The Shelter Cycle (13 page)

Often, reading, he would hear something—a creak in a wall or the ceiling overhead, a mousetrap somewhere, even a mouse trying to get free of a trap, slapping it across a distant floor. A footstep, the sound of breathing? The sound of a cart on the tracks, as if someone was pushing it down the tunnel or a wind was somehow blowing underground? He would stand, wait, listen. He would walk to the door of the tunnel, open it, stick his head through. Silence.

 

•

 

Colville picked up Kilo in one arm and climbed up the narrow ladder to the lookout. Finally they reached the top, and he pushed the dog in, climbed over, struggled to the long, low window.

There was still light outside, fading. Thick snowflakes fell, white slanting through gray. The room around them was five feet square, its ceiling low. Levers on the wall slapped open other, smaller windows—only inches across, enough for the barrel of a gun—and freezing air rushed in before he snapped them shut again. There was one swiveling office chair here, and an old copy of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, hundreds of dead flies on the floor.

Last night he'd heard footsteps, or sounds like footsteps. Faint laughter that sounded almost like wind, that was likely only wind. Little things—his multitool, his maps—migrated from the pack while he slept, ended up on shelves or desktops. Sometimes he'd return to his family's quarters and the floor would be open when he was sure he'd slid the plywood cover back across. All he could do was notice these things, and prepare himself, and wait.

Back down the ladder, he found his way to the classroom. The secret wall, the hidden door. Every few hours, several times a day, he came here, and each time he made some progress. Soon, he would be able to withstand this energy, meet it with his own.

Bending down now, he crawled beneath the table of the altar. He felt the waves, pressure in his ears, a slight pulse in his bones. He leaned in, laid his hand flat against the trembling door. He had never touched the lock, and now—for only a moment—he held it in his hand. Hot, it shook his whole arm, twisted his shoulder. He let go, stumbled to his feet. With Kilo close behind him, he hurried away, back toward the tunnel.

 

 

 

The trailer felt so temporary as a place to live, just as our bodies were temporary houses for our souls. Once in the kitchen I looked up and saw a mouse run across the clear plastic below the light, disappear into the ceiling. The window near the sink was bowed, plastic, scoured cloudy by the wind. Wings brushed softly in the walls, swallows making their way beneath the trailer's siding.

Maya and I slept. We woke up in the living room of the trailer, warm beneath our blankets on our mattress. We stayed in bed sometimes until Mom said we had to get up. Rarely we'd hear Dad as he left for the shelter, since he woke up so early. More often it was Mrs. Young with her morning decrees. Their altar was on the opposite side of ours, on the other side of the wool blanket and the bookcase, on their side of the living room. We could see movement, their bodies, in the gaps above the books, and we could hear them, their conversations, their footsteps. The whiskery clatter of the wires that Mr. Young carried, or the bitter smell and hiss when he was soldering something.

Mornings, the heavy wool blanket shook and trembled as if from the force of Mrs. Young's decrees, the energy of her breath forced out. She wanted the child she was carrying to be special, to come into the world with a lot of Light, and she was preparing the baby as it moved toward embodiment to join us in the physical plane. Maya and I just sat up in bed, listening, brushing each other's hair. Mrs. Young gasped, her voice circling, going so fast it was hard to see how she breathed. We listened, and we understood, or we thought we understood.

Now I can see, I can feel how she felt, wanting to do everything possible for the baby so it will be born healthy and happy, and lucky, so it will have the best life it can have. I don't sleep enough, now. I try to eat as healthy as I can. If I still believed, if I could believe like Mrs. Young did, I'd be decreeing all night, collecting pictures of gemstones, drawing double-helix diagrams of DNA, listening to waltzes, traveling in my dreams.

We had so many rules to guide us, our parents did, and now I wonder how I will raise you, what beliefs I have to pass down. Back then, everything was clear: you ate sugar, your energy fell; you listened to rock music, the bass and drums made your chakras spin backward. Christmas carols were always in season, filling a house with holiness. Stuffed animals were never allowed, and neither were comics where animals talked, or books by Dr. Seuss.

And then there were all the rules about food, the posters and diagrams hanging in our kitchen. The Messenger said that carrots were the only food that could grow at ten thousand feet, so they had to be right for us. We ate so many carrots that our skin was tinged orange.

I
T HAD BEEN
half an hour since she'd talked to the Messenger, and Francine's fingers, on the steering wheel, still trembled.

With the blue sky overhead, she drove down the long incline toward Livingston. She skipped the town and took the second exit. Past the McDonald's, the small shops of taxidermists and fishing guides. She drove south on 89, through the narrows, into Paradise Valley; the Yellowstone River flowed on the left, closer and then twisting away, returning. She passed a flatbed truck stacked high with hay bales, stalks and leaves fluttering across her windshield. She accelerated back into her lane and suddenly slowed again. Here was the turnoff to Mallard's Rest campground. Here her father's station wagon had gone straight into the river. He had been going in the other direction, north, in the other lane, just gone to pick something up in town.

That was almost twenty years ago, and it had been almost that long since she'd been in the valley. She hadn't come back; she hadn't been able to return. Not until this morning. The radio played static, humming higher and lower as she accelerated. She switched it off.

A new gas station had gone up across the street from the little town of Emigrant. The place itself looked almost the same: the post office, the saloon, all the haphazard houses of Glastonbury speckling the foothills behind it. Francine turned right, past the buildings and onto the gravel roads, then left, up the long switchbacks.

