Down

The missing house was isolated at the end of one of Haven's long, lonely roads stretching out towards the edge of town. Nathan tapped the photograph they had courtesy of a neighbour. "Yesterday..." He raised his eyes from the picture and scowled across the empty plot. Audrey was inclined to agree with him: in most towns, houses did not go missing overnight.

As much to lift his mood with the gentle teasing as for any response to a whole house going missing, she said, "It's cute. Folksy." At his economical silence, she gave up on the project totally. "So what's the theory? Freak weather, again? Random fluctuations in the time-space continuum caused it to never be built?"

"Well, there was definitely something here." He gestured for her to follow him as he stalked out across the grassy ground. From his more elevated perspective, he'd been able to see that further up the gentle slope grass and a truncated path met bare, scarred earth. They trod across it, noting the regular lines and angles where exterior walls had been. "No debris. Unless it blew away to someplace called Oz--"

"--Don't discount that," Audrey cut him off.

He grunted. Forced to brush up fast on her fluency in monosyllable and, well, none-o-syllable since coming to town, she interpreted it easily as grudging acceptance.

The cute, pink-painted house from the picture, with ancient timbers and overhanging gables, was completely gone, foundations and all. Anywhere else, this might count as weird. In Haven, it wasn't even the weirdest thing this week.

"If it was a missing person, the first question we'd ask would be when was it last seen, and by whom."

Nathan indicated the borrowed photo. "Mrs Nemes, last night, around eight o'clock. I almost guarantee you she didn't do it."

"Almost?"

He was silent on that point except for the faintest facial twitch. "Besides, first question isn't how a whole house was whisked away. It's whose house Stokes disappeared into to swill coffee and commandeer breakfast."

"Right." Audrey envied the absent patrolman. It was far too early on a chill morning, and the faint mist of rain in the air had managed to seep right to her skin. She hadn't quite worked her way up to envying Nathan, in his too-light jacket. The new kid Rob Stokes had boyish charms and good looks matched only by his will to get away with damn near anything. "If only he'd use his powers for good--" Her voice faltered as she caught sight of a break in the geometric brown lines of the empty plot.

"What?" Nathan, turning, followed her running steps. She skidded down onto her knees next to the four macabre digits rising pink and forlorn from the earth. She scratched up the dirt with her own fingers. "Sir? Ma'am? Hold on there!" she rattled. Though certainly the unfortunate victim's chances seemed slim... well, she'd seen weirder instances of survival. "We'll get you--"

No. Barely below the surface of the soil, she found truncated ends and a little blood. With a gasp, she fell back. Nathan grabbed her shoulder, preventing her from overbalancing. They stared at the severed fingers in that particular silence, the one that happened when things went from just normally weird to dangerously weird.

Nathan fished in his pocket and bent to lift one finger, using the plastic of an evidence bag to cover his hand. He held it to the light. The cuts were angled, distorted and drawn out as though the flesh had been dragged before it was severed. "Thin hands. Young skin. Bitten nail, right index. Stokes."

"How would you know that?"

Crazy, but then again, was it wholly unreasonable for a man who had no feeling nerve receptors to distract him from such a stupidly microscopic detail? "All right..." But now Audrey was paying attention to some details herself; like the strange drag of those cuts, like the way the fingers had been reaching outwards at the boundary between bare earth and grass. Away from the site of the missing house. House, disappeared; Stokes, disappeared. Except the bit of him that had been almost elsewhere. A faint rumble seemed to tug at the ground beneath her feet. She turned and grabbed Nathan, unintentionally causing him to fumble and have to clutch at the severed finger. Oops. "We need to be not here, right now."

They lunged over the linear division and kept going several steps further before pausing nervously to look back. Everything looked just the same as it had, innocuous despite their panic. "So. Underground," Nathan said, swallowing. "Sinkhole? Gravity beam?"

"Mole people?" All right, she probably deserved that look. "Okay, gravity warp. Maybe. I will never get over these sorts of conversations on a Monday morning."

Half an hour later, it seemed half the town had turned up with the backup and the geophys expert and the EMTs. Amazing how resistant a crowd could be to warnings of geological instabilities and risk. Vince and Dave Teagues had gotten there ahead of the rest and their bicycle leaned against a tree while they argued over a camera tripod.

Questioning the neighbours, few and far between though they were, had expanded on the brevity of the first report, determining that the vanished home's owner, Callum Meary, had a wife and daughter. There was unfortunately no reason present to believe they hadn't been home last night when the place disappeared, got sucked into the ground, or whatever had happened to it.

"No, it makes no sense at all!" the geophys guy was up to half-shouting, now. "That whole theory is ridiculous! The underlying geology doesn't support it!" Nathan grimaced, because he knew that whether it was supported or not, 'sinkhole' was likely to be the theory that went down in the report. Guy must be pretty new to town. "Sinkhole? There is no hole!"

"What is the underlying geology?" Parker asked. "Haven's sandstone is infamous, I'm told. Likes to shift, right?" She swapped a glance with Nathan.

"This bluff is on solid granite! Shallow glacial deposits and topsoil, then solid rock!" He reluctantly grumbled, "I can tell you more when I've my equipment set up."

Parker left him to do that, falling back in at Nathan's side. "So we've got maybe four people missing," he said, studying the ground contemplatively. "If this hits granite, the house can't be too far down." If they're still alive, at least hung silent.

