Heaven Way
It’s been 25 years to the day since my friend Baptiste disappeared. Not officially. The date in the police record says ‘September 14’ because his aunt didn’t report him missing until three days later. I was the last person to see him though. I know when and where he disappeared, and I told the cops, but they brushed me off. I was just making things up to protect my friends, they said, and that I had watched too many horror movies.
Baptiste and I were thick as thieves ever since first grade. To most people, we must have been an odd pair. The shy, withdrawn kid with the thick Haitian accent our classmates often made fun of, to a point where he sometimes refused to speak – and me, the whirlwind whose parents got summoned by the principal almost on a weekly basis because I kept interrupting the teacher and just wouldn’t sit still. We were both outsiders in our way, but that wasn’t the reason we got along. We actually had quite a few things in common; things that are of enormous importance to kids. The same favorite Power Ranger, the same favorite TV shows, those kinds of things.
By the time we entered middle school, we also discovered a shared fascination with urban legends and abandoned places. The Midwest never had a shortage of those, not even in the confines of our small hometown. There was the overgrown substation on Brooklyn Road, the derelict corner store just across the public pool, and the most exciting one to explore: the decaying residence of the late Mrs. Avner. From what we knew, her heirs had been in a legal battle over the property for more than a decade. To our dismay, the police kept a close eye on the place although it had never looked like anything worth stealing was left in there for as long as I can think back.
Our fascination with abandoned places grew as we got older, and with it our frustration. Neither my parents nor Baptiste’s aunt really cared what we did all day long, but that didn’t mean we could do as we pleased. With one old boneshaker of a mountain bike between the two of us, our range of exploration was limited. We were not even in high school when we ran out of new places to see, and roaming around the same old factory yards, overgrown gardens, and closed stores wasn’t very exciting. We still kept going, always hoping to find something we had overlooked on a previous visit – a hidden door or at least some cool trinket – but we never did.
Still, our excursions beat hanging out at home. Most things did. Getting screamed at by my dad because a teacher had complained about my behavior again was just as unappealing as sitting in silence next to Baptiste’s aunt while she watched soap operas. And so we kept exploring.
When we enrolled in high school, everything changed. Being the brainy one who sometimes paid attention in class, Baptiste developed an interest in computers. At first, I thought it was the dullest thing ever. These were school computers, after all. There were no games on them, just boring programs to practice typing and making spreadsheets, and that certainly wasn’t my idea of fun. However, I changed my mind when Baptiste introduced me to the magic of the internet.
Only one out of the three computers in the school library had internet access, and that was probably just an oversight by the school. It was the late 90s. Most teachers didn’t know anything about computers and struggled with simple tasks like printing a page or formatting a letter. That’s probably why nobody suspected what we were really doing in the library after class. To the faculty, we had turned our bad behavior around, finally took school seriously, and did our homework in there. In reality, we were exploring. Baptiste had discovered what soon became our holy grail: a webring titled ‘Haunted Ohio’.
To those who don’t know, webrings were a common thing on the early internet. They were a quick way to find related content in a world before hashtags. Member websites had a button that took you to another page in the webring. If you kept clicking long enough, you took a round trip through everything the webring had to offer, from established big shots with high visitor counts to newly added members and obscure niche stuff you’d otherwise never have found.
Haunted Ohio quickly became an obsession for us. It had everything we could ever have dreamed of: accounts of ghost sightings and alien encounters, the online journal of a woman who documented her seances and conversations with restless spirits from the Civil War, an archive that meticulously linked unsolved murder cases to demonic possession, and so many abandoned mines and factories, schools and mansions, that one could get the impression Ohio was just one huge ghost town.
The most interesting page on the webring had a map of ‘flimsy spots’ as the author called them. These were places where the ‘fabric of reality was thinner’ and the overlap with some other dimension caused inexplicable phenomena. Except for some especially convincing cases, we didn’t put much stock into the supernatural stuff. What made it so interesting were the listed locations. Either the owner of the website was from our area, or that other dimension was strangely fond of bleeding into western Ohio specifically. Some of these ‘flimsy spots’ were relatively close by. Not close enough for two kids with one bike, but close enough to make plans based on the off chance that one of us would miraculously get a car once he turned 16.
Instead of a miracle, we got Tommy. Most people, namely our teachers, considered him a curse. To us, he was the biggest blessing we could have hoped for.
