a long tunnel off the cellar which led to a small coal outcropping mined out of the hill. The air was moist and cloying.
The noises seemed to have stopped. But Morgan could hear water dripping.
A large crevice behind the staircase was full of trash and fallen mud. Morgan’s great-uncle and the two families who had lived there after him had dumped their garbage there for an old underground stream, now diminished to a trickle, to dispose of. For most mountain dwellers the area streams had been their dishwasher, garbage collector, and sewer line. Someone had tried to bury the trash by hauling in dirt, but that had only made individual bits of trash stand out like jewels.
A sighing seemed to move through the house.
An old lace-up boot, four rusted cans, a piece of rotting tire, driftwood, a chair leg. Someone’s baby doll, minus one arm, an eye, and half the hair pulled out. Rising and falling water had left topographical map lines on the torso. He moved the doll, thought he heard a faint cry, went so far as to search for a voice box, but the head cavity was full of dirt, nothing more.
He’d had a doll as a child. “Little Boy Blue” it said on the tag. He’d begged his mother for months to buy it for him. His father had wanted to give him a gun for squirrel hunting, but he didn’t want to kill squirrels. He’d pestered her so much she’d finally given in.
“Now, Morgan, don’t get your clothes all dirty, now. And let little Louise play with Blue too!” His mother smiled at the neighbor lady across the fence. “Oh, he’s all right.”
Morgan overheard her and began whispering to Blue, away from little Louise. Louise began to cry.
When his father came home from the fields each night Morgan was talking to Blue on the faded purple living room rug. “Is that true, Blue? Do you really come from there? How do you know so much, Blue?”
His father towered over him, the face from the eyes down a darker color than the rest. His father walked to the back of the house and a door slammed.
“Will you take me there, Blue, will you?”
The wide black belt surprised him.
“I’ll beat the queer out of you, boy!”
Blue slipped from Morgan’s fingers as he frantically tried to protect his legs, shoulders, and head from the blows.
Morgan didn’t cry, not once. Even when Blue’s head was cracked. Blue just stared at him. Blue didn’t cry either. Morgan didn’t belong here.
Blue had been sent to take him back where he belonged.
A key chain protruded from a section of yellow clay near the stair railing. Two old Indian-head pennies. A ball of wire. Half a yellow dinner plate. Armour’s Baking Soda can. A round ring of amber flush with the dirt surface. He took a stick and dug around the ring, exposing one, then two, then a whole cache of amber beer bottles, the labels rotted off.
Drinking, fighting, and making babies had been about the only things to do in those hills. When his father drank, it upset his aim. More than once a belt aimed at Morgan’s rear or legs bruised a cheek bone or scarred an eye instead. Once in his frustration his father had thrown down the belt, picked up a brick and struck Morgan in the back of the neck.
The next morning Blue seemed to have a small crack in the back of his neck. Morgan knew Blue was angry inside, but the doll just closed his eyes.
But that night Morgan heard whispering from underneath his bed. Blue was gone from his pillow. When he crouched and stuck his head under the bed he could see Blue lying on the floor, mouth open, staring at him.
* * * *
He’d reached the bottom of the staircase, his head beginning to ache again. He could barely see anything around him, or the tunnel mouth a few feet away. Listening carefully, he could hear a scurrying as of tiny feet back toward the coal outcropping. The floorboards were creaking above him. Alice was pacing. Something scratched behind him. He whirled, but there was nothing.
He started down the tunnel to the coal outcropping, wishing he had another flashlight. There were more scratching noises ahead of him.
Someone had stacked large wooden crates and crumbling cardboard boxes along both sides of the tunnel. He recognized some of the objects as old family possessions; this cellar had long been a Gibson family storage center. The wood and cardboard were oily and blackened, almost the color of coal. The moldy, humid smell was overpowering here, a scent he had enjoyed as a child but which now seemed oppressive, as if his throat were rapidly filling with cool, moist earth.
He coughed, suddenly feeling dizzy, and grabbed the side of a box.
A loud squealing and a nest of squirming, hairless baby rats spilled out onto the tunnel floor. Morgan stepped back quickly, mashing one of the pink, shapeless forms into the mud.
Morgan ran, then stumbled several steps before reaching a bare part of the wall past the boxes. He slumped there, trying to catch his breath. Alice was pacing directly over his head, in one of the bedrooms now, as if she were following his progress.
He could hear more distant noises, noises like whimpers somewhere back near the coal outcropping.
He’d gone out west looking for Alice, or someone like her. She had been a fascination since the first day he’d met her. She said it herself, though not in the way he might have liked: “You always sound like I’m some rare, odd stone you’ve picked up.”
“You’re different from any woman I’ve ever known. I’m just fascinated.”
“But I need you to like me for what I want to be, not what you want me to be!”
Alice would make him forget. Make him forget all the bad times. Like the night at the fraternity house, the night that got him into the hospital. “Rum and sleeping pills don’t mix! Morgan killed himself with thirty-six!” There was a loud banging at the door, he remembered, but he’d been having a lot of trouble with voices, and after awhile he had learned to ignore them.
She would make him forget his father’s phonecall, the call that came only a week after Morgan had entered St. Anthony’s Mental Hospital. “We can’t afford to keep you in that fancy place no more, Morgan.” The old man wanted to trade cars again. “Now listen, Bob Wilkins down on Long Branch just got back from that State place, and he’s a whole lot better. An’ it don’t cost nothin.”
Massive, brain-numbing doses of Thorazine, Stellazine, Mellaril; they’d make him a whole lot better, sure pa. Plus maybe a little bit of Congentin so he wouldn’t feel inclined to swallow his tongue. Three aides had to drag him away from the phone, like a puppet or an enormous, cast-off doll.
Alice would make him forget. He had been sure of it. He wouldn’t be able to hear the voices.
* * * *
Morgan slid down the tunnel wall and leaned back on his heels, his fist knotted against his mouth. The noises like voices had grown louder down at the tunnel’s end. He wanted to scream, run back up the stairs and capture Alice in his arms again, hold her and make her comfort him. He couldn’t do this for her.
Perhaps he did need her more than she needed him, but he was determined to give her something in return. “I’m sorry, Alice. Sometimes I can’t help the things I feel. I hate to use the
