Eli March — Chapter 1: The Seam in the Floor

Eli March got home at 6:14 a.m. with a sore back, a day-old donut in his jacket pocket, and the particular kind of tired that comes from stacking cat food for eight hours under lights that never stop humming.

His mom was already in the kitchen, keys in one hand, travel mug in the other. She looked at him the way she always did after a night shift, like she was checking him for damage.

"There's coffee," she said. "Drink it before you sleep, not after. You get weird when you sleep on an empty stomach."

"I don't get weird."

"You talked to the ceiling fan last week. You called it Kevin." She poured a second mug, set it on the counter in front of him, and kissed the side of his head on her way past. "Water heater's leaking again. I put a towel down. Don't let it flood your room."

The door shut. Her car coughed twice in the driveway and pulled away.

Eli picked up the mug. Steam curled off the top, and he carried it down the basement stairs.

The basement was his whole life, more or less. He had a mattress on a pallet frame, a desk made from an old door, and a TV he'd rescued from a curb. The water heater stood in a closet at the far end behind a folding door that had never folded right. Mom's towel was soaked through, and water was spreading across the linoleum in a thin, shining sheet.

He set the coffee on the dryer, swore at the water heater, and went for the mop.

It took him a full minute to notice that the water wasn't pooling. It was moving. It slid in a narrow line toward the back corner of the closet, where the linoleum met the wall, and it disappeared.

Eli crouched. There was a seam there, perfectly straight and hair-thin, running under the edge of the flooring. The water ran into it and never came back out.

"Okay," he said to nobody. "That's not normal."

The linoleum was old and brittle. It came up in one curling sheet when he pulled, and underneath it the concrete wasn't concrete. It was a stell plate about three feet across, set flush with the floor and dull gray. A ring of small raised marks ran around its edge. They weren't numbers or letters exactly. They were closer to tally marks, grouped in fives.

He pressed his palm flat against the metal. It was warm, the way a laptop is warm.

Something underneath went click.

The plate sank half an inch and slid sideways into the wall with a sound like a long exhale. Cold air rolled up out of the dark, smelling of dust, oil, and something sharp he couldn't name, like the air right before a storm. A ladder of iron rungs was set into the side of a shaft that went down much farther than any basement should.

Eli sat back on his heels and looked at it for a long time.

The smart move was obvious. He would put the linoleum back, tell Mom the water heater needed replacing, and never mention this to anyone.

He went and got his phone, turned on the flashlight, and climbed down.

He counted forty-one rungs. At the bottom was a room.

It was long and low, and it had been carved out of the rock under the house. It was clearly older than the house, and maybe older than the street. Pipes ran along the ceiling in bundles, some copper and some a greenish metal he didn't recognize. Along the left wall stood a row of cabinets with glass fronts. Behind the glass sat dozens of cylinders the size of soda cans, each resting in its own socket. Almost all of them were dark. Three glowed faintly, one amber, one blue, and one a deep, bruised red.

The far end of the room was the machine.

Eli didn't have a better word for it. It filled the wall from floor to ceiling in layers of brass rings, glass tubes, dials with needles that trembled even though nothing was running, and cables as thick as his arm that ran into the rock. In the middle, facing outward, was a chair. It was bolted to the floor and padded in cracked leather, and its armrests ended in two metal plates shaped to fit a pair of hands.

Five round lamps hung in a row above the chair. All of them were dark.

A chalkboard leaned against the wall beside it, covered in tally marks. There were hundreds of them, grouped in fives, rows and rows until they ran off the bottom edge. Across the top, someone had written in hard, slanted capitals:

FIVE DAYS. NOT FOUR. NOT SIX. DON'T FIGHT IT.

Eli read it three times.

He should have gone back up. He knew that later, and honestly he knew it right then too. But he'd spent two years stocking shelves and sleeping through daylight, and every single day had felt exactly like the one before it. Standing in that room, he felt awake for the first time since high school.

He walked to the chair. He didn't sit, not at first. He only rested his hand on the armrest, just above the metal plate.

The needles on every dial swung hard to the right.

All five lamps above the chair lit at once, white and steady. A deep hum came up through the floor and into his teeth. The brass rings began to turn, slowly at first and then faster, each ring spinning against the one beside it.

"No, no, no. I didn't touch it. I didn't—"

His hand was on the plate. He didn't remember putting it there. He tried to pull it away, and it wouldn't come. It wasn't stuck exactly. It felt like the machine had asked a question and his hand had already answered.

The room tilted. The chalkboard, the cabinets, and the three glowing cylinders all stretched away from him like reflections in a spoon. His phone slipped out of his other hand. He never heard it land.

The last thing he saw in the basement was the chalkboard, and one fresh tally mark scratching itself into the slate, all on its own.

Then came cold water.

It hit him at the knees, and he staggered forward with his arms out and his sneakers skidding on smooth stone. He was standing on a staircase in the middle of an enormous hall, far bigger than any church he had ever seen. Its columns rose into shadow, and its high windows were made of colored glass that threw shaking blue and gold light across the flooded floor below. Everything below the fifth step was underwater. The water was dark and completely still, and he could see the tops of doorways beneath the surface, and the heads of stone statues gazing up at him from the deep.

Somewhere far above, a bell rang once.

The water climbed a step.

Eli looked down at his hand, the one that had been on the machine. Five small marks sat on the back of it in a neat row, like tiny burns.

One of them was glowing.