Tommy had been held back twice and was just one major incident away from being expelled altogether. He argued with teachers, rarely paid attention, started fights in the schoolyard, and got caught smoking behind the gym on a regular basis. If he showed up in the first place, that was. It wasn’t unusual for him to skip school for days at a time. The only teacher who ever scolded him for that was a substitute, and she only did it once. Everyone else probably just said a silent prayer when they saw Tommy’s empty desk in the morning.
When he first joined us, he didn’t try to make friends with anyone. He barely acknowledged us during class, and during recess he either hung out with other older kids or disappeared behind the gym. Some of my classmates gossiped about Tommy when they were sure that he wasn’t around. I think they were equally afraid of and intrigued by him. There were all sorts of rumors. His mom was a stripper, his dad was in jail (the reasons for that varied), Tommy had almost been expelled for threatening a teacher with a knife, brass knuckles, or even a gun. All of them were bullshit, but I didn’t know that at the time.
Baptiste and I didn’t have much of an opinion about Tommy all through freshman year. At most, he was a convenient distraction. When he was around, the teachers had their hands full with him and didn’t call my parents because I was late for the third time that week. Other than one group assignment that an overly optimistic teacher gave us, we just didn’t have anything to do with Tommy. He showed up once that week and offered us five cigarettes for putting his name on the paper. We accepted the deal, Baptiste got a quarter from his aunt for the smokes, and that was the full extent of our interaction with Tommy all year.
The first time we had an actual conversation with him was in sophomore year. As so often, Baptiste and I were hanging out in the library after class. That week, two new websites had been added to Haunted Ohio, one about monster sightings in Lake Erie, the other about locations linked to a possible serial killer in Youngstown. We were browsing the latter because it included several photos of a derelict textile factory that looked suspiciously similar to the factory another website claimed was used by a satanic cult for human sacrifices.
Our meticulous comparison of the photos was interrupted when the door swung open and Mr. Stevens, our homeroom teacher, walked in with Tommy. We hastily opened a random text document to pretend we were doing our homework, but Mr. Stevens stayed by the door and didn’t even look in our direction. We heard him say that he had enough of Tommy picking fights instead of doing his homework, so he’d spend his detention in the library from now on.
“Maybe I can strike a deal,” Baptiste whispered to me. “Homework for smokes. If my aunt buys five for a quarter, we might be able to afford a new saddle for your bike by the end of the year.”
Mr. Stevens left and Tommy came over to the computers as soon as he saw that he wasn’t alone in the library.
“What are you in for?” he asked after slouching down on one of the desk chairs. He gave the geometry book Mr. Stevens had shoved in his hand an annoyed glare, then tossed it on the desk.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just doing our homework here like the straight A students we are.”
Tommy shot me a puzzled glance, then studied the computer screen for a moment. It showed a photo of the old factory again since Baptiste had closed the empty text document as soon as the door had fallen shut behind Mr. Stevens. “Doesn’t look like homework.” Tommy sat up and leaned closer to the screen for a longer look. “Man, look at that copper. Those pipes must be worth at least 50, 60 dollars…” He turned to Baptiste. “Where is that place?”
And that’s how we found out that Tommy shared our interest in abandoned places, albeit for a different reason. Exploration, while fun, was secondary to him. First and foremost, he was on the lookout for things worth taking and selling. Scrap metal the junkyard would buy, anything valuable enough to pawn or take to the thrift shop. He had plundered all sorts of places around town and even been inside the Avner residence. According to him, there wasn’t ‘anything cool’ left in it, only ‘old people stuff’ that nobody would buy.
At times I had wondered how he afforded luxuries like cigarettes, brand name skate shoes, or the discman Mr. Stevens had confiscated a few weeks ago because Tommy refused to turn it off during class. Him having a job of sorts explained it, and not just to me. His grandmother, who Tommy had been sent to live with, believed he worked part time at the junkyard and therefore didn’t question where the money came from.
Baptiste’s plan to pitch the ‘homework for cigarettes’ deal was quickly forgotten. Instead, we showed Tommy other websites on Haunted Ohio, and he told us about the places he had raided in and around town. His detention was almost over when Baptiste navigated to a website about supposedly cursed places, and Tommy recognized one of the derelict houses.
“It’s not haunted,” he said. “I’ve been in that basement. There, that’s mine.” He pointed to the blurry photo of a wall covered with graffiti and the moldy remains of green wallpaper. “It’s just a shithole not worth the long drive.”
