Unfounded

I was 9 years old the first time I saw the columns. I remember waking up and noticing that the morning sunlight wasn't stabbing its way through my childhood bedroom's blinds. Overcast, I thought. So I went downstairs for breakfast. My parents were already there, which was normal, but my father was wearing something that looked like a cross between a formal tuxedo and a surgical gown. That was not normal.

"What's that for?" I asked.

My parents shared a long glance, then my father turned back to me. "Have you seen them? Have you looked outside?"

I had no idea what he was talking about. What was 'them'? Who talks about the weather like that? But I was 7 and didn't really understand how strange that phrase was until I was older.

"Nope," I said as I bounced out of my chair and walked over to the window. Our street looked like the normal suburban street it was, just with less morning sunlight than normal. I looked up to the clouds and even at 9 years old my stomach shot straight into my throat. I didn't know exactly what I was seeing, but I knew it was impossible, and I knew I should be deeply afraid of whatever could do something like that.

Rising up above the the roof lines and trees of my extremely average, extremely flat Midwestern town were gigantic grey columns. They stretched so high the top of the window cut off my view; I had no idea where they stopped.

"What the hell are those?" I asked, trying to maintain my balance.

"Language!" my mother interjected. Worrying about something as mundane as my evolving vocabulary at a time like that only made the incredibly bizarre scene outside even stranger by contrast.

"Okay, but what's going on?" I asked. I looked back at my dad and his weird... outfit? Uniform? Costume? Even now I can't find the best word to describe it. There was something ritualistic about it. Like it had been designed long ago, and worn by many people, passed down through time.

"Those are the columns," my dad said matter-of-factly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "They come up sometimes. It just means there's something that needs doing. It's nothing to worry about."

"Um, where? Like, where do they come from? And what needs doing?" I asked, even more confused now. My parents' apparent comfort with the columns was incredibly disturbing.

"They're nothing to be afraid of, honey. Put some shoes on, we can go see one." My mother smiled at me as if she could make me feel any better in that moment. Maybe she could. I don't know. I went and put my shoes on.

"What about school?" I asked as we walked out to the sidewalk.

My mom laughed. "There won't be any school today. Just enjoy the day off."

"Where do they come from?" I asked again, getting frustrated with not being told anything that answered any of the dozens of questions that were flying through my head.

"Well, the ground, I think. You'll see." My mom smiled warmly at me, like she was teaching me some new word or science fact.

"You think? You usually know everything." Of everything that was happening that morning, it feels impossible now, but I think the most unsettling thing of all was that in that moment I realized my mom barely knew more about the columns than I did. But she was comfortable with them. She was clearly accustomed to their presence, somehow. But she didn't know them.

We walked for about a block before coming to one. It towered over the town, it's height matched only by the other columns spread around it. I quickly noticed they were laid out on a perfect grid pattern. Every few hundred feet, another column rose up toward the sky. With nothing to compare them to except each other (the tallest building in town was a 4 story Days Inn that had been built the year before), I couldn't even begin to estimate how tall they were. They didn't extend forever; I could see that much. But they reached up incredibly high. Maybe to the clouds. I don't know.

"They're cement," I said.

"Concrete," my mother corrected. "Cement is an ingredient in concrete. These are concrete."

"So someone must have built them. Concrete is used to build things." My 7 year old mind was working so hard to understand what I was seeing. I walked up to the column and placed my hand against it. It wasn't until that moment that the magnitude of what I was looking at really set in. The column was so high, far too high for me to even guess at, but it was wide, too, about the width of an average single family house. The four sides reaching skyward appeared to be the exact same width. And as far as I could tell, looking off into the distance, all the columns seemed to be the exact same size and shape. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. To this day I can't say. Enough that, even spaced out as they were, they could block out the sun.

"Maybe someone did. Maybe not," my mother said, a hint of mystery with that second part.

"So you really don't know where they come from?" I tried one last time.

My mother laughed. "No, I really don't."

"Does dad?"

"Your father knows more than I do. He doesn't know everything, but some. He'll tell you when you're older."

That didn't satisfy me at all. I wanted to know then and there. As we started walking back to my house, the tiniest part of my brain recognized something that was so impossible to explain, even compared to the columns themselves, that it didn't make itself known as a conscious thought until weeks later. And even then, I never voiced it out loud. I never brought it up. I never asked where the space for the columns came from. Because it was abundantly clear that the town itself had been shifted in space, building and ground and trees and the distances between them all moved to accommodate the sudden appearance of the columns. I know that seems impossible. This all does.

