off porthole where he had been standing. He was cowering. All this happened before the ball actually shot back out of the porthole and hit the wall just above his head. I laughed shamefully when I saw him pale-faced and cowering. "Good reflexes, man," I chuckled. "Sorry about that."
Pointing a shivering finger at the sealed porthole above him, his red eyes suddenly pasty white with fear, Wes said shakily, "Guys, there's something behind there. Something knocked[i/]." Riemann just looked at him suspiciously and then met eyes with me. I just laughed.
Everything changed gears when we all heard a noise, however, and this one made us all jump in unison. It came from the concrete mound. There, a slender figure eclipsed the light of the lamp. It was a girl of about five and a half feet. She had pink hair, knee-high black leather boots, faded and torn jeans and a black shirt on which it read, in bright purple lettering, Orgasm Donor[i/].
"Liss," said Wes, standing, shaking his head. Both he and Troy let out sighs of relief which swiftly broke into laughter. I looked away from her and back at Riemann. His eyes seemed even wider, if such a thing were possible, and he suddenly seemed quite tense. He held his hand to chest as if he were trying to hold back his heart from bursting out his body.
Liss scampered down off the mound, her thumb and index finger around one band of the tiny brown book bag she had strapped to her back. It was littered with band stickers. Her walk slowed, her narrow eyes taking on an almost vicious look as they locked with Riemann's. Looking away from him and towards no one, her chin up, she spoke somewhere between a bark and a hiss.
"Why'd you bring the teacher along?" She said bitterly to the two of them, and I looked at Troy in a way that I hope suggested I wanted to ask that very same thing to Wes with respect to Liss.
"Chill, Liss," Wes said dismissively, reaching into his back pack, looking to the ground to avert both their deathly glares, "Riemann's our pillar of logic here."
I turned my back to her slowly and towards the hole, nodding. "Yeah," I laughed, "and that's certainly something we need in this fucking house."
"Well, has the flanneled pillar here offered any explanation as to why someone would put a foot of concrete over a manhole in the basement floor of some creepy house pushed back in the woods?" She asked in a snooty manner, her thin eyebrows darting up her smooth-looking skin, her soft lips puckering up defiantly. After a moment lacking response, that pucker stretched to a menacing ear-to-ear grin. "Didn't fucking think so. Captain Logic here is a bit out of his goddamn element, I'd say. A little over his boxed-in head."
Riemann seemed oblivious to the insult and remained looking at her with those same wide, cautious eyes. After realizing he was staring, however, he averted his eyes, and instead began staring on the ground. I followed his eyes and found a metal pole that had been rammed into a computer monitor. After a moment of silence amongst the ground, however, he finally spoke, and loud enough for all the group to hear. "I'd say that metal pole over there, with enough force, might let us break open the porthole on the other side."
Wes looked at him suspiciously. "Why the hell would we want to break through?"
"Same reason we came down here," he said, "curiosity."
Wes shrugged. "Then why the hell can't we just use the pickax?"
Riemann laughed and stepped towards him a bit, pupils staring dead into his, eyebrows raising in challenge. "Would you like to climb in there, Wesley?" He asked, pointing his thumb toward the hole. Wes accepted defeat and his eyes dove to the ground.
Liss grabbed the pole and drug it over and Riemann, though thankful, seemed perplexed about her now all the more. He grabbed the pole, taking his place behind her, and Wes took his position behind him. I saw quite clearly that I had been voted out, so I stepped to the side, leaning against the sealed-off porthole beside Wes's book bag. I did it cautiously, though; afraid that noise from the wall might return. The three backed up and the pole's end, guided back by Wes, was nearly at my chest when I took the hint and moved a bit to the side. All the while Riemann counted, "One," and louder, "Two," finally screaming, "GO!"
With that, they ran the pole into the porthole. I heard the loud clanging noise, the roar of metal being punctured -- but it was coming from behind me. I tried to move, but it was too late. Something slammed into my shoulder with an incredible violence, sending me spinning, spinning, slamming into the ground, yelping in pain, screaming every obscenity I could conjure out of my cerebrum.
When I was finally able to look up, I saw that Liss had knelt down beside me, eyes wide with worry, asking me, "Troy," pleading, "you all right?" Her hand was touching my shoulder. The first time she had made physical contact with him in three months, I suddenly realized.
And then her hand fell away limply. I looked upward to meet with three pale faces sporting eyes and mouths round as my tennis ball. Liss, Wes and Riemann were all fixated on the space behind and above me. Looking to my side, looking up, I saw the pole leaning partway out the porthole behind me, its covering slammed off, bent, broken. This made no sense to me, none at all, but I was too angry about the pain in my shoulder to deal with that now. In anger, I just shoved the pole deeper into the hole out of which it had come. As I did so, however, the pole sticking up and out the hole of the wall behind the three pf them moved in parallel, sending the eyes and bodies of Riemann, Wes and Liss in that direction.