The realization that Tommy had a car hit us at the same time, but Baptiste was the one who said out loud what we thought. “Maybe we should team up then!” He tapped the screen. “We can look for worthwhile places online.”
“There are often recent photos on the websites,” I chimed in. “Some even have maps or directions.”
Tommy’s demeanor immediately changed to what we’d later jokingly call his ‘business mode’. His brow furrowed and he gave both of us a long, appraising look, then he leaned back and folded his hands like a mafia boss in a movie. “What do you want in exchange?”
“We scout for the best targets, you drive us to places we want to see just because they seem cool,” I promptly replied.
“And you always get first dibs,” Baptiste added.
Tommy considered our offer for a moment, then he nodded. “Yeah, that sounds fair. We have a deal.”
Our first trip with Tommy took place the next weekend. His beat-up Ford F-150 significantly expanded our reach, and Baptiste had taken full advantage of that. The location he had picked was a place we had long wanted to explore: an old grain silo that allegedly attracted aliens. According to the website, there had been six instances of hovering lights and a strange humming in the past five years. The aliens apparently only visited at night though. By day, there was nothing unusual about the place – except for the fact that we hadn’t been to anything even close to a silo yet. For us, it was exciting to finally explore something bigger than a house. For Tommy, the prospect of a good haul was all that mattered.
The silo delivered. When we drove back home in the early evening, Tommy’s trunk was filled to the brim with scrap metal. Baptiste and I had explored to our heart’s desire, and as it turned out, the scavenger hunt for old farming tools and other things we’d usually not have given a second glance was actually a lot of fun. I even found a perfectly good pair of binoculars that Tommy didn’t want.
After this successful first outing, weekend trips to eerie and not-so-eerie places became a regular thing. Haunted Ohio proved to be a treasure map for scavengers, although ghost hunters and ufologists were probably left disappointed more often than not.
The spookiest thing we ever came across was a skeleton with a straggly brown wig. It was half-buried under the collapsed porch roof of an abandoned farm. According to Haunted Ohio, the farm had belonged to Edna Burwick who had allegedly poisoned a number of farmhands in the 1950s instead of paying them at the end of the season. Most had been hobos and runaways that nobody had reported missing, except for Mr. Burwick who had died under mysterious circumstances in 1949. His obituary had been on the website, along with an old newspaper article about the case.
It was incredibly unlikely that we had just stumbled upon the remains of a previously unknown victim 50 years later, in a pretty obvious spot at that. Still, we were pretty freaked out – until we went closer and saw a faded plastic pumpkin and the withered packaging of fake cobweb in the rubble. Once we had seen all the Burwick farm had in store, we removed the Halloween decor, then hid the skeleton under some loose floorboards in the kitchen to give the next explorers an even better scare.
The three of us were out and about almost every weekend. Winter slowed us down, of course, but we didn’t let a little snow or rain ruin our fun. If the weather was too severe for long trips, we went back to places around town to see if anything had changed. Baptiste also pitched his idea to do Tommy’s homework at some point, but instead of trading for smokes, Tommy pawned things we found during our joint treasure hunts for us. It kept him from getting expelled and us from being broke. Over time, our transactional arrangement with Tommy turned into a real friendship. Some days, we just hung out in the library, browsed Haunted Ohio, and made plans for spring. And as soon as the weather got warmer again, we jumped back into action. When summer break came, we sometimes even took two trips per week – and almost exhausted the list Baptiste had printed out on our last day of school.
Looking back, it’s crazy how far we roamed all by ourselves, but as long as we were home in the evening, neither my parents nor Tommy’s grandmother cared. Some of the places we went to were harmless, not counting the risk of alien abductions or vengeful ghosts. Others had the ‘No Trespassing’ signs and security cordons for good reason, and we were lucky to get in and out unscathed. A few times, we almost got caught by guards or nosy passersby, but always managed to hide or slip away unnoticed. For the most part, the dangers of dilapidated buildings and derelict machinery didn’t cross our minds. It was all just good, exciting fun. The best summer of our lives.
Until that one day in September.
