Pit I
readtime ~22min
I used to stare at hunch-backed old men waiting in line at the supermarket and pray that I’d be on the other side of the grass before my hair turned grey. There was something inherently tragic about the ageing process; moving forward and then back again. The idea that a person had to decay with the personal experience of what it was liked to be young seemed to me to be a major case of poor planning on behalf of God. I used to hold my breath, shut my eyes, and just watch a colors pulsate on the back of my eyelids waiting for time to move on without me. I drove my parents up the wall with a unceasing barrage of my own anxieties. Privately, I think it must have affected them in that their own son, who wasn’t even old enough to spell the word “mortality,” served almost exclusively as a reminder of their own. My mother learned to leave the room whenever I was in a twenty five foot radius of anyone that was eligible for AARP, and discussions with my father nearly ended altogether when I made a comment about a new batch of grey hairs and wondered out loud about how much time he had left on the metaphorical clock.
Middle school was a lonely time. Teachers didn’t like me for reasons I’m sure it would be no stretch of the imagination to imagine, and the other kid’s sentiments were aligned with the teachers. I was like the weird foreign kid, except for the fact that I spoke perfect english. Most people learned that interacting with me was social suicide, and although it did sting, it allowed me a kind of surgical focus into my new outlet: examining dead animals.
I didn’t kill anything. That was against the rules. The point was to study animals who had already died, and I quickly learned the best times to look for these animals. There was recess (obviously), then lunch, and then if I was lucky I could catch something fresh on my walk home from school. It never felt like a problem; it was just a curiosity. I was looking for clues to a question that no one had the answer to, and yet the realist in me knew the way this hobby would be perceived by others. It was a dirty secret. Like I was having a steamy affair with someone it would morally black to have an affair with, except for instead of sleeping with someone’s wife I was playing with dead animals.
The only friend I had at that time was this kid named Jeffrey whose mother my Mom met volunteering. Jeffrey was this homeschooled kid with the rat tail haircut, who looked like he had never been outside in his entire life. Jeffrey’s rat tail was all but wagging when we first met, and he immediately insisted that we refer to each other as friends. Being in no position to be choosy; I agreed. Jeffrey’s past times included setting things on fire and shooting frogs with a BB gun. It was a match made in heaven. Although every minute spent with him was an exercise in patience, Jeffrey’s hobby of shooting frogs paired perfectly with my obsessions in examining all things dead. Our friendship, however was a brief affair. It ended when Jeffrey graduated from frogs, to birds, to people - namely me, and I graduated from studying dead animals to smashing a Mexican coke over a bad haircut. Our friendship fizzled out after that.
Things came to a head at home when my mom noticed a rancid odor permeating from my room, and after some exploring, she discovered a decomposing pigeon in a shoebox under my bed. In my defense, I knew nothing of decomposition, and was simply monitoring it to see exactly what happened to something after it died. However, my mental health and overall sanity came under fire when she discovered a collection of different specimens tucked within the confines in my closet, and she floated the idea to my father that their son was in dire need of some “serious help.” Within a week I was having biweekly sessions with a child psychologist where they had me field questions, and paint pictures on canvas. My interest in the lifeless was more of any outlet than anything. Once I discovered the only thing preventing me from not going to therapy was me self-sabotaging myself I stopped being so obvious about it. My parents were able to relax, and things seemed to ease up back at home. Things were going as great as they ever had been until the trip.
My dad’s annual fishing trip was the only thing I ever saw him get genuinely excited about. Him and a few of his high school buddies would head up north under the pretense of a fishing trip, and proceed to get blacked out every day for three days straight. It was the highlight of their year. I’d go to humor him, but mainly because my mom wouldn’t let him go without me. Most of the time he’d be out on the boat sipping beers with his friends, and I’d wander around the camp looking for something dead to look at.
Fish did nothing for me. I had tried fishing before, and even chopped off a few heads, but my heart was never in it. There was something soulless about looking into the eyes of a fish. They didn’t have that obscure sense of existential awareness that you’d see in a mammal or a bird that makes them easier for pescatarians to swallow.