"What are the chances they're alive?" she picked up, her brow scrunching cutely. "I wouldn't want to rule it out. Especially the people who were inside the house. It's a Haven thing, who knows what rules apply?" But that made both of them more hesitant about the evidence of Stokes' fate. If the house had been pulled down around them, the family might at least have air cavities and space. It seemed more likely that Officer Stokes had met his end buried alive, smothered in the dark, dense mud.

Nathan suppressed a shudder. "Haven PD's getting less and less new recruits these days."

She gingerly plucked the evidence bag containing Stokes' warily-retrieved fingers from Nathan's grasp and gifted him a tight smile. "I should get this to the medics to put on ice. Who knows, if we find the rest of him, there might still be chance of reattaching them."

He nodded and let her go. Sighed, looked around at the circus, and sighed again. The Chief was out in his fishing boat, which left this his mess by default. "We need to get down there," he told the agitated geologist. "Where should we start digging?"

The guy wasn't happy, but they rounded up a small JCB from Sally Anderson, plus a volunteer work crew led by the lady herself, wearing plaid shirtsleeves in the chill, and started digging down at the edge of the scarred earth. A very firm warning that digging the ground out might cause further disturbance cleared most of the onlookers finally. Nathan cautiously accompanied the geophys expert as they walked the blank ground with the equipment, both sweating despite the reported temperature, and it was a relief when they could beat a hasty retreat back to the side of the ongoing excavation to talk over the results. Parker joined them, handing over a cup of coffee. "Courtesy of Mrs Nemes, who I also almost guarantee didn't do it. Not unless her Trouble somehow involves a lot of cats. Digging cats. It's okay, it's not so hot."

The mass of lines on the geophys results didn't mean much to Nathan, nor Parker, but the expert set aside his aggravation for reluctant fascination. "It's down there... Maybe six, seven feet to the level of the roof."

A cautious check with the digging crew and a study of the missing house's photograph for comparison established they'd hit that depth soon, close to one of the small upper floor windows if they bore left a short distance. They dispensed with the digger and used manual effort to move the hole -- now tunnel -- forward. A few minutes later, they struck a wall, and further digging around located the window.

They broke the glass, but found that calling couldn't raise anyone inside. "Hell," Nathan summed up.

"It's void beyond," Parker said, withdrawing her arm from the broken window and raising it for him to haul her up out of the hole. "They could still be alive and injured. I'm not looking forward to it, but I guess we do have to go in."

He was nodding when she uneasily shifted her gaze back to look him up and down, and correct herself, "Or somebody does. No offence, Nathan, but it's gonna be really dark in there. How good are you in the dark?"

He returned a sigh, closed his eyes and planted his hand blind against the side of the geologist's lime-green truck in demonstration. "I can't feel the truck. I do know I can't push my hand any further. It's fine."

She nodded with a little apologetic smile. "Great. Then I guess we're going down."

It turned out they were the automatic choices to go in more ways than one. The window wasn't big, and she was small and Nathan thin as a string-bean. Even so, it was a tight fit, and they both lost a few patches of skin. The work crew would focus on taking out the window and widening the gap while they were inside. Audrey had her doubts about the venture, no shortage of them, but hoped they'd be in and out too quickly for problems to manifest. Submerged under the earth or not, it was still just a smallish house -- how long could it take to search?

Unfortunately the looked-for simplicity eluded them, as she should have anticipated. The room inside, formerly a child's bedroom, was mixed with sheared-off earth surfaces and disjointed rubble. Whatever had pulled the house into the earth hadn't done so smoothly. The floor angled shallowly, making footing awkward. Belongings and furniture had tipped, strewing the floor. Only half of the bed was visible, its covering blue and white check blanket interrupted by a displaced mud block the size of a car.

"Tell me there's nobody under that," Audrey breathlessly begged Nathan as he edged nearer, shining a flashlight.

He shook his head, expressionless but not that kind of expressionless. "There's no blood spilled in here, Parker. All I can smell is dirt."

"Right. Your nose." She forced a smile. The truth was, she didn't completely buy his protests about his efficacy underground. She might trust Nathan Wuornos absolutely under most circumstances, but the man was notoriously untrustworthy when it came to any sort of looking out for his own health. Still, he had four senses that worked better than hers to make up for the deficit, and the reminder was comforting. That they were not going to immediately find dead children was also comforting, although-- "The house disappeared in the middle of the night. Not that I'm complaining--" she eyed the crushing weight of the mud block "--but you'd think someone would have been sleeping in this bed when whatever happened."

"Only emphasising that we don't know what happened," Nathan said. His fingers hovered momentarily over his gun, but with one hand occupied by a flashlight, they both needed the other free to navigate the treacherous terrain which the displacement of the house had made of a very normal kid's bedroom.

"Mm. We don't even know whose Trouble this is. It could be someone who's down here, but I suppose it doesn't have to be."

"Gives a new slant on putting someone six feet under."

"You two found anything in there?" Anderson shouted from the window behind them. Nathan half-turned to address her, while Audrey kept the flashlight rolling over the walls of the room, studying how the familiar had been warped and twisted. A faint tremor shook the ground, sending the beam dancing as her balance reeled.

"Get back from the window!" Nathan yelled. "Stokes lost fingers because he was caught on the edge. It's happened at least twice. Could happen again."

But the tremor calmed and stopped, leaving a silence that was even more ominous without it.

"There's clearly no-one in this room," Audrey said, hearing in her own voice that the tremors seemed to be catching. "Let's move on."