School had started again two weeks earlier. The teachers were baffled by Tommy’s daily attendance – two weeks straight set a new record – but nobody said a thing. They probably thought the Lord had finally answered their prayers, but Baptiste and I knew his good behavior had a much simpler reason than divine guidance. Tommy was just as excited as us to have access to the school computer again. There were only two or three places left on our list; places we had always put on the backburner in favor of more interesting options. After being cut off from our source for so long, we had a lot of catching up to do in the library. Many websites on Haunted Ohio had been updated during the summer, and a handful of brand new ones had joined the ring.
Augur26, the author of the ‘flimsy spots’ website, had been especially busy. Three new locations had been added to the map. All were linked to strange disappearances, but only two of them had photos.
The first one was a single-lane bridge that led over a small creek and a hiking trail. According to the description, several hikers had gone missing by unwittingly entering the ‘dimensional rift’ under the bridge. That’s what made this place so dangerous, Augur26 wrote: It didn’t look dangerous or even unusual. It was just a regular hiking trail, and even in bad weather, the other side of the underpass was easily visible. Two newspaper articles about missing hikers were included, one from 1985 and the other from 1992, along with three photos that confirmed the bridge’s unassuming appearance.
The second location was a lake, more specifically the small island in its center that housed an enormous old elm tree. The lake used to be a popular spot for family weekend trips until the belongings of a missing little girl had been found on this island last summer. This entry was a bit of a letdown for us. First, the lake itself was just that. A lake, not a building that could be explored and relieved of its scrap metal. Second, there were no other disappearances. The various linked articles were all about the case of the missing girl. We skimmed them and quickly came to the conclusion that Augur26 was reaching. Undoubtedly, the lake had been the scene of a crime, or maybe just a tragic accident, but it was certainly not mysterious or supernatural.
Which left us with the third new entry, the one that only had a scanned map instead of photos. Augur26 apologized for that, saying he meant to visit, but car troubles got in the way. Since it would be a while to get his car fixed, he had done as much research as he could online. Reading the description, it turned out that this ‘flimsy spot’ was a quarry that had been depleted and closed down in the early 80s. According to the only linked article, there had been plans to turn it into a landfill years ago, but for some reason, that never happened. Tommy found a plausible explanation on the map he had bought a few weeks ago though. There was already a landfill less than 20 miles from the quarry, and the only town in the area really didn’t need two.
What had earned the place the spot on the ‘flimsy spots’ list was a series of strange disappearances. At least seven kids between the ages of 11 and 19 had vanished without a trace since 1988, the website said. Other than Augur’s far-fetched theory about a dimensional rift, nothing connected the cases. Those kids had gone missing years apart, and apparently the author was also pretty generous with the area he considered relevant. Two of the kids had last been seen on a now closed campground that didn’t even look close to the quarry on Tommy’s map. The jacket and backpack of another kid had been found deep in the forest, more than 10 miles in the other direction. Either these ‘flimsy spots’ were much bigger than the website let on before, or Augur26 had let his imagination run wild for a bigger update.
Whichever it was, a quarry was definitely more interesting to us than a lake or a bridge. Tommy had vetoed both due to the distance and the low chance to find anything good. Baptiste and I were not keen on checking these places anyway. Going by the photos and articles, there just wasn’t much to see. And so we agreed on the quarry as the destination for our next weekend trip.
We set out in the afternoon of a dirty midwestern late summer’s day. The air was heavy, and the sky had been grey and overcast since morning, but we were too antsy to let bad weather get in our way. What worried me more than the risk of rain was the possibility that the quarry might not live up to our expectations. In our excitement, we had talked the place up for days and theorized about what we might find. The quarry was just within our range. This would be our longest trip yet, and if it wasn’t worth it, Tommy would probably not take chances on more distant locations anymore. He had somehow convinced himself that there’d be an old excavator he could cannibalize for useful parts. Baptiste and I had our doubts about that, but for the sake of future trips, we kept quiet and clung to the hope that there’d be something worthwhile at least.
Our worries about Tommy’s fickle mood were put to rest as soon as he picked us up though. Thanks to the plentiful hauls of the past weeks, he had finally been able to afford a new cassette player for the car. Obviously, that was far more exciting than an excavator that may or may not be at the quarry. So exciting, in fact, that the subject didn’t come up even once on the way. Tommy was too busy playing DJ to speculate about the bounty our trip might yield.
The drive was longer than expected, and there was a light drizzle at some point. By the time I spotted the old quarry sign ahead, the weather had cleared up though. A blue sky peeked through the canopy of the forest, and it felt more like summer than fall when we got out of the car.