My dad and I seemed to have a silent understanding of exactly what page we were on for the trip. It was politics. I was the ambassador of the nation of mom, and he was on vacation. In exchange for me letting him catch up with his pals, he was willing to turn a blind eye to my peculiar hobby for the weekend. In a way, it was a vacation for both of us, but he still had to go through the motions of inviting me, so he could look my mom in the eye and honestly say that he had.
“Wake up,” he’d say. “Time to go fishing.”
“No.”
“OK.”
And the matter would be settled. Just like that.
The town where we stayed was the kind of place where everyone knew each other without being properly introduced. There was one movie theatre, one hotel, one hospital, one gas station, one stoplight, one general store, and about eleven different churches all of which were centered around a lake the shape of a deformed kidney. Before setting out for the trip I always made sure to brush up on the local fauna of the area, and mentally catalogue all the animals I hoped to see dead in their natural habitat. The plan was to wake up at a reasonable hour, have breakfast, pack a lunch, and then explore the local barrens to see what I could find. There wasn’t a specific agenda. It was more of a chips-fall-where-they-may type of situation, but first I needed the right supplies.
I made a trip down to the corner store to pick up a couple bottles of water and a pocket knife just in case, and while I was down there I caught this freckle-faced girl staring at me behind the counter. She had a kind of wispy figure with deep set blue eyes that felt especially uncomfortable to be stared at by. I shopped fast, gathered my things, and brought them to the counter and was in the middle of counting down the seconds to get the hell out of there when the mother��who clearly had an agenda��locked me in a conversation trap.
What was my name?
Where was I from?
What brought me out here?
I answered the questions politely, but underneath the surface I felt an ancient rage building up. Couldn’t she see that I had places to be? Daylight was burning. These dead animals weren’t going to investigate themselves. The mom was about three and a half sentences deep into a story about her husband when I decided to make a run for it.
She was too quick for me. She was a mom and��like all moms��she was perceptive.
“Where are you off to?” she said. Then before I could answer, the woman delivered a social checkmate, “why don’t you take my daughter with you? Come on she could use some sun.” She said speaking more to herself than to either of us.
And so I did. I took her daughter along for the ride. Her name was Skylar.
Initially, I was irritated that Skylar mom had pawned her daughter off on me, but as we trekked towards the pine barrens I warmed up to the idea. In a lot of ways her situation was a reflection of my own. We were baggage to each of our respective parents, but at least I had my freedom. Plus, at the very least, I at least appreciated the fact that Skylar didn’t reject in front of her mom. If she was going to tag along there was no reason why it didn’t have to be pleasant, but she needed to be set straight. I was on a mission I had no intention of deviating from, but the mission called for tact, so I posed it to her as delicately as possible.
“I’m looking for dead animals,” I said. “You can come if you want.”
“Ok. Why?” She replied.
“I don’t know. It helps me relax.”
“How does looking at dead things help you relax?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? It just does.”
“I’m not going to help you kill anything.”
“We don’t kill. Just look,” I said. I even gave her a smile, because it seemed like the right time to do it.
“You’re kind of weird.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
Skylar shrugged.“I’ll get used to it.”
Skylar and I carved a path starting from one end of the lake to a grove where the locals would gather to smoke weed, and where Skylar had once stepped on a beehive the previous summer and still had scars from. By the end of the first day I had already crossed the opossum off the list— one of the weekend's most prioritized mammals—and by the end of the second Skylar surprised me by taking me to a see a dead elk she had overheard a customer complaining about to her mother that morning. Skylar was never as involved in the animal aspect of our adventures, but she was always polite in her feigned interest. Her happiness seemed to derive from the importance of the role she played in our dynamic. She was Lewis and Clark. She navigated her way through the barrens with the trained instincts of a mother of four at the supermarket. By the time it was the third and final day of the trip I was waking up earlier than my Dad to meet up with her and get a jump start on the day. I had taken the liberty of making a handwritten agenda of our plans, and had even been generous enough to make a copy for she and I wouldn’t have to share. Skylar ripped them up as soon as they were in her hands.