The doorframe was warped, and a full foot of dense mud was packed between the plasterboard of the wall, plaster and boards deformed and cracked. They had to step over a corresponding void in the floor, depth unknown, their flashlight beams striking downwards into the black and finding nothing. Floorboards creaked and shifted. Afraid they would give way, Audrey grabbed for a bookshelf, which itself moved, dumping its contents on the floor and over her feet. As she reeled, still searching for balance, Nathan grabbed her around the waist. "Easy, Parker." They were on the upper floor landing, and another chasm gaped before them -- the sheer drop of a staircase, turned into a nightmare of broken and jagged edges by the stretch and warp of being forced underground.

"I'm going to get some grapples and rope," Nathan said, leaving her clinging to the wall. Audrey sidled around the edge of the landing and cautiously peered inside the second bedroom at the other side.

"Hello? Mr Meary? Callum?" She dredged up the names of his wife and child. "Amy? Suzannah?" Grimly, she tried, "Officer Stokes! Robert!" There was nobody there, and the state of this room much the same as the last, so... maybe the family really hadn't been there. Or... the whole household had been downstairs, in the middle of the night? Or something else was going on here that she would like even less.

She tried shouting down into the stairwell, where banisters had twisted and snapped like matchsticks. A dicey exercise of hanging over the top step and exploring around with the flashlight showed her a blockage of walls and mud jumbled up together. The downstairs had been mashed even more than the upper floor. If they were down there alive -- chances seemed to be decreasing -- it was certainly possible they hadn't heard her. She tortuously cranked her body back up to call to Nathan.

"Parker."

Not a good moment to startle her with the silent approach. She clutched her chest and had to remind herself that smacking him would do no good. Then again, it couldn't hurt either. He didn't notice, slinging a coil of rope and some clamps onto the landing floor. "What's up? Wait, did you hear that?"

"Hear what? Nathan, we're going to need shovels. Take a look at it down there."

He brusquely held up his palm. "I heard a groan."

She grabbed for his shoulder -- and missed -- as he lunged incautiously into the master bedroom. "I looked in there. Be careful!"

"Someone's here." But standing in the centre of the crazily askew floor, playing both flashlights methodically over the floor and around all four walls, they could see no-one.

Nathan spat onto his shirt sleeve and rubbed it across his nose. "Too much dust. Dirt. On the air." He crossed to the big wardrobe dragging open the doors, but turned back to her, his expression painted with confusion in the flashlight's beam. "Parker, I could swear--"

Painted with confusion, and something else. She reached up and touched his forehead. He flinched from her hand, and she held her fingertips up to show him the red smear.

"Is that mine?"

"No, it's dripping..."

He turned and as one, they angled their flashlights up into the ceiling of the old wardrobe. It was half destroyed, but protruding from splintered breaks amid shattered spars of wood -- one leg from the knee down, and half an arm and shoulder.

"Stokes," Nathan said, presumably recognising a badge or scrap of uniform, because Audrey wouldn't have known. He cast around grimly. "I'm not keen on bringing anyone else inside. We'll have to get him out to the EMTs." A tremor made both flinch. "Sooner the better."

"Give me a boost." With her flashlight between her teeth, she let herself be lifted. His leg and arm might be a mess, but right now at least, Robert Stokes was alive; as she touched his neck to find a pulse, he saved her the effort by groaning and shifting.

"All right, how are we going to do this?" Nathan asked. She craned her neck to look worriedly back at him. Supporting her weight appeared effortless, but she knew that was because he simply couldn't feel any strain... or damage.

Audrey took the flashlight from her teeth and rested it by Stokes' head. It was a big wardrobe. "I'll climb up and ease him down to you. There's room." It wasn't the easiest thing she'd ever done, but they managed between them, Nathan easing the broken body to the floor. The thick oak of the top of the wardrobe was buckled and holed where he had lain. "He landed with hell of a force. Careful with him. He must have broken bones." Nathan's occupation with that task left her contemplating how she was going to descend. With great difficulty, it turned out.

"Easy," Nathan said as the injured man moaned and moved again. A small hesitation before he touched his hand to Stokes' chest, the man without touch understanding the comforting value of it. "We've got you, Rob, and we'll get you out of here. Audrey..."

She scrambled next to him, and using a sheet from the bed as a stretcher and following the instructions of his clenched, wordless jaw, helped support and lift Stokes' weight. Together, they managed to get Stokes across the wreckage of the landing, and through the outer child's bedroom, where outside, crowbars and hammers had widened the space of the window enough to hand through the beefier, younger man with slim margin spare.

Audrey breathed easier when he was passed outside. "Well, Stokes is alive, and that's a bonus we weren't expecting." The ground beneath her feet trembled even as she spoke, and she exchanged an unhappy glance with Nathan.

"This is taking too long," he said, with abrupt decision. "We've got the one person we knew for certain was caught in this. I want to make sure the family are okay, but let's make some credit card and vehicle checks before going further, and at least be sure they haven't skipped town."

"Right." Not to embrace a retreat too whole-heartedly, but Audrey did not like this. "Let's get out of here."

As the ground shook again, Nathan waved the folks on the other side out of the way and started to scramble through the hole, urgently grabbing for her hand to pull her with him.

She felt it on the air; a gathering pressure, a wrongness. She drew in breath, yet seemed to draw in nothing, like the air had been stolen from around her. In abrupt, horrible realisation, she gripped Nathan's hand in both of hers and pulled back. She hadn't any breath to warn him, but heard him choke and he quit fighting her right before her hearing cut out. In absolute silence, they both fell backwards and hit the floor.