-

When we got back home, my father was still wearing that strange outfit, somehow both faded and shiny looking. He was collecting a suitcase I'd never seen before from my parents bedroom. My parents shared another long, silent stare.

"I'm going to have to go in now," my dad said, more to my mom than to me.

"I know," she said. I'm not positive, but I think I heard her choke on the words for a split second. "You'll be home tonight though, right?"

Of course he'd be home that night. Dad worked in the municipal building just a couple miles away. He came home every day after work. "Why wouldn't he be home tonight?" I asked. My parents both looked at me, uncertainty in their eyes. I couldn't tell if it was because they didn't know why he might not be home, or something else. Then, my overloaded brain finally catching up with the conversation, I added "Is it because of the columns?"

Dad opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. After a moment, he started again. "Yeah, it's because of the columns. Part of my job is to take care of them when they show up, and sometimes it can take a little while."

I was confused. "You work in an office. You do paperwork. What do you do when the columns show up?"

"It's a different part of my job. I just, someone has to go into a special part of the municipal building and that person is me. It's..." he trailed off, clearly unsure of how to explain this to me. "It's specialized work that I was trained to do when I first started there years ago. So when the columns appear, I'm the one who goes."

I nodded, completely confused and honestly understanding the situation less than I did before. My dad, who helped manage the town's budget, also went to some special part of what looked like a very boring building, and did SOMETHING whenever the columns showed up. Which clearly wasn't often, because I was 9 and this was the first time I ever remember seeing them.

"Where do you go? What do you do?" I wanted to know so much more about what was going on, what my dad was doing. "Is that why you're wearing that jumpsuit tuxedo thing?"

My dad ignored me my questions, and ruffled my hair instead. "I love you, kiddo. See you soon." He turned to my mom and kissed her and told her he'd be back as soon as possible, then he picked up the suitcase I'd never seen before, and left.

-

The next morning, the columns were gone. The space between the buildings and trees and streets in the town was back to normal and the sun tore through my blinds so sharply that it stung my eyes, even as they were closed. I ran downstairs to find both of my parents eating breakfast. Everything had returned to normal. Neither of them talked about the columns, and they changed the subject whenever I brought them up. Soon, I realized I was not going to get any more information from them and gave up. As I left for school, my mom bent down and grabbed my chin so I had to stare her straight in the eyes. She gave me the most stern look I've ever seen. "Andy, you are not to talk about the columns with anyone. You are not to talk about anything that happened yesterday. You are not to talk about what your father told you. No one else will talk about it either, and if anyone does and you talk about it with them, you'll both be in trouble. Your teachers know this. Your friends know this. Their parents know this. People you've never met in this town know this. Do you understand me?"

And I think it was the look in her eyes more than anything else, but I took what she said so seriously, that I could feel it at the core of my soul. These were things that we were not going to talk about. And so I didn't. I went to school and it was just a regular day. No one mentioned the columns. No one mentioned the weird way the town had shifted to accommodate them. No one mentioned how they were gone the very next day. And no one mentioned that six students from my school, including one girl from my class, vanished sometime between the day before the columns appeared and the day they disappeared, and were never seen again.

-

The memories of that day never left though. They sat inside me, unspoken, for over a decade. Looming, like the columns, over my every subconscious thought.

-

I moved away for college, to a school where I didn't know many people, and so was forced to make new friends. Once, I tried to tell them about the columns, but they thought I was joking, and as I was telling them about it, I realized how crazy it sounded, so I played it off and agreed it was a joke and no one laughed and I never mentioned it again.

Anyway, as often happens when you make new friends, at that mercurial age where you're still trying to find yourself and what you do and don't like, I developed new interests, based on the interests of my new friends. My favorite, though, and the one that has stuck with me ever since, was exploring abandoned places.

Every time, I'm a little scared of getting caught trespassing or something--honestly, that probably adds to the thrill--but the real excitement is seeing these incredible places, sometimes in states of disrepair that you would never see in your day-to-day life, and some of them looking perfectly preserved in time. There was an incredible abandoned resort outside of Orlando that had an indoor miniature golf course and trees growing up and out of it's solarium-inspired glass ceiling. And this tire plant in Georgia where it looked like the workers had just not come into work one day, then the next, then the next, and eventually never again. All the machinery was still there, just waiting for someone to turn the power back on and get back to work.

So when I went back home for Thanksgiving, and found out that the old municipal building had been shuttered and a new gleaming glass-encased structure had been built a few blocks away, I knew I had to go see my dad's old workplace.

