Synopsis/Details
On the fourth day of summer vacation, five fourteen-year-olds are killing an afternoon in TOM ALDER's backyard when BETH notices something the others have walked past all day: a mound of dirt sitting in the middle of Tom's mother's vegetable garden, the size of an upturned kitchen table, that was not there on Tuesday. The dirt is the wrong color. It is subsoil, PETER explains — the dirt that lives under the dirt — which means it came up rather than down. It is also warm. JOAN, Tom's mother, comes out with lemonade, looks at the ruin of her tomato row for a beat longer than the children expect, and tells them to dig it out and flatten it back down. They dig for forty minutes. Two and a half feet down, KARA's spade strikes something that answers like a suitcase instead of a rock, and under the loose soil they uncover a curved grey shell as wide as a manhole cover. It is warm too. And as the five of them crowd around it, it swells, settles, and swells again. It is breathing. The mound comes apart and nine feet of grey, eyeless, slab-limbed creature stands up out of row seven. It does not roar and it does not charge — it walks, and that is worse. The children scatter. Beth runs the wrong way and is cornered against the shed wall; GREG throws a shovel to pull the thing off her; TOM makes the back steps screaming for his parents, who assume it is a game right up to the moment they look out the kitchen window. PAUL comes off the steps three at a time and puts himself between the creature and Greg. Joan stops at the bottom of the stairs and lifts her phone. The shutter sounds very small in the enormous quiet of the yard. The creature turns its head toward her — and is gone. Not sinking, not fleeing. Gone, between one frame and the next, the air folding shut where it stood. At dusk, Paul walks a flashlight through the excavation. There’s no tunnel and no burrow. The floor of the hole is undisturbed hardpan and has been for a hundred years. The only evidence in the world that the afternoon happened at all is a set of four-inch prints marching across the lawn, and a dusk-lit, motion-blurred photograph on Joan’s phone that anyone who was not there will call a fake. That night Tom dreams of a garden with no fence at the end of it, rows running out into the dark, dozens of mounds all breathing in unison. In the morning the other four turn up on their bikes and, one by one, describe the same dream. Greg tells them all to stop, because he does not want to know that. Beth says quietly that she does not think the creature was ever chasing them — it was going where it was going, and they happened to be standing on it. Paul comes out with a rake and asks the five of them to help him fill in the hole. They do. By noon the garden looks ordinary again — and at the very back of it, in row twelve, where nobody has been standing all morning, there is a fresh mound of dark subsoil the size of a dinner plate, steaming faintly in the cool air.