A much more real pressure slammed down upon her chest, the light from the gap onto the outside world went out, and all her senses were consumed by the feeling of falling.

Nathan stared into the darkness. He was as sure as he could be that his eyes were open, and he didn't think he'd passed out, although whatever had just happened had, well, felt was the wrong word, for certain, but it had processed very strangely. He tried to pull himself up, reaching around, and was aware of an obstruction that wouldn't let him go further. There had been a wall in that direction, last he'd been able to see it, but he didn't think it had been so close. He could smell blood, but then he was covered in Stokes', after carrying the injured man. He could hear sharp breathing. "Parker?" He tasted dust and dirt particles on the air when he opened his mouth.

"I'm here. Are... are you all right?"

"I don't know." The irony hadn't been intentional. He smiled wryly into the darkness.

"Right. Stupid question."

"I can't find my flashlight," Nathan said. "Do you still have yours?"

"Yes, but--" He heard the sound of plastic being slapped and shaken. "It's dead. Let me look for yours." He heard her scrabbling about and, for one instant, her hand fell on his and lit up the numb darkness with a blaze of sensation. She squeezed his fingers and moved on. A moment later, light returned to the world. A much lesser, thin, wobbly beam of it, but he could see by this one. Audrey Parker smiled shakily at him. She looked all right. Dusty, dishevelled and out of breath. She said, "Let me see you."

He raised his arms in surrender and let her run the flashlight over him, pulling his bloody shirt up to ascertain that it really was just Stokes' blood. "I think we're probably lucky we were already on the floor."

She nodded, easing back. "You're okay, I think."

Nathan predicted his twelfth MRI, all the same, and opted not to mention that he wasn't wholly sure about the stability of his left leg as he cautiously stood up. He wasn't taking his pants off down here, and it could be a pulled muscle for all he knew.

"You should take the flashlight," she said, uneasily handing it across. "You need it more than I do, right?"

For once he didn't bother to argue. He shone the beam where the opening had been, fresh air and sunlight and freedom, and found a barrier of compacted earth. "We're deeper." He took out his cellphone: the small illumination from its screen was a bright idea he hadn't had at the optimum moment for it, but there was no signal either.

"Damn." Parker sounded a bit more amused than the situation warranted. "I wasn't figuring on a journey to the centre of the Earth, or I wouldn't have worn these shoes."

"They'll keep digging. Get to us in a few hours, maybe." No need to panic yet. There'd been hours between this and what happened to Robert Stokes. "Wish I'd brought the radios." Hadn't seemed necessary at the time, and there was no guarantee they'd be working either.

Parker took a deep breath and he figured he knew what was coming. "If we're stuck here anyway, maybe we should check out downstairs. If there is someone else trapped here--" He was already nodding.

They leaned on each other to navigate the floor. Its slant was now much worse. Support beams had snapped and the boards had too much movement for comfort. The gap between the door and landing had stretched by three feet or more, packed with mud and leaving only a slither of an opening, cramped and dark. The ground was forcing the house apart, both trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Nathan picked up the rope and clamps, which they were lucky had caught on a protruding splinter and not disappeared down either of the holes in the floor. Parker stepped over him and continued into the room where they'd found Stokes. "Parker," he protested.

She staggered back with a hefty silver candlestick in each hand. "If we're going down there, we'll probably need something to dig with. These seem to be the best candidate on-hand."

He pulled a face and aimed the flashlight down the stairs. It struck the toothy maw of the former banisters and the harsh intrusions of dirt forced through the walls and thrust up from the holes in the stairs. Going down would be hard work, with no guarantee that they could reach anyone even if rooms were still intact with survivors inside them. "Nothing else to do," he sighed.

"Who wants to be bored? But it's going to suck that we only have one flashlight. Oh, wait." She disappeared into the room again. "This is someone's home, even if it doesn't look much like it anymore. So there must be something here. Power cuts aren't completely unknown in Maine. Give me some light over here." Throwing shadows in the thin beam, she wrenched open the nightstand's drawer and exclaimed in triumph. She returned with another flashlight and a handful of spare batteries. She passed two of those to Nathan, who pocketed them.

"Genius," he agreed.

"Don't forget it." He watched her tie the rope around her waist and after a moment's thought go loop the other end around the oak wardrobe. She frowned. "If someone down there is Troubled, this rescue could be all the more dangerous."

"And if they're not, this could start happening elsewhere in town. Finding out would be a priority."

Parker thrust the candlestick and flashlight through her belt and begun edging backwards down the stairs, putting as much of her weight as possible on the rope rather than the jigsaw of the staircase and trying to keep close in to the wall. Even so, Nathan could see the whole frame of the stairs under strain, slowly threatening to peel back from the wall, sagging dangerously. Great. He weighed a bit more than Parker. He also acknowledged enough about the limitations of his Trouble to know being buried alive wouldn't be fun for him, pain receptors or not.

Parker apparently had the same thought as she hit bottom, the pale circle of her face rising to stare back at him. "Maybe I should see what I can find first. No sense both of us coming down here unless we have to."

"All right, but I hear you in trouble, I'm down there."

Audrey knelt on the dirty floor and scraped at the mud blocking off the base of the stairs with the candlestick. Mysteries were usually better than candy, but she could admit the ones that didn't involve digging with improvised tools in the cold and dark, finding new ways to ruin a perfectly good set of clothes, were much preferred. Under her knees was a mess of coins and pot shards -- a smashed child's piggy-bank from the broken and empty wall shelves overhead. A pink stuffed bunny she'd found now rested safely in a corner out of the way.