"What?" Wes yelped. I stood up, holding my shoulder as I looked back and fourth at the portholes and poles on either side of me. Wes moved the pole at his end, watching as the pole at my end moved in accordance.
"Hey, Professor Pillar," Liss said, "I flunked your physics class, but isn't this, like, totally fucking impossible?"
Nodding slowly, almost zombie-like, Riemann took his flashlight and beamed it into the hole on his end, turning around to watch as the light spilled out the opposite wall and fell on his shoulder. He shut it off and then looked deep, deep into the hole, saw the room from the other side, saw his back, saw the back of his head looking into the hole at him looking into the hole at himself, himself, forever and ever. He grabbed the ball from my hand and threw it towards the hole on the other end of the blackness and it shot out the hole behind him. His hand went to his forehead, his head sank down.
"Holy shit," was the verbal summary of his ultimate conclusion.
Wes was wrestling a bit more with words, if only to ensure he was understanding this clearly and the shit he'd smoked earlier wasn't laced. "So this hole's here, and that hole's there," he said, pointing to either end of the room. "And this room, the one we're in, is between these two portholes." The Pillar nodded and Wes continued. "And that dark cave-room in there is between the other sides of these same two portholes." The Pillar nodded. "And the distance between the portholes, it's less than the distance between them in here, right?" Riemann nodded again, and Wes echoed that nod, saying, "Well. That's just," he thought, but nothing came. "I don't know."
"Fucked up?" Liss offered. Riemann nodded in agreement. Wes scratched his pubic-hair beard for a moment and ran his fingers through his short, curly red hair, both of which were caked in sweat and dust. Riemann turned from where he had been looking at them all and towards the hole, sticking his head deep into the blackness. Grabbing the pickax leaning against the wall, he climbed halfway in and, looking down, he saw a step ladder made out of rope and wood planks. Interesting. He just stood there a moment, still and silent, dazed and considering. He finally shook his head, looked at everyone sympathetically through his sunken eyes, let out a little laugh and said, "We've got to go in there."
"We?" Wes barked, then chuckled. "Uh, no. No way, man. You maybe. Not we."
"I'm kinda curious," Liss said to Wes in Riemann's defense. He took a plastic bag filled with something green and little book out his back pocket. Tearing out a page, he filled the center with what he'd pinched out of the plastic bag. Nervously, hesitantly, Liss said, "I think I'm gonna go with the old man," and Wes just shrugged as he rolled the paper, saying, "Well, have a good time at the bottom of the loop."
I heard a clang and, looking behind me, Riemann took his head out of the porthole. He must have dropped the pickax into the void. "There's a bottom to the cave after all," he said, "and its not too far down." Then he climbed in and made his slow decent.
I came to the hole, watching the darkness swallow my former professor before looking up, across to the porthole in the rock wall. Through it I saw his own back, eclipsed by Liss and Wes passing a thin cigarette back and fourth. I watched as Liss approached me, watched as her hand extended to my shoulder, hovering above it in hesitation, wanting to touch him but paralyzed in the cold embrace of her own ambivalence. She withdrew her hand and turned around, back to his field of vision now and towards the back of his body. Meeting my eyes through the hole on the other end. She had somehow felt my gaze. Embarrassed, I turned around, taking my head out of the hole, and Liss turned around yet again, and for the same purpose as before, to face me. She was not so bold as to look me directly in the eyes this time, however.
"So," I said accusingly, though towards Wes, "what are you smoking?"
Wes flipped open the book, took a look. In a voice stuck in inhale, a voice which dared not let out a mere puff of smoke, he said, simply, "Revelations, as it turns out. Wanna hit?" I shook my head, looking away from him to find Liss looking at me now. She was looking at me with reddening eyes that melted away the cold shoulder I'd been giving her.
"I'm going," she said, as if suggesting my company.
"I still exist to you," he said in mock surprise. It was more of a bitter, sarcastic statement than a question, however. In response Liss took the cigarette from Wes's hand. She took a hit, held it for a second and looked me dead in the eyes. Then she blew the cloud in my face.
Neither of us moved for a moment. My face was stone cold. Her lips were fixed in a sneer, her eyes daggers jabbing mercilessly into my own. Then, with her shoulders back and chin angled upward, she simply walked away. As she crawled into the hole I had the intense impulse to follow her down, half out of curiosity for what lied below and half out of fear of what might happen to her, but I resisted. Instead I looked at Wes, who shook his head with a smile and a sigh. He need not say anything, he'd said it all to both of us before. I looked away, and in the process my eyes fell upon the stone protruding out of the punctured porthole behind Wes. Its stone also had a rivet, around the stone were also figures, and its rivet also pointed to a circle. A light flickered on behind my eyes.
"Its a knob," I said.
"What?" Wes said, blowing out a stream of smoke. "You mean like for changing channels?"