“We’re going off track today,” she said.
“We’ve been off track all weekend.”
“Maybe you have, but I’ve been hiking through here since I could walk. I want to see something new.”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked but shouldn’t have.
What Skylar had in mind was a hike only comparable to what I imagine climbing Everest to be. At one point I stopped to drink out of a stream. I was that thirsty. I was no longer concerned with my hobby, but rather my own survival. Skylar—having seemingly been trained by the Navy Seals—seemed fine, and insisted on soldiering on whenever I got a chance to catch my breath. Her plan was to reach the summit before three pm , so that we would have enough daylight to get back. Three came and went with the promise that we definitely should be OK if we made it before four. By the time it was six it was dark, and the ribbons of dirt that formed that path on our way up the mountain now looked unfamiliar as we climbed down. By nine o’clock PST we were both willing to admit out loud that we were lost.
Skylar held her phone out to the sky and begged to God for a signal. “Please tell me you have a bar,” she said.
“I don’t have a cell phone,” I replied.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said stuffing her phone in a pocket. “Hey, why don’t we just pick a trail and follow it down. They all have to lead to the bottom, right?”
“All those roads go through the barrens. That place is pretty spooky at night.”
“We can’t sleep out here. Besides you’re like obsessed with looking for dead things. How are you afraid of trees?
“I’m not obsessed,” I replied a bit wounded at the truth.
“Look. We don’t have have another option. I’ll know where we are once we get closer to the bottom. It’ll be fine.”
But here is what happened.
Skylar picked a road and we decided to stick to it, and for a while it looked like she made the right call. It was dark enough to see every star. After about an hours work of walking down it seemed to curve upwards, then back down, then east then west, and you get the picture. It seemed like we were going every direction except for the right one, and the urgency of the situation became more apparent with each new moment. We panicked or begun to panic. Skylar suggested that we take a break on overturned tree to collect ourselves, and before long we were collected enough to realized how royally fucked we were.
She remained silent, and monitored her heart with a pair of fingers pressed to her throat. I reclined on the log and attempted to ease the tension.
“You know, sailors use the stars to navigate the ocean. The ocean is way, way bigger than this forest, so we should be fine,” I said.
“I don’t know how to read stars. Do you?”
I shook my head. They all looked the same to me.
“So do you like, like boys?” I asked.
“What? Do I like boys?”
“Just curious.”
“Yes, dude. I like boys.” She said. “Do you like boys?”
“Of course. I mean no,” I said choking on my own spit, and then trying not to cough. “Of course I like girls. I mean, like guys like my dad, or you know, like my teachers. But I like girls. I’m, uh, attracted to the opposite sex.”
“Are you seriously hitting on me right now?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. I was twelve years old, and really wasn’t sure. “I think maybe the reason I asked is because I’m trying to distract myself. I’m kind of freaking out.”
Skylar nodded, and held a hand up to tell me to please stop talking. “If you want, I can go by myself and get help and you can wait here.”
“No way. I’m not letting you go off by yourself,” I said with convincing bravado. The reality was I was more concerned with being left alone then I was for her setting off unattended.
“OK. Then maybe we should find some place to sleep. At this rate we’re just going to get ourselves more lost.”
She had a point. I had to admit that. And so I said it. “You’re right.”
We attempted to make our way back to a clearing we had discovered a quarter mile back. Crickets and owls sung to us as we hiked past all the landmarks. Past the decaying tree with carmel colored mushrooms sprouting from its crevices. Past the stream where I had drunk from earlier that day, and was tempted to revisit. Past the cluster of used condoms and cigarette butts scattered around a divot in the trail, and past a dead chipmunk that looked exactly like what you might imagine Larry King to look like if he were a dead squirrel. Each landmark signaled to us that we at least had not deviated from the path that we had been on for the past hour. We were relieved, but then there were the flowers.
