Chapter 23

The air was full of dust and the groaning sounds of wooden boards being badly stressed. Someone said, "Shit," and I agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment. My head ached. I had fallen over something uncomfortable. It had knobs and rods and hard bits, all of which were placed at precise angles to jab into me. Most of a frozen ham appeared to have landed in my lap. Whatever had happened, it appeared to have affected the whole house, or at least the dining room.

"Is everyone okay?" asked Gail.

"I feel like crap and I seem to be wearing a ham."

"What the fuck is happening?" Phil asked again.

"Edith?" Gail called.

"I'm here," said Mom faintly. "I think I'm stuck under something, though."

"Mom!" I felt enormously relieved, partly because she hadn't been squashed in the fall, partly because I was in the dark and something terrible had happened and on some level, I really just wanted my mommy to tell me everything would be okay.

I heard someone blundering past me. "Where do you keep the flashlights, Mrs. M?"

"Junk drawer… in the kitchen…"

I sat up, trying to shove the imprisoning rods away, and banged my head on something hard. The sounds of drawers opening came from the kitchen, and a minute later a beam of light shot through the darkness. I realized that I was partly trapped under one of the dining room chairs and managed to push it off me. The ham rolled away, leaving a pineapple ring and a maraschino cherry stuck to my shirt. The bowl of green beans had overturned onto my legs, but fortunately the tablecloth had caught the worst of it. Whenever… whatever it was… had happened, the table had fallen on its side, spilling everything toward me.

The beam of light was joined by another one as Phil found a second light. I put up a hand to ward off the glare as he came toward me. The dining room was a sea of overturned chairs, and the sideboard had fallen over.

"Mrs. M? Where did you end up?"

"Over here," said Mom from the other side of the table. It was at an angle, as if two of the legs had broken off. I got to my feet and joined Phil, and he silently handed me one of the flashlights.

Mom was trapped under the table and a pile of chairs. She looked very pale, although no one looks particularly healthy in a flashlight beam.

"Are you okay, Mom?"

"I'm not sure. My ankle's stuck."

A heavy wooden table leg had fallen across her shin. Phil and I each grabbed part of the table and heaved. Mom pulled it out and I heard her hiss of pain. I transferred the flashlight to my teeth and began pulling chairs out of the way.

"Was there an earthquake?" asked Phil.

"Not an earthquake," said Gail. Another point of light flared up as she lit a candle. It smelled strongly of plastic. "Dammit, Edith, I've told you not to buy cheap scented candles."

"I am not spending twenty dollars on a candle," said my mother. Phil pulled her to her feet. She was clearly favoring her ankle and had to lean on his arm. "For twenty dollars, it would have to give me an orgasm every time I lit it."

Phil made a small sound of emotional distress. I wanted to cheer. That was the Mom I remembered.

I ran the flashlight toward the sliding glass doors to see if there was glass on the floor. To my surprise, they were intact. I could see dirt on the other side, mixed with pebbles and the thin white threads of roots. It looked almost like a cross section of a dig, complete with a harder layer of orange clay at the bottom. Whatever had happened, it had buried the side of the house completely.

"Did the house fall into a sinkhole?" I asked.

Phil joined me at the door. He frowned. "Do we even have sinkholes in this part of the state?"

"Have you got a better explanation?"

There was enough candlelight for me to catch the look he threw at me. Considering what we'd just lived through, that was probably justified. Still, I was just going to pretend for a few minutes that we had fallen into a real, actual, goddamn sinkhole that just happened to open up in our nice and normal subdivision, rather than a portal to hell or the bowels of the Thelemic Antichrist or whatever the hell else it might conceivably be. If I pretended hard enough, it might even be true.

For one thing, people sometimes survived falling into sinkholes.

"I was just tied to a table by a crazy woman who fell apart into rose petals," Phil finally answered. "I don't have an explanation for anything."

This was not helpful to my mental state, even if it was true. "Let's assume it's a sinkhole for the moment," I said very carefully. "Maybe we can go upstairs and get out through a window."

Possibly there was something in my tone that made Phil decide not to pursue the matter just yet. "Worth a shot," he said.

Phil and I made our way to the stairs. The steps were littered with broken glass and shattered frames. I pushed my graduation photo aside with my foot and followed Phil up.