He was already stoned again. I pointed to the star-like stone. "Yeah, exactly. This one is set to the circle symbol just like the other porthole. I think this particular symbol signifies a loop. And the figure eight is the infinity symbol, right? The two lines connected to one another, maybe they signify two different points merged by a wormhole. And -- "
"Fuck," Wes snapped, breaking Troy's concentration, "bitch has my joint." Wes ran to the other porthole. I looked to the one right beside me and saw him poke his head through the one at the other end. Positioned halfway down the ladder was Liss, who looked up at him with a Cheshire Cat grin. Between her thumb and index finger she waved the bait and continued stepping down the latter. "Damn it," I heard Wes grumble. He stuck one leg into the hole, just straddling it a moment. Then he turned his head away from my line of sight. "Troy," he called to my back.
I threw my ball at him and it hit him in the head and fell down into the void. "Hey," I said, "you don't have to yell. I'm right here."
He turned his head around, looking across the gap of the cave to my face on the other end and giggled. "God, that's fucked up," he said. "Anyway, you comin'?"
I looked down at Liss and she was already looking at me. I couldn't read the look on her face, it could've been anything. "Yeah," I said, looking back up at Wes, "just let me get your back-pack and I'll follow you down."
I knelt down to grab his back-pack at my feet when we all seemed to hear a strange noise from the bottom of the hole. I stood up, book bag in my hand, and looked down at Liss, clutching the ladder on the other side of the cave. She had a worried face.
"Riemann," she yelled down into the abyss, "you all right?"
"Found another porthole," he yelled back.
I turned around and walked to where Wes was, hanging halfway out of the porthole, and handed him the book bag. He put his foot on the small stone beneath the porthole to gain balance as he reached for it. As he did so, the stone turned like a bike pedal. With a crunching, grinding sound the point of the star with the rivet moved to the left, click-click-clicking away from the circle symbol. It fell onto the pause-rewind symbol and, at that very moment, the darkness of the cave within the porthole disappeared. The portion of Wes that was within the porthole disappeared, but not his forearm or his leg up to his thigh. With a wet slice and a sizzle they fell to the floor. Bloodless, the fingers of the hand twitched and spasmed. From the porthole behind me, I could hear Wes screaming.
I just stared at them there, backing up in terror until my back hit the wall behind him, the wall which bore the other porthole. Liss held onto the ladder for dear life, and she looked at me terrified. "Is he alright?" I screamed, but she couldn't answer. I could hear him screaming from somewhere down in the blackness.
"Hello?"
It was a foreign voice from behind me. Spinning around, I met the eyes of a frighteningly tall, bony-faced man in a white lab coat. The name tag read Hinton and he held up his hands as if in defense as he stepped eagerly but carefully through the hole, carefully avoiding the severed and cauterized leg and arm, which he looked at with an amused confusion.
"Just relax," the man said to Troy, as his eyes shifted to Troy and the room all around him. "Now, tell me, what year is it?"
"2007," he said. "Who are you?"
"I was a prisoner," he said. "Evidently for about sixty-three years on this end, but on my end it was the blink of an eye. I wish I could extend my thanks," he said, pulling out a revolver from his back pocket, "but I'm really pressed for time now."
"Shit," I said under my breath. Looking down into the abyss just passed the portholes rim, I knew I'd have to jump. There was no step-ladder on this side.
He pointed the gun at me. Before I was able to jump, he fired, the bullet piercing what I was beginning to consider as an accursed shoulder. It threw me back and I tumbled into the porthole, falling through the darkness and landing on something soft.
I looked down. It was the body of Wes. Screaming, I threw myself off of him and rolled along the dirt floor, making my way to the far wall. I could hardly see the portholes up above at all, so it must have been quite a drop.
"Troy," a voice said from behind me, and I saw Riemann kneeling on the ground. Liss was right by him, and she ran up to me and threw her arms around me. She wasn't crying -- it wasn't like her to cry -- but she was stuttering, her voice shakily trying to articulate to me that Wes was dead. I touched her head with my outspread hand and I whispered that I knew.
"Look," I said to Riemann, "there's a scientist up there and judging from the name tag its that infamous Dr. Hinton."
Riemann looked at me, confused. "How?" Is all he could say.
"The knobs," I said. "The stones below all the portholes, they change the, I don't know, `stations', I guess."
Nodding, Riemann said, "They connect distant points in space," though it seemed mostly to himself. He had a bad habit of thinking out loud.
"And time, apparently," I added. "So I guess we pulled a Pandora after all."
"Well, we got to get out of here," Liss said, "and we can't go back up that ladder. When Wes fell on me, it busted."
"Then I don't know how the fuck we're going anywhere," I said.
Riemann smiled, looking down at the porthole he crouched over on the floor. It had been sealed, welded shut, and from his end. He stood up. "Stand back," he said, and we did. He swung the ax again, again, again, and finally managed to make a small opening. Light from the other side poured upon his face. He swung again, again, and the covering was gone. Cautiously, he stuck his head through, and a moment later he looked up at me.
"You've got see this," he said.
I crawled over and looked at the porthole. I saw a purple sky with white clouds. Rain seemed to fall towards me, but at the lip of the porthole it just dripped as if across a window, gathering around the edges, but when I put my hand through the hole I felt no glass. I felt only the touch of raindrops. Riemann was right by me, watching all this.
