Back downstairs again, lickety-split. She strikes a match: psssttt! The match head splutters to life, and then she raises her tiny torch to the dark. The blackness does not give. Inky shadows flee from her, splaying over the cement behind, but no light penetrates this third room. At. All.
Okay, that’s even stranger. That’s not the way light works. Or darkness, for that matter: if the room is empty, then nothing should prevent light from penetrating.
She reaches a tentative palm, like a mime tracing an invisible door, and instantly snatches it back. Whoa, cold. She haahs warm air onto her fingers, shaking her hand until the feeling needles back in darts and tingles. What she’s felt is so frigid it burns—and hard, like a pane of black glass. Yet in that brief contact she felt the darkness, well … seem to give a teeny, tiny bit: as if the glass, smooth as a sheet of quartz crystal, morphed to a dense yet pliable cellophane.
But there is something else: a sound, scratchy with distance, seeping from that gloaming. What is that? She cocks her head, straining to tease out the components. The sound is as crackly as the weather band radio Jasper listens to whenever there’s a big blow and Superior gets wild. So someone left on a radio? Like Sal has done upstairs? That doesn’t make any sense, not even for Jasper. Probably just hearing a weird echo. And yet there is something making noise in there. No matter how hard she tries to pull the sound to her, however, all she gets are static-filled whispers, like the hiss of sand spun into a dust devil.
Whoa, wait just a second. The hairs on her neck suddenly spike with alarm as another thought occurs to her. What if there’s someone living under Jasper’s house? That stuff can happen. Over on the mainland, down around Ashland, bums hole up in broken-down shacks all the time. The news says so.
I shouldn’t go in there, she thinks. What if there are snakes? Or rats? Or something worse, like monsters and shadows, in the dark? That could be. Maybe that’s why Jasper’s walled this up, so what’s inside can’t get out.
Or what if the black is the monster?
“That’s just silly,” she says. “It’s your imagination. It’s like when you listen to a seashell and hear the ocean. You’re listening to air, that’s all.”
Candle in one hand, she reaches for the blackness, wincing as her fingers meet that icy, glassy darkness, but forcing herself not to flinch back—and this time, there’s a difference. This time, she hears the faintest, tiniest click. Like the snap of a light switch or the sound her little jewelry box makes when she reaches underneath and presses the little brass nib and—snick-click—the hidden compartment springs open.
Oh! Her heart does a spastic little flip. Now the glassy black membrane seems too thin and gives easily, and she watches as her hand and the candle slide into the dark.
Almost instantly, the flame dies and goes out.
What? Maybe the draft blew it out. But when she pulls out the candle, the yellow arrow of its flame still flickers. Huh? She eases the candle in again, and right away, the flame disappears—and so, she notices now, does her hand. Yet she still feels molten candle wax spilling onto her fingers. The sensation is distant, the wax’s warmth leeching away quickly, as if sucked into a deep well. No pain, though. Just cold and—
And then, something inside hooks her wrist and tugs.
“Oh!” Emma ekes out a tiny, wheezing cry. “No!” She tries taking her hand back, but this something only tugs harder. From deep inside, the whispers suddenly swell, growing louder and more excited, the sound like the scritch-scratch of rats scurrying over glass. Stifling a shriek, she plants her feet on either side of the door and pulls. The darkness gives like grudging, soft taffy and then lets go with a sensation like the snap of a rubber band: ka-twannnggg!
She tumbles back, gasping. Her hand is still attached, all fingers accounted for, but the tips are white and icy. The candle’s dead. A thin streamer of smoke curls from the blackened wick—and the molten wax has frozen.
There really is something—someone—in there. She sprawls, unmoving, paralyzed with fear, her heart going thumpity-thumpity-thumpity-thump in her chest. She felt a hand. There were fingers, and she heard it … them. They almost got her.
And what about the candle? Her hand? Once she pierced that darkness, she hadn’t been able to see either. She’s paid attention in science: no light + brain-freeze cold = … outer space? Or a really cold vacuum? But neither makes sense. There can’t be a black space-hole under Jasper’s house.
Then her mind jumps: Matchi-Manitou, in his deep dark cave. The Ojibwe say there’s a big evil demon in a huge black cave under Devil’s Island. Jasper goes over there all the time. He paints nightmares and then covers them up. He boozes and babbles about White Space and broken Nows and Dark Passages.
So maybe this is one of them, a Dark Passage, and this is like Devils Island. Her lungs are going so fast she’s dizzy. Catch a clue, Emma. You live in a cottage overlooking Devil’s Cauldron. So is this a tunnel that connects the two? Is this the Dark Passages Jasper’s so scared of? No wonder Jasper’s covered this over. He doesn’t want whatever’s in there getting out. Or me or anyone going in. Something grabbed me. Something’s whispering. If Matchi-Manitou had gotten a really good grab and—bam!—she’d gotten hooked and reeled in like a salmon, what then? Would she have been able to see at all? Maybe she wouldn’t want to. She’d be dinner. Matchi-Manitou would drink her blood and crunch her bones and eat her up, munch-munch-munch. Even if she’d managed to get away, where would she be? What if she ended up somewhere—some when—else?
You are not going to think about this anymore. The sweat pops on her forehead as she levers that door, really throws her weight against it. You are going to forget all about this. Stick your fingers in your ears and la-la-la-la all the way back upstairs.
The door is pissed. Doesn’t want to close at all, nosirreebob. She can feel it protesting, or maybe that’s only what lives inside the dark exerting some force to keep her from closing it off again. From deep within, the whispers seethe, but there are so many she can’t make out the words, which she thinks is probably good. She doesn’t hear them; she’s not listening, la-la-la-la …
Finally, grudgingly, the door grumbles shut. She doesn’t dare look at that white blank too long either. If she does, she might see the ring again, and then the urge to pull open the door and push against the dark would be too strong.