We checked my bedroom first. The window was dark, but when I ran the flashlight beam over it, I saw no roots or pebbles. It looked as if the beam was vanishing into the distance, not as if something was pressing against the glass like the dirt downstairs, yet it was pitch black.

It couldn't possibly be dark outside yet, could it? It had been late afternoon just a few minutes ago. I pulled my phone out, the screen bright in the darkness. Five thirty.

This was not the darkness of five thirty.

As impossibilities went, this was minor compared to my grandmother made of rose petals. I had accepted that; surely I could accept this too. This one wasn't trying to kill me. I went up to the window, moving the flashlight beam, trying to see anything. Phil cupped his hands around his eyes and stared into the dark.

"Anything?" He sounded resigned.

My flashlight, angled down, hit the porch roof, lighting up the black asphalt shingles. I felt a sudden wave of relief, although I'm not sure why. Possibly I was just relieved that the laws of physics still seemed to apply. I moved the beam again and encountered… earth.

Churned earth, specifically. The wreckage that follows a bulldozer, everything ripped up and mixed together, not the smooth undisturbed layers that archaeologists pray for. Not even the settled dirt and clay of an old development like Lammergeier Lane. This was new and raw, as if someone had dumped hundreds of tons of dirt around the base of the house and then turned off the moon and the stars overhead.

I swallowed. The dirt came up the edge of the porch roof and continued as far as the flashlight beam would go. Where had it come from?

"This looks a bit like a sinkhole," said Phil, with very little hope in his voice. "Doesn't it?" It seemed to be his turn to pretend that this was completely normal.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that a sinkhole wouldn't take out the sun too, but I knew exactly what he was feeling, so I didn't argue.

Phil gazed out the window for a few minutes. "This is fucked up," he said finally.

"Yes. Yes, it is." I felt oddly calm. Of course there was no sky. Of course there was nothing but dirt and the house. My grandmother had come back from the dead made of roses. If that was possible, why should the world obey any rules at all?

"Let's check out Mom's window," I said finally, turning away. Phil followed me, so close on my heels that he nearly stepped on my feet when I stopped at the door.

"Sorry," he mumbled.

"S'okay." I opened the door. A Post-it note fluttered to the floor like a dying moth.

The floor creaked underfoot as we went to the window. Here again, dirt was piled up past the first story. The deck had vanished completely. Farther back I could just make out a few bedraggled shapes that might have been stones or the tops of the rosebushes, but the flashlight beam didn't reach very far. The darkness outside seemed somehow thicker than the absence of light. Smoke? Dust?

It's like the dark has weight here,I thought, then wished I hadn't. I could hear the house creaking and popping around me, little noises of strain as the house settled. God only knows what it was settling into.

I focused again on the shapes outside the window. Those had to be the rosebushes. They'd been buried in dirt, just like the bottom half of the house, and now only the tops were sticking out. As if we'd been caught in a blizzard, say, except that it was dirt.

"We could probably climb out my window onto the porch roof," I said. "It's only a couple feet down from the window. Then maybe we could jump down from there."

"Yeah," said Phil. "Let's go tell Gail and Mrs. M."

On the way out the door, I saw that the Confederate wedding had fallen and shattered. I took a certain pleasure in putting my foot squarely on the groom's smugly wistful face.

The stairs groaned again as we went down, more loudly than before. All that weight can't be good for the walls, I thought. I vaguely wondered how we were going to remove all the dirt and how much it would cost to repair the damage, then snorted at myself. You know, the resale value of the property may not actually be the biggest concern right now.

Mom and Gail had found more candles and righted the table. They looked up when we came in. "What's it look like?" asked Gail.

"The first floor is buried," I said. "The upper windows are clear, but it's very dark out." I wondered how on earth to express what we'd seen. "I, uh, don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

Gail let out a long breath. "Yeah," she said. "I was afraid of that."

"But where are we?" asked Mom.

Phil and I shrugged helplessly. "Someplace dark," I said. I didn't think saying "another hellscape plane of existence" would be particularly helpful.

We all looked at Gail, who shook her head. "Don't look at me. I'm just a witch. This is completely beyond my experience."

Mom put her hands on her hips. "Well, how do we get back?"

Gail made a helpless gesture. Phil said, "Um." I did neither. My gaze was riveted on the sliding door.

Behind Mom's head, something white moved on the other side of the glass.