The Kingdom of Ohio (34 page)

 

 

“Did you see anything?” she whispers.

“Don't think so. You?”

She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to visualize the ruined tunnel wall. The dark streaks left by the blasting powder on the dull gray rock, the debris and puddles of mud on the ground.

She feels him shift, unseen, beside her. “Then we should—”

“Wait,” she interrupts, groping blindly to put a restraining hand on his arm. “Perhaps I did see something. I am going to light another match.”

Peter silences the objection that starts on his lips and a moment later light blooms through the cramped underground world. Blinking against the sudden brightness, she points. “There, on the wall—you see? A darker place?”

He peers and then sees it: one of the gouged fissures in the rock that looks infinitesimally different from the others, a deeper shadow to its darkness. Peter half falls toward it.

“What do you see?”

“There's an opening.”

Peter hears her draw a sharp breath. His heart is racing as well, his earlier drowsiness vanished. “Give me the matches,” he says. “I'm going in.”

The fifth match sputters out.

 

 

Gingerly, he fits his bruised body into the fissure in the tunnel wall. The jagged opening is hardly wider than his chest and as Peter pushes farther into the narrow space, his coat pocket catches on an outcropping. He pulls at the fabric but it holds fast, his arms wedged helplessly against his sides by the rock. He becomes abruptly aware of the mass of stone around him, the tons of blackness pressing downward on this fragile pocket of air. The crushing weight of granite—

A wash of terror hits him, and he stifles the urge to scream. Beyond the verso of the unending subterranean night, he can feel something growing closer, some kind of presence, hungry and poised. With a burst of panic-born strength, Peter frantically jerks again. With a tearing sound the snagged pocket gives way and he tumbles forward, crying out as his aching body lands on jagged rock.

“Are you all right?” she calls.

He stands. “All right,” he croaks, hardly recognizing his own voice.

Shakily he lights a match and holds up the flame to the crevice in the cave wall—which is suddenly reduced in scale to a few difficult steps over a rocky ledge. She is standing in the outer darkness of the tunnel, her arms wrapped across her chest, squinting against the light. He holds his hand toward her, helping her through—then raises the match, and together they survey the space.

The cave is the size of a small room, a dozen feet across and the same in height. The walls and floor are dull gray granite, flecked with quartz. The stone is molded into uneven arcs as if shaped by gas or water—a space that has been here, he thinks, since before the city and before all of us, unknown and waiting. And in the wall, opposite where they stand, is a small wooden door.

For a time, both of them simply stare.

The most disturbing thing about the door is its utter ordinari ness. It is made of old, unpolished wood, reinforced with three horizontal iron bands. Five feet tall and three across, it is set directly into the sheer rock wall of the cave without any visible frame. It is the most unlikely thing, here in this impossible place, Peter has ever seen.

And everything, all of it, was true. This is the thought that hits him, the realization accompanied by a wave of dizziness that nearly makes him stumble beside her. Her story, the journey through time—all of it. He shakes his head, stunned by the wealth of sudden possibilities.

Some letters have been carved into the center of the door. C-R-O-A-T-O-A-N, he reads. She starts forward but he grips her arm, holding her back.

“Wait,” he says. The match burns his fingers and he blows it out.

In the darkness that descends, neither says anything. Half-formed thoughts are leaping at the edges of her awareness: threads of hidden meaning, each leading away into the warp and weave of things unseen. She tries to remind herself that now, more than ever, it is essential to be careful and scientific. But at the same time, unthinking, the door seems to pull her closer. On her arm, she can feel that Peter's hand is trembling.

“What does it mean?” he asks. “Those letters?”

“I do not know.” Her throat feels constricted and tight. “I saw this door and the letters in the basement of my father's house. I never thought about their meaning. The mark of the carpenter, I supposed.”

Again, neither speaks for a time. The darkness and silence around them broken only by the faint sounds of dripping water and their breathing.

She reaches out and touches the dry, rough wood. Lets her fingers drift across the letters, down to the door's iron handle. Silently he does the same. In the dark they are standing almost cheek to cheek.

“What now?” he whispers.

She closes her eyes. The alternation of absolute blindness and sudden light, together with the swarming murmur of underground echoes, prevent her from thinking clearly. She pictures the green vistas of Ohio, the landscapes that haunt her memory. The quiet rooms of the house in Toledo where she grew up, the order of her basement laboratory with its racks of polished instruments, the look of hopeful confusion on her father's face—

All this comes to her, an abrupt longing that takes her breath away. And now, all these things are possible and within reach. This, and even more: perhaps she could travel back even further and prevent the invasion of Toledo, to save everything that was lost. To be reunited not only with her father, but with her beloved, long-dead mother, whom she can hardly remember—

She sways on her feet, shaken by the images. When she had first arrived in New York, the demands of survival had obscured any speculation about what might be possible if she could find or reconstruct the device—daydreams that had seemed, in any case, shadowed with the threat of madness. Later, after their encounter with Edison and Morgan, she had determined to ignore such hopes. But now, standing in front of the door, they come crowding back more urgently than ever.

And even if beyond the portal is only fire and death, she thinks, in the last moments of the exploding mansion—even so, it would at least be certainty.

Beside her, Peter shifts nervously in the darkness.

“So, now . . .” he starts, then trails off, not knowing how the sentence ought to end.

His mind is racing as he grapples with the reality of what they have found. He thinks of his father, half shadowed across a nighttime campfire. The sky and the dark evergreen forest and the rearing horse, its forelegs churning. His hours here in New York, beside her, all their misunderstandings and accidental betrayals: all the things he could've said and done better. Only—the realization strikes him—there's something that feels strangely right about their time together, despite everything, awkwardness and all. That we even met, that any of it even happened, he thinks. Maybe that's enough.

