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hey found the well on the third day of looking. James saw it first through a veil of ferns. He said nothing but waved his brother over. Lex stepped past James, as older brothers should.
They peered down into its mouth.
“I wonder if it’s still there,” James said in a small voice. “It’s been a long time.”
“This has to be it,” Lex said. “There’s nothing else it could be.”
James nodded. “Nothing else it could be,” he said.
Lex—real name Alex, but nobody wanted to say the whole thing—circled the well until his tennis shoes had trampled down the ferns and bracken and they could see the thing all around.
It was about six feet across and ringed by a crumbling rock wall a foot high. Across it rested a stout wooden pole with a rusted iron half-hoop set into its center. The opening dropped quickly out of the fading sunlight and into blackness. It gave James a strange feeling, as though he was looking into the bottom of everything and seeing nothing. A cold, wet smell rose from it. James thought of the inside of a frog.
There was no way to know how deep it was, short of dropping something into it and listening. Neither of them wanted to do that.
James looked ill, like he was going to cry again, cry without stopping for hours, the way he had cried two days before when his mother had told him something was growing inside her that would make her die. He was only seven.
“It’s there,” Lex said. “We’ll need some rope.” He was ten and practical.
“That was a long time ago. Mom was just a little kid then.”
“It’s there,” Lex said again. “It’s got to be.”
“Do you think it will remember her?”
“Of course it will,” Lex said. “Mom is too pretty to forget.”
“Listen—we need a rope.”
“How big?”
“Don’t know. Pretty long. It looks pretty deep.”
“Okay. What are we going to do if we—when we find it?”
“We’ll talk to it. We’ll give it a present.” Lex tightened his mouth, and blurted it: “We’ll make it fix Mom.”
James blinked. “What if it doesn’t want to?”
“Shut up. It’ll want to. It loves her. You want to do this with me or not?”
“Yes. You know I do.”
“Then I’ll go. I’ll take it something.”
“Why?”
Lex scowled. “You’re so dumb, he said. It’ll want something, won’t it? I already thought about it. I’ll bring it a baseball. It wants something to play with, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” James said, “I remember. Wait, though. I’ll go. I want to do it.”
“You’re too little.”
“I am not! I’m almost as tall as you!”
“No, you’re not. So shut up, would you? I’ll do it.” Lex looked
him up and down. “I look more like Mom anyway.”
James had to admit this was true. Lex had their mother’s flat gold hair, the wide space between the eyes. It would like that about him.
“We’ll make it fix her,” Lex said again. “It loves her.”
“Lex?”
“Hm?”
“Don’t do it without me. Don’t leave me up here alone.”
They went home. James had a feeling in his stomach—worry, but along with the worry something squirming with excitement. It was like the day before a birthday party.
That night they told their mother they were going to bed early. She waved them on with a thin smile; she was curled up on the sofa, too tired to reply. Once upstairs, they crept out the window and climbed down a drainpipe and returned to the well.
They leaned over it. Over his arm Lex held a long loop of rope he’d taken from Mr. Coover’s shed. James held a pair of flashlights as his brother inserted the rope into the metal hoop and tied it to itself, then tossed the end into the pit. The twin beams of the flashlights followed the rope as it tumbled into the dark. Pretty soon they couldn’t see it anymore.
Lex pulled hard on the rope. He nodded. “Okay,” he said, and took a flashlight from his brother and put it in the front pocket of his jeans. His baseball was in the other pocket.
“Lex,” said James, sounding worried, “why don’t we wait until tomorrow?”
“For Mom to get sicker? You wait. I’m going.”
“Lex, Lex—wait, wait. I want to give it something too.”
James dug around in his pocket and handed Lex his red pocket knife. It had fourteen blades and a bottle opener. His father had given it to him for Christmas the year before.
“You think it’d like this?” he asked. “It used to have a toothpick but I lost it.”
“Sure.” Lex put the knife in his pocket with a nod. He pulled himself onto the ledge around the well and looped his arm around the rope, then stepped forward and twisted his legs around it. Suddenly he was hanging in the air, had changed from a boy on the ground to one in space, with nothing holding him over the dark hole but a length of rope tied with a knot he’d learned for a merit badge two years ago.
“Oh, Lex, Lex! Be careful, be careful.”
“Shut up. I’ll be fine.”
“You think it’s true?”
“About Mom? You heard what she said, what Dad said. Six months, they said. Can’t you see how she’s different?”
James thought of his mother before, alive and cheerful, a light to her. He thought of her now, narrow and worn like old paper that crackles when you hold it, and felt the twist of fear.
“No,” he said. “I mean about her story. About what she said was down here, what she found when she was little.”