At least the candlestick was bulky and its flat base scooped the dirt out with reasonable efficiency. She hacked and dragged, pulling it forward in clumps, and hoped she'd guessed right about the position of a doorway, because if she ran up against a wall after all this, the results weren't going to be pretty in so many ways.

"Sounds like I should come help with the manual labour," Nathan's voice floated down to her.

"No, no," she gulped between hacks at the soil. "This is fun for me."

"I wouldn't want to take away your fun."

"Heh--" With a grunt of effort, she displaced a huge glob of earth and stumbled back, panting, as a portion of the blockage crumbled at her feet. "Yes! Now we're talking."

Nathan was laughing at her. "Parker," he said, far too amused, "enough. I'm coming down."

His first step made the stairs groan and screech. About to voice a concerned warning, something else responded to the penetrating noise and caused her to shush him instead. He paused, balanced mid-step.

A voice. Muffled. Almost inaudible. And on the other side of the earth wall.

She lost several moments silently gaping. Truly, she'd been expecting to find bodies or nothing. But if she wasn't hearing things, then maybe -- just maybe -- nobody had to die today. Maybe nothing was harmed but a piece of real estate, and how many Haven problems ended so well as that? Audrey pressed herself against the wall, trying to listen. The voice had ceased. She hadn't been able to make out the words. She yelled back: "Hello? Hey, in there! Callum Meary! Amy! Are you there? This is the police!"

She heard the reply, just as faint as the first. Probably they couldn't hear what she was saying, either, but they now knew they had company on the other side of the wall. She took a deep, shuddering breath and said to Nathan, whose silence -- and he could do more shades of silence than anyone she'd ever met -- managed to be quizzical, "Yeah, you should come down. I need your ears."

"You heard someone?" He didn't wait for her reply before starting again, rather less cautiously than before.

Audrey tore at the mud with renewed vigour. It gave her something to focus on that wasn't his progress down the Temple of Doom array of traps on the stairs. When she had to stop to rest her arms, she shouted through to the people on the other side, letting them know that she hadn't given up.

Progress got quicker when Nathan joined her, miraculously still in one piece. His ears picked out more detail from the muffled voices than she could. "Two people, a man and a -- a little girl, I think. I can't hear the wife." Through the wall he yelled, "Haven P.D.! Hang in there!" He abandoned the candlestick and his boney hands scrabbled at the wall, wresting it apart with unfeeling flesh. His face was etched in concentration, harder planes than usual caught in the flashlight's beam.

"Hey, calm it down." She caught his nearest hand and pulled it back, grimacing as she apparently startled him. His sleeves were rolled past his elbow and his skin very cold. She put the candlestick -- hers, in fact -- back in his hand, and bent to retrieve the one he'd discarded to replace it. "I know there's a kid in danger, but... tearing your hands up won't help them."

He gave her back a look of betrayed impatience. That look. The one that asked, why all the fuss? She hefted the candlestick and imagined feeling the same way about it and her own hands both -- not a part of her, just more unfeeling tools. Was that what it was like?

The expression on it aside, his face did manage to make her smile. "You know what? We must look like the intrepid superheroes Mud Man and Mud Girl, and if we do meet these rogue mole-people, we are gonna fit right in."

"Comic books? I'd have thought them the last thing you'd need to read around here," he judged. He gouged at the wall again then abruptly held up a hand, staying her.

Even Audrey had heard that. "We're down here, in here! Oh, thank God--" The father, Mr Meary. She could hear his daughter crying. Purposefully, she picked up the toy rabbit she'd found earlier, trying to protect it from her mud-caked hands with her sleeves, doing her best to brush the mud from its fur without adding more. She tucked it under her jacket and nodded to Nathan.

"We're almost through. We'll have you out in no time."

They broke through to find a burly man, as mud-encrusted as both of them, standing with his arms protectively around an eight or nine year old girl. They'd backed to a safe distance from the door, but surged forward as the barrier started to come down.

"Officer Wuornos!" Nathan didn't recognise Callum Meary, but when you were a policeman, the Chief's own son besides, you were as good as a public figure and plenty of people recognised him whom he didn't know. Some of it was to do with other things, too, of course. The whispers. Legend on the lips of the gossips of Haven. "What happened? My wife, my little girl--" His sentences fragmented. "A -- an earthquake? Amy, she's -- God, she's been like this all day. I just don't know what-- We've got to get Suzie out of here!"

"Hey." Nathan gripped his clutching hand. "We will get you and your family out. Please, stand back so we can widen the exit."

"It's our house," the kid accused. "What could do this?" Her bewilderment stung, making his heart ache keenly, if only metaphorically. Home was the place associated with safety. But if they didn't know what had turned it into this death trap either--

"You don't know what happened?" Parker asked. She gestured and Nathan wordlessly gave her a boost up so she could wriggle through the small hole they'd made and reach the distressed family. Best place Parker could be was with them. She had a way with the Troubled, and if one of them was causing this they needed it stopped, soon. They had been occupied far too long with all the climbing about and digging. There couldn't have been much more time than this between the last two... events. So Nathan concentrated on digging out the exit, working just about as fast as he could, and listening to his partner with half an ear. "Tell me what you remember. What you experienced."

All business in her words, they belied her smile and the humour and compassion with which she unveiled the pink rabbit from beneath her jacket and handed it across to Callum Meary's daughter.