“But think of Morgan,” she murmurs in the darkness beside him.

“How's that?” Peter shakes his wandering thoughts away.

“Think of how he or Tesla might employ this device.” She draws a breath. “If we use the door, they will find it and follow us through. Even if I were to destroy the device itself on the other side, it is possible the portal would remain open.”

“So, then . . . ?”

She closes her eyes.

This should be—she expects it to be—a terrible decision: between everything she has loved, and her responsibility to the world in which she finds herself now. But strangely, with Peter beside her, it hardly feels like a choice at all. Because maybe the past only exists, she thinks wordlessly, to make the future possible.

She opens her eyes and straightens.

“Will you light a match?” she asks.

Peter feels inside the little box with his fingertips. There are four left, he is pleased to discover—although what good four moments of sight will do in this vast darkness, he realizes, is hard to imagine. He fumbles out the match, and strikes it.

 

 

The flame is dazzlingly bright in the small space of the cave, exaggerated shadows leaping across the stone walls. They squint against the light, at the ancient wooden door, a fragment from another world juxtaposed into this alien setting.

“Can you destroy it?” she says.

“The door?”

She nods, fighting the urge to cry. “If the mass anchor is destroyed, the portal should collapse.”

Peter looks up and around, surveying the space. Small cracks run through the arched stone of the roof, the fragile hollow of the cave already weakened by the rift in the tunnel wall. Even so, he realizes, it will be dangerous—maybe even more risky than the first blast.

As the match sputters into darkness he meets her eyes again: her face smudged with dirt, her nose dripping from the cold, a tightness of held-back tears around her eyes.

The match goes out.

He stands very still, hearing her breath and feeling the warmth of her unseen presence.

Inexplicably now, Peter remembers the sense of invisible power that once pushed him up the span of the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe this—it strikes him—is what the city, with the nameless urgency of its buildings and bridges, has been telling him all along: not any one meaning, but something about why things mean at all. Which is that if things were certain, they wouldn't mean anything.

If it were certain, it wouldn't be love.

“Yes,” he says. “It's risky for us. Very risky. But, with luck, yes.”

 

 

Utter darkness.

“Climb back into the tunnel,” he instructs. “I need rocks to shape the charge.”

She nods, wresting down a momentary doubt about the door. Because this is the only way, she reminds herself: for the sake of history itself. For the sake of everything. To put the past aside, and by doing so to make the future possible.

She gropes her way along the wall of the cave until she finds the fissure and pushes herself into it, a wave of claustrophobia descending—and then she tumbles out into the wider excavation beyond.

“I am outside,” she announces.

“Good,” he calls back. “Toss the rocks through.”

Fumbling on the tunnel floor, she feels her fingernails break as she lifts chunks of debris and pushes them through the crevice. Despite the pain, she is grateful for the distraction from the suffocating weight of darkness on all sides. Inside the cave she can hear the tapping of Peter's hammer and the faint exhalations of his effort, echoing in the tomblike stillness. Then the sound of his hammer stops and he mumbles a curse.

“What is it?” she calls, straightening. “Is something wrong?”

“Not enough fuse left.”

“Then”—her heart catches—“you cannot destroy the portal?”

“Not without destroying us along with it.” He groans, a shuffling sound as he shifts his weight. “Fuse won't reach out of the cave.”

Both stand silently in the dark for some unmarked span of time.

There must be a way, she thinks, clinging to her earlier sense of conviction.

“Could we—” Abruptly, in the darkness, a spark of inspiration comes to her. “Perhaps we could use cloth from my dress.”

“Wouldn't burn hot enough.”

“If you dust it with blasting powder?”

He falls silent and she waits, holding her breath.

“Maybe,” he says. “Could work, I think.”

 

 

Crouched inside the cave, Peter hears the sound of ripping fabric.

“How much of this do you need?” she calls.

He tries to visualize the space of the cave, at the same time trying to ignore all the things that could go wrong. “About fifteen feet.”

The ripping continues, then stops. “Do you need more rock?”

“No. Got enough here already.”

He hears her shuffle, slip, cry out softly, and then she tumbles through the crevice to half fall against him.

“Here.” She presses a coiled strip of cloth into his hand, and then he feels her move away. Clutching the makeshift fuse he kneels by the base of the door, where he has chipped out a channel in the rock. He opens the bag of supplies and gropes for the powder box—then feels inside the matchbox. Three matches remain. One match, he has promised himself, he will save, even if he isn't certain exactly why.

“Take the matches.” He holds the box out toward where he can hear her teeth chattering. A moment later her hand finds his own in the dark. “Strike one, and step away.”

She does, and squinting against the light Peter glances in her direction to find himself looking up at a breathtaking expanse of exposed leg, below the torn hem of her dress—

Struggling to focus on the task at hand, he dips his fingers into the powder box and runs them down the length of the cloth. The remaining blasting powder he pours into the channel below the door, fitting in a blasting cap at one end and tamping down a layer of broken rock above.

The match gutters out.

She climbs back through the fissure into the tunnel. He follows, trailing the makeshift fuse.

“Here,” he says. “Sit with your back to the wall. Plug your eyes and ears, like last time. You remember?”

“I remember.”

He lowers himself beside her.

“You have the matches?”

“I do.” She presses the small box into his palm.

He removes their next-to-last match from the box and draws a breath. This time, strangely, he is hardly nervous at all. He feels larger than himself, filled with some beginning or end. He reaches out and squeezes her hand; she squeezes back.