Hellworld Read online

  Even though that’s what I tended to think, I would never say it to Mrs. Brower. Or anyone else, really. If she wanted to believe in that sort of thing, she had that prerogative. Just like I had the prerogative to know it was a waste of time.

  “Take care,”Mrs. Brower said.

  “I will—you too. Thanks again.”I walked across her driveway, through the decorative river rocks dividing our properties, and to my front door. We’d had grass in the front yard once. Now our yard boasted only dirt and yellow weeds. We were starting to get complaints.

  I let my happy mask drop as I pushed the door open. It felt like entering a cavern: everything dark and cold. Our front blinds were closed tight, and the only light came from the television ahead of me in the living room, making my father look like a corpse.

  Dad sat on our couch, eyes half-lidded, gazing at the TV. Reruns of M*A*S*H. I’d had to cancel our cable months ago after Dad lost his previous job, so all we got now were about seven antenna channels.

  I said nothing as I shut the front door, blocking out the afternoon sun. As if Dad were a vampire who would burst into flame if exposed for too long. Without a word, I walked past him to the kitchen, set the pasta on the stove and turned the burner on low, then tossed the bread into the microwave to seal it from the air. I moved to stand in the arch between the living room and kitchen. Needle-legged spiders had woven a home high in one corner of the archway.

  “Mrs. Brower made us dinner.”I struggled not to add the word “again.”

  “Mmm,”Dad said.

  I leaned against the wall, digging my hands into my black uniform pants pockets, feeling less cool than Mrs. Brower had looked. “Want to tell me what happened today?”

  “No.”He wasn’t quite looking at the screen, his eyes aimed just a little below it. On TV, B.J. refused to let a soldier die on Christmas.

  “Are you going back?”

  “No.”

  “Dad, you have to work.”

  “I know, I know, Plum. I’m sorry. I’m trying. Jesus, I’m trying.”

  The words were undead. Rote memorization and recitation. Even throwing in his nickname for me, “Plum,”didn’t impress me. “Plum”wasn’t the greatest nickname of all time, but it was his for me, and that’s all that mattered. Usually, secretly, I loved it. Times like this, it just made the ache sharper.

  “Okay, well. Look again tomorrow, okay?”

  “Mmm.”

  “You want some spaghetti? There’s sausage in it. It’s really good.”

  I knew that from previous experience with Mrs. Brower’s dinners. If Dad wasn’t going to be working again for awhile, that meant a nauseating amount of take-home Arby’s for both of us. That got old after the first two times.

  “No,”Dad said.

  I watched him for a minute. If not for the slow rise and fall of his stomach, he could have been dead there on the couch. The springs and cushioning had given way, creating a Dad-shaped divot conforming to his body.

  “Want me to wake you up in the morning?”I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Sure”was code for whatever; or more often, probably not; or, you can try but it won’t work; I’ll just go right back to bed as soon as you’re gone.

  “I’ll wake you up, and you can drive down to the library and check out the job sites.”I sounded like Mom when she used to tell me I was, in no uncertain terms, going to clean my room, or finish homework, or wash the dishes.

  We had no Internet at home anymore, so that meant frequent trips to the library, where Dad could go online to search for jobs. It’s also where I went to school now, essentially, in increments of only thirty minutes depending on the length of the line of people waiting to use the computers. I took online classes exclusively these days, trying to get my diploma as fast as possible so I could get better work as fast as possible and with a little luck even get into college . . . as fast as possible. Usually, I came to the library in the midmorning or early afternoon to study, but I always seemed to run into conflicts with my work schedule. Lately, I’d been thinking of just taking my GED tests and getting the whole stupid thing over with.

  “Okay,”Dad muttered, as sullen as the teenager I should have been.

  I took that response as an improvement. “Okay”was code for I’ll at least attempt to do what you said. I probably wouldn’t get any better from him.

  Going back into the kitchen, I forked some of Mrs. Brower’s pasta into a bowl. Adding a couple slices of the French bread to it, I carried my dinner out to the backyard, unable to handle eating beside Dad in the dark, or even sitting in the kitchen and overhearing the brave men and women of the 4077 save more lives in Korea. We needed our own Hawkeye in this place.