There was a narrow driveway that led into the forest and down to the quarry. A rusty sign on a bent pole said ‘authorized vehicles only’, and a barrier between two concrete cones blocked that path. Such things never stopped us from going wherever we pleased, but in this case, it just didn’t seem worth the hassle. We had explored industrial sites before, and none of them had been far from the road. So we left the car parked by the sign and went on foot.
It was indeed a short walk and I recall thinking that this was probably not what people imagined when I told them we went to creepy, abandoned places. There were no old, knobby trees, no lurking shadows, no dusky half-light, not even ominous ruins or anything else that could have been haunted. The day was warm and sunny, the forest was light on this side of the road, and we could see where the treeline ended from afar.
When we reached the open, craggy terrain beyond the trees, we were thoroughly unimpressed. Again, what we found was not what people typically picture when thinking of quarries – a large, man-made crater, carved tiers, filled with water. This wasn’t the kind of quarry that gets turned into a nice spot for weekend trips. No, this was the boring kind. A shelf quarry, and a small one at that. More than anything, it looked like a construction site without machines. The only building, if one can even call it that, was a rusty container office that looked every bit like it had been here since the quarry’s heyday. It sat in the shadow of the rock face, and at first glance, it was the only point of interest. Otherwise, the terrain was dominated by huge piles of grey beige gravel and debris, likely broken slabs of granite. Here and there lay overgrown remains of scaffolding, but there was certainly no excavator or other machinery here.
To my surprise, Tommy was unfazed. After surveying the area from the crater’s center for a while, he just shrugged and said: “That’s not as bad as I thought.”
“It’s not?” Baptiste blurted out what we both thought. “There’s nothing here!”
“There’s no excavator, you mean,” Tommy corrected with an air of importance. “Yeah, I changed my mind about that. I asked my boss if there’d be anything worth taking if I happened to come across an ownerless excavator. He said no.” He always referred to Stan Bentley, the junkyard owner, as his ‘boss’, and Baptiste and I always found that funny. “At least nothing that would fit in the car. He did say that, if I should somehow find myself in an old quarry, there might be pipes or valves he’d buy for a few bucks though. So keep your eyes open. There could still be money lying around here.”
Without anything to satisfy the explorers in us, a chance to make at least some money was the next best thing to justify the long drive. We decided to begin our search in the container office. Not because it was the most obvious place to look for pipes, but because there really wasn’t anything else that caught our eye. At best, we were hoping for an old tool box or maybe, if we were lucky, some spare parts for machines that were no longer here.
Once we reached the container, those hopes quickly faded. It was in really bad shape, even worse than it had looked from afar. One wall was almost completely rusted away, and there were holes in the others, which had left the interior exposed to the elements for who knows how long. In one corner was a trashed desk, half-buried under gravel, crushed beer cans, and cigarette butts. The remains of what had probably once been a filing cabinet lay piled up in another, overgrown with stinging nettles and chickweed. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t find anything worth taking when we rifled through the trash.
“Hey, check this out!” Baptiste stood next to a large hole in the back wall and gestured for Tommy and me to come over. “We might be onto something here!” He stepped aside to let us take a look.
Outside lay a locker unit with three doors, off-white and dented, but mostly intact. Not the small lockers from school. These were the big, sturdy ones. We had found similar lockers in an abandoned hardware store once, and there had been a bunch of good stuff in them. A whole bag of hinges, several brand new cash boxes with matching keys, an almost complete set of wrenches. Although the lockers behind the container office didn’t look all that lucrative at first glance – one was open and visibly empty – they were probably our best bet.
“Only one way to find out!” I proclaimed, then climbed outside through the hole. Baptiste followed and together we tried to open the closed middle locker. The door was stuck, probably because it was the most dented, and barely moved when we pulled on the handle. “We might need the crowbar.” I turned back to Tommy.
“Coming right up!” He briefly disappeared in the murky container where we had left our backpacks, and when he came back, he held out the crowbar to us. “You think those fit in the trunk?”
“What, the lockers?” I took the crowbar and passed it on to Baptiste. “No way, man. Unless we somehow pry them apart, we probably can’t even carry them.”
Tommy regarded the lockers for a moment with his ‘business face’, then he shrugged. “Well, let me know how it goes. I’ll go see if there’s anything that looks like a pump station.” With that, he disappeared in the container again, and I turned my attention back to Baptiste.
