“Yeah, ‘The dead reign there alone,’” I said.

“What was that?” Heather asked.

“From ‘Thanatopsis’,” I said. “A poem by William Cullen Bryant. ‘Thanatopsis’…a way of seeing the dead.”

“You’re a morbid fucker,” Travis said. “Too many scary stories for you.”

Jerry paced to the other side of the room, pulling his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. He stopped, and looked at the doorway to Heather’s kitchen. “When I was a kid—”

“Let me guess: you wet the bed?” Travis snickered.

“No. I was just thinking about the crawlspace under the house. Unfinished crawlspace. Like a pit of dirt. My mother always threatened to make us go down there when the tornado sirens went off. She never did, though.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Spiders. Cobwebs. She was scared of them.”

“I’d take a few spiders over a tornado,” Travis said. “Part of living in Kansas, my friends.”

Heather worked Jerry over with her dark brown eyes. “I’ve got a crawlspace under this place. I don’t go down there.”

Travis climbed out of his chair. “What are we waiting for? You up for it Jerry? Mr. Underworld?”

“I don’t go down there.” Heather’s tone dropped into the room like a stone in deep water.

A moment passed, thick and suddenly uncomfortable. We were all tired. I looked at the paintings on the walls of the tiny living room, canvases stretched over twisted, strange frames, organic shapes with large curves, paintings in three dimensions. Bright abstractions covered each canvas. They were Heather’s work she’d done while in school, and I found something feminine in her paintings, plump but shapely, just like her body. Something full of life and thoroughly out of place in any discussion of death. She was young, mid twenties at most, and had lived in the same house in college. She’d taught with us for only three years, and this was her first job. I don’t know why I looked at the paintings. I don’t know why I tried not to think about the basement. The beer swirled my thoughts in a tired jumble and stirred the quiet attraction I felt for her into something a little more sinister until Jerry interrupted.

“Okay. Fine, I’ll check it out.” He rubbed his hands together. “I’ll go,” he said in a clear, bold voice.

“It’s in the back, a little trapdoor just inside the rear entry.”

Travis chuckled. I threw a pillow at him.

We followed Jerry through the kitchen and bathroom and into the alcove inside the back door. Heather’s coats hung from a makeshift rack, and she brushed these aside. A rectangular line broke the hardwood floor, and, at the near end, a slot had been cut through for a handle. The wooden floor creaked throughout the house, uneven and worn in the kitchen and living room. But the area around the door in the floor was in great condition.

“I don’t go down there,” Heather said again.

“Yeah. Yeah, we know.” Travis raised his beer. “Bon voyage, Jerry.”

Jerry knelt, pulled up the door, and averted his face, eyes pinched shut, as he did so. “A little stale down there. How deep? Is there a ladder or stairs?”

Heather handed him a flashlight. “A few stairs. It can’t be deep, but I’ve never gone down.”

Travis stifled a laugh.

“Of course.” Jerry nodded. He took the light, clicked the switch, and frowned. A few good slaps with the palm of his hand, and the bulb flickered to life. He pointed the yellow beam downward. “Here goes nothing.”

I’d begun to sober and felt a nagging urge to move, to get out of the cramped hallway. Restless. Uneasy. I was tired, too. I looked at Heather, lost for a minute imagining the line of her neck as it traced toward her chest and her round breasts. These weren’t thoughts I wanted to have about a colleague, but as we stood close in the darkness waiting for Jerry’s little expedition—his ridiculous, childish trip into the dark—these were the thoughts which circled my brain. The whole event seemed suddenly so silly. So juvenile.

The flashlight winked out just then, and Jerry cried out.

“What is it?” I leaned over, squinting into the opening.

“Nothing. Nothing really. Just hit my head.”

A sound of scuffling and patting packed earth came from the crawl space. As I knelt closer to the hole, I noticed how foul the air was, sour and stale and whispering of cobwebs and dirt and mold. I had the sudden urge to vomit. The yellow light blinked and came back, and I staggered to my feet.

I held out a hand and helped hoist him the last few steps. Jerry’s head was wet with blood when he emerged from the basement. His hands were filthy with dirt, with plenty of dark soil packed under his fingernails. I only noticed because I held his wrist, and once he was on steady ground he pulled away.

“I need to clean this cut,” he said.

“Shit, Jerry. What the hell happened?” Travis asked.

Jerry shook his head. “Dunno. Hit a pipe, I guess. I stood up pretty fast.”

He washed his wound, a tiny scratch of about an inch long, but it bled a good deal as head wounds will. The sight of blood, no matter how innocuous, killed the mood, and saying our goodbyes to Heather, I helped Jerry to my car and drove him home. Travis stumbled to his own car, humming the school fight song in a drunken warble. When I pulled in front of Jerry’s place, a wood frame house with limestone foundation like many other older houses in Lawrence, he looked at me, and I suppose I should have seen something in his eyes. It’s no use blaming myself, I suppose, but now, knowing what happened, I feel uneasy about it. Like I should have known. Like I should have asked him to stay with me that night.

“There was a mound down there…like something’s buried,” he said.

“Down there? Heather’s basement?”

“Yes. Buried,” he said.

I glanced at his hands. A little dirt clung under his fingernails even though he washed them while tending his head wound. “Buried?”

“I dunno. I think—I think Heather’s place survived the raid. Quantrill’s raid during the Civil War.” His shoulders rose and fell. A sigh slipped out of his mouth and he nodded, waving a hand toward his house. “Kind of like this old relic I rent. My penchant for history runs deep.” He pulled at his lip for a moment. “Look…I have something I want you to have. Wait here.”

“Sure.” I drummed my thumbs against the steering wheel as he vanished into his house. The purr of the car’s engine nearly lulled me to sleep, and he had to tap the window to get my attention.

“Here,” he said, holding out a black folder, a faux leather portfolio. “It’s some stuff I want to keep safe.”

I took the folder.

“Have a good night, all right? Thanks for the ride and everything.”

“Call me tomorrow,” I said.

He waved and slammed the door.

I woke around three that night. Cotton filled my mouth, at the awful, dehydrated feeling I’d never gotten used to after a night of drinking. I shuffled through the apartment, poured a glass from the kitchen tap, and drank a full twelve ounces. Then I looked at my fingernails. An image of Jerry’s dirty hands flitted through my brain, enough to cause a chill and keep me up surfing late night television for another thirty minutes. I settled on a segment of The Longest Day, the bit where French resistance fighters take on the Germans from a bombed-out nunnery. It’s funny to recall the details, to go through the paces in my memory. I imagined Jerry’s death happened somewhere right around three, when I woke. The coroner couldn’t pinpoint as much, of course, but placed Jerry’s final breath in the vague, no-man’s land after one and before dawn. Jerry had left one cryptic text shortly after I dropped him off.

they want to be whole

Nothing more.

But I didn’t find out until Monday. None of us did. Jerry didn’t show for school. The secretary called. The principal called. No answer from anyone. He hadn’t phoned on Saturday, the day after our drinking binge at Heather’s, but we were adults. The police had to force his door because his landlord was on vacation.