Getting access wasn't hard. Even though it was located in the heart of the old downtown area, there were hardly any businesses left, either moving to larger outdoor malls scattered around the edge of town, or shuttering for good, having given up to e-commerce. So early on the morning of Black Friday, everyone in town was doing one of two things: sleeping, or waiting in lines far away from the aging downtown area. Even the police were keeping watch over the mobs of sale-hungry shoppers, and so I didn't even seen a single patrol on my way to the old municipal building. I didn't know if the building had a guard, but if it did, he or she must have either had the night off or decided to spend it trying to score some crazy deal at one of the shopping centers, figuring no one would notice their absence on that night of all nights.

The building was old, visibly so. It looked almost exactly like the city hall building from Back to the Future. Same bricks and round columns on the steps leading up to the main entrance, even the same triangle shape at the roof line that at one time housed a large clock, but was now just a large empty circle built into the building's face.

-

It's a little weird that we describe buildings as having human body parts, like faces, isn't it? We describe everything in terms of the human body, honestly. It's like our own body is the only way we can truly understand the world around us.

-

I was surprised to find every single window and door was boarded over, which seemed a little overkill for this place, but getting in was still a simple matter. I knew from countless times driving by as a child that there was a set of stairs built into the sidewalk on the building's right side, leading down to a door directly into the building's basement.

-

That's another thing we never talked about when I was little, or when I was grown for that matter. That not a single building in town seemed to have a basement, save for the municipal building. I don't know why that occurred to me just now. I guess you just don't think about some things.

-

The location of the door, below street level, virtually guaranteed that no one would see me prying off the plywood that covered the door, even though that was never a risk on this particular night. It gave me peace of mind though, as I pulled the small crowbar out of my backpack, brought along for this exact scenario. It took a minute or two, but soon the plywood was removed and set aside. It had been impossible to do silently, but the noise I'd made hadn't seemed to have stirred anyone, so I was feeling more brazen about my entry. The next obstacle, the locked door, didn't stand a chance. The wood holding the bolt in place was old and weathered and gave way with the first kick. I probably should have felt guilty about literally breaking and entering, but the thrill of exploration, combined with the number of times my college friends had dragged me out to do this exact thing with them before, had numbed me to it by this point. I was past feeling guilt for trespassing. I only felt curiosity. Intense curiosity, as I remembered my dad telling me he had to go to a special part of the building the day the columns appeared.

I shuffled the plywood back into place so that a cursory glace by a passerby wouldn't appear too suspicious, and closed the door as best I could. I grabbed a nearby chair and propped it against the door to hold it shut, and promised myself I'd nail the door shut on my way out.

The beam of my flashlight dashed over a fairly mundane office. Old, very out of date, and missing most office supplies, but the skeleton of the office it had once been was easy to see. It was just missing computers and copy machines and telephones, and people milling about.

Or so I thought.

As I waved my flashlight again, I noticed the desks weren't missing computers. They'd never had them. Old typewriters--maybe from the 70's, at a guess--were placed neatly in the center of every desk. Their plastic cases had discolored and yellowed to the point that the brand name was impossible to read, and the stickers affixed to the keys to label them had either peeled completely off or were almost there, but at one time, this had been a functional office. It had clearly stopped seeing use well before I'd first thought, but the bones were still there.

-

Bones. People constantly talk about a building's bones. And no one even thinks about it.

-

I knew my dad used a computer every day at work. It had been early in the computer age, and I think he'd started with DOS, but I know the building's technology was moving beyond typewriters even when I was a child, and they'd just shuttered it a couple of years ago. I knew most of the building had been using up to date technology before they moved to the new location, so why was this room stuck in time? Not only stuck, but apparently abandoned well before the change in location? Judging by the state of the typewriters, the room may have been abandoned since I was a kid. Maybe longer.

I walked further into the room, examining the desks, looking for any scrap of paper that might give me an idea of the last time this room had seen use.

This was my favorite part of exploring abandoned places: piecing a story together in my head, trying to understand what happened at this place. It felt sort of like what I imagine being an archaeologist feels like, except with concepts and technology that I inherently understand and don't need to consult reference books for.

The desks seemed void of any pieces of paper, so on a whim, I opened a drawer. Nothing. I moved to another desk and opened a drawer. Found a three hole puncher, but nothing informative.

That third desk though.