"Amazing," he said under his breath, involuntarily.
I stuck his head down into the hole and, strangely, found myself looking up from the ground on the other side. I quickly pulled my head up.
"Strange," I said.
"Let's go," Riemann said, and I looked at him as if he was nuts. What was on the other side of that hole didn't look like any earthly setting, and there was no telling what might happen to us if we spent any time on the other side. I just laughed and tried to shake my head, but I was too frozen in fear of his suggestion to me, his expectation of me. He just shrugged, "What choice to we have? There's no other way out."
"There's that knob," I said, pointing to the stone sticking up at the far end of the porthole.
"Guys," Liss said, and I looked behind me. Her eyes were large and fixed on the porthole.
I looked back at the porthole. Suddenly, the light that had been splashing up from the hole and lighting Riemann's features was gone. He looked down. Troy and Liss stood up and they could see clearly the large, black pupil with a vivid purple iris looking up at them. They stepped back, but Riemann just remained there, transfixed. They watched as a hand reached out from the hole, grabbed Riemann's head and pull him down with incredible force. He screamed a high pitched wail.
After the soles of Riemann's shoes were pulled through the hole, I reached over and turned the knob on the ground. Yellow sunlight poured out of the porthole, and as we carefully approached if we felt a warm summer breeze and heard the comforting sound of chirping birds.
Liss grabbed a hold of me. I could feel her body trembling. "Don't you fucking leave me," she said, and I had been saying the very same thing to her, only within the privacy of my own mind.
We held each other's hands tight, our fingers interlocked. She followed me as I stepped on through to the other side.
Looking up from where I had been crouching on the damp basement floor, I watched as Wes slammed the pickax down again, again. Little bits of concrete shot through the air and all the dust had formed a cloud that swallowed us. He stopped suddenly, throwing off his gloves and pulling down the bandanna that had been hanging off his nose. Wiping his sweaty, dirt-caked forehead with the back of his hand, he looked at me with red eyes. Not just from lack of sleep, either. Only half-joking but still obviously embittered, Wes said, "I'm telling you, Troy, after all this shit there had better be buried fucking treasure under here."
Looking to where he was pointing, I saw the manhole. Laughing to myself, shaking my head, I bounced my purple tennis ball and caught it in a fist. I smiled and looked behind me, where Professor Riemann stood. His hands were deep in the pocket of his jeans and his eyes looked huge behind his thick-rimmed glasses. It was almost ominous, the way they seemed to bulge out of his face, hidden beneath his beard and his ball cap. "Well," Riemann said, "let's open her up and have a look."
"And hope to hell we're not pulling a Pandora," I added under my breath as I stood up.
Riemann placed the crowbar at the corner of the cover and pushed down with a manly grunt, raising it just enough that Wes and I could push it aside. It fell on the chunks of concrete beside us with a loud clang and, as Riemann knelt carefully to look down the hole, he confirmed, "Yeah, seems to be a room all right. Looks like its about a twelve foot drop."
Directly below the hole we could all see a mound of concrete. Wes handed Riemann the bungee and, nodding in thanks, the old man was readying to ease himself down. That's when I held out my arm, blocking his path. "Wait," I said, and I could hear the hesitance in my own voice. "Just hold on. Maybe we should take our time with this. We don't know what could be down there."
Wes just laughed, shaking his head dismissively. He threw me a look and it seemed he was embarrassed by me, perhaps even a little annoyed with me. I turned and saw that Riemann was getting curious, and my heart sank when he asked, "Well, what do you think is down there?"
"Go ahead," Wes urged teasingly, with more than a hint of annoyance in his voice, "tell him, Troy. Tell him all about the spooky Dr. Hinton."
With that, my head fell and I turned away from both of them, frustrated. Riemann had to know what all this was about now. There wasn't a soul that had grown up in this town who had not heard the tale about Dr. Hinton and his crew of seven.
"Let's not get into this now," I said.
"No," Wes said. "Let's."
Kids had been getting drunk and stoned in this house since I was in junior high, but no one ever knew about this basement till Wes found it last week. When he told me about it the day after he'd found it, I didn't catch on at first. He was stoned out of his gourd as he so often was, so I figured maybe it was all aimless babble.
"You found it, damn it," I yelled at him. "You're the one that found the damn mound."
Then he had told me about the mound he had found in the basement, however. How it had the name Hinton etched into it, and we knew what that meant. Those stories we heard when we were kids about the mad scientists in the woods who'd found that underground structure. Some said it was a crashed flying saucer they found, but we both felt too old to believe in that stuff anymore. But the story went that the government scientists built a house and a basement atop it. That they tinkered around with the machine and that it could do amazing things. Then the government closed the program. When the scientists refused to leave, they buried them alive in concrete. None of that made sense, though. Why would they just leave the house here, abandoned in the woods?