"It didn't feel like an earthquake," Meary said. "More like one big jolt, and that's not even -- It wasn't like falling. It was like being dragged, but... no, I don't know how to describe it."

"No need," Parker said, with a wry inclination of her head.

There was no room for the last cascade of debris to go anywhere but the floor underfoot. Nathan clambered over it and through to the Mearys and Parker without much difficulty. They'd been digging from this side, too, he noticed, eying a pile of dirt half-burying an armchair and bookshelf. From the size of it, probably most of the night. It was a sitting room, or had been, TV smashed in one corner. The little girl, Suzie, clutched a cellphone, forgotten as she fondled the rabbit, with its screen a muted glow. These people had been here for hours without any real light.

"I -- Amy was in a state," Meary was continuing. "I wanted to call the doctor out. She didn't want him, I couldn't get her to take her meds. We even woke Suzie and dragged her down here with all the damn noise from the argument. Hell, maybe that's just as well. If this hit and she'd been left all alone up there in the dark..."

Nathan thought back to the state of the bed upstairs, but didn't say it. All the same, his attention moved swiftly from her to the remaining person in the room, curled up with her face turned away into the back of a sofa. One end of the sofa was sunk through shattered floorboards and it didn't look a safe place to linger, but it didn't seem the woman cared. Amy Meary, about forty, red hair loosely and messily tied, thin form clad in a white tank top and jeans and seeming uncaring about the presumed cold. She didn't move to acknowledge them staring at her, hadn't moved when they bust in, hadn't acknowledged anything. Did she care that she was rescued?

"She's had a hard time," Meary said desperately. "It happened before, after Suzie -- post-partum depression. Even though this time--" He broke off in a sob. "Some people can't catch any luck, you know? It's not her fault."

"She's... depressed," Parker repeated, a tinge of dawning realisation mixing with startlement in her voice. Her eyes darted uneasily to Nathan's and under her breath she muttered, "Oh, boy."

He rubbed his forehead in frustration. "All right." So they'd had a woman whose moods controlled the weather already. Why not? "Fine, Parker."

Meary was oblivious to the non-sequitur exchange. "She lost her baby, lost her aunt, lost her job all in six months. That kind of run, it would level anyone." Defensive. "She's been low before, like I said. Never like this."

The helplessness in Parker's eyes told him this one was going to be a bit of a tall order, even if he hadn't seen the closed-off state of the woman. "Okay..." she said slowly, and crossed carefully to the sofa, where she sat down even more carefully next to the woman, resting the flashlight in her lap to take up the slack hands in her own. "Let's see who we have here. Mrs Meary?" She stroked the unresponsive woman's hair, trying to coax her to turn her face. "My name's Audrey. Can I do anything to help?"

"Are you and your daughter hurt?" Nathan asked Meary.

"Bruises..." He looked down at his kid, swallowing. "God, her back's black and blue. I haven't even been able to look since all the lights died. She could have broken bones."

"I'm fine," the kid said, eyes fixed on Parker with her mom. Little trooper. "Dad's hurt."

"Might have some cracked ribs," Meary admitted. "Amy, I don't have a clue. She could have done anything in this state and wouldn't react. I came back the other day and she'd burned her hand on the stove, hadn't noticed or didn't care, didn't do a damn thing for it. I had to drive her out to Emergency at 9 o'clock at night and wait for hours, Suzie and all."

Nathan hoped his wince hadn't been too obvious: that story was close to home. "You're all lucky you were shielded by the house," he said instead. "Focus on that. She's sitting up and breathing, and not bleeding that I can see." Though he did notice the very extensive bandages on the woman's hand. "That's a start."

He looked back over his shoulder, thinking back through the hole in the blocked doorway to the route they'd come down. "We need to get you and your daughter upstairs. There was a... second collapse, a couple hours ago, but they're digging us out." He hoped like hell that was true.

"We're still trapped?" Suzie looked stricken.

"They're digging us out." He couldn't say it any more positively than that. It'd be true if he was up there, but he didn't have a crystal ball to tell him what was going on up on the surface. Over on the sofa, Parker had gotten Meary's closed-off wife to actually look at her. "When this happened, the first time, the second time -- I don't know if there were any more." Meary's face confirmed yes. "How did Amy react?"

"React? She didn't. I told you, she's been like this since yesterday. This -- whatever this is -- this didn't cause it. She's sick, goddamnit, Wuornos!"

"Right." He took a deep breath. "But I'm thinking maybe it does go the other way. You've heard of the Troubles?"

"My wife? You're trying to claim my wife caused this? No. Just... no. That's not -- nothing like this runs in her family."

That wasn't quite the usual denial, but Nathan figured they'd get to exploring that later. More pressingly, he asked, "Where's your wife's medication?"

"In the bathroom cabinet. She wouldn't take it, I wasn't gonna damn well force her to. It doesn't matter. We can't get to it now. The pills don't help much, anyway. Useless, like that damned doctor."

"They might help enough." To Audrey he said, "Parker, I think I should try get to her medication. There doesn't seem much point getting these people out of here if--" He broke off, sliding his eyes up and then sharply downwards indicatively, and capped lamely, "Well, it could happen again. Mr Meary, can you get your daughter upstairs?"

"Hold up, Nathan," she said. Her hands gripping Amy's were white-knuckle tight. "I don't think we have time. I think we need to do this properly, all the way. Right now."

