Even when I was young, it was a rare day where I didn’t spend at least a few hours out in the woods, venturing farther from home each time (much to the chagrin of my parents), preferring to camp under the stars and to drink teeth-rattlingly cold snowpack runoff rather than play baseball with the neighborhood kids. At seventeen I left school entirely and began working for the forest service, volunteering at first and then earning a stipend for wandering the wilderness for research and survey, a fortuitous occupation with a permanent wanderlust. Over the two decades since, I’ve seen incredible things…unexplained behaviors of wildlife, weather, and landscape combining into sights few can claim to have witnessed. Avalanches sending huge boulders rumbling down a hill smashing through old-growth trees like spiderwebs, waterspouts appearing out of blue skies above crystal clear lakes, the deep throaty groans of bears investigating my tent and snuffling mere inches from my head; each trip held new visions and new experiences.
It was in early November that I started out on another journey into the trees, hiking into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness area in Idaho to monitor forest health and look for latent wildfire flashpoints, although at this point in the year it was unlikely I would find anything still smoldering…I was prepared to forage for food if necessary but carried sufficient supplies for an easy week, or two hard ones. I trekked into the wilderness for several days, and had seen nothing more unusual than a skittish deer with one crooked ear. When at all possible I venture into those lands where not even evidence of humanity can be seen; if a road crosses my path I go still deeper into the forest, if I run across the bones of a campsite or a pile of litter I feel surrounded by people, by their noise and their clutter. There are still areas of wild in this world and that is where I feel most at home, and most content.
After four days of backcountry hiking I finally felt I had truly left civilization behind…the sounds of the wind through the scrub pines answered my songs and jokes (to avoid startling any creatures in my path), and the constellations lulled me to sleep at night. I had left behind power lines, roads…not even a path with human footprints disturbed my solitude. And that, more than anything, was probably why I found the thing so disturbing.
Pushing aside a low obstruction of brush the thick undergrowth abruptly gave way to a clearing…a perfectly circular space around thirty paces in diameter, and at its center a dark disk set flush with the ground. The grass within the clearing was a gradation of green, from a healthy fresh hue at the outer perimeter where the bushes began, fading smoothly to a sickly yellow and then finally a pale, almost gray color just around the disk itself. Approaching the thing I felt a foreboding which I could not explain…I had seen many manhole covers in cities of course, but for some reason running across one in the depths of the forest filled me with an unutterable chill…and yet I couldn’t help but draw closer, lowering to my haunches to inspect it.
The disk did indeed look like your standard manhole cover, replete with holes for some sort of implement to hook within and remove the thing…but rather than any city name or ‘public works’ insignia, the only decoration was a deeply embossed word stamped across top and bottom so regardless of one’s position it would be readable…ACCESS.
The day was a cool one and stretching out my hand to rest upon the metal I had anticipated a cold smooth surface…however, the cover was almost uncomfortably warm on my hands, and the surface was more of a pitted raw iron feel than a smooth steel. Kneeling beside the thing, I noticed an odd sound…or, rather, an odd lack of it. The sound of wind through the nearby trees was still clear, hissing its ebb and flow, but the previously pervasive tittering of birds and chirping chorus of insects had vanished. A lassitude came over me as I knelt and closing my eyes for just a moment I was surprised to feel a warm solidity against my cheek…opening my eyes I discovered I had somehow taken off my pack and laid down, my face pressed against the very edge of the metal circle, arms outstretched and wrapping around the perimeter of it. Looking around there were no roads, no paths, no signs of any kind that any work had ever been done here…why on this Earth would there possibly be a sewer entrance here, here where none lived to maintain, where no utility pipelines travelled?