"Just knock it off, you two," Riemann said calmly. "We've come this far, we dug up the manhole. At this point it won't hurt to drop down and take a peek at whatever it is that's down there."
"Sure, man," Wes said, holding his hand out to the hole, "sure. You first."
"Afraid?" Wes glared at me for a moment, and I cursed myself for yet again forgetting how damned sensitive he could be about such accusations, even if they were in jest. All seemed to be silent and I quickly realized I'd stepped over the line by saying that. I couldn't find anything really good to say to manage the damage, so I just shrugged and said, "I mean, curiosity killed the cat."
It was lame, and the fact that he didn't point it out revealed that he'd forgiven me for questioning his masculinity. "Yeah," he said after a moment, relaxing a bit and laughing. "Well, I ain't no pussy."
Riemann eased himself down with the help of the bungee and I quickly followed after him. Once my feet touched ground, I turned on my flashlight, looking up. The hole we'd come down from was at the center of four curved beams of a dome ceiling. Between them there was a jagged crystal of an eerie purple hue.
Wes peered down from the hole above. "Any gold?"
Looking around me, I saw an ovular room of stainless steel. There were portholes in a column at the center of the walls and most seemed sealed off. Welded shut with metal, splattered with concrete.
"Tons," I said.
Wes made his way down the bungee, his backpack and a large, battery-powered lamp slung over on his back. As soon as he got to the ground, he turned on the lamp, bathing the entire room in light.
"Liar," Wes said.
I stepped towards the stainless-steel walls in wonder. "This one's still open," I said, and Riemann approached me, shining his flashlight into it. We both peered in and across the dark gap, which seemed to be the interior of a cave, he could see another sealed porthole in a wall of rock that stretched as high and wide as his flashlight could reach.
"That's weird," is all Riemann could find to say, but there was a significant uneasiness in his voice that didn't escape my attention. I looked away from him and the hole and back at Wes, who seemed eternally unimpressed with anything. He was leaning on the wall behind us, against a sealed-off-porthole. Sighing, he threw his navy green backpack to his feet.
"What do you suppose this is?" Riemann said. He was holding a star-shaped stone that protruded from below the manhole. It had a small rivet on top. On the wall beside each of the five points were etched figures. The side with the small rivet, it was aligned with a simple circle. Then there was a dough nut-shaped symbol, then a sideways figure eight. Then there were two vertical lines connected by two horizontal lines, curved inward towards one another. And then there were two horizontal lines connected to two overlapping arrows pointing to the right, and Riemann brushed his fingers against that one.
I laughed. "Looks like some mixture of the pause and play buttons on a DVD player," I said.
He didn't seem to hear me over the volume of his own thoughts. He just stood there, shaking his head. "What is[i/] this place?" Riemann said, mostly to himself.
Looking across the cave inside the porthole, I could see a small hole in the seal of the porthole on the other side. A bit of light escaped through it and for a second I could've sworn that I'd seen some movement. Were my eyes playing tricks on me? I held my ball in consideration until, with a shrug of indifference, I threw the ball with all his might into the porthole and across to the other one. I watched it hit the dead center of the porthole and then moved quickly out of the way, because it looked as though the ball was going to bounce back out of the porthole and I didn't want it to hit me in the face. Before it even shot back out of the porthole, however, I heard Wes gasp, "Fuck!" from behind me. Quickly swinging around, I found that Wes had dropped to his knees below the sealed-off porthole where he had been standing. He was cowering. All this happened before the ball actually shot back out of the porthole and hit the wall just above his head. I laughed shamefully when I saw him pale-faced and cowering. "Good reflexes, man," I chuckled. "Sorry about that."
Pointing a shivering finger at the sealed porthole above him, his red eyes suddenly pasty white with fear, Wes said shakily, "Guys, there's something behind there. Something knocked[i/]." Riemann just looked at him suspiciously and then met eyes with me. I just laughed.
Everything changed gears when we all heard a noise, however, and this one made us all jump in unison. It came from the concrete mound. There, a slender figure eclipsed the light of the lamp. It was a girl of about five and a half feet. She had pink hair, knee-high black leather boots, faded and torn jeans and a black shirt on which it read, in bright purple lettering, Orgasm Donor[i/].
"Liss," said Wes, standing, shaking his head. Both he and Troy let out sighs of relief which swiftly broke into laughter. I looked away from her and back at Riemann. His eyes seemed even wider, if such a thing were possible, and he suddenly seemed quite tense. He held his hand to chest as if he were trying to hold back his heart from bursting out his body.
Liss scampered down off the mound, her thumb and index finger around one band of the tiny brown book bag she had strapped to her back. It was littered with band stickers. Her walk slowed, her narrow eyes taking on an almost vicious look as they locked with Riemann's. Looking away from him and towards no one, her chin up, she spoke somewhere between a bark and a hiss.
"Why'd you bring the teacher along?" She said bitterly to the two of them, and I looked at Troy in a way that I hope suggested I wanted to ask that very same thing to Wes with respect to Liss.
