Beneath The Firmament

Zimmy Ashbaugh backs the cherrypicker off of the transport trailer. Branches and pinecones get crushed under the lift’s wheels as Zimmy rolls into the residential alleyway. He had gotten the call around 4:30 AM, that as a result of last night’s wind storm, multiple sections of Sloop Valley were without power. The huge cedars are known for ejecting their upper branches during these winds, which were common this time of year, and sending them hailing down onto rooftops, street-parked cars, and most critically for Zimmy, onto the local power line assemblies.

Today’s job put Zimmy between the houses of the Hartford neighborhood, whose population is affluent and old. The problematic pole overlooks a particularly nice home - a three story craftsman style house, with a back garden built for hosting gatherings. A covered patio with a table, a fleet of grills, gravel path through an herb garden, leading to a rectangular, unornamented lawn, which unbeknownst to Zimmy is actually compliant with the official dimensions of a regulation British croquet court.

“Power blew last night!” a voice emanates from under Zimmy’s feet, through the metal grating of the bucket he is now hooked into. Down on street level, Martin Drummond stands there, with his flip-up sunglasses and his wife’s shivering white dog, Marshmallow.

“Sure did” Zimmy replies, “We’ll have it back within the hour. How are you, Mr. Drummond?”

“Ohhhhh, fine. Just fine. Thought I’d come check out the damage.”

Zimmy pulls a device out of his belt; it looks like a sort of crescent wrench, with an array of lights near the handle. “Didn’t look so bad to me coming in. This is our only downed line here.”

“Yeah. Doesn’t seem too bad.” Martin pauses, in that masculine way, searching for anything of significance to say. When nothing comes, he resorts to saying - “Well alright then.”

“Alright then.” Zimmy returns. He places the crescent of his device around one of the power lines. A few of the lights light up, and it lets out a beeping sound. Martin shuffles away, his Nikes squelching on the wet pavement. Zimmy moves the wrench to the next line, but this time, no lights, no beep. “There’s the problem” he mutters to himself.

Zimmy goes about his work, detaching the bad line, the topline, isolating it, and grounding it. He booms down with the faulty topline, hops out of the bucket and gets to work undoing the shielding, reveal the fray in the cable. Lucky for him, the fray is mendable, he doesn’t see the need to rip out any of the old cabling. He replaces the shielding and hops back into the bucket.

As he gets himself into a position to reattach the topline, he notices something. On the backside of the pole there is a large cable, some sort of high-gauge JOY line, which has been tapped in to the top side the transformer in a rather unofficial manner. This pirate assembly was impossible to see from the ground, but from up here Zimmy can see it clear as day - someone was stealing city power. Despite the immense hazard it posed to both private and public safety, Zimmy couldn’t help but admire the simplicity of the wiring job. Whoever was responsible for the installation had ignored many redundancies of electrical power line installation, but the installation work that was done, had been done with an apparent aptitude for the trade. This rogue power line bowed out, away from Zimmy, over the manicured backyard, and straight into the house, through a hole in the turret on the house’s third floor.

Topline in hand, mere moments away from clocking out, Zimmy considers his options. He really hates to be the responsible guy in these situations. It’s neither his fault nor his problem that someone wanted to tap into the grid. But he can’t help but consider what could be going on at the other end of this rogue line. It was a hazard, after all, and it would ultimately fall back to him were something to happen. Say, a house fire, or explosion. Back and forth he looks - the power line, the house, the power line, the house.

_____________

Zimmy lowers his bucket and returns to flat ground. He walks out of the alley, around to the block, and to the front of the house in question. A longer walk than he thought. He knocks on the door.

There’s no answer. His knock seems to carry an echo into the depths of the house. He knocks again, to the same non-response. He knocks a third time.

“Hello? This is Sloop Valley Hydroelectric, is anyone home?”

When his words are met with the same silence as before, he peers through the door’s window - a half-moon arch of glass near the top of the door. He stands on his tiptoes to get a worthwhile angle. At 5’6”, Zimmy is the shortest lineman on the SV Hydro roster. Lace sheers are drawn on the inside of the window, but the split between the two drapes hang just enough apart to permit one of Zimmy’s eyes to peer through.

Inside is dark. Very dark. It would make sense, of course, given the power outage, that the inside would be dark. But even by power outage standards, in the daylight you’d expect a house to have at least a bit of illumination from window light, bouncing off white walls. This, of course, goes off that base assumption that the house has walls. Zimmy, wobbling on the tip of his steel toes, looked upon a different scene - of bare studs and fiberglass insulation and exposed plumbing and unfinished wiring. The walls were stripped of their drywall. There appeared to be no internal walls set up either, not even the framing, so the space stood cavernous and broad. This includes the upper floors, which are non-existent. The floor beams have been sawed out, allowing him to see straight up to the roof beams, about 40 feet high. He can see ribs of the turret, now from the inside. That pesky power line comes in through its portal, bows out to around the center of the ceiling, tethered by a hook to the centerbeam, then dropping straight down to the main floor. As a result of Zimmy’s height, he can’t actually see anything on the ground floor, leaving him to only speculate where that power line could be going.

