The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Read online

  “What’s that about?” Basz asked, pointing. “Was that there when you lived up here?”

  His uncle shrugged, his shoulder blades momentarily jutting out of his back.

  “What do you suppose they kept penned in there?” Basz persisted.

  “How the hell should I know?” his uncle said.

  No point having livestock out here—not enough land for them to graze. Perhaps a garden, Basz thought. But why would you wall a garden in? Surely there were no animals on the islet they needed to protect the plants from, and tall walls would diminish the sunlight.

  His uncle dipped his paddle back in and, grunting, dragged it through the water. Basz took his own paddle up from where it rested athwart the gunnels and began pulling it through the water on the boat’s other side.

  The closer they came, the bigger the house seemed.

  “Why would they abandon it?” Basz asked. “It’s the only decent house out here.”

  His uncle didn’t bother answering.

  “Is this a good idea?” asked Basz a little later, when they were nearing the shore.

  His uncle shrugged again. “Beggars can’t be choosers, Basz,” he said. “Keep paddling.”

  The way Basz saw it, as they pulled the boat onto the dark, squelchy mud of the islet’s shore and unloaded the boxes of food, was that he wasn’t the beggar—his uncle was. Basz was, basically, just along for the ride. He was not the one who needed to hide. He was not the one who had gotten himself into, in his uncle’s words, “a minor bit of bother” and then made it much worse by knifing the man who came to try to talk some sense into him. All that had been his uncle, not him.

  True, Basz had been present, but he hadn’t been involved. At first, he’d just watched from the sofa as the two men argued at the door. But once his uncle flicked out his knife and pushed it deep into the man’s side, he had leaped up quickly enough to grab his uncle’s wrist and keep him from stabbing the fellow a second time.

  Basz settled the stabbed man carefully onto the floor, then found a towel the man could hold tightly against his wound.

  “We should just kill the fucker,” said his uncle. “Easier all around.”

  But Basz talked his uncle out of it. That was usually his role with his uncle, talking him down. The wound was bad but not too bad, Basz argued. Barring sepsis, the man would recover. Perhaps in time, he told his uncle, the incident would be forgotten, or at least minimized.

  “So here’s what you do,” said Basz. “You call 911. Tell them there’s been an accident and to send an ambulance. Then hightail it out of here, find a place to hide until you know if he lives or dies.”

  His uncle stared at him a long time. For a moment Basz imagined he’d just push him aside and slit the fellow’s throat—easier all around—but finally his uncle nodded and put his flick-knife away.

  “Where we going to hole up?” his uncle asked.

  “We?” said Basz. “No, just you.”

  His uncle shook his head. “I don’t want you giving people the wrong idea about these events when I’m not around. I’m keeping my eye on you. You’re coming.”

  “But I—”

  “You’re coming,” said his uncle.

  From the floor, the stabbed man regarded him weakly. The towel, Basz saw, was already sodden with blood. Almost certainly the man would die.

  “So, where?” asked his uncle.

  “Don’t know,” said Basz. “Got any ideas?”

  His uncle thought a long moment. “One,” he finally said.

  The man was still alive when they left, though no longer conscious. It had been a long drive, six hours, maybe seven. At first Basz was worried about pursuit, but he’d been vague enough in the 911 call that it no doubt took some time for the police to figure out what had happened and who had been responsible.

  On the drive, Basz got a little information out of his uncle, but the man, laconic as usual, didn’t give up much. It was like bleeding a stone.

  There was a lake up there, his uncle told him.

  A lake?

  He had lived near the lake one summer, years ago, in the town next to it.

  The whole family had? Basz’s mom and grandparents too?

  His uncle shook his head. Just him.

  But why just him?

  His uncle shrugged. “Long story,” he said.

  “We got time,” said Basz.

  But his uncle didn’t take the bait. Instead he just let the road markers slide by. How long was it before he spoke again? A dozen minutes, maybe two dozen.

  “It’s sparse up there,” his uncle said. “People mind their own business. But there’s a safe place to stay.”

  “Who we staying with?” asked Basz.

  “Nobody,” said his uncle. “It’s not that kind of place.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not that kind of place’?”

  “Nobody’s living in it.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s stories,” said his uncle.

  “What kind of stories?”

  “The usual shit,” said his uncle. “It don’t mean anything. Don’t worry about it.” And a few minutes later: “The stories are good for us. They’ll keep people away.”

  It was early morning by the time they drove through what passed for a town, little more than a single street three or four blocks long. They had barely entered it before they were out again. His uncle slowed to a snail’s pace, peering into the bushes and ferns lining the road. At a certain point, he stopped, reversed a little, then drove the car off the road and onto a little path until it was completely hidden.

  They got out and walked back into town. His uncle jimmied the back door of a mom-and-pop grocery. In the stockroom, he found two empty crates, began to fill them with supplies.

  “Should you really break in and steal shit near where we’ll be hiding out?” asked Basz.

  “Don’t be a smartass,” said his uncle. But before they left, his uncle was careful to clean up, to make it less immediately obvious there had been a break-in.