She saw his face close down. They didn't disagree often -- funny enough, when he was the local here and she the outsider, plus her impressions of guys in law enforcement, guys in the particular, had never been that they were amenable to being overruled by a chick. Nathan was content to defer to her, usually. She'd seen enough of him to know he didn't do it with everyone... to know he could be stubborn as a rock. But that only meant that when he did stand his ground with her, he did it with intent. Every movement was controlled down to the minimal jerk of his head as he voiced a curt, "A word, Parker."

They had nowhere here to talk that was exactly private, but as soon as she rose from the sofa, reluctantly releasing Amy's hand, he grabbed her arm and pulled her to the furthest corner of the room, where he leaned in so close she could feel the warmth of his breath. "It's not going to cheer her up if we tell her she's responsible for nearly killing her husband and child, or badly injuring a police officer."

Audrey had less reason to be quiet. His face was mostly in shadow, but she sought his eyes anyway. "No, but it might shock her out of it. She's not processing normally right now. She has no control over her moods. We need to get that back, one way or another."

"The world just fell in and that didn't do it."

"Hey. I didn't say it was going to be easy." She realised the mistake of squeezing his arm and let go before he could notice. "Nothing about this is easy."

"We should at least take the kid out," he said, mulish.

"I need her, Nathan. A stranger isn't going to bring Amy around. Suzie's our best chance."

"The poor kid's been stuck down here with her this whole time and she hasn't cared about it yet."

Audrey winced, and said hopefully, "There was nothing she could do about it, then."

"We can't have much time." Nathan's words were a bit too forceful, and it hung on the air, the one thing they agreed on. A pause stretched, and he said slowly, "I haven't heard digging, or any attempt to contact us. They haven't broken through yet. Who knows when they will." That was probably the reason he gave in, and she saw it in every line of his body when he decided to trust her. In truth, she wasn't sure where she'd earned such trust, but she was grateful for it. She had a... an instinct, something in her that told her she knew how to help these people, led her to forge on after crazy impulses with confidence beyond reason. Nathan let her get away with too much, and she vaguely knew that. Then again, he had instincts, too. "Don't make her too happy," he warned, very low. "I don't think this place will survive a resurgence to ground level."

"I don't think there's any real danger of that." Audrey swung away from him.

"What's happening?" she heard Meary press Nathan behind her, held off by some answer that was typically non-verbal.

"Amy." She crouched down before the closed-off woman, avoiding jagged teeth of broken floorboards. She took hope from the fact Amy Meary's eyes had shifted, tracking at least some of her progress across the floor with Nathan and back again. Maybe she was wrong about the efficacy of a stranger's words. It didn't matter. If Sally Anderson and her crew had broken through, they'd be hearing them. Nathan had retreated to the opening at the base of the stairs to make sure.

If they took Amy out of here like this, chances were she'd do it again someplace else. They couldn't save her, or those around her, unless they stopped this at the source. "Amy, I need you to listen to me. I know it's hard to care about anything right now."

"--Don't--" The denial and muscle response as she tried to pull away was the most hopeful sign so far.

"Your family have lived in Haven a long time. You must have heard of the Troubles. They're not just stories."

"We don't do that." Adamant, words bleeding misery, but response nonetheless. She'd been right -- Meary's wife had been hanging on every word she'd spoken in that conversation with Nathan. "We don't cause earthquakes."

That was strange, like something Meary had said earlier -- not total disbelief, not real denial. "Fine, so there's a something, but it's not this something. But people have more than one genetic line, Amy, and everything I see here points to you doing this. You pulled your house and your family underground, and unless you can control yourself, you'll keep doing it, until this place breaks up completely and Suzie and Callum both suffocate, buried alive. Until you've buried us all beyond any hope of rescue by the people trying to find us."

"No," she said, her denial absolute.

"You leave her alone--!" A burst of activity from Meary, but Audrey didn't look. Whatever he tried was curtailed by Nathan. Panting, Meary struggled to get further words out. "It's not her fault, I told you. She can't help being like this. You can't just flick this off like a switch!"

"But she needs to," Audrey said, merciless. "I'm not asking for reasonable or normal. I know that. I'm asking for heroic. Trying to see the world a little bit brighter can save lives today. Isn't that crazy? Amy, this time it's not just you. Maybe it looks a better option to retreat from the world, to -- to bury yourself like this. But you can't and shouldn't make that decision for them. I know you know that. Suzie--" The girl, who had been creeping closer, clutched her dad's cellphone and her pink, grubby rabbit as Audrey urged her to her mother's side.

"It's not me!" Amy yelled, ripping her hands away, the sharp sting of nail scores across Audrey's palms piercing the gesture, causing her to pull back involuntarily. The buried house around them rumbled, dirt shifting, particles cascading in thin showers from the cracked ceiling, floorboards groaning and plaster creaking as it gained still more cracks, and for a moment, she was afraid that Nathan had been right, and she had finally pushed this one too far.

Then, Amy lunged forward and threw her arms around Suzie, pulling her daughter to her. "I'd never hurt you, baby. Mommy's gonna get you out of here. I promise. I'm sorry. I promise. We're all gonna be fine." Tears flowed through the mud on her face, but there was no trace, now, of that blank expression, those dead eyes. The submerged house around them stabilized and quieted. The falling dirt dwindled to a trickle and then stopped.

"Go to them," she heard Nathan's voice, gruff with emotion. She turned tiredly in time to see him release Meary and push him gently towards his family.

Audrey rose to her feet. She rested her hand on Meary's big shoulder, squeezing gently, but his back was to her, his arms around his crying wife, and in that moment she acknowledged he was probably no more aware of her touch than Nathan would be. She smiled at her partner, hands in his pockets and flashlight nonchalantly in the crook of his elbow.