Writing about it hadn't fully prepared her for how beautiful it was, how broken. The makeshift cabins and the nicer ones, the dented trailers, the Airstreams, the pickup trucks, that blue sky everywhere pressing down on it all. Someone else might not recognize the bumps in the landscape like she did, the white hooked pipes that stuck out of the ground, ventilation for the shelters below, or recognize the half-hidden doors leading into the earth. The Kletter Shelter, Mark's Ark, all the ones whose names she'd forgotten.

Gravel rattled in her wheel wells, kicked up under the car. She had never driven here, had never been old enough; she lost her way, doubled back, found it again. Here the road leveled off and five trailers clustered. Ornate little houses stood against their outside walls. Someone else might believe they were dollhouses, or birdhouses. She knew they were for Elementals, and she wished she could feel the nature spirits now, helping her, invisible, all around her.

She parked, climbed out, then turned and walked away from her car, up the road. Already she was out of breath; she'd take the longer way, which was less steep. Helios Way, Capricorn Way, Sirius Way. These signs were new; these streets had never had names.

Higher, ahead, juniper trees hooked across the horizon. To the left, the plateau where their trailer had been, now completely bare. No triangle cut the air of the narrow canyon, the tepee long gone. She closed her eyes, shivered, then kept on, following the long curve around. She could see her car below, waiting where she'd left it, and now someone was watching her. She could feel it. Not from behind her, where she had been. It was from one of the houses she passed, set back in the limestone cliffs.

There. A two-story house, fifty feet away. Two people in different windows, upstairs and down, looking out. Who lived here, whose house had it been? Perhaps they recognized her.

Smoke sifted, blown sideways out the top of the chimney. The house was dark blue, its door pale yellow with three diamond-shaped windows. A blue Ford pickup with one black door stood parked to one side. Francine stepped past the mailbox, down the gravel driveway; halfway to the house, she looked up again and the faces were still there in the windows, watching her, so motionless that she realized they weren't people at all. They were posters pressed against the windowpanes, and there was a reason they looked familiar: El Morya with his turban, his black beard, his stern glaring eyes, and, in the upstairs window, Saint Germain beaming down.

Turning again, she climbed back to the road, around the last corner. She paused, her hands around her belly, her heart beating so fast. She tried to breathe, to slow it.

She turned off on a path she knew, worn down through the scrub as it arced along the side of a rise. The slope grew steeper; stones kicked loose, rolled downhill. She paused, rested, took another step, two. Her lungs held so little air, compressed by the baby. Then she went around the last corner, onto the small plateau.

The black metal door was set into the hump of the hillside, framed by railroad ties. A short square tunnel to reach it, and then the door with all its hinges on the inside, its three dead bolts. She unbuttoned, unzipped her pants, squatted down out of the wind, and peed between two clumps of sagebrush; then she stepped into the dark tunnel, to the door. It took a moment before she found the key Maya had given her—it was still too early for Maya to catch her, to catch up with her, to meet her—then to force the key into the stubborn locks. Slowly the dead bolts loosened, gave way. Still the door scraped; it took all of her weight to get it open enough to slip through into the darkness.

The tunnel continued, the dirt floor slanting downward. She waved her hand in the cool air above her head; spider webs against her fingers, then a string. When she pulled it, the walls around her flickered, the air bluish. Two fire extinguishers, a shovel, a camping lantern. The one long fluorescent bulb ticked and hummed overhead.

A twinge, a painful tightness in her stomach. Francine almost sat down. She waited, settled, then walked ten feet to the wooden handrail and went carefully down the steps.

Not so large as the outside door, this one was covered in huge rivets, two dead bolts locking it. In the dim light it took a while to fit the key in, to force the door open. She pushed with her knee, and then slapped around the corner with her hand, flipping on every light switch she could reach. She was inside.

Straight across the hallway from the door hung a poster of Cyclopea, the all-seeing eye, greeting her, staring. Watching over or just watching her. Next to it a framed portrait, the usual one, of Saint Germain. Water and insects had gotten inside the glass, so the left side of his face was pale and wrinkled, tattered, half of his blond mustache worn away. None of it seemed to bother him. He gazed out, reassuringly, as handsome and serene as ever, as if he didn't mind being buried here for so long.

Francine turned right, followed the curve of the hallway, stepped around mousetraps, boxes of rat poison torn and spilled open. It was warmer here, out of the wind; the air pressed close around her. It smelled more like dirt than she remembered. When it was all new, it had smelled like sweet wood, new lumber. It had hardly felt like being underground.

She passed the kitchen, the light flickering, all the chairs and tables stacked on top of each other. Huge pans hung from hooks in the curve of the ceiling. She kept going as the hallway narrowed, past the first numbered rooms.

There were thirty of them, thirty families. And when she reached the door with the brass 7 on it, she paused and could not quite stop. She was not ready. Not yet.

She kept walking, following the hallway's curve. Overhead, round openings, the inlets for the vacuum system that would spit dust and dirt back out into the world; beneath her feet, larger capped openings, which led to all the grain and food storage below.

Here, long shelves of books, covered in clear plastic; here, a treadmill, a weight bench; here, startling her, radiation suits hanging like white bodies from their racks.

The silence felt thick, pressurized, black in her ears. When she whistled, the sound echoed and followed the hallway all the way around, returning behind her. This was where her father had taught her, one day when the shelter was almost complete, with no one else inside. She was running around and around the circle of the hallway, doors and numbers flashing past. Her father's whistling echoed down the tube; she could hear it from the other side, where she couldn't see him. And then she whistled and it echoed to him, and he whistled back to her.

She whistled again. The faint sound that returned to her made her feel better; as if it were more than her own breath.