  They each carried a crate. They walked out of town and down the road past the hidden car to the shore of the lake. There, they stole a canoe.

  II.

  His uncle wasn’t following him. He turned to see him still standing on the muddy shore of the islet. He had put his crate down in the mud and was pushing the canoe out into the lake.

  Basz walked back to him. His uncle watched the canoe float away, bobbing gently.

  “What the hell?” Basz asked.

  His uncle turned. “Anybody sees a boat on the shore it’ll just let them know we’re here. Now we’re safe.”

  “We could have just hid it in the bushes,” said Basz.

  There was an instant where it was clear from the sheer astonishment on his uncle’s face that he hadn’t even considered this, but almost immediately the expression was gone. That was his uncle’s problem, thought Basz—he didn’t think before acting. That was why his life was such a mess.

  But what’s my excuse? Basz asked himself. Why am I here?

  “How are we going to get off?” asked Basz.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said his uncle.

  But there is no bridge, thought Basz. That’s why we had the canoe.

  His uncle bent down and in a swift fluid motion hoisted the crate to his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a look at the house.”

  The front door was padlocked shut. They used the solitary window to get in, his uncle plucking a rock off the ground and breaking a pane, then reaching through, unlatching it, lifting the sash.

  “In you go,” he said, and so Basz clambered in, cutting himself in the process, though not too deeply. It was nothing to worry about, he told himself as he tried to staunch the bleeding.

  The house was stagnant inside, a layer of grime thick on every surface. It stank of mildew. The rooms were bare: no furniture, nothing but stone walls, a fireplace, a packed-dirt floor. No beds in the two small side ro
oms. No shelves, no cabinets, nothing to cook with or in—which made half of the foodstuffs they had stolen useless. In the center of the main room’s dirt floor, someone had gouged what looked like a crude drawing of a face. The face looked somehow familiar. Basz stared at it until his uncle called his name, then went over and took the two crates he passed through the window.

  “See if there’s a key in there for the padlock,” his uncle said.

  “Why would they keep the padlock key inside the locked house?” asked Basz, but he looked anyway.

  There was no key. He examined the door, looked to see if it might be easy to remove the hinges, but they were tight. Without a hammer and chisel he doubted he could loosen the pins from the knuckles.

  He returned to the window.

  “Well?” said his uncle.

  “It’s empty in here, totally barren,” he said.

  His uncle shrugged. “No key?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about the back door?” his uncle asked.

  Back door? Yes, there it was, the wood so blackened and grimy that in the dim light from the single window he had thought it a discolored portion of the stone wall. It was held shut by a single hook and eye. He slid the hook out then turned the handle and pushed it ajar.

  “I’ll come around,” said his uncle, disappearing from the window.

  But the door, as it turned out, didn’t open onto the outside.

  There was a short passage, roofless, walls made of vertical palings, logs perhaps eight feet tall, tapered at the tips. Or probably a great deal more than eight feet tall, considering how much of them must be buried in the ground. Basz went down the passage, looking for a door in the side of it, but there was no door, only an opening at the very end, leading into the palisade.

  He entered. It was hard to say what it had been: a courtyard of sorts, perhaps, or a garden. Whatever it had been, it was now overgrown, thick with plants that seemed like ferns but were squatter, more fibrous. They twisted and curved in a way different from any ferns he had known. They looked tortured. They grew to the height of a man and were so thoroughly and angrily interlaced that it was hard to see through them. He could see the top of the palisade and could see that the logs had been set vertically here as well and were sharpened at the tips. He could just see in the far wall, over the torrent of green, the upper edge of a crude doorframe. At least that’s what it seemed to be from where he stood.

  The ferns, if they were ferns, were wet. His feet sank into the ground as he stepped into them. A half dozen steps and he could no longer see where he had come from. He took a few more steps and tried to orientate himself by the walls of the palisade, but the ground must have been curved like a bowl, sloping down as you moved toward its center. The farther he got from where he had begun, the more the ferns seemed to thicken not only before him but over him as well. Soon, he could see nothing, neither before nor behind. All he could see was the ghost of the sunlight through the fronds themselves, dimmer all the time.

  And then a cloud must have passed across the sun: suddenly, it was hard to see anything at all. He stepped forward and found the trunk of a tree in his path, thick and broad. He tried to sidle around it but there it was again, much wider than he’d thought—doubled, perhaps, two trunks that both were and weren’t the same plant. Or perhaps the second belonged to another plant entirely and he’d somehow missed the gap between.

  He took another step and this time passed around it. Things seemed even darker on the other side. His face and jacket were soaked through now. A frond brushed by his face and left it tingling and numb. Was it just the cold and the damp making it so?

  Surely he must be near the wall now. But no, here was another trunk, and another, and another, tightly together but not arranged regularly enough to be a wall. Somehow he had managed to step into what seemed a closed circle of trunks. But it couldn’t be truly closed—if it was, how could he have gotten inside? All he had to do, he told himself, was feel his way around them, slowly, carefully, until he found how he had first gotten in.

