There came a day in the fall of 1919 when I was on Sycamore Hill, in what was known then as the Sentry Woods. The town of Sentry’s Rest was here, but it was really just a village and Sycamore Street ended at the Little Rumple River. The bridge—the first bridge—wasn’t built for another fifteen years at least. The neighborhood you grew up in didn’t come into existence until after World War II, when the GIs came home.
I was walking in the woods where my backyard is now, pushing through the scrub timber and bushes, looking for a dirt road that was supposed to be somewhere up ahead, not thinking of a goddam thing except wondering where in the village a young man might get a drink, and down I went. One moment I was walking in the sunshine and the next I was in the well of the worlds.
If you shone the flashlight between the boards, you know I was lucky not to be killed. There’s no handrail, and the steps wind around a nasty drop—just about a hundred and seventy-five feet. The walls are cut stone, did you notice? Very old. God knows how old. Some of the blocks have fallen out and tumbled to the bottom, where there’s a pile of them. As I tilted toward the drop I threw my hand out and caught hold of a fissure in one of those empty sockets. Couldn’t have been more than three inches wide, but it was enough to get my fingers into. I pulled myself back against the curve of the wall, looking up at daylight and bright blue sky, my heart beating what felt like two hundred licks to the minute, wondering what the hell I’d stumbled into. It surely wasn’t any ordinary well, not with stone steps going down and cut stone blocks walling it around.
When I got my breath back… there’s nothing like almost falling to your death down a black hole to make you lose your breath… when I got it back, I pulled my electric torch off my belt and shone it down. I couldn’t see a goddam thing, but I heard rustling sounds, so something was alive down there. I wasn’t worried, I also carried a holstered side-piece on my belt in those days, because the woods weren’t always safe. It wasn’t animals you had to worry about so much… although there were bears back then, plenty of them… as it was men, especially shiners, but I didn’t think there was any moonshine still down in that hole. I didn’t know what might be, but I was a curious lad, and I was determined to see.
I fixed my pack, which had come all crooked when I fell on the steps, and went down. Down and down, around and around. A hundred and seventy-five feet deep is the well of the worlds and a hundred and eighty-five stone steps of varying heights. At the end is a stone-sided tunnel… or it might be better to call it a corridor. It’s high enough so you could walk it without ducking your head, Charlie, and have most of your height again to spare.
The floor was dirt at the foot of the steps, but after I went on a bit… I now know it measures out at a little more than a quarter-mile… it goes to stone flooring. That rustling sound kept getting louder and louder. Like paper or leaves blowing in a light breeze. Soon it was overhead. I raised up my torch and saw the ceiling was covered with the biggest damn bats you ever saw. Wingspans like on a turkey buzzard. They rustled more in the light and I lowered it back between my feet double-quick, not wanting to send them flying all around me. The idea of being smothered by their wings gave me what my mother would have called the fantods. Snakes and most insects are okay by me, but I’ve always had a horror of bats. Everyone has their own phobias, don’t they?
I went on and on, a mile at least, and my torch was starting to fail. No Duracells back in those days, boy! Sometimes there was a colony of bats overhead and sometimes there wasn’t. I made up my mind to go back before I was left in the dark and just then I thought I saw a spark of daylight up ahead. I snapped off my torch and sure enough, it was daylight.
I went toward it, curious as to where I might come out. My guess was the north bank of the Little Rumple, because it seemed to me I’d been heading south, although I couldn’t be sure. I started for it, and just as I was nearing it, something happened to me. I can’t describe it very well, but I need to try in case you decide to follow in my footsteps, so to speak. It was like being lightheaded, but it was more than that. I seemed to turn into a ghost, Charlie, like I could look down at my body and see right through it. I was insubstantial, and I remember thinking that we all are, really, just ghosts on the face of the earth trying to believe we have weight and a place in the world.
It lasted maybe five seconds. I kept walking even though I didn’t really seem to be there. Then the feeling went away and I went to the opening at the end of the tunnel… maybe another eighth of a mile… and came out not on the bank of the Little Rumple but on the side of a hill. Below me was a field of gorgeous red flowers. Poppies, I think, but with a smell like cinnamon. I thought, “Someone has rolled out the red carpet for me!” A path led through them to a road where I could see a small house… a cottage, really… with smoke coming from the chimney. Far away down the road, on the distant horizon, I could see the spires of a great city.