Toby Olson - Tampico

The other night in a dream in which my mother was rising through a fissure caused by natural eruptions in the earth’s crust, her rotted wood casket riding on a river of mud, coming down to where I stood in panic in a meadow out of sight of the house, I felt a constant pulse of water under the dream’s textures and the spongy ground below my feet was sinking and I woke up shaking, thinking it was the house, but it was me, my heart racing and a flush and tightening at my temples. I lay there, looking up into moonlight and shadows on the ceiling, and in a while I was beyond the aftermath of the dream, and I slipped out from under the covers, searched for my slippers with my feet, then put my robe on and stood listening, watched the betta circle under the dim fluorescent, searching the tank for his mate, thin as a knife blade when he faced me. I listened to the gurgling of the circulating pump, then noticed a sound under that sound, as in the dream, something below the bedroom floor, a pulse of water, faintly percussive, and I took my robe off and kicked my slippers away and dressed myself in jeans and tennis shoes and a loose sweatshirt and headed for the cellar stairs.

There are lights in the cellar, bulbs hanging from electrical fixtures, each with its own chain, and once I’d felt my way down to the foot of the ladder and pulled the first one, I saw that the floor was dry, a dirt floor, black soil over hard clay a few inches down. I went to other lights and pulled the chains, and when there was enough light I moved along the stone walls on both ocean and meadow side, but could find nothing. Bits of mortar dissolved under my fingers, fans of sand falling to my tennis shoes, but that was all. Then I looked up between the joists in the low ceiling, places where my father had hung boat and fishing gear. I saw a bargepole, paint worn away on a string of lobster buoys, and I saw the members of my mother’s dismantled quilting frame, the nails in rusty rows at the edges. But I could find no water, and when I went to the boxes sitting on wooden skids on the dirt floor, I found only the dampness of humidity in the cardboard. I was tempted to open a box, one marked with the first letter of my father’s name, but as I bent over it I heard a trickle and a quiet splash. It seemed to be coming from the end of the room, down in the old wine cellar under the building’s ocean side edge. My father had bought the house from a man who had owned it most of his life. He’d bought it, in turn, from an old sea captain, a whaler who had accumulated wealth and had a taste for wine. But we’d never used his cellar. It was a small dank room with a low ceiling, and I had to duck under the lintel as I climbed down into it, its floor two feet below the cellar proper.

It was dark there and I could see nothing, but I could hear the water falling, drop upon drop, deep in the room’s side. There’s no electric light in the wine cellar, but in moments my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and the light flooding in dimly from the other room cast shadows on the stone walls and I could see into the wine vaults, square openings at waist level, extending out beyond the house foundation, and I could see the serpentine green of the marble floor at the lip of one of them and could tell, in a faint glow coming from inside, that it was wet.

I moved to the vault and put my fingers into the shallow wash, then squatted down and looked in. I could feel a soft breeze on my face, and back between the rotted wine racks, I could see a rubble of rock and cement where the back wall had caved in, a space between the rubble and the vault’s ceiling, and the dim glow coming from behind it, a latticework of light.

The water had pooled in a concave indentation in one of the rocks, and drops fell down a few inches from its lip, striking the flooded floor with a faint ping, sending out miniature waves that caused a hushed echoing in the chamber as they rolled over the marble. It was the sound that had entered into my dream, no louder here than above.

I reached into the vault, my shoulders beyond the opening, and pulled at the wine rack on the left. The wood crumbled in my hands and wet sand fell from the ceiling into my hair. I backed out and shook my head, then climbed under the lintel again and up into the other room and went to my father’s box and opened it. It held old fishing clothes, and I dug among them, remnants of the scent of mothballs in my nostrils, until I found an old black watch cap, a blanket, and a pair of canvas gloves. I put the cap on, tucking my short hair up under it at the edges, then climbed back down into the wine cellar.

I pulled the rotted racks away, dropping the wood to the vault’s side, then pushed my sweatshirt above my forearm, stood to the other side and reached in and swept the water from the marble floor with my hand. Then I spread out the blanket, covering the floor as far in as I could reach, put the gloves on and boosted myself up, turning and ducking my head as I crawled in through the vault’s opening, and shuffled forward until my toes scraped at the chamber’s lip, and then I paused, stiffening, the feel of the situation coming to me in a rush. I was inside the chamber, like a child in an oven in a fairy tale, and the fist was closing in my chest and I had to fight myself to visualize the way out: the opening into the large cellar, the ladder, up into the kitchen, then down the hall to my bedroom. Sweat had beaded on my brow, and I had to shake my head to get the sting out of my eyes. Then a cool breeze was washing across my face, drying it, and in a few moments I was okay again. I’m in the house, I told myself, and I’ll have no trouble getting back.

I inched ahead again, my knees bunching the blanket, occasional drops of water falling to my neck, and in a few moments had reached the rubble and was working to pull it away, sweeping pebbles and sand to the side, lifting the larger rocks and hunks of cement in both hands, my elbows on the blanket through which water was seeping, wetting my sweatshirt. I shoved the last rocks away and saw there was a crude opening beyond, an old watercourse or a place where different strata had joined and had shifted apart. It was a brief tubular passage through grey shale and clay, a rivulet of water meandering down its center, and the mineral veins that ran through it were visible in various bright colors in wetness at its end, where I saw the latticework of light, a jagged circular opening filled with roots, bits of earth hanging from filaments, and a soft fluorescent-like glow in the interstices.

I hesitated only for a moment, then crawled through the remnants of rubble, my knees chafed by grit pressing up from the hard marble floor. Then my knees were beyond rock and marble and were forcing shallow cups in the forgiving clay.

I crawled forward, my gloved hands and my feet to the sides, the narrow river running between my legs, and in a few yards had reached the light lattice at the passage’s end. I guessed I was no more than ten feet from the back of the wine vault, fifteen from the foundation of the house itself, and yet I felt I’d traveled a long way and was in a different world entirely.

The roots were twisted in gnarled layers filling the opening, much like a crudely woven basket, and when I reached my hand into the matrix and pulled at the clinging clods of dirt the fingers of my glove caught in stiff thorns and I had to withdraw it. I took the glove off and tried again, snaking my hand and my arm up to the elbow in the rigid web. I was still kneeling, my free hand in the river on the passage floor, and suddenly that hand was moving, water rushing between my gloved fingers, and I was falling forward. The root basket was turning in the opening. It had hold of my arm at the wrist deep within it, and as it rotated the light coming through it was like that in a kaleidoscope, flashes of circling color on the passage walls and in my eyes. And it was moving back as it turned, like some massive withdrawing screw, pulling me toward the opening.