It was a thick stack of bound paper, at least half an inch. Couple hundred pages, I guessed. Most of the cover page had faded, but as I started flipping through it, it became clear it was some sort of report by a civil engineering firm. There were some graphs that meant nothing to me, some diagrams that might have been for the town's sewer system, and page after page of numbers, like a spreadsheet made before Excel was a thing.

Using my flashlight as a reading lamp, I went back to the first pages, which I figured would be an introduction to the document, explain what I was looking at, maybe give me some dates. Engineering projects had timelines, so I was looking for numbers, names of months, etc. As I was scanning though, I began to notice a phrase repeat itself throughout. "The Concrete Layer". Capitalized just like that. Like a proper noun. Like it was a name.

It became clear that the project I was holding was some sort of, for lack of a better phrase, "check up" on whatever this Concrete Layer was. This engineering firm conducted a bunch of drilling operations, went down into the sewers, making sure this Concrete Layer, whatever that was, was intact and stable. But it went on. They checked lake-beds, riverbeds, they had drilling sites spread out across at least 400 square miles! Roughly a 20 mile by 20 mile square, encompassing the town and outlying communities. But all sites and investigations referred to the same, singular "Concrete Layer". Not various pieces of concrete foundation. One singular unit. Like the entire town shared one gigantic foundation. What the fuck did that mean?

I turned another page that was formatted differently from the rest of the report. It was on letterhead from the National Security Agency, and didn't seem to have anything to do with the survey, at least not directly. It appeared to be more concerned with extending an ongoing agreement between the town and US Marshals made in the 1800s, and again with something called the Black Chamber in 1920. Apparently the letter was to ensure ongoing cooperation between the town and the NSA who took over handling the arrangement sometime after the Black Chamber.

I was reaching the point where I couldn't make sense of anything in the report when I turned one more page, a summary of the costs involved in the survey. A number of city officials had signed off on the costs, and there, third down, was my dad's name and signature. Whatever this Concrete Layer was, my dad knew all about it.

I put the report back in the drawer, and moved my light around the room. I thought maybe I could find an office with more information, something that would make sense of what I had just read, something to explain why it seemed like a single piece of concrete foundation stretched for 400 square miles under my town.

Instead of an office, though, my light was drawn to something else. In the far left corner of the room, the paint on the wall stopped several feet out. It was nothing but bare cinder block moving into the corner, where, instead of the two walls meeting, was a single, bare metal door. It took a moment for me to understand why my flashlight had gone straight there when I had meant to search the room in full, but as I looked a the door, and at the space around it, and at the space leading to that space, I realized that every single line in that room pointed to that corner, and that door.

It was like when you're taking art in school and you learn about perspective and your teacher shows you what a vanishing point is, the point in a picture where all the perspective lines lead. And they were all pointing to that corner, unfinished, proud in its bare cinder blocks, and that solid, blank door.

I'm still not sure if I had no choice but to enter that door, or if my curiosity of the situation convinced me that I did, but I walked straight there, grabbed the L-shaped handle, and thrust it open.

A smell came back to me that I still struggle to describe. It was several things, separately, and all at once. It was the smell of earth, dirt, wet and pungent, and the smell of death and decay, like life had been trapped behind that door and eventually succumbed to the passage of time, and it was the smell of sweet things, like barbecue sauce or ketchup.

I pointed my light into the darkness and found a plain, unfinished concrete staircase leading down. The walls, equally plain and cement, gave no hand holds, so I took my time with each step, knowing I had nothing to catch myself on if I lost my balance.

The staircase continued down for some time. I tried to count steps but lost count around 75, and then it continued down for at least as much longer, maybe more. Eventually it came to rest in a large, perfectly rectangular room, cast entirely in concrete. There was only one door, about 200 feet away at the other end, and nothing on the walls or floor. The ceiling loomed oppressively overhead.

As I walked across the room, I began to hear a faint humming. At least I think I was hearing it. I may have been more feeling it than hearing it. In any case, the closer I got to the other side, the more I felt the vibration in my body, down to my bones. I noticed it wasn't constant, but was rather rhythmic, a steady thrumming, coming from somewhere beyond the door. Somewhere beyond, and below.

I reached the door and found that rather than being metal like the one that led to the staircase, this one was concrete, like the rest of the room. The only metal were the hinges that it swung on. There was a hole the size of my fist to reach in and pull from. Before putting my fingers in, I bent down and examined the hole from every angle with my flashlight. Finally confident there was nothing in it but more bare concrete, I reached in and with all the strength I had, pulled the door toward me, open.