"Chill, Liss," Wes said dismissively, reaching into his back pack, looking to the ground to avert both their deathly glares, "Riemann's our pillar of logic here."
I turned my back to her slowly and towards the hole, nodding. "Yeah," I laughed, "and that's certainly something we need in this fucking house."
"Well, has the flanneled pillar here offered any explanation as to why someone would put a foot of concrete over a manhole in the basement floor of some creepy house pushed back in the woods?" She asked in a snooty manner, her thin eyebrows darting up her smooth-looking skin, her soft lips puckering up defiantly. After a moment lacking response, that pucker stretched to a menacing ear-to-ear grin. "Didn't fucking think so. Captain Logic here is a bit out of his goddamn element, I'd say. A little over his boxed-in head."
Riemann seemed oblivious to the insult and remained looking at her with those same wide, cautious eyes. After realizing he was staring, however, he averted his eyes, and instead began staring on the ground. I followed his eyes and found a metal pole that had been rammed into a computer monitor. After a moment of silence amongst the ground, however, he finally spoke, and loud enough for all the group to hear. "I'd say that metal pole over there, with enough force, might let us break open the porthole on the other side."
Wes looked at him suspiciously. "Why the hell would we want to break through?"
"Same reason we came down here," he said, "curiosity."
Wes shrugged. "Then why the hell can't we just use the pickax?"
Riemann laughed and stepped towards him a bit, pupils staring dead into his, eyebrows raising in challenge. "Would you like to climb in there, Wesley?" He asked, pointing his thumb toward the hole. Wes accepted defeat and his eyes dove to the ground.
Liss grabbed the pole and drug it over and Riemann, though thankful, seemed perplexed about her now all the more. He grabbed the pole, taking his place behind her, and Wes took his position behind him. I saw quite clearly that I had been voted out, so I stepped to the side, leaning against the sealed-off porthole beside Wes's book bag. I did it cautiously, though; afraid that noise from the wall might return. The three backed up and the pole's end, guided back by Wes, was nearly at my chest when I took the hint and moved a bit to the side. All the while Riemann counted, "One," and louder, "Two," finally screaming, "GO!"
With that, they ran the pole into the porthole. I heard the loud clanging noise, the roar of metal being punctured -- but it was coming from behind me. I tried to move, but it was too late. Something slammed into my shoulder with an incredible violence, sending me spinning, spinning, slamming into the ground, yelping in pain, screaming every obscenity I could conjure out of my cerebrum.
When I was finally able to look up, I saw that Liss had knelt down beside me, eyes wide with worry, asking me, "Troy," pleading, "you all right?" Her hand was touching my shoulder. The first time she had made physical contact with him in three months, I suddenly realized.
And then her hand fell away limply. I looked upward to meet with three pale faces sporting eyes and mouths round as my tennis ball. Liss, Wes and Riemann were all fixated on the space behind and above me. Looking to my side, looking up, I saw the pole leaning partway out the porthole behind me, its covering slammed off, bent, broken. This made no sense to me, none at all, but I was too angry about the pain in my shoulder to deal with that now. In anger, I just shoved the pole deeper into the hole out of which it had come. As I did so, however, the pole sticking up and out the hole of the wall behind the three pf them moved in parallel, sending the eyes and bodies of Riemann, Wes and Liss in that direction.
"What?" Wes yelped. I stood up, holding my shoulder as I looked back and fourth at the portholes and poles on either side of me. Wes moved the pole at his end, watching as the pole at my end moved in accordance.
"Hey, Professor Pillar," Liss said, "I flunked your physics class, but isn't this, like, totally fucking impossible?"
Nodding slowly, almost zombie-like, Riemann took his flashlight and beamed it into the hole on his end, turning around to watch as the light spilled out the opposite wall and fell on his shoulder. He shut it off and then looked deep, deep into the hole, saw the room from the other side, saw his back, saw the back of his head looking into the hole at him looking into the hole at himself, himself, forever and ever. He grabbed the ball from my hand and threw it towards the hole on the other end of the blackness and it shot out the hole behind him. His hand went to his forehead, his head sank down.
"Holy shit," was the verbal summary of his ultimate conclusion.
Wes was wrestling a bit more with words, if only to ensure he was understanding this clearly and the shit he'd smoked earlier wasn't laced. "So this hole's here, and that hole's there," he said, pointing to either end of the room. "And this room, the one we're in, is between these two portholes." The Pillar nodded and Wes continued. "And that dark cave-room in there is between the other sides of these same two portholes." The Pillar nodded. "And the distance between the portholes, it's less than the distance between them in here, right?" Riemann nodded again, and Wes echoed that nod, saying, "Well. That's just," he thought, but nothing came. "I don't know."
"Fucked up?" Liss offered. Riemann nodded in agreement. Wes scratched his pubic-hair beard for a moment and ran his fingers through his short, curly red hair, both of which were caked in sweat and dust. Riemann turned from where he had been looking at them all and towards the hole, sticking his head deep into the blackness. Grabbing the pickax leaning against the wall, he climbed halfway in and, looking down, he saw a step ladder made out of rope and wood planks. Interesting. He just stood there a moment, still and silent, dazed and considering. He finally shook his head, looked at everyone sympathetically through his sunken eyes, let out a little laugh and said, "We've got to go in there."