  Our house had one of the few tall trees in the area: an old, crusty, yet somehow smarmy pine rising higher than even the two-story houses that peered over our walls from adjacent streets. As if apologizing for my childhood outrage that our house had one stupid story instead of two awesome stories like so many of the other places nearby, Dad had built me a tree house in the pine. The tree house consisted of a single four-by-eight piece of plywood that formed the floor, with two sides protected by a railing. Nothing fancy like you’d see on TV, and I didn’t mind. The other two sides were open, and faced our small patio. It was about fifteen feet up, and accessed by a wooden ladder nailed into the trunk.

  The way the branches fanned out provided enough privacy for the tree-climbing girl I’d been, but also formed a hole straight overhead through which I could watch the stars when I’d come out at night with Mom’s desserts. Sometimes, back then, Mom came up with me and we’d eat while she pointed out stars and constellations, and told me about how we were all made up of star stuff, and that the universe was so big there were galaxies we didn’t even know about yet because their light hadn’t reached us.

  I missed those desserts. I missed being that girl.

  I missed Mom.

  3

  Now

  * * *

  “How long’s it been?”Selby whispers. Her voice is cramped.

  “Since we climbed up?”I ask.

  She nods, and holds my arm even more tightly.

  “Maybe an hour,”Charlie answers.

  Neither Selby nor I say anything. Charlie’s expression, what little we can see of it by the light of the camera screen, gives him away. He has no idea, no more than we do, but we also know not to check the time on his phone. No reason to waste battery, not even for a second.

  “Are the bandages holding?”I ask her.

  “Think so.”

  “Let me see if you’re still bleeding.”

  The three of us pause, Charlie swings the camera toward us—then, dark.

  Selby squeals, “Noooooo.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,”I say quickly. How much more adrenaline can my body take?

  “Don’t move,”Charlie says. “Just stand exactly where you are.”

  I force deep breaths through my nose. Slow, slow, I tell myself. Go easy, Abby.

  Having even the small bit of bluish-white light from the camera taken away, battering us back into the blackness of the cave, makes the darkness worse.

  Having that glimmer to hang on to, then losing it . . . it makes it worse.

  The hope makes it worse.

  I wonder if this is how Dad feels every day. Every day, wondering if Mom will call, or show up at home. Five years of wishing and waiting.

  And hoping.

  I need to call him. As soon as we get out of this damn cave, I have to call him, make sure he’s okay. Tell him I’m okay. He has no idea I’m here. How stupid am I? I should have told him exactly where we were going. But I couldn’t, not at the time. It would’ve just sent him spiraling . . .

  No point worrying about it now. The important thing is to get to my phone and check in.

  But how can I tell him about Mom? How can I make him understand what we saw?

  Charlie fumbles around with the bag. I hear a series of clicks and bumps, t
hen the camera viewfinder blazes back to life.

  “The battery died, is all,”Charlie says, shouldering the bag again. “This one’s full. It’ll buy us some time.”

  “But not much,”I say. I hunker down and peel up the hem of Selby’s shirt. A circle of blood the size of a quarter stains the gauze, but I don’t think it’s any worse. Then again, I’m not a nurse.

  “I think it’s okay. Let’s go.”

  She nods briskly and straightens her back, lifting her chin defiantly.

  Even if it really has been an hour since we crawled out of the cavern where we found the pit, we have no less than seven hours to go. Considering our snail’s pace, probably a lot more.

  I don’t want to die in the dark. There’s no “letting your eyes adjust,”because there’s nothing for them to adjust to. Only the black—a cataclysmic black that would probably fool us into thinking we were dead long before our bodies dried to death.

  “Let’s go a little faster,”I say.

  We go a little faster.

  “I’m thirsty,”Selby says after several minutes of shuffling more quickly along the dusty ground.

  Charlie pauses only long enough to hand her a fresh bottle of water. Selby takes it, sips from the top, and holds it back toward him.