Lex didn’t say anything for a long time. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I hope so.”
He started climbing down the rope.
“Put the light down here so I can see, would you? Not like
that! Get it out of my eyes!”
James lowered the flashlight beam so it lit up Lex’s feet and the rope dangling between them. “How’s that?”
“Good, good. Ouch. This rope is thinner than the one in gym class.”
“Is that bad?”
“Never mind. Keep the light where it is.”
Lex climbed down farther into the well until his blond head was a glimmer in the darkness. His breath, ragged and heavy at first, soon sounded far away, an echo.
“Lex, can you see the bottom?”
“No,” Lex called. His voice floated up weakly.
A few minutes passed. He said, “No, wait—there’s something. A place to stand. Good, ’cause I’m almost out of rope. Shine the light closer to the wall a little.”
James moved the flashlight beam.
“Too much, come back—there. Keep it there. I’m going to climb over to it—there’s a big hole or something in the wall.”
“Okay.” James breathed a little, the first breath he’d taken for some time.
The rope swung rightward slightly as Lex tried to maneuver closer to the wall. A scraping, gasping sound came from the darkness below, then a mutter of swearing. “Jesus,” he said. Apparently Lex hadn’t quite made it that time.
James held the beam into the darkness. Could it be down there? The tremendous thing their mother had met on the day she’d tossed her favorite ball into the air until suddenly, with one sudden bounce, the toy had dropped into the dark well? The thing that had climbed the long walls of the well with a wet slap of its clawed feet, and returned the ball to her?
As if I would have let that horrible thing into bed with me!
she’d said, with the bell-like laugh they loved. As if I would have married it! And she would shudder delicately. Back you go, I said. And it went!
Had it brooded down there after she told it this? Had it considered for these many years what had happened, what their mother had done and said?
Again the rope swung, jerkily this time, and a scuffling noise floated out of the dark as Lex seemed to be scrambling his feet on the wall, trying to get a foothold.
“Ah!” Lex sounded annoyed—not, James thought later, angry or upset or frightened. But then he didn’t say anything for a while.
James tightened his jaw. “Lex?” he called.
No sound came back.
He tugged on the rope. It was tight; something was weighing it. Lex, of course. Of course it was Lex. It had to be. What else could be down there?
A wet slapping sound.
The rope swung lazily to the center of the well and after a few wobbles stood still in the air. James watched for a long time. It didn’t move again. Its end vanished into darkness.
Lex! called James, fear rising like sickness. He moved the flashlight beam around the rope but saw no sign of Lex. The well stayed as black and silent as before they had come.
“Lex? Lex?”
He pulled on the rope. It rose in his hands too easily. Soon he had pulled it all out, and it lay in his hands like a dead snake. Its end was frayed.
He thought of climbing down into that dark. He thought of what he would be giving up if he did not. He felt the fear rise again into his throat and it rose higher until he vomited into the yellow grass. He wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and spat to clear away the bad taste.
He called his brother’s name into the well for what must have been hours, until his voice was raw. There was no reply. The flashlight batteries had begun to fade and its light to dim and flicker and die.
He rubbed his dirt-smeared palms against his eyes to make the tears go away, rubbed hard until he saw purple shapes behind his eyelids. He looked again. Nothing had changed. He blinked, bit his lip. Finally, he dropped the rope end back into the well. It spiraled into the shadows, wavered and swung, and at last hung straight and still.
James slid the flashlight switch to Off and went home.
All that night his mother rocked him, asking him what had happened to his brother, over and over, and over and over he replied, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I was in bed. Maybe he ran away because he was mad at me.”
“No, no,” she said. “He was angry at me because I haven’t been with him. Oh, I wish your father would come back. He’s been out so long.”
His father was out looking for Lex in the dark.
“Oh,” she said again, “you must tell me where he is.” She wept, had been weeping since she’d seen the empty bed.
James didn’t tell her. But he looked at her and she had a light to her face again.
“Mother! Do you feel better?”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“You do. I knew you would. I’m glad you do.” He threw his skinny arms around her neck. “He’ll be back,” he said. His voice shook with crying. “Maybe he’s just out playing with someone.”
She embraced him and covered his face with her wet one. “That’s my little man,” she said into his hair. “That’s the best thing you could have told me.”
“I know,” he said, trying not to think of the blackness. Of the well with the rope still dangling. Of the thing still down there, wanting someone to play with. He resolved to go the next day and remove the rope, so no one would know. He would push down the cross-pole too.
“I would give you anything,” he said.
“I love you so much,” she said. “Don’t you ever leave me.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I won’t, not ever.” |
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