"We?" Wes barked, then chuckled. "Uh, no. No way, man. You maybe. Not we."
"I'm kinda curious," Liss said to Wes in Riemann's defense. He took a plastic bag filled with something green and little book out his back pocket. Tearing out a page, he filled the center with what he'd pinched out of the plastic bag. Nervously, hesitantly, Liss said, "I think I'm gonna go with the old man," and Wes just shrugged as he rolled the paper, saying, "Well, have a good time at the bottom of the loop."
I heard a clang and, looking behind me, Riemann took his head out of the porthole. He must have dropped the pickax into the void. "There's a bottom to the cave after all," he said, "and its not too far down." Then he climbed in and made his slow decent.
I came to the hole, watching the darkness swallow my former professor before looking up, across to the porthole in the rock wall. Through it I saw his own back, eclipsed by Liss and Wes passing a thin cigarette back and fourth. I watched as Liss approached me, watched as her hand extended to my shoulder, hovering above it in hesitation, wanting to touch him but paralyzed in the cold embrace of her own ambivalence. She withdrew her hand and turned around, back to his field of vision now and towards the back of his body. Meeting my eyes through the hole on the other end. She had somehow felt my gaze. Embarrassed, I turned around, taking my head out of the hole, and Liss turned around yet again, and for the same purpose as before, to face me. She was not so bold as to look me directly in the eyes this time, however.
"So," I said accusingly, though towards Wes, "what are you smoking?"
Wes flipped open the book, took a look. In a voice stuck in inhale, a voice which dared not let out a mere puff of smoke, he said, simply, "Revelations, as it turns out. Wanna hit?" I shook my head, looking away from him to find Liss looking at me now. She was looking at me with reddening eyes that melted away the cold shoulder I'd been giving her.
"I'm going," she said, as if suggesting my company.
"I still exist to you," he said in mock surprise. It was more of a bitter, sarcastic statement than a question, however. In response Liss took the cigarette from Wes's hand. She took a hit, held it for a second and looked me dead in the eyes. Then she blew the cloud in my face.
Neither of us moved for a moment. My face was stone cold. Her lips were fixed in a sneer, her eyes daggers jabbing mercilessly into my own. Then, with her shoulders back and chin angled upward, she simply walked away. As she crawled into the hole I had the intense impulse to follow her down, half out of curiosity for what lied below and half out of fear of what might happen to her, but I resisted. Instead I looked at Wes, who shook his head with a smile and a sigh. He need not say anything, he'd said it all to both of us before. I looked away, and in the process my eyes fell upon the stone protruding out of the punctured porthole behind Wes. Its stone also had a rivet, around the stone were also figures, and its rivet also pointed to a circle. A light flickered on behind my eyes.
"Its a knob," I said.
"What?" Wes said, blowing out a stream of smoke. "You mean like for changing channels?"
He was already stoned again. I pointed to the star-like stone. "Yeah, exactly. This one is set to the circle symbol just like the other porthole. I think this particular symbol signifies a loop. And the figure eight is the infinity symbol, right? The two lines connected to one another, maybe they signify two different points merged by a wormhole. And -- "
"Fuck," Wes snapped, breaking Troy's concentration, "bitch has my joint." Wes ran to the other porthole. I looked to the one right beside me and saw him poke his head through the one at the other end. Positioned halfway down the ladder was Liss, who looked up at him with a Cheshire Cat grin. Between her thumb and index finger she waved the bait and continued stepping down the latter. "Damn it," I heard Wes grumble. He stuck one leg into the hole, just straddling it a moment. Then he turned his head away from my line of sight. "Troy," he called to my back.
I threw my ball at him and it hit him in the head and fell down into the void. "Hey," I said, "you don't have to yell. I'm right here."
He turned his head around, looking across the gap of the cave to my face on the other end and giggled. "God, that's fucked up," he said. "Anyway, you comin'?"
I looked down at Liss and she was already looking at me. I couldn't read the look on her face, it could've been anything. "Yeah," I said, looking back up at Wes, "just let me get your back-pack and I'll follow you down."
I knelt down to grab his back-pack at my feet when we all seemed to hear a strange noise from the bottom of the hole. I stood up, book bag in my hand, and looked down at Liss, clutching the ladder on the other side of the cave. She had a worried face.
"Riemann," she yelled down into the abyss, "you all right?"
"Found another porthole," he yelled back.
I turned around and walked to where Wes was, hanging halfway out of the porthole, and handed him the book bag. He put his foot on the small stone beneath the porthole to gain balance as he reached for it. As he did so, the stone turned like a bike pedal. With a crunching, grinding sound the point of the star with the rivet moved to the left, click-click-clicking away from the circle symbol. It fell onto the pause-rewind symbol and, at that very moment, the darkness of the cave within the porthole disappeared. The portion of Wes that was within the porthole disappeared, but not his forearm or his leg up to his thigh. With a wet slice and a sizzle they fell to the floor. Bloodless, the fingers of the hand twitched and spasmed. From the porthole behind me, I could hear Wes screaming.
