Posted on February 6, 2008

The Hole: Part 58

For the next fifteen hours they drove, stopping only to eat, relieve themselves, and fill the truck’s tank with gas from the metal drums foraged in Nahom. The conversation about what was going on continued, but in the absence of a mundane explanation, it quickly became futile. Any supernatural answer might work, after all, since all were unbound by a necessary congruence to known facts. This didn’t stop them from tossing ideas back and forth, but the result was only more confusion.

I-64 turned into I-70, but the roads remained empty. For the whole of those fifteen hours, they didn’t see another car or any of the crazies. As the excitement of the brush with the creatures faded, the drive took on a pleasant atmosphere: the scenery was beautiful and lack of anything to run into gave Elliot the opportunity to look out and enjoy it.

Eventually they’d agreed to hold off on any further speculation until they reached Colorado. If they found the Hole there, then maybe all their questions would be answered—a prediction Evajean insisted on maintaining. And, as had originally been the plan, if Colorado was a bust, they’d head north into Montana and check out the story of the truck driver in the bar.

Several hours after it got dark, Elliot pulled off the road, gathered the guns from the back of the truck. When these were placed within easy reach, the two of them tilted back their seats and went to sleep. As before, motels were available off several exits, but the idea of being caught again by the crazies made taking advantage of them seem foolish.

Evajean fell asleep almost immediately, Hope curled in her lap, but Elliot had a more difficult time. The seat only went slightly further back than in airline coach, and the padding inside had hardened with age. He twisted, trying to find a comfortable position, but none worked, either giving his head nothing to lean on or else forcing his spine to an awkward angle. After perhaps an hour of this he gave up and got out of the truck.

The night air had shed much of its heat and he was again reminded that this was the end of September and he and Evajean had only the engine of an old truck to keep them warm. Even the hotels would be unheated.

He dug around in the back of the truck until he found an apple. Taking a bit, he returned to the front and sat down on the hood.

The sky was clear and the moon just a pencil line arc overhead. Elliot leaned back on the windshield and pulled his jacked tight. He finished his apple while looking up at the stars and tried to force himself not to return to the problem of unanswered questions.

When he was done and too cold to stay outside, he got back into the truck and turned it on. Evajean woke up only briefly, turning and giving him a questioning look, then fell asleep again. After a few minutes, once the cab was at a comfortable temperature, he killed the engine and resumed his efforts to get some rest.

By morning, the sky had cleared entirely. Low, flat clouds cut the sun, but it was still warm enough that they were able to drive with the windows down. Hope pushed his head out and, while Evajean held him tight, panted into the wind.

Elliot drove with a shot gun jammed in next to his seat, ready this time for any new creatures that might charge the truck. He wasn’t concerned with the crazies anymore, at least not in the sense of fear for his life, but the coincidence of those two creatures being right by where he and Evajean stopped was too great—he was sure there would be a lot more out there.

“We should be there tomorrow morning,” he said and Evajean looked at him, nodding.

“Just one more night. We can do that.” She shrugged. “And if there are people there, maybe we can even sleep in real beds. I feel exhausted all the time now.”

“It’s stress.”

“That, yeah,” she said, “but I bet it’s also from sleeping in a truck.”

That afternoon, after they’d stopped to eat a small meal, and with no further sign of strange beasts, Elliot tried bringing up Nahom again, but the response was the same. She didn’t remember anything and didn’t want to talk about it.

“I really don’t know what you want me to tell you,” she said after he’d pressed her to think back, to try to remember anything of what had happened.

Elliot sighed. “I don’t know either,” he said. “Do you have the box? Can you take it out for a second?”

Evajean reached around behind her seat and pulled out the small, golden cube. It was about the size of a rubik’s cube and perfectly smooth on all sides, the edges and points crisp but not too sharp to hold.

“Can you look at it for me?” Elliot said. He didn’t want to stop driving just to inspect the cube.

“There’s nothing on it.”

“No seams? Anything like that?”

Evajean turned the box around in her hands, holding it up in front of her face. “No,” she said.

“Even at—”

“Wait!” She pulled the box very close until it almost touched her nose.

“What is it?”

“Stop,” Evajean said and waved her hand at him. “Just let me look.”

She twisted the box, around and around, scanning her eyes along each of its twelve edges. “There’s something…” she said and pushed her fingernail against the metal.

Elliot heard a click and Evajean jumped back in her seat, dropping the cube onto the floor at her feet. She bent down and picked it up. “Look,” she said.

Elliot did. Then he put his foot on the break, slowed the truck and pulled off onto the shoulder. He killed the ignition and leaned over to look at the box.

Evajean had opened a seam along one of its edges. The metal was pulled wider at the center than the corners, like a small change purse. Evajean held the opening up to her eye but then dropped it down and shook her head. “I can’t see anything,” she said.

“Can you open it more?”

She pushed her finger inside. Elliot had a momentary vision of the think snapping shut, a hungry little mouth, but then Evajean looked at him and grinned. “I think I just need to…” she said and pulled the box open the rest of the way.

There was no sound as hidden seams along the top and bottom fell open. The two halves folded back on each other. The inside was filled with sheets of paper, aged and yellow, but not crumbling. Each was filled with tiny lettering in close rows. It was a book.

“What does it say?” Elliot asked.

Evajean flipped the pages. “I can’t read it. The letters aren’t english ones.” She turned a few more of the small sheets. “Some look like math symbols. Did you take calculus?”

Elliot nodded.

“They look like those.”

“Is it math?”

“I don’t think so. There aren’t any numbers. It just looks like math in some spots.” She leaned back, setting the open cub in her lap. “None of this is going to be easy, is it?” she said.

“What isn’t?”

“But I guess this could just be some sort of old book, you know? Or a child’s toy. Why does it have to be important?”

“It was glowing,” Elliot said. “And you held it over your head and used it to kill all the crazies. I think there has to be something to it.”

“Then you see if you can figure it out,” Evajean said, handing him the book.

Elliot took it. The cube was light, maybe only a quarter of a pound, and the side felt slick, almost oily. The pages inside were thick like good quality stationary and, up close, he could see that what he’d thought was the yellowing of age was really just the paper’s naturally dark cream color. Evajean was right about the look of the symbols. Squiggles and mathematics like characters and things that looked like the designs on a piece of sheet music filled each page top to bottom, margin to margin. Each letter—if they were letters—was tiny, only an eighth of an inch tall, and they were packed together without spaces. Elliot didn’t recognize any of it.

“I have no idea what this says,” he told Evajean. “This could be what the crazies speak.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said. “I guess it could.”

“They speak their own language, you know? You can tell listening to them. Of course this might be something else entirely, but the crazies were talking to us—talking to me—and we found this book in the same place they were. If I had to bet, I’d bet they’re the same thing.”

Evajean took the book back from him. “How are we going to translate it?”

“I don’t know. If there was a university still running, we could find a professor, someone who can read ancient languages, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Evajean laughed. “If there’s a whole university still running,” she said, “we can give up on the Hole entirely and settle down in that college town. Maybe eat Ramen.”

Elliot laughed with her but he knew translating this book was critical. They’d found it for a reason and it had been what drove the crazies away in Nahom, what killed them in such spectacular fashion. The book had power and it was the same kind of power, he was sure, that made the crazies crazy and the people of Nahom have their shadow spirits.