  “No, drink it,”I say. “Sipping won’t prevent dehydration. You have to drink.”

  “Girl Scout,”Selby calls me, but tremulously. I appreciate, briefly, her attempt to make a joke. It’s a good sign.

  Selby takes two big drinks. It may as well be blood leaking from all three of us. Life-giving fluid, now gone. Irreplaceable until and unless we reach the outside.

  “The RV will have food and water,”I say, mostly to hear myself say it.

  “Yeah,”Charlie says. His voice is lifeless.

  No. Not lifeless. I know now what a truly lifeless voice sounds like. Charlie is still warm and breathing. But I understand his tone. He knows as well as I do that after the creatures that came out of the pit, after seeing what remained of that smashed boulder, the chances of the RV being in any kind of useful condition are slim.

  “I don’t wanna die down here,”Selby says.

  “We’re not,”I say.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “No. But I know talking about it isn’t going to help.”

  Selby falls silent. The cavern echoes with our footsteps crunching over gravel. Here and there we spot more crushed rocks and boulders, all victims to the pounding feet of some of the animals we saw escaping the pit. If “animal”is even the right word.

  I wait until we creep up another steep, jagged embankment before asking Charlie and Selby both, “What were they? What do you think they were?”

  “It doesn’t matter,”Selby says immediately.

  We climb onto a flat stretch of ground, and pick up our pace to a walk rather than a shuffle. The ceiling is tens of feet overhead, so there’s no threat of banging into something and knocking ourselves out.

  “It might matter,”I say. “It might matter a lot. We let them out. They shouldn’t even exist, but we all saw them. What do you think they were? Come on, you’re a scientist.”

  “I won a science fair.”

  “Yeah, but you’re brilliant. Going to Caltech, remember? So come on. What do you think?”

  “Talking about it isn’t going to help,”Selby says, echoing me with razor clarity.

  I glance at Charlie for help. He doesn’t say anything. Silenced, I go first over a pile of rocks blocking our path.

  Maybe she’s right. Maybe talking about what we let loose just doesn’t matter.

  4

  Then

  * * *

  When I was about four years old, a new satellite TV network launched called Outasite. As in, “out of sight.”As in, “way out there.”

  Outasite began as a repository of every old, weird, supernatural, and creepy television show that ever aired, plus several that never should have, and with good reason. Most shows were from the 1990s, like The X-Files. Some shows dated back to the eighties and even seventies or earlier. The Twilight Zone, The Ray Bradbury Theatre, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Unsolved Mysteries, etcetera. The guy who played Spock on Star Trek—the original guy—hosted a seventies-era show called In Search of . . . that always talked about Stonehenge and those crystal skulls from Central America.

  Any show having anything to do with government conspiracies, cryptids like Bigfoot or Nessie, UFOs, ghosts, legends, myths—you name it, Outasite aired it. On the weekends they played science-fiction and horror movies, mostly B-grade stuff and oldies you can get for free online. Night of the Living Dead, for example, or the black-and-white version of Last Man on Earth.

  They had original programming too.

  My mother became a cohost on one of these original shows: The Spectre Spectrum. Even I can admit that TSS came off as an obvious rip-off of the show Ghost Hunters, but TSS had actual scientists of varying disciplines, rather than plumbers, going on ghost hunts. Not to badmouth the GH guys; they were really cool. I met them a few times, at conventions and stuff, and they were always nice. One of them even guest-starred on a TSS ep once in season one.

  The Spectre Spectrum wasn’t trying to prove or disprove anything. They just wanted the truth. At least, that’s what the opening voice-over always said. My mother was originally a crime scene investigator, which was not nearly as glamorous as the TV shows make it seem. Her cohost, Dr. John Prinn, was an anthropologist specializing in world religions and cults. Dr. Prinn also happened to have two sons, Charlie and Stephen, and I think I started crushing on Charlie the moment I met him. I was nine at the time. Mom thought it was cute. Every week, Mom and Dr. Prinn brought in guest hosts, some of whom came back on a regular basis, and others who clearly did not belong on television. They almost got Neil deGrasse Tyson once, which would have been awesome.

