The room was lit but too dim for sunglasses.
No one spoke.
They took me in.
I took in the rest of the circle.
Hundreds of books, magazines, and newspapers piled haphazardly on shelves and tables.
A television mounted to the ceiling was on. The volume muted.
A man sat at a table with three computers.
IT?
Sitting next to the pale girl with the sunglasses was a woman with gray hair.
She spoke first.
May?
I turned on the recorder in my pocket …
“Your first visitor, Posty.”
“This is Pat O’Toole.”
“Coop’s little brother?”
“I didn’t know Coop had a brother.”
“Well he does. And he’s here. I checked his ID, and you can see the family resemblance.”
“How’d he find you?”
“Are you sure it’s his brother?”
“I’m sure. He staked out the post office box.”
“Smart, just like Coop.”
“Where is Coop?”
“Didn’t you tell him?”
“I told him he wasn’t here. He wanted more information. Who’s the girl?”
“May’s keeping it a secret until we are all here. Very mysterious. Her dog is tied up outside.”
“I saw it.”
“I’ll tell all of you who she is, or who I think she is, after dinner.”
but everyone else was.
And talkative.
Except for the girl with sunglasses.
She sat at May’s side and said nothing.
She didn’t touch the food.
No one talked to me.
I imagined Coop sitting there for the first time.
I bet everyone talked to him.
And by the time the meal was over he knew all their life stories.
But they knew virtually nothing about him.
They liked him just because he was sitting there.
He should have been a cop.
Or a Catholic priest. Lucifer would have spilled his guts to Coop.
“We’ll put those Christmas lights up after dinner,” Sparks said. “Make it festive for tomorrow.”
“I’ll start that turkey first thing in the morning,” Chef said. “Beautiful bird. Kosher. Not frozen. Clean. Nice find, Posty.”
“Pat found it.”
“Nice going, kid.”
“Did you get an inventory of our stash, Posty? I got the eBay account all set up. We’ll be able to get some of the things we need for here off eBay, but we need to build up the balance in our PayPal account before we can bid. We’ll need photos of everything for the auctions. Have you started on that?”
“I’ll try next week, but it’ll be hard, because the pickings are going to be good, like they are after every Christmas …”
And this is how the conversation went.
Catching up, mild ribbing, but Community business was always at the center.
The dinner seemed to go on forever.
All I wanted was to find out about Coop.
His name did not come up.
The subject was carefully avoided.
So was the mystery girl with the sunglasses.
Chef brought over a cake and sliced it into thirteen even pieces.
Coffee, tea, milk, and bottled water were poured.
The girl ate her cake.
I was close to completely losing it.
“Let’s start with the girl,” May said. “I found her outside our door this afternoon. She hasn’t spoken. In fact, I don’t know if she can speak. I believe she’s from the Deep.”
Every fork stopped.
They stared at the girl as if she were from another planet.
For nearly a minute there was total silence.
Then everyone started talking at once.
“They’ll come looking for her.”
“If she hasn’t spoken, how do you know she’s from the Deep?”
“She can’t stay here.”
“We’ll have to send her back.”
“How’d she find us?”
“There will be retributions.”
“They’ll come tomorrow.”
“They might come tonight. Depends on how long she’s been gone.”
“They can see in the dark.”
“They have vicious tracking dogs.”
The girl continued eating her cake, seemingly unaware that everyone was talking about her.
“Who are they?” I asked.
shifted to me.
Except for the girl’s. She was trying to spear the last cake crumb off her plate.
I pushed my untouched cake over to her.
“Those who have never been above,” May answered.
The girl started eating my cake.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they have always been below. Bred and born in the Deep. Most of them have never seen the sun or the moon or the sky.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It’s true. And Posty could not have chosen a worse time to bring you beneath, but of course he didn’t know about the girl.”
“I’ll lead him back up first thing tomorrow morning. No. I better take him up tonight. Tomorrow might be too late.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I came down here to find Coop.”
“He’s not here.”
“I figured that. Posty told me I had to talk to you to find out where he is.”
“I know where he went, but I don’t know where he is.”
“I’m sick of these riddles. Where is my brother?”
according to May.
Maybe.
I talked her into letting me stay, at least for the night. Early tomorrow morning Posty is taking me back up top.
Maybe.
I’m transcribing the recordings into my journal right now.
The room I’m in is ten by twelve feet.
I’m sitting on Coop’s surplus army cot.
There’s no bedding. I guess that’s why Posty had me get a sleeping bag.
There are wooden crates stacked up along one wall with a few of his favorite flashlights and headlamps, cans of tuna, unopened letters … all of them from me.
