The Thing in the Root Cellar

The light was green-white. Like rot on wood. Like the phosphorescence on a beach at night. It came from somewhere below the farmhouse, from the root cellar beneath the kitchen, and it pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat that had forgotten how fast to beat.

Sam Whitmore was twelve years old. He was also not sure that anything around him was real.

He had been coming to the root cellar every night for a week. He told his uncle Craine he was storing potatoes. He was not storing potatoes. He was watching the light. Two shapes, glowing green-white, sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor of the deepest part of the cellar. They were small--maybe ten inches tall. Their skin was translucent, like the inside of a onion, and beneath it light moved slowly, like blood moving through ice.

They did not speak. Or rather, they spoke, but Sam was not sure the speaking was happening in the room or in his head.

"We have been waiting," one said. The voice sounded like wind through dry leaves.

"Waiting for what?"

"For the one who would see us. Or for no one at all. Both are waiting."

"Are you real?" Sam asked.

The one on the right tilted its head. "That depends on who is asking."

Sam did not sleep much. When he did, he dreamed of two green-white lights moving through a dark forest, and a man with no face watching from behind a tree, and a red ribbon lying on the ground like a wound.

He woke up and told himself it was a dream. He told himself many things. He told himself that the root cellar was just a root cellar and the light was just light and the man with no face was just the man he had always known--his uncle Craine, who had taken him in when his parents died and given him nothing but work and a cold room in the attic and silence.

But he was not sure. He had not been sure for a long time.

Craine found out about the light two weeks after Sam first saw it. A woman from the next farm--Mrs. Gable, who spent her days watching other people\'s business and her nights reporting it to her husband--had seen Sam going into the cellar at night. She had seen the green-white light through the cellar window. She had told her husband. Her husband had told the doctor. The doctor had told Craine.

"Ghosts," Craine said. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee from a chipped mug. His face was the colour of old bread. His eyes were small and sharp and full of something that was not quite curiosity and not quite fear. "Or something else."

"Check them," he said to Sam. "Bring a red ribbon. Tie it around them. Bring them to me."

Sam did not move. "Why?"

"Because I am your uncle," Craine said. "And because if you do not, I will send you back to the convent. And you do not want to go back to the convent."

Sam did not want to go back to the convent. The nuns had been kind. But kindness from strangers is a fragile thing, and when Sam had asked Sister Margaret if he could stay--just a little longer, just until he figured out what to do with his life--she had looked at him with those large, sad eyes and said that God had other plans.

So here he was. In the kitchen. With a red ribbon in his pocket. And two green-white lights in the cellar.

He went down at night. He held the ribbon in his hand. It was red silk, soft, the kind his mother used to wear on her hair. He knelt by the opening to the deepest part of the cellar and he held it out.

The two shapes did not move. They glowed. They pulsed. They were the most real things Sam had ever seen. Or the least real. He could not tell the difference anymore.

"You are afraid," one of them said.

"Yes."

"Then be brave. Tie it loosely. We will do the rest."

He tied it. Not tight. A loop. Something that could be undone.

The shapes stood. Their green-white light grew brighter. They climbed onto Sam\'s shoulder. They were heavier than they looked. Warm. Like hands. Like--

"Like parents," Sam whispered. And then he was afraid, not of the shapes, but of the word.

He carried them upstairs. Craine was waiting in the kitchen. He did not gawk. He did not smile. He simply sat behind the table and watched with eyes that were small, sharp, and hungry.

"Wash," Craine said. "Wash and we will talk."

The shapes stepped into the copper basin by the door. They moved--fast, impossibly fast--through the water, and when they emerged, the red ribbon was gone, and their light was blinding, and the basin was empty.

"We go now," the one on the left said. And they jumped. Not out of the basin. Through it. The kitchen floor, old and rotten and held together by nails and neglect, gave way beneath them, and they fell through into the earth below, and their light faded, and the floorboards closed behind them with a sound like a door shutting.

Sam stood there. Alone. The ribbon dangled from his hand.

Craine did not go mad. He went outside. He got a flashlight and a shovel and a rope and he went into the cellar. He dug. He dug for three hours. Then he dug for three more. On the fourth night, he went down alone. He was drunk. He did not see the rotted floorboard. He fell through. He broke his neck on the stone below.

They found him in the morning. The sheriff said it was an accident. Sam did not believe the sheriff. He was not sure he believed anyone. He was not sure he believed himself.

That night, he went to the root cellar. He knelt by the opening. He shined his flashlight down into the darkness. The hole was there. The earth was there. The light was--

There was no light.

He told himself Craine had been right all along. There were no glowing things. There was only a root cellar and a broken floor and an uncle who had fallen and died. There was only a boy who had lost his parents and his uncle and his mind, in that order.

He went upstairs. He packed a bag. He left the farmhouse at dawn. He walked to the train station. He bought a ticket to Boston. He got on a train. He sat by the window and he watched the New England landscape pass by: white churches, stone walls, pine forests, grey sky.

He closed his eyes. He fell asleep.

He woke to the sound of the train. He opened his eyes. And in the darkness beyond the window, in the space between one pine tree and the next, he saw it: two green-white lights, pulsing slowly, like a heartbeat that had forgotten how fast to beat.

He opened his eyes wider. He pressed his face against the glass.

They were gone.

He told himself it was the darkness. He told himself it was his imagination. He told himself many things.

He did not know if Craine had been real. He did not know if the shapes had been real. He did not know if he had ever been real.

He looked out the window. He saw the horizon. It was grey. It was endless. It was real enough.

He closed his eyes. He slept.

He did not know if he was waking or dreaming.

He did not ask.

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