It was Skylar who spotted them first. They blossomed from a vine coiled around base of a towering Alder tree. The petals spread wide open like the mouth of a great predatory creature, and were a vibrant shade of purple that seemed to glow in absence of light. The plant scaled up the tree and punctuated the trunk with its blooms transforming it into an organic lighthouse.
“What plant is that? I don’t recognize it,” I said
“I don’t either. They’re beautiful though,” Skylar said picking a flower off the vine. It wrinkled into a brown heap of sediment as soon as she pulled it off the vine. “Did you see that?”
I had. I went to pull a flower off myself to see it again, but she seized my wrist.
“Don’t,” she commanded.
“You don’t think their poisonous, do you?” I asked.
“Maybe. I wouldn’t snack on them.”
We stood in a trance for what was either a moment or more looking up at them.
“Do you hear that?” She asked.
I switched my attention from the flowers to sounds that were not heard. “I don’t hear anything.”
“We are in the middle of a forest. That’s not normal. There should be noise.”
I strained myself trying to detect anything other than our own breathing, but there was nothing to make out. The crickets, the owls, and whatever animals there were that I was trying not to think about were now mute. Dead air.
“It couldn’t be the flowers. That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“That’s the only thing that does make sense.” She said kneeling to trace the vine to wherever it ended.
Skylar followed the vine into the brush, and exited into a clearing on the other side. I waited behind. And then I heard her scream. She began calling out my name imploring me to come and check out whatever she was seeing.
But here is what happened.
I dove into the brush after her not knowing if I should be afraid or excited, and came out the other side before I could decide which one I was. At the center of the clearing was a cabin.
Had it not been for it’s peculiar placement there was nothing objectively impressive about it. It was as wide as a two side garage. The wood it was constructed with, although old, was handsome and well maintained. The foreground was swarming with the plant in such great numbers that illuminated the clearing with the brilliance of a campfire. Vines spread from the cabin in all directions like a vast network of veins prodding out into the forest, and clinging to the branches overhead. A letter or number was carved into the surface of the door.
It read: V
Skylar drifted to the center of the clearing. She closed her eyes and twisted underneath them allowing herself to be bathed in color. “ This place is incredible,” Sklyar whispered. “Do you think it’s abandoned?”
If there were lights within the cabin they were not on.
“Looks like it,” I said. “Although, anybody that chooses to build something way out here though probably isn’t itching for company,.”
Despite my words being the only sounds being made, Skylar still chose to ignore them. I knew what was coming before it came. Skylar had been planning on knocking since the moment she saw the damn thing, and she was rapidly approaching and understanding with herself that she was going to knock on this door whether I was on board or not. And so she did.
Skylar marched towards the door with the confidence of a marine, and planted her fist into the wood three times.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
The blows echoed through the clearing before it fell back into silence.
“Is there anybody home?” She called.
Nothing.
If you’re committing a crime like breaking and entering the least you could expect was some level of caution taken by the criminal(s) committing the crime. But Skylar and I were not a cautious people. The fact that she had been the one to knock sparked a competitive excitement in me that told me that I needed to be the first one inside. I counted my steps as I approached her. The scene played out in my head a dozen times before I reached her. I would open the door, and inside would be a monster, or a serial killer, or a body, or at least someone who’s interested were aligned in whatever the opposite of our own interests were. And yet, there was no stopping any of it from happening. Opening the door was a form of rebellion, and as a young teen, rebellion was a essential to my genetic coding. I took exactly thirteen steps, nudged Skylar away from the frame, and turned the knob myself.
It was unlocked, because of course it had to be.
It was as big as it looked on the inside as it did from the outside. Flecks of dust hovered in the air like frozen snowflakes. There were no windows, and besides the dust it was empty. With the exception of the space flowers outside, and the ominous looking “V” on the door there was nothing special about this place.
Skylar wandered around the room with a hand placed flat against the wall.
“You know what I think,” she said. “I think that people probably come here to hook up.”
“Could be,” I said thinking that if I played it cool she would think that I had come to the same conclusion by myself.
“This is kind of perfect. It’s got a roof and a door. What more can you ask for?”
I suggested a pillow.