  The light brightened momentarily, whatever cloud that had been between the sun and the ferns now gone. The trunk directly across from him had a strange protrusion on it, just level with his eyes. It looked almost like a face. Almost, funnily enough, like his own face. How strange, he thought, staring. And then the light shifted again, which made it seem like the eyes of the face were opening.

  He felt sleepy. That was understandable; they had travelled all night, and the last twenty-four hours had been a nightmare. When was the last time he had truly slept? He would push his way to the far wall, open the door for his uncle, but after that he’d go back inside and rest.

  Where was the wall? Or was this, what he was thinking of as trunks, the wall after all? Maybe he was already there.

  He reached out, feeling for a latch, but there was nothing, only what felt like the curve of a shoulder but strangely damp, strangely cold. Was this his uncle, already in? Was it his own arm he was feeling? He reached up and touched what felt like a beard, a nose, the contours of a face. It felt like his own face. But if it was his own face, what was it doing in front of him?

  He could hear his uncle calling out, shouting his name. His face was pushed against something, and he was lying down. He had fallen somehow. His arm was tingling, his face too. He tried to answer his uncle, but his tongue was no longer his own. After a while, the cries faded, coming from a greater and greater distance.

  He managed somehow to get to his feet. Where was he exactly? Was the man still bleeding somewhere on the floor? Had his uncle, frustrated by Basz’s attempts to hold him back, stabbed him as well?

  What’s wrong with me? he wondered.

  It was too dark to make much out. He felt around and found he was not inside after all but in a tight grove of trees. The bark of each was strange, warm, gnarled with protuberances in one spot alone, at head height, in a way that reminded him of a face. What face? Even by touch it was somehow familiar.

  He tried to push his hands into his pockets, but his fingers were numb and he couldn’t get them to go in right. Or, rather, he couldn’t feel them enough to be sure if they were in or not. There was a lighter in there, in one of the pockets, if he could just get it out.

  He shook his hands, felt his fingers tingle, could discern their limits just long enough to close them around the lighter. They dragged it out. He thumbed the spark wheel, threw a few sparks. He tried again, then a third time, focusing now on the plastic lever behind the wheel, and suddenly there was a flame, his knuckle close enough to it that he could smell the hair burn off it. He lifted the lighter and saw that yes, it looked like a face. Not only a face, but his own face, ashen and dumb, on the trunk of the tree. And there, again, on the tree beside it, and again on the tree beside that. He lifted the lighter higher to get a closer look and the eyes clicked open, like a doll’s. Not just in the face in front of him but in all the faces surrounding him. And then his thumb slipped, and the flame was snuffed out.

  III.

  It just took him a single goddam minute to make it around from the window to the door at the back of the house, but by the time he got there, the door was closed again. Where was Basz? What was the bastard up to? He tried the door, hammered on it, but there was no answer.

  He went back and looked through the window, but Basz wasn’t in there. Maybe in one of the two side rooms? But the door to each was open and from the window he could see most of each room—if Basz was in one of them, he was pressed against the wall, hiding out of sight. Why in the hell would his nephew do that?

  He walked a little way down the slope, scanned the lake. Maybe Basz had decided to cut out and swim for it. He hadn’t wanted to come in the first place—if he’d had his way, he would have stayed behind and betrayed them—and so, maybe he had left to do just that.

  But he couldn’t see anything or anyone in the water, just a few loons and the gently lapping waves.

  Why, he idly wondered, did I let the
canoe go? It had seemed to make sense at the time, but it was almost like someone else was doing it, not him. Why had he ever thought it was a good idea?

  He went to the back door. Maybe Basz had gone into that structure, the stockade or pen or whatever. There was a gap of about fifteen feet between the stone house and the palisade, and from what he could tell from the two half-filled parallel trenches running from one building to another, there had once been a walled passage of some sort running between the two. Now, the logs that must have formed the walls of that passage had been piled in front of the entrance of the palisade, blocking the way in.

  “Basz?” he called out. “Basz?”

  He walked around the structure. There was no other entrance. What was it they had said about the house, years back when he had spent that summer at the lake? Nobody goes there, was all the old bastard he’d worked for had said at first, and then, when pressed, It’s not the house but the island, what lives on it. Which was why, he gathered, they had chopped all the trees down. But since, as the old man said, it wasn’t the house that was the problem and the trees were already chopped down, he figured the house should be all right to stay in, even if the stories were true, which they weren’t. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  The logs were too heavy to roll. There were spikes too, he now saw, driven into a few of them, holding them in place. Because of the way the logs had been piled against the door, he could clamber up them. A little tricky—slippery in his boots, and a couple times he almost fell. But in the end, he climbed high enough that he could just peer over the wall and down into the palisade.

  It was empty inside, muddy, nothing but mud, certainly no Basz. What had the structure been for? What had been kept inside? And why had they felt the need to barricade the entrance?

  He climbed back down, walked back to the front of the house. Still no sign of Basz. He lifted the sash and, grunting, started to work his way through the window, then thought, Why bother? Instead, he kicked the front door with his boot heel until the hasp holding the padlock tore loose.