  The first season of The Spectre Spectrum ended on a cliffhanger in a mansion in Cumberland, Maine, and ratings rocketed. Had Mom and Dr. Prinn stumbled into concrete evidence of the supernatural when one of their cameramen captured the milky image of a woman in an old-fashioned dress roaming this allegedly haunted house? Skeptical fans who’d enjoyed their takedowns of ESP, tarot cards, and hauntings tuned in to see if the show had sold out; true believers tuned in to see if their beliefs would be vindicated. Season two began with Mom and Dr. Prinn admitting they could not prove nor disprove anything supernatural in the film evidence. Internet message boards lit up with fans taking sides and arguing amongst themselves, and the show’s following grew.

  Mom and John Prinn were into a rhythm by then, and had great on-screen chemistry. I’m old enough now to know that, sure, maybe some sexual tension existed between them. Proximity has that effect. But as far as I know, nothing ever went on. It’s also entirely possible they were acting. They had a show to do, after all.

  “All television is entertainment television,”Mom said once.

  Season two ended strong, with what one reviewer called “a withering, if not blistering, disassembly and utter demolition of medical miracles.”TSS became Outasite’s highest-rated and most-watched show. Dad got to quit his job as a software engineer and just focus on raising me and building golf clubs, this odd hobby he enjoyed. We weren’t rich, but Mom did well that year.

  Season three of The Spectre Spectrum promised to be even better as the team went to shoot the first episode at an allegedly haunted cave in remote Southern Arizona.

  Except the episode was never finished, and TSS went off the air.

  While shooting that first ep of season three, my mother, Dr. Prinn, and their entire film crew disappeared. No one had heard from them since.

  There had been a search for my mom and the film crew, of course. In the cave and the outlying areas. An investigation that went on and on. But Mom and Dr. Prinn, and the six others who were on the shoot, had simply and literally vanished. The belongings of the cast and crew had been left in the TV trucks and vans like they were expecting to come back.
No signs of struggle, no signs of violence, nothing missing. Nothing but eight people, anyway. The cave had proven to be too massive to search in its entirety.

  Mom’s TV show about strange, inexplicable events actually became a TV show about a TV show about strange, inexplicable events. NBC produced The Mystery of the Spectre Spectrum, a two-hour documentary on their disappearance. A handful of knockoffs and “special reports”followed on cable and satellite. The web burst with conspiracy theorists who said our parents had found everything from John F. Kennedy alive, to ancient aliens, to a government facility using Americans as laboratory rats. Those were some of the more reasonable ideas floated.

  Most people believed there’d been an accident in the cave. A massive ceiling collapse, maybe, or unexpected flooding . . . or maybe they just got utterly lost. The unnamed and unexplored cave spidered out into dozens if not hundreds of side tunnels, a colossal labyrinth underground. Despite a month of searching, no trace of them had ever been found. So the accident theory is what Dad eventually accepted. Or, rather, tried to accept.

  That’s what I tried to believe too. But I couldn’t. Not deep down. Not really.

  Mom, like John Prinn, was a skeptic. A scientist who had no time for ghosts, cryptids, or miracle resurrections. I asked her about God once, while she was still a CSI, and she hugged me and said, “Abby-dabby, in my line of work, I’ve seen too much of what humanity can do to one another to think there’s anyone out there looking out for us.”

  That had been pretty sad, but then Mom said, “But I will look out for you, always. No matter what.”

  And I believed her. Maybe that’s why I still held out hope that somehow, someday, they’d be found alive somewhere. Or, more likely, maybe someday we could have solid confirmation they were all dead. Not the happiest thought, but at least maybe then we’d find peace.

  I was eleven when we lost Mom, and Dad was coming up on forty. Over the following months, though, Dad turned into an old man and I turned into a grown-up. That’s how we managed to deal. He checked out and I stepped up. I made sure the bills got paid, made sure we had food, fed the cat, pushed Dad to get to his doctor appointments . . .