We managed to break the doors open, but there was nothing worth the trouble in the lockers. A faded plastic lunch box, some old work clothes including a pair of worn boots, and a manual for some kind of hydraulic system that had sustained severe water damage, to a point where it was more of a brick than a book.
Disappointed, but not too surprised, we made our way back to the front of the container office. Our backpacks were still by the door, but Tommy was nowhere to be seen. A hissing sound from above solved that mystery right away though. He had climbed the container and already spraypainted the circle of his trademark smiley face on the upper edge above the door. When he noticed us standing there, empty-handed, he pointedly shook the can before adding the eyes and a frowning mouth.
“I take it you didn’t see a pump station?” I didn’t really need to ask. If Tommy had seen anything promising, he’d not have jumped straight to marking the place with the unhappy smiley. He usually did that when we were about to leave – a happy face if the haul had been good, a frowning face if it hadn’t been worth the drive.
“You were right.” Tommy nodded to Baptiste, then put the cap back on his spray can, and slid it into his pocket. “There’s nothing here. Not anymore.” He climbed down to us, using the rickety scaffold on the short side of the container, then pointed across the crater landscape. “We can check out that thing, I guess.”
‘That thing’ turned out to be a small concrete building on the other end of the quarry. It was about the size of a phone booth and barely stood out from the dull surroundings. Without the faded red roof, we’d probably have overlooked it altogether. Even with our limited knowledge of quarries, we were fairly sure it was too small to be a pumping station. We went to take a look anyway, still hoping it might surprise us and be something that justified the long drive.
We walked between piles of gravel and shattered granite slabs, through a shallow rectangular hole full of trash and dead leaves, and hopped over the remains of a corroded fence. The small building turned out to be a substation of some kind. On one side, a faded sign listed transformer settings and something about fuses. The other side had a few buttons above a broken plastic hatch that hid a gaping, empty cable duct. Tommy pressed all buttons, and to nobody’s surprise, nothing happened.
“Three hours.” Tommy gave the substation a half-hearted kick, then turned around and strolled toward the looming rock face. “We drove three hours for this. No wonder people disappear around here. Why the hell would anyone want to stay?”
Baptiste had wandered away from the substation as well and now stood on top of a heap of light grey gravel. With the backpack on his shoulder and his hands in the pockets of his slightly too large varsity jacket, he looked like a prospector surveying the land. “I think Augur26 ran out of ideas. The whole update was bullshit. He had all summer to come up with something cool. And what did we get? A bridge, a lake, and a pile of rubble. We should have-”
“This way leads to heaven.”
It wasn’t what Tommy said that gave us pause, but the way he said it. The frustration was gone from his voice, and when he turned around to us, there was a smug smile on his face. Perplexed, I looked around, but didn’t see anything that explained the sudden change in his mood.
“What?” Baptiste, still on his elevated lookout spot, apparently couldn’t make sense of it either. “Which way?”
“This way.” Tommy pointed to the rock face. “That could be a pump room or some kind of maintenance tunnel. Or at least a storage room for spare parts.”
Shielding my eyes from the sun, it still took me a moment to see what he had spotted. Two doorways, maybe 80 feet apart, that led into the rock. The words Tommy had said were spraypainted next to the entrance closer to us. Heavenly or not, this discovery was certainly something. A quarry, Tommy had cited ‘his boss’ earlier, needed water to manage the dust which could damage machinery and posed health risks for the workers. Of course such a crucial system wasn’t standing around in the open! A sheltered maintenance tunnel like this made a lot more sense.
With newfound hope that we had finally found the motherlode that would make this trip pay off, we rushed toward the rock face. I spotted a heavy industrial door on the ground, and a short distance away, there was another in a pile of smashed slabs. Yes, this definitely looked like we were on the right track. Doors like these always protected something of value. The graffiti and the trash outside the doorways made it obvious that we were not the first to discover this place, but that didn’t mean anything. A lot of places we explored were vandalized in some way, or known hangout spots for ghost hunters, UFO enthusiasts, and the like. Being first wasn’t important. Being well equipped, that’s what really mattered. With Tommy’s tested and tried tool collection in our backpacks, we were more often ahead of the game than not.