His toe-standing energy exhausted, Zimmy steps away from the door. He assumes he had just been looking at a DIY renovation project, though why they would need a direct line from the power pole was still beyond him. And why was there not any external evidence of any work? No drywall bags or refuse containers. Perhaps a tidy worker, he thinks. An incessant curiosity begins to infect Zimmy. What could that power line be so necessary for? If the house already had sufficient house power coming in from the underground lines? It must be some sort of high output equipment, though for the life of him, Zimmy couldn’t come up with any kind of home renovation device that would warrant a power draw that significant.

As he invents a justifiable story for what he had stumbled upon, Zimmy’s eyes wander around the front yard, in search of something that could boost his height and get him a view of the house’s floor. On the porch he looks at the potted plants, which appear well tended. The porch itself was large, a wrap-around, complete with a porch swing. The paint was fresh, and the chain was still shiny and new.

Zimmy takes a seat. Should he call the department? As a self-defined libertarian, Zimmy was not one to snitch. His assessment of the unknown homeowner, based solely on their aptitude for power line rigging, was that they were industrious, decent, and opted to accomplish work on their own rather than indulge the bureaucratic channels of the Charr County Department of Energy. He respected that. On top of this, he didn’t much care to talk to his supervisor, Vilmos, right now. Vilmos had become a real asshole to Zimmy ever since a question was thrown out about the romantic availability of Vilmos’ ex-girlfriend, Sandra Hoot, a waitress at the Fountainhead Diner. Do you blame me? Zimmy would often defend himself to a neutral third party in his head. I like older women, sue me.

This is when he sees the gnome. Sitting in the garden, underneath the low-hanging Japanese maple, is a ceramic garden gnome: red cone hat, white beard, and blue dungarees. Zimmy sees at its feet, a circular depression of soil, not entirely lined up underneath the gnome. Zimmy lifts himself off the porch swing, a bit awkwardly, and reaches through the porch railing, lifting the gnome up. Impressed in the soil beneath the gnome is a single silver key. Zimmy makes a glance back at the door, then, as inconspicuously as he can muster, a scan around the neighborhood. The coast is clear. He swipes the key.

He slides the key into the door’s deadbolt, twists the bolt back into its receiver, depresses the thumb latch and swings the door open. The first thing he sees is nothing. Where the ground floor should be was instead a black pit, descending deeper than light was willing to reach. Along the walls were the remnants of the house’s floorboards, which were splintered and jagged and unreliable for bearing load, as if they and been blown apart from beneath.

Zimmy sticks his head over the lip, looking down into the pit. A blast of cold, moist air hits him, dampening his mustache. He gawks at what he’s seeing, forgetting for a moment why he’s snooping in the first place. He looks to his right, finding again the mysterious power line. He finally gets his answer - the line terminates at a power box, providing power to a hoist elevator, the kind you would see on skyscraper build sites. The orange-painted steel mast descends down the pit. The cage is absent, likely Down There.

Slack-jawed with a perverse curiosity he had not felt since his shoplifting days, Zimmy sidles along the splintered remnants of floorboards, to the hoist’s controls. He dummy-tests the up-down lever, which appeared to be powerless, of course. He takes one more peer over the edge.

_____________

Zimmy sprints around the corner back into the alley, almost slipping on the wet leaves. He vaults himself back into the picker’s bucket and booms up to the power pole - top line in hand, not bothering to hook himself into his harness. He loops the top line through the junction, tensions the table down, and flips the transformer’s breaker. All around the neighborhood he hears the power come back to life. Stereos engage, news reporters and oldies stations blast at full volume, even a distant vacuum whirrs back to life. If he had been looking, Zimmy would have seen lights switch on around the neighborhood, but he was already lowering his bucket again, dismounting, and sprinting back to the pit.

Across the street is the Drummond’s house. Marshmallow is in the window, watching Zimmy run. The dogs barks at him, loud despite being behind glass, over and over again, that high pitch yip.

A green light is now illuminating the control panel. He slams the lever into the ‘up’ position, and he hears, down in the depths, a metallic lurch. Zimmy can still hear Marshmallow yip and yip and yip, until eventually the dog’s voice is overpowered by the whir of the motor, which grows louder and louder, accompanied by the rattling the metal cage, and the clinking of the rack-and-pinion assembly clawing its way up the mast.

Eventually he sees it, the cage, emerge from the ink below. It jolts to a halt, right in front of Zimmy. He unlatches the cage door, and steps inside. On the internal cage controls, he moves the knob ‘down’.

And down he goes. He watches the walls turn from concrete foundation, to dirt, then clay layer, then stone. Deeper and deeper he goes, losing the light, now only having the red glow of the hoist’s operating light, reflecting off the slick walls.

The hoist rattles away and soon Zimmy forgets exactly how long it’s been. A minute perhaps. Or maybe five. Maybe ten. He didn’t feel like checking his watch. He didn’t feel like doing anything. He found himself perfectly happy, watching the red stone scroll by him, just outside the cage window.

And so he goes down, and down, and down.