"She's not happy," he said, gently deadpan.

"No," Audrey agreed, quirking her mouth. So-so. "That was too much to ask, even of me. But I think it's going to be enough."

The rescue crew broke through to them about half an hour after they got the Mearys upstairs, which at least gave the poor kid chance to pick through the wreckage of her room and with her parents' help save those things she couldn't bear to lose which could be saved. Amy had worked up to caring enough to clamber across to the master bedroom for precious trinkets and a photo album. A good sign, for sure. The family would have to rebuild, on top of everything else, old tragedies and new revelations. Rebuild back from ground level, but at least not from nothing. The last flashlight had the grace to wait until Amy ventured back from her foray with it to flicker out, leaving them in the dark but for the faint glow of the cellphone, with its periodic peep of a dying battery, held in Suzie's hand.

"Don't worry, kid," Nathan reassured, between mechanically hacking at the earth beyond the window space in the gloom. "When that goes, I have another."

They never needed it. Shortly after, daylight broke through into the darkness in a small slither, quickly crumbling and widening out, then dwindling again as the hole was obscured. Nathan's eyes adjusted slowly, blinded after the long darkness. He heard Sally Anderson's voice before he saw her face at the gap. "How about that? Hours of hard labour and everyone's right here."

"Sally! Good job."

Relief all around. Surprise, too. "You really got them all!"

"Yeah. Chalk this one up a win." Parker, grinning, passed Suzie and her sheet-wrapped bundle of salvaged things through the opening first. In the dim light that filtered through, Audrey looked as grey as the haze of the air full of drifting dust. A monochrome angel. Nathan's heart did a little jump, which he felt, so knew it couldn't be physical. He smiled anyway to himself and pushed the feeling back down, back in its place.

"I do hope that son of mine's at least been making himself useful in the hole he's gotten himself into this time?" The Chief, out of sight but putting his oar in as usual. Great. Nathan's smile disappeared. An interrupted fishing trip meant he'd be hearing about this one for a while.

"Chief. You didn't have to come back. I -- we had this under control."

"Getting yourself buried alive is control?" The snort on the end of the derisive declaration had Nathan's hands clenched at his sides.

"Hi, Chief," Parker said, cheerful and peppy to break up the tension. "Sorry to cut short your trip."

They sent Amy up next. Hopefully, hopefully no longer a danger.

"Well, you know," the Chief grumbled down shortly, as they worked on widening the hole enough for Callum Meary's broader form. "They tell you two of your officers are buried alive, hard to think about fish." Nathan tried to share a weary glance with Parker, but when she rolled her eyes, he had the impression it was aimed at him. He looked elsewhere.

Once Meary was through he gave Parker a boost first then emerged grimy and dishevelled into the sunlight, to be hauled up by helping hands and ropes. The hole in the ground was a full five metres deep... No wonder it had taken so long to get to them. He crested the lip with emerging wonder for what the rescue crew had managed to do. But he didn't register the Chief's -- his dad's -- hand on his shoulder until he turned around and saw it.

Audrey prodded Vince and Dave with a few relevant questions while Meary and Nathan were taken aside by the EMTs, the latter very much against his will. She'd lost sight of her partner after that and thought he'd been hauled inside the ambulance to be privately strip-examined by the determined lady who'd grabbed him. She had to work hard to quash her amusement enough to concentrate upon more serious matters of... history, and Trouble, and the Meary family. Or the O'Daniels, in this case; Amy's pre-married name.

She managed to commandeer a moment on the unfriendly geologist's laptop for Dave to check the Herald's archives.

After that, while Vince and Dave argued excitably, she wandered around the scene, chewing over what she'd learned, thoughtful and... yes, a little glum. Not too glum. Some things you really needed to take as a warning, after all.

Nathan's reappearance snapped her out of it. He jogged over with a wiped-flat expression, plasters on his hands and some kind of bandaging bulking out the line of his jeans above his left knee. "You escaped," she accused him.

"No. Carla made me promise to show up at the hospital. Booked in an MRI. I've got two hours."

His lack of enthusiasm almost got a smile from her. Almost. "At least you got a temporary reprieve."

"Only because they're busy. Turns out a bunch of people across town got attacked by a... 'really big budgerigar' seems to be the working description." Audrey gawped. "Sounds like Trouble to me. You want to go? Probably time to pick this one up before I have to--" He jerked his head. Irritably.

"I had been hoping to get cleaned up first... but in the face of your obvious disappointment, how can I refuse?"

"Who could refuse a giant budgie?" he shot back.

"I know you're only hoping this will turn into something serious enough to get you out of that trip to the hospital." Nathan kept his expression bland. She gave in. He could do that for hours. "Fine. But we're getting food on the way."

They fell into step heading back towards his blue Bronco truck, and she shared, reluctantly but with a sense of obligation, "I did find out something about Amy's family... the last three generations were stage magicians." She looked down, imagining the depths under their feet, the weight and the dark, and how utterly, utterly opposite this Trouble had become when encountering Amy Meary to everything it had been in the past. "Their major act was levitation. They've never needed to fear the Troubles before, Nathan. When they came around in the 1950's, it made their fortune. Her great-grandfather could fly."

She heard the sharpness of Nathan's indrawn breath. He said shortly, "I need coffee, Parker."

"Yeah." She managed a small smile, for him. "Coffee, pancakes and a giant budgie sound like just what we need to set this day to rights."

END

Back