Pickett’s home is deeply stale, his windows painted shut and taped up with plastic. Something moves between the floodlights outside: one of the dogs made indistinct by the cloudy film. The second follows the first- they are nervous and pacing. They realize they have been duped. One growls and the growl builds into a half-hearted bark. The other turns and they are quiet again. How would they describe this dilemma to their master? Better to let the evening’s events unfold as they will. Better to let the master sleep, to gamble on catching the intruder upon his retreat.
One dog stoops to smell the ass of the other.
I revise my narrative: the dogs are idiots. My getting across the yard seemed a lot like luck, and I’m not lucky. This makes more sense. The dogs are just bad at what they do.
A profound feeling of relief comes over me, the same dirty relief we’re taught to resist as a child. This is the relief in seeing that we are better than a situation, not because we’ve risen above it, but because the depths of the world are infinitely low and the odds will statistically fall in our favor some of the time. I do not become a better person for fooling the dogs, but I feel like one.
Pickett snores, which is wonderful for me. It provides a baseline for the success of this intrusion. I listen for Alice’s rattling in its lulls and pull a stretch of carpet from the living room floor, distracted by my reflection in the black glass of an old television. Beneath the carpet, a trapdoor, and beneath the door, a stairway that takes me deep into the earth. I emerge into a place (too big to be a room) that is occupied by statues as far as my feeble light will reveal. Pickett has taken the pieces in a semi-circle from the stairs, inadvertently recreating a theatre in the round. One stands out from the rest, centered as I am on this dark stage.
A statue of Pickett himself.
The statue of Pickett is strange- the form is undoubtedly his, but its details blur and self-censor under the cone of my flashlight. Nearer, I see the details are absent entirely, that they have been eroded. The stone is smooth where I touch it: along the face, over the brow, across the fingers. These places are smooth for having been touched many times before.
Alice’s missing pick peers out from a pile of dust several yards away. From it, I find an entrance to ‘The Maze of Secret Rooms,’ an unsuspecting fissure in the stone that gives way to cramped mildew and creaking wood. I slip into the stone like the Stranger once did in a cave very much like this one.
Thinking of him gives me no relief.
I leave my own statue in Pickett’s yard. I have shrugged off stranger things than that. Let him haul it back into the earth where it can be in peace with the others. Let Pickett be with his business- he isn’t the first man to find his fortune under the ground or to be so worn by it.
-traveler