It’s not commonly spoken of outside the trade but there are stories passed among those of us in the forest service, particularly those muddy boots who had spent extended periods of time in isolation…much like aged fishermen returning to port with more stories than fish, the walkers of the woods who man a firewatch tower alone for weeks, blaze new trails and so on, return to civilization with tales of grave dangers, giant beasts and lights in the sky, told in seriousness but later laughed about with a glance over the shoulder as they’re transferred from second- to third- to fourth-hand accounts. I was warned before my first extended walkabout of ghouls and grues, of deepwood spirits, of staircases deep in the forest which are on no account to be ascended. It was of this last legend that I thought of now, staring at this manhole cover, but my fingers moved towards the lid almost of their own accord. Scrabbling into the soil at the edges of the thing, nudging deeper until curling around the bottom edge, and then I was hoisting…lifting the lid, which I would have thought heavier than I could manage to move unaided, until it tumbled aside. Peering over the edge, I spied a ladder spidering down into the darkness, a ladder pocked and reddened with age and, I assumed, with damp although it seemed quite dry. I couldn’t make out the bottom of the shaft, but dropping a small stone over the edge (for who, given a dark pit, could resist the temptation to do that?) I heard not the clattering of stone against stone or even a muted thud as of it falling onto bare earth, but a ringing report of metal. The sound came from some distance below but not so far as to seem unreachable.
I had made the decision to leave, to turn my back on this abyss, when I felt my feet against the rungs of the ladder…and down I climbed. It was not to avoid people that I ventured into the woods, it was not a misanthropic desire for solitude, it was a need to see…an absolute drive to explore the deep corners of this world and I realized as I went down the ladder that this was just another wilderness, a new trail to follow. My feet slipped now and again on the rungs of iron as I descended, past where the light from the sun reached and down into inky darkness. With muttered complaints the rungs bore my weight, though the shaking of the metal beneath my hands told me the ladder was working itself out of the concrete walls…as sight became useless I began to pay more attention to touch and to sound, and the metal railings vibrated against my palms like the heartbeat of a bird as I descended. I had no idea what I would do once I reached the bottom besides climb right back out again, but soon I was faced with a decision as my feet found no further purchase…looking up, the bright circle of sunlight beckoned, yet having climbed down so far it seemed foolish to reverse my course prematurely. Exploring with my fingers I could only feel the walls, and dangling my legs to probe with my feet revealed only empty air. Slipping a flashlight out of my jacket pocket I managed to click the soft rubber button on the endcap, and the swath of light showed a blank wall of gray before me, the wall of the shaft like an old fashioned TV tuned between channels. Craning over to aim the light down I saw only about eight or nine feet of space before the bottom of the shaft was revealed below, some pieces of broken ladder strewn around a circular area with another dark disk in the center of the floor. Holding the flashlight between my teeth like a glowing cigar, I grasped the bottom rung and lowered myself, hanging there in the void and then letting go…dropping down the few feet to the concrete perimeter below, a foot or so away from the disk.
It was as I had seen from above; apart from the disk, a few chunks of ladder lay scattered where they had fallen onto the otherwise featureless concrete, and little else. I bent down to the metal manhole cover in the center of the floor, probing with my fingers but unlike the entrance above, it was set a couple of inches into the concrete, and I was unable to fit even a fingernail between the cover and the cavity it sat within, as if the edges of the cover extended underneath the concrete rather than being placed on top of it. Similar to the entrance, however, I noted the warmth of the iron surface, despite it sitting down there in the darkness for who knows how long.
Moving around at the bottom of that pit felt like having been buried alive; clicking off my flashlight and standing on top of the cover in the very center of the shaft, staring up at the bright entrance above, it was easy to understand what it would be like, to be lowered down into an open grave, seeing the dirt cascading onto my face. I could see the silhouette of the ladder a few feet up, and needing both hands free I slipped the flashlight in my pocket and jumped, stretching out as far above as I could reach. I felt my hands against the cool metal of the ladder, holding for a moment and then slipping down as my grip failed…and as my feet fell heavily upon the manhole cover with a metallic clunk there was a blinding flash of light around me, seeming to originate from below! Looking around at my feet all was darkness again, but jumping again I saw a crescent of golden light from beneath when I landed. It was as if the cover was on a spring, sinking into a brightly lit room and then bouncing back upwards against the unyielding concrete rim with a clang, sealing shut. Bracing myself against the wall with a chunk of ladder I shoved hard with a foot down and sideways, and succeeded in pushing the lid off of whatever was pressing it back upwards. The light spilled into the shaft and I had to shield my eyes, and looking down at the thumbnail of light I couldn’t make out any details of a room. I slid the manhole cover aside with a grind against the concrete, and stared down.