It was a struggle, but the hinges appeared in surprisingly good shape. I would have expected them to be rusted to hell and back, but they appeared well cared for. The challenge came from the weight of the door itself. Putting my foot against the wall to help apply leverage, I was eventually able to get the door open wide enough to slip through.

I peaked in and illuminated what I could with my light, but couldn't really understand what I was seeing. Just on the other side of the door, the walls shifted from unfinished concrete to something even more primitive. It looked like adobe clay, the kind that indigenous people built things out of thousands of years ago. It was rough to the touch, but warm. Surprisingly warm.

Beyond the door, another staircase plunged downward again, this one made out of the same adobe as the walls around it. The air was growing stifling. I couldn't even begin to estimate how far underground I was. I was beyond trying to understand why this passage was located beneath the municipal building. I'd even mostly forgotten about "The Concrete Layer", now driven only by a maddening need to know where this series of blank staircases and corridors led.

I walked down the stairs for maybe five minutes, but, strangely, I wasn't sure. It felt like about five minutes, and logic told me I'd walked about five minutes down the stairs, but also I had the slightest, most vague memories of having walked down those stairs for years and years, maybe even decades. I had indistinct, dreamlike memories of having lived a substantial part of my life walking down that staircase. When I reached the bottom, I felt much older, mentally and physically. I felt my face and body, but it no longer felt like mine. I didn't understand. Everything felt wrong, like a bad trip.

I walked down another long, blank corridor made out of adobe, and found that the other end had a doorway, but no door. Just some straw hanging across it. I wondered how long the straw had been there? How long did dried straw last? I had no idea.

I pushed it aside and walked across and immediately threw myself to the ground. I found myself on an elevated walkway, also made out of adobe, in the middle of a chamber that was so large I could not see its walls, only where the concrete ceiling hundreds of feet above me eventually sloped over the horizon. The thrumming had grown so loud, I could feel it in the core of my soul.

The walkway was only a few feet wide and only extended another twenty or so, before plunging down to the adobe floor of the chamber hundreds more feet below.

I scrambled for my flashlight only to realize I didn't need it. Somehow, something was illuminating the chamber. There were subtle cracks in the adobe floor far below me, and some sort of light was pouring through them, but it wasn't a color I can describe. I'm not sure it was a color at all. I honestly don't know what it was. But it let me see.

All around me, as far as the horizon would allow, the adobe clay ground stretched. And at regular intervals, perfectly squared columns, made out of adobe clay, lazily bobbed up and down. Not the way the ocean moves, or even the way a field of grass moves in the wind. The movement of the columns was lazy, but there was no mistaking that the movements were that of a living being. There was purpose to them. They moved in rhythm with the thrumming and I realized I had been feeling this movement in my body since the cement corridor all those steps ago. That's how powerful the movement of this ground was.

Carefully, I crawled to the edge of the walkway, and peered down, pointing my flashlight down, more out of muscle memory than need. But I will never forget what I saw.

Directly below the end of the walkway was pile of human bones dozens of feet tall, maybe more. Size was almost impossible to estimate in that maddening chamber. Clothes were even visible wrapped around the bones on top. The bones further down looked much, much older. The ones nearest the bottom, or as far down as I could see them, looked to be disintegrating into dust.

As quickly as I'd seen the bones though, something happened. The adobe floor of the chamber, as though reacting to the light I'd just shone on it, roared to life. Columns shot up at regular intervals, with incredible speed. They crashed into the ceiling, but somehow, kept going. Everything around me shook.

I turned and ran. I ran and ran and ran. I almost passed out on those stairs a couple times, but it felt like the stairwell was going to collapse at any moment, and my survival instinct kept me going.

After some length of time--I'm even less clear on how long it took me to run up as it did to go down--I eventually made it back to that bizarrely unused office. I ran out the door and onto up the final few steps to the street and couldn't believe what I saw.

Towering over me, at regular intervals, scattered for miles and miles, dwarfing everything else in the world, were the columns. The same ones I'd seen when I was 9.

-

The next day, the columns were out, but my parents and I didn't mention them. I went to sleep that night, and left the next morning. The columns had vanished overnight. Three weeks later, I read an article online about a woman who said her sister lived in my town and had a daughter. The woman said the sister's daughter disappeared the day after Thanksgiving, but the sister won't talk to her, and the town's police said they looked into the report and concluded it was "unfounded".

Submitted September 20, 2019 at 04:20AM by AndrewJames7878 https://ift.tt/350Z4Cr