Thanks to his headstart, Tommy reached the doorway first and rushed through without hesitation – only to emerge a moment later with an annoyed look on his face. “I don’t believe this!” he exclaimed and kicked a can from the trash pile on the ground. “It’s empty! It’s just a stupid hallway with nothing in it!” He walked a few steps along the rock face, kicked the can again, then dropped his backpack halfway between the two doorways. “Nothing! Not even a stupid cage light!”
“There’s got to be another door,” I shouted back. “Pumps are really big.” At least I imagined they were. “That’s probably just a lobby or something.”
“No, he’s right.” Baptiste, who had peered through the doorway, turned around to me, and he too looked disenchanted. “Maybe it was just used for storage.”
I threw my backpack to Tommy’s, then went to take a look for myself. The result was sobering. It really was just a hallway. Plain, bare concrete walls. Not even a fuse box or light switch. Old tiles on the floor that reminded me of the school showers we never used, but here, there wasn’t even a dirty drain in the middle. Nothing suggested there had been shelves to store anything, and there was certainly no door or junction that led deeper into the rock.
When I went back outside, Tommy stood by the other, more overgrown doorway and admired his latest work with a sneer. He had sprayed ‘This way leads to hell’ onto the wall and done a fairly decent job matching the other artist’s handwriting. Can-writing. Whatever you want to call it.
“Isn’t hell supposed to be… I don’t know, more exciting?” I asked, not really expecting an answer to that.
Tommy had one anyway. “No. Hell is supposed to be the worst. If it’s exciting, it’s not the worst.”
“Good point,” I admitted.
“Where’s the other door?” When we turned around, we saw that Baptiste had gone back to the industrial door and was shoving weeds and rubble away with his feet.
“Over there, I think.” I pointed to the nearest pile of broken slabs. “It’s not going to fit in the car though.”
“I know.” Baptiste briefly paused and leaned down, then continued to shove dirt away. “I just want to know what the damn hallway is meant to be. Maybe the doors have labels.”
I exchanged a bored glance with Tommy before we both shrugged and went to inspect the other door. With nothing better to do, we could as well satisfy Baptiste’s curiosity. On my own, I don’t think I’d have bothered. A part of me did wonder what a long, narrow room like that was used for, but I’d probably have brushed it off as ‘some kind of quarry utility only quarry workers need to know’.
As it turned out, the slabs and debris were heavier than they looked, and having neither work gloves nor a shovel meant we had to be careful with the sharp edges and broken glass in the pile. By the time we had freed the door enough to turn it around, Baptiste had already returned to the hallway. I didn’t see which doorway he went through.
Fuck. I’m sorry. I’ll get back to the story in a moment. It’s just that this uncertainty has been eating away at me for so many years. I went over that day in my mind so many times, hoping for a repressed memory to surface. That I subconsciously did see Baptiste enter the hallway, or at least caught a glimpse of him heading there. I think the ‘heaven’ doorway was closer, so he probably took that one, but maybe I’ve just been telling myself that for so long that it became real in my head. Fuck. Why did I not look up when he called out to us, saying he hadn’t found any clues? Why did I not tell him to come over and help us flip the damn door?
There were stenciled white letters on the door, but they were too faded and scratched to make out what they said. Tommy thought it had the word ‘valve’. I thought that was just wishful thinking and went to the doorways to report our lack of findings to Baptiste.
Before I went into the hallway, I grabbed a bottle of water from my backpack and noticed that the flashlight was gone. My first thought was that Baptiste had seen something that warranted a closer inspection, maybe a hidden hatch or compartment in a wall. That fleeting hope didn’t last long. When I went inside, Baptiste was standing in the center of the hallway, flashlight in hand, but not switched on yet.
“There’s something written on the door, but I couldn’t read it,” I said. “Tommy thinks it might say ‘valve’ or ‘voltage’. He’s still trying to decipher it.”
Baptiste shot me a puzzled look, then nodded to the other doorway. “What do you mean? He’s right there.”
“Right were?” Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder to see if Tommy had followed me even though Baptiste had clearly nodded in the other direction. “Do you-”
“Very funny.” Tommy’s voice had a slight echo, as if he was indeed in the hallway with us. But he wasn’t. There was no shadow anywhere near the other doorway either. My own was sharp and dark against the grey concrete. Had Tommy been just outside the doorway, I’d have expected his to look the same. “Now get in here. We’ll check the walls with the flashlight again, and if there’s nothing, we’ll head back to the car.”
“Get in here?” I repeated. “I am in here!”