It was like looking at a reflection of trees in a placid lake. I was looking down into an open area and could see the tops of buildings from my vantage point, only….reversed, upside-down. As I knelt, gripping the rim of the opening and ducking my head through the hole to get a better look around I couldn’t help but hold my breath as though I were plunging into water…I felt no cold rush of liquid into my nose as I bent through, no pressure against my ears, but I felt my stabilizing grip on the lip become a firm grasp as my legs raised, or rather fell; as my perspective shifted, and soon I was dangling from the lip of the hole, a smooth dark shaft below me with a circle of sunlight far below, and I heard the pieces of ladder from the floor clattering against the walls of concrete as they too tumbled down, disappearing through the sunny opening I had entered through. Slowly I pulled myself up, hoisting a knee over the edge of the hole and climbing through into the open air.
I lay on a patch of yellowish grass, close to a cluster of wooden buildings…I couldn’t see any signs above doorways on what looked like shops; drawing close, the doors I tried were all locked fast. Glancing through the windows revealed…nothing. No goods, no registers, not even any empty shelves or display cabinets were in sight, the buildings merely empty wooden shells. I wandered the streets of the town until sunset, and ended up breaking a ground-level window on a building to climb through and have shelter for the night, although there was no sign of rain. In fact, as I lay in the dark on the floor wrapping my arms around myself for warmth inside my coat, I realized what was missing; there were no natural sounds whatsoever; no clouds scudded across the starless sky, no winds blew through the trees, no birds or squirrels or rats roamed the dirt streets of this small strange town, if indeed it were a town. It seemed more like a movie set than anything, a simulacrum of flimsy materials never intended for actual habitation.
It was the following morning when I saw the people.
There were two of them on the block when I climbed out through my window, about 8 am by my watch. A man and a woman, perhaps twenty yards apart and walking in opposite directions, dressed in businesslike attire…they would have fit in on any street in downtown New York, except they were entirely motionless, both with heads turned towards where I emerged. They did not blink or greet me, but stared in silence, seemingly frozen in mid-stride, ignoring my greetings…I didn’t approach, but headed the other way around a corner, and over the next few hours I saw perhaps five or six more people, all equally nonverbal and without motion, all staring fixedly and unblinkingly at me. They appeared like mannequins, but I watched as their heads moved to follow my progress as I walked past them. When I returned to the street I’d been on earlier, I realized they were not actually stationary, either; I verified where I had been by the broken window on the building where I had slept, but there was no sign of the two people I had seen that morning.
It was yesterday, two days after climbing down the ladder, when I approached one of the inhabitants, determined to find out where I was or at the very least to have a little company…as usual I was ignored by the person I hailed, even as I approached, speaking directly to his face. He was a stocky, florid-faced man of perhaps fifty with short cropped gray hair and he stared right back at me, looking attentive and in all respects normal, but without an iota of change to his expression as I questioned him, introduced myself, shouted, swore. My final resort was to reach out and grasp his shoulders, ready to shake some damn sense into him…but at my touch the man…collapsed, like a coat with its hanger removed. At my feet and draped across my hands lay a heap of clothing and a pelt of warm, rubbery, flabby skin…this was the same for the other three people I encountered, each staring fixedly into my eyes and each collapsing at my merest touch. This is not the world I know, these are not my kind, and besides which I have run out of food and from all I have seen there is no nourishment of any kind to be found in this hell. I am writing this to carry with me…at this moment my legs dangle over the edge of the open access panel, the shaft which connects this world to my own, so tantalizingly close. I am not sure if I can grab onto the ladder eight or nine feet down or whether perspective will flip again, or if I will simply hurtle through the opening I see at the end of the shaft but at least, at the very least, should I die it will not be here, it will not be in this empty world.
As I look around me I see no less than eight of these beings, holding their silent vigils…when I began writing this, there were no more than two. They seem to be growing bolder.I only ask that if I do not survive and yet these words are somehow discovered, that the access panel I describe be sealed. I cannot bear the thought of those soulless monstrosities ever creeping through, entering our world…or perhaps they have done so all along.
The preceding was contained in a sheaf of papers on the body of a deceased forest service worker, whose corpse was spotted by hikers in a tall pine tree on an early Spring camping trip. The man’s body had been nearly skeletonized from several months of exposure, tangled in branches approximately thirty feet off the ground, bearing the hallmarks of a fall from a considerable height; this was further substantiated by broken foliage above where the body had come to rest. Cause of death has been officially attributed to a skydiving incident, although no parachute was discovered on or near the body.