Things he’s gathered from up top.
Dozens of books, including Dracula and A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
His tap shoes are nowhere to be seen.
He wouldn’t have taken them if he thought he was coming back soon.
He’s gone.
Coop isn’t journeying to the center of the earth, but he’s headed in that direction.
May tried to talk him out of it.
Coop listened carefully to all her reasons for not venturing into the Deep.
I could imagine him nodding, frowning, smiling, not saying anything, and totally ignoring all of her warnings.
And I could see why.
No one in the Community has ever been into the Deep.
Their information is based on rumors, urban myths, wild speculation, and a large dose of paranoia, based on exactly one face-to-face encounter.
Here’s some of what they told me about the People of the Deep, or the “Pod,” as the Community calls them.
Anywhere from a couple dozen to a thousand Pod live in the Deep (depending on which Community member you talk to).
They are satanists.
They are criminals.
They are drug addicts.
They are cannibals.
They are lepers.
They raise killer dogs to protect them and to chase down those who try to leave.
They speak a different language, but some of them know a little English.
Most of them cannot read or write.
They never take baths or showers.
They eat rats raw.
They never shave.
They can see in the dark.
They echolocate like bats.
They have lived in the Deep for generations.
They kidnap runaways from above as breeders to keep their gene pool healthy.
You cannot be a member of the Deep unless you were born there or kidnapped from above.
Their leader is a man named Lod, which stands for Lord of the Deep.
Lod paid the Community a visit, along with some of his people, the first week the Community arrived.
He ordered them to leave.
May convinced Lod that it was to the Pod’s advantage to let them stay. In exchange for leaving them alone the Community would provide the Pod with food, supplies, whatever they needed. This way the Pod would not have to go up top.
This is what Posty was doing during the stops we made as he led me to the Community. He was making food and supply deposits in predetermined locations, dumping stuff into sealed garbage cans to keep the rats out.
After this initial meeting the Community never spoke to the Pod again.
The Pod left lists of the things they needed.
Posty and others said they’d see Pod members once in a while darting away, or hiding in the shadows waiting to pick up supplies, but they don’t make contact with them.
Ever.
If Coop had gotten the same earful that I had just gotten, and I’m sure he did, this is the question he would ask himself: If the Community has had virtually no contact with the Pod, how do they know they are satanic, foreign-tongued, drug-addicted, illiterate, dirty-rat-eating, bearded, cannibalistic, leprous, bat-like, criminal kidnappers?
Coop makes up his mind about people from his own personal experience.
Except for their initial meeting, the Community has had no personal experience with the Pod.
May and the others might as well have begged Coop to go look for the Pod.
He’s been gone for almost a month.
No one knows if he’s alive, lost, a Pod prisoner, or perfectly fine.
I asked if they would help me look for Coop.
This received an instantaneous and unanimous N-O.
They don’t know where the Pod’s compound is located.
They aren’t supposed to look.
They told Coop not to leave.
He didn’t listen.
He’s on his own.
Subject closed.
is the girl with the sunglasses.
Who doesn’t speak and who might be deaf.
I say this because she finished her cake — I mean my cake — slowly, in complete silence, without looking up once as they debated her fate.
They came up with two solutions:
Turn her out on her own beneath.
Take her up with me and turn her out above.
They chose the second solution because they were afraid that if they turned her out beneath, she might just hang out on their doorstep. Or worse, find her way above and tell people where the Community is located.
They didn’t care about what happened to the girl once she got up to the street.
What if she was deaf and mute?
What if she had never seen the sun or the moon or the sky?
What if she had the opposite of what I have? Agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces.
All they know about her is that she likes cake.
But the Community doesn’t care about what-ifs.
Coop had seen right through them.
This is why he decided to head deeper.
He didn’t find what he was looking for here.
I didn’t either.
The question is, what am I going to do about it?
How can I find Coop if I don’t even know where I am?
If they kicked me out without a guide, I’d probably wander around for weeks and starve to death before I found my way to the top. My bones would be …
“You just follow the fresh air …”
I jumped.
I switched the recorder off.
“How’d you get in here?”
“Through the door.”
“You can talk.”
“I can hear too, so keep your voice down. You’ll wake the others. Coop told me all about you.”
grabbed a towel off a hook on the wall and draped it over the lamp next to the bed.
She took her sunglasses off.
Her eyes were pale blue.
“You’ve seen Coop?”
“He used to talk into one of those,” she said.
“What do you mean he used to?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a recorder identical to mine.
Smashed.
