Page 97 of Under Story

Honey-yellow mushrooms crowd the floor. Armillaria: the same species she found here before.

—

“How was your hike?” asks Eli.

“Invigorating, actually,” she says, pulling her linen bag over her head.

After embodying her double for years, dishonesty comes easily to Laurel, but she’s never lied to Eli. Why doesn’t she tell him about the cave? Her thoughts about it are too nascent, too vague. She feels a gathering momentum. And she feels protective.

“I’d like to go back tomorrow,” she adds.

Eli plates potato curry from the stovetop. The Pakistani couple who own the nearest grocery store sell fresh food to go every day. “I’ll come with you. We could stop by that cherry place afterward.”

“To be honest,” Laurel says, “it cleared my head to be alone. Do you mind?”

Eli lifts a shoulder. “Okay.”

She blows on a spoonful of curry. A clock ticks in the kitchen.

“If I take my hike in the morning,” she says, “we could do Cherry Republic in the afternoon.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Eli says. “It was just a way to pass the time.”

His face betrays no emotion. Laurel chides herself for feeling stung. The terms of their reengagement have always been clear: to get here, they had to work together. Now the wheels are wobbling, the hood held shut with tape, and maybe even the flicker between them—that moment in the gazebo—was some perverse, subconscious way to keep each other going. They’ve been yoked for years. She can’t blame Eli for wanting to be free of her.

—

Laurel dreams of Silas. The next morning, while making breakfast, she is besieged with memories of pregnancy. The aches on the sides of her abdomen. A journal entry: I already feel the baby is a part of us. In the last month, she slept on her lunch break, and her stomach stretched until it had no give.

As she eats, her chest tightens. It eases only when she drags her mind away, to the cave.

She stops at the café where she bought sandwiches years ago. The same cashier is working the register.

“Nice weather,” he says, jutting his chin at the window.

—

Laurel has plenty of experience pruning apple trees, but this is no apple tree. After cutting through two branches, her tank top is soaked. She sits for a moment, panting. Then she maneuvers through the gap.

Scant light flows in, but not enough for her to see clearly. At first, she merely has a sense of shape: a cavity, rounded, shadowed. The ground is oddly knobby, and she almost loses her balance.

When she turns the headlamp on, she understands why. Roots braid from floor to ceiling: a labyrinthine inner lining.

Laurel has never seen anything like it. Underground, the diameter of a tree’s roots can reach up to seven times that of the branch system. With nowhere else to go, these have turned in on themselves and bunched in brain-like folds. Rhizomorphs sheathe the roots in black netting, just as they do the trunk and the branches.

This phantasmagorical vision shakes Laurel on its own, but what she notices next nearly makes her lose her balance. The rhizomorphs have been studded with pins that measure electricity.

Wind pours through the opening. Fallen pins skitter into the back of the cave. Laurel forces a slow breath and follows them. The beam of the headlamp is narrow: she can only see one part of the space at a time. When her foot catches, she staggers, and the light swings crazily.

She lands near a metal box. A padlock hangs from the front.

Laurel fumbles for her double’s key ring. She already identified the three larger keys: the first corresponds to the house, the second her campus office, and the third leads to the Rhizotron. For the miniature one, though, she still hasn’t found a match.

The padlock opens with a fine shower of rust.

Inside are two shelves. The top holds more pins, as well as labels and a pen. On the bottom, Laurel finds the same voltmeters she used in her maze experiment.

She feels lightheaded. There is a Nutcracker quality to the cave, as if something toy-sized has grown grotesquely large: instead of standing over the experiment, Laurel is now inside it.