“I have an idea,” she said lowering herself to the floor, and instructing me to do the same. “You can lie on my shoulder and I’ll lay on yours. We can be each other’s pillows. See?” She guided me through a trial run.
I had had some initial reservations about the experiment given that I had perspired a coffee mugs worth of sweat in the last twenty hours, but these reservations were retired by the comfort of the position and because of the raw physical distance between my head and a female breast. We laid there for a long while not saying much. I practiced breathing and thought about turning my head towards Skylar and trying something bold that had not occurred to me to try before.
Skylar sat straight up before I could talk myself into to trying the bold thing.
“Let me ask you something,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Do you feel different?”
“Honestly Skylar, everything today has felt different.”
“No. I mean physically. You were thirsty, right? Probably hungry too.”
“Yeah. Both in a big way.”
“And how do you feel now?”
I shot up too. I had been so distracted by nature of the cabin, and all of hypothetical situations that the cabin represented that I hadn’t given a single thought to my basic necessities. But now that Skylar had mentioned it I hadn’t felt craving for either since we first discovered the place. My thirst was quenched, my stomach felt full, and if you had wiped my memory and told me that I had just woken up from a year long coma I would have believed it. I felt that rested.
“I feel fine. Kind of great actually,” I replied.
“Think about all we’ve been through today. The last thing we should be feeling is kind of great.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a certainly not normal.” She said taking out her phone to use as a light. She gasped and dropped the phone on the floorboards. “That’s not possible.”
“What?” I asked retrieving her phone from the floor.
“When we came in here it was 11:34. I checked right before you opened the door,” she said closing the space between us. “How long would you say we’ve been in here?”
“If I had to guess, maybe an hour or so.” I replied.
Skylar nodded.
“Look at the time now.”
The clock read 11:34. Not a second had passed since we entered through the door.
“Your phone must be broken,” I said.
“Everything else works.”
“Daylight savings,” I explained.
Skylar rose to her feet.
“When does daylight savings start?” she asked. She put a hand over her mouth and started pacing. She was supposed to be the calm one. Seeing her on edge pushed me way over the line.
“I don’t know.”
“Then why did you say that!?”
“It made me feel better at the time!”
And then it was quiet. We took time to collect ourselves. We were just barely calm enough to understand that this was unfamiliar territory for both of us, and that it was best explored while we were on the same team.
“Hey, you know what,” I said. “Let’s get some air and cool off. Does that sounds good to you?”
Skylar looked over her shoulder like she was staring out a window that didn’t exist, and then nodded in agreement to the plan.
I got to my feet. It was too dark to see anything but shadows. Step by step I made my way to the exit. A blind man probing the darkness for the cold steel of the knob.
Skylar just stood there looking at her phone is disbelief.
“Can I get a light, Sky?” I asked.
Skylar pulled a God and let there be light, and then—without announcing the toss— pitched the phone at me. I saw a double helix of light dancing through the night before it crashed into my temple.
The phone bounced off my head then crashed to the floor. It sent a hollow echo into a space below the boards.
“I’m so sorry. I thought you wanted me to throw it,” she said moving towards me.
“Wait,” I said holding up a hand to halt her approach.
I got down on my knees to where the phone had landed and hammered my hand against the wood, and then did it again to make sure I heard what I thought I had. The sound was carried away by a pocket of air below.
“There’s something below here. Hear it?” I gave it another knock. “That’s empty space.”
Skylar picked up her phone and joined me on the ground. She shined a light through the cracks and saw darkness deeper than the light from the phone was able to penetrate.
“It’s a long way down. I can’t see the bottom,” She said. Skylar scanned the area with the light, and discovered a square had been cut into the floor. At the top of the square was a cable with a ring attached to it.
What happened next seem to happen in moments before they actually occurred. When I took the cable in my hand it did not seem like a choice that I had made, but rather a choice that I had had to make. When I pulled it gently towards me just to see if it would give from the pressure, I had already known that it would.
“What time does it say on your phone?” I asked.
“11:34” She replied.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought you would say,” I said before ripping open the door.