Chapter 23
The circuit was dead and the scavenger pump had stopped, and for a few seconds nothing happened at all. Then the fence post, the shared white PVC post that had started this whole morning, the one sitting two inches on my side of the survey pin, began to sink.
It went down vertically, straight and true, the way a post sinks when the ground underneath it simply isn't there anymore. Five inches first. It paused there, as if the earth were considering it, and then it went another five, ten inches down in total, and the enclosure mounted to it went down with it, tilting as it sank, its conduit bending and then snapping with a thin metallic shriek. My junction box, my contactor, my five years of nights in the dirt, all of it dropped into the mud and kept going, swallowed by the same void it had been holding back.
And then Marlene's wall went.
It didn't topple outward the way a leaning wall falls. It collapsed inward, toward the void, as if the ground had reached up and pulled it down. The stones went one after another at first, and then all at once, a slow avalanche of fieldstone and mortar and dirt. About a hundred and twenty fieldstones, give or take, stones Marlene had picked and placed and mortared herself over I don't know how many weekends, and every one of them tumbled down into the dark with a sound like a river full of rocks. Her rose bushes went with them, roots and thorns and blooms, torn out of the soil and dragged down into the slurry, red petals scattering across the black water like confetti at the worst party anyone ever threw.
Marlene made a sound I had never heard a person make, not quite a scream and not quite a sob, and she took a step forward before Vasquez caught her. "No," Vasquez said, firm and gentle at the same time. "No, ma'am. You can't go down there. It's still moving."
She was right. The ground was still settling, the mud still bubbling where the wall had been, the whole yard still sinking by inches while we watched. Bennett had his tape out and was stringing a perimeter between the cruisers and what was left of the lawn, his hands steady even though his face was white, and Vasquez was on the radio again, telling dispatch to keep the neighbors back and to get the utility crews out here before somebody walked into a live wire in the mud.
I thought about that fence post then, the one that had started the whole morning. Two inches on my side of the survey pin. Marlene had called the deputies over two inches, and now the post itself was ten inches underground, and the fence it belonged to was in pieces, and the wall she had built stone by stone was at the bottom of a hole. All morning we had fought about a line on a map, and the ground had just shown us what it thought of lines on maps. The post was gone. The line was gone. The only line left was the one between standing on solid ground and standing on a lid, and we had been on the wrong side of it for decades without knowing.
The roses were the last thing I saw go clearly. One bush, roots and all, slid down the slope of mud with a few red blooms still on it, and it went under the black water without a sound, like it had never been there at all. Marlene watched it go, and her hand tightened on my sleeve, and I didn't pull away. There was nothing solid left to hold on to except each other, and the pavement under our feet, and the deputies telling us to step back.
Behind us, the cruisers' lights kept turning, red and blue in the rain, and ahead of us, where a fence and a wall and a garden had been that morning, there was only mud, and black water, and a hole that went down further than any of us could see. Somewhere under the street, water was still moving, and the pump that had held it back was gone, and I knew that whatever came next would not be decided by me or Marlene or any fence post, but by the county and the state and the hole itself, and none of them were in any hurry at all.