I just stared at them there, backing up in terror until my back hit the wall behind him, the wall which bore the other porthole. Liss held onto the ladder for dear life, and she looked at me terrified. "Is he alright?" I screamed, but she couldn't answer. I could hear him screaming from somewhere down in the blackness.
"Hello?"
It was a foreign voice from behind me. Spinning around, I met the eyes of a frighteningly tall, bony-faced man in a white lab coat. The name tag read Hinton and he held up his hands as if in defense as he stepped eagerly but carefully through the hole, carefully avoiding the severed and cauterized leg and arm, which he looked at with an amused confusion.
"Just relax," the man said to Troy, as his eyes shifted to Troy and the room all around him. "Now, tell me, what year is it?"
"2007," he said. "Who are you?"
"I was a prisoner," he said. "Evidently for about sixty-three years on this end, but on my end it was the blink of an eye. I wish I could extend my thanks," he said, pulling out a revolver from his back pocket, "but I'm really pressed for time now."
"Shit," I said under my breath. Looking down into the abyss just passed the portholes rim, I knew I'd have to jump. There was no step-ladder on this side.
He pointed the gun at me. Before I was able to jump, he fired, the bullet piercing what I was beginning to consider as an accursed shoulder. It threw me back and I tumbled into the porthole, falling through the darkness and landing on something soft.
I looked down. It was the body of Wes. Screaming, I threw myself off of him and rolled along the dirt floor, making my way to the far wall. I could hardly see the portholes up above at all, so it must have been quite a drop.
"Troy," a voice said from behind me, and I saw Riemann kneeling on the ground. Liss was right by him, and she ran up to me and threw her arms around me. She wasn't crying -- it wasn't like her to cry -- but she was stuttering, her voice shakily trying to articulate to me that Wes was dead. I touched her head with my outspread hand and I whispered that I knew.
"Look," I said to Riemann, "there's a scientist up there and judging from the name tag its that infamous Dr. Hinton."
Riemann looked at me, confused. "How?" Is all he could say.
"The knobs," I said. "The stones below all the portholes, they change the, I don't know, `stations', I guess."
Nodding, Riemann said, "They connect distant points in space," though it seemed mostly to himself. He had a bad habit of thinking out loud.
"And time, apparently," I added. "So I guess we pulled a Pandora after all."
"Well, we got to get out of here," Liss said, "and we can't go back up that ladder. When Wes fell on me, it busted."
"Then I don't know how the fuck we're going anywhere," I said.
Riemann smiled, looking down at the porthole he crouched over on the floor. It had been sealed, welded shut, and from his end. He stood up. "Stand back," he said, and we did. He swung the ax again, again, again, and finally managed to make a small opening. Light from the other side poured upon his face. He swung again, again, and the covering was gone. Cautiously, he stuck his head through, and a moment later he looked up at me.
"You've got see this," he said.
I crawled over and looked at the porthole. I saw a purple sky with white clouds. Rain seemed to fall towards me, but at the lip of the porthole it just dripped as if across a window, gathering around the edges, but when I put my hand through the hole I felt no glass. I felt only the touch of raindrops. Riemann was right by me, watching all this.
"Amazing," he said under his breath, involuntarily.
I stuck his head down into the hole and, strangely, found myself looking up from the ground on the other side. I quickly pulled my head up.
"Strange," I said.
"Let's go," Riemann said, and I looked at him as if he was nuts. What was on the other side of that hole didn't look like any earthly setting, and there was no telling what might happen to us if we spent any time on the other side. I just laughed and tried to shake my head, but I was too frozen in fear of his suggestion to me, his expectation of me. He just shrugged, "What choice to we have? There's no other way out."
"There's that knob," I said, pointing to the stone sticking up at the far end of the porthole.
"Guys," Liss said, and I looked behind me. Her eyes were large and fixed on the porthole.
I looked back at the porthole. Suddenly, the light that had been splashing up from the hole and lighting Riemann's features was gone. He looked down. Troy and Liss stood up and they could see clearly the large, black pupil with a vivid purple iris looking up at them. They stepped back, but Riemann just remained there, transfixed. They watched as a hand reached out from the hole, grabbed Riemann's head and pull him down with incredible force. He screamed a high pitched wail.
After the soles of Riemann's shoes were pulled through the hole, I reached over and turned the knob on the ground. Yellow sunlight poured out of the porthole, and as we carefully approached if we felt a warm summer breeze and heard the comforting sound of chirping birds.
Liss grabbed a hold of me. I could feel her body trembling. "Don't you fucking leave me," she said, and I had been saying the very same thing to her, only within the privacy of my own mind.
We held each other's hands tight, our fingers interlocked. She followed me as I stepped on through to the other side.
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