“It doesn’t work anymore.”
She handed the recorder to me.
“Where’s Coop?”
“In the Deep.”
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t know.”
but the memory stick was intact.
I slipped the stick into my recorder and hit Play.
I left the Community this morning with dire warnings that I will never return. May’s final words were: “No one who has gone into the Deep has ever returned from the Deep. This is the last mistake you’ll ever make.” She meant it sincerely, but I didn’t take it to heart, as May doesn’t know anyone who has ventured into the Deep …
I paused it.
“What’s the matter?” the girl asked.
“It’s Coop, but he doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds … I don’t know … more formal or something.”
“He’s writing a book. Or I should say, dictating a book.”
“He told you that?”
“He said he was writing an episto … I can’t remember how to pronounce it, but he’s writing a story that reads like it’s nonfiction.”
“Epistolary novel.”
“That’s it. I suppose now he won’t have to insert any fictional aspects. He’s discovered enough to write a very interesting nonfiction book that can stand on its own. He said he was using some of the recordings you sent him for the book and from other people he’s recorded over the past year.”
His own Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Or Dracula.
The little snippet I just played sounded a lot like Jonathan Harker from Dracula. I remembered what Coop said in his very first recording to me. You’ll be able to transcribe all this into one of those journals you’re always scribbling in. Epistolary. Remember that?
Maybe Coop had gotten the recorder because he could not see to write in the dark.
“So I take it you can read,” I said.
“Yes. And I can speak. And I’m not deaf. And my name is Katherine, but you can call me Kate.”
She put out her pale hand.
I shook it.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but the name kind of threw me. I guess I thought that someone who had lived underground her entire life would have a name like Root or something. Katherine was an open-meadow-with-wildflowers kind of name.
“Why didn’t you say anything when everyone was talking about you?”
“Because there was nothing to say. I knew they wouldn’t help me from the moment May took me in.”
“They’re going to take us both up to the top in the morning.”
“I didn’t come here to go up top.”
“Then why did you come here?”
“To ask if they would help me free your brother from the Deep.”
“Coop’s a prisoner?”
“If he’s still alive.”
“What does that mean?”
“Keep your voice down. We can’t talk here. I have to go. If you want to come with me, leave your pack. You can only take what you can carry in your pockets. They’ll be here soon.”
“Who?”
“The Pod.”
was Bouncer.
A mutt.
About twenty pounds.
With smoky-gray fur and a docked tail vibrating madly upon seeing Kate.
She undid the rope, and Bouncer demonstrated how he got his name.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re outsid
e. What’s going on?”
I had to keep bobbing and weaving so Bouncer couldn’t lick my face.
“I’ll explain while I get ready.” Kate handed me the flashlight I had given her from Coop’s shelf.
She caught Bouncer in mid-bounce and flipped him onto his back. He didn’t seem to mind. She pulled her sweatshirt off and put it on the dog. It was too big for him. He looked embarrassed.
“We’ll have to make some alterations. Do you have a knife?”
I had a brand-new knife. I handed it to her.
She cut the sleeves off so Bouncer wouldn’t stumble over them with his front paws.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a decoy.”
She cut the sleeves into strips and used them to tie the sweatshirt around Bouncer’s front legs and stomach.
“That should hold. We’ll let him get used to it for a couple of minutes.”
Bouncer started running around in circles getting used to it.
“I was shocked to see you arrive at the Community. Coop said that you had claustrophobia.”
I was shocked that Coop had told her that he had a brother who had claustrophobia.
“He told me about the tunnel you and he dug. He said the collapse was all his fault, that he shouldn’t have taken you down there.”
“He did most of the digging. And I was nervous about the tunnel before it collapsed. And if it wasn’t for Coop, I’d be dead. What’s going on between you and Coop?”
Her pale skin flushed red.
She looked away.
That was all the answer I needed.
Coop had a girlfriend.
Or a girl who liked him a lot, which would not be a first.
I wondered if he felt the same way about her, which would be a first, unless I had missed one or two while he was gone.
Bouncer seemed to have gotten used to his ridiculous-looking costume.
He sat at Kate’s feet panting.
“Go top and stay!”
Bouncer jumped up, did an airborne one-eighty, and vanished into the darkness.
“What’s all that about?”
“Bouncer is one of our top dogs. We use them to find our way up from the Deep. I trained him.”
“Then you’ve been to the top?”
She smiled and said dramatically in a pretty good imitation of May, “I have seen the sun and the moon and the sky.”
I laughed.
I saw why Coop might like her.
She had the same weird sense of humor he did.