Baptiste let out an overt, annoyed sigh, switched on the flashlight, and pointed it at the ceiling. “You’re both idiots.” He glared to where Tommy’s voice had come from. “I’ll check again, although I doubt the door really said ‘valve room’. It’s called ‘pumping room’. You said so yourself earlier.”
“I’m no expert on quarries,” Tommy’s voice sounded again, and I still couldn’t make sense of him casting no shadow. He had to be right in the doorway, and the sun stood high against the rock face outside. “And neither is my boss. Maybe he just got the terms mixed up.”
While Baptiste scanned the ceiling with the beam of the flashlight, I leaned outside to see how Tommy managed to hide in the doorway. The walls were not that thick, so I expected to find him in an awkward and uncomfortable position, just for the sake of this stupid prank. However, I didn’t see him at all. If he was going back and forth, his timing was nothing short of impressive.
“I’m not in the mood for this shit,” I said, making no attempt to hide my annoyance. Obviously, Tommy was wreaking his frustration over the wasted gas on me, but it hadn’t been my idea alone to come here. It had been a joint decision. “Let’s just wrap things up here and call it a day. Maybe we’ll have better luck next weekend.”
“What shit?” came a prompt answer, and now Tommy sounded puzzled. “I’m not doing anything! I’m just standing here! Are you blind?”
I wanted to reply, but Baptiste beat me to the punch: “This is hands down the worst prank you ever came up with.” He lowered the flashlight and looked back and forth between me and where Tommy claimed to be. “And the laziest. You can’t even be assed to hide outside. How is that supposed to be funny?”
“But he is hiding!” Tommy and I shouted with one voice.
“Yeah, sure.” Baptiste sighed and pointed the flashlight at the wall straight ahead to resume his inspection. “Then how come I can see you both just fine?”
For a moment, it was silent. Then Tommy and I asked, simultaneously and bewildered: “You can really see him?”
“Yes, of course I can. You couldn’t hide in here if you tried. That’s why this prank is so damn stupid.” Baptiste shook his head and first pointed the flashlight at me, then at the wall on the other end of the hallway. “And it’s not getting funnier if you look at me like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Again, it was silent for a long moment and I tried to sort my thoughts. I had assumed Baptiste was in cahoots with Tommy, but he seemed genuinely annoyed at us by now. Why would he keep playing along? Besides, he just wasn’t a good enough actor to keep it going. He’d have laughed out loud the moment he thought I fell for the joke. And in stark contrast, Tommy’s idea of a good prank was to jump out from a dark corner and yell ‘boo’. Mind games like this were not his style. The longer I thought about it, the less sense it made. When would the two of them have had time to come up with this anyway? In the minute or so it took me to drink some water? Even if that had been the case, it still didn’t explain how Tommy could hide so masterfully in an empty hallway.
“Tommy?” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask him. The mood had taken a sharp turn toward the uncanny, and I think I said his name out loud just to make sure he was still there.
“Yeah?” came his answer from the other end. He too sounded uncertain, bewildered.
“For fuck’s sake!” Baptiste stepped back, leaned against the wall, and took a deep breath. “On three,” he said, now calm and composed. His ‘diplomat voice’ – the tone he used whenever he had to mediate between me and Tommy. “On three, you both go outside. You take a good look at one another, and when you come back, you act normal again. Agreed?”
I nodded and I assume Tommy did, too, because Baptiste began to count.
Over the years, I often asked myself why he told us to go outside. Was it because we were acting stupid and he just wanted to finish his inspection in peace? Did he plan to pay us back with a prank of his own? “Guys, come back, I found something we missed!” – and when we rushed back, he’d say something like: “Oh, sorry, it’s just the brain cells you dropped.” Maybe he even had a gut feeling, despite his annoyance, that we were not playing around, and wanted us to prove to each other that we were really inside the hallway like we said.
I’ll never know, but damn, do I wish we had tried something, anything else. Why didn’t we just walk toward each other and meet in the middle? That too would have proven we were both in the hallway. Why didn’t we call it quits and leave together? None of us was holding out for an amazing discovery anymore. We had no reason to stick around. But we did.
When Baptiste got to three, I went outside, only to see Tommy exit the other doorway. I imagine his expression mirrored my own, a mix of relief and confusion, when our eyes met. Like myself, he had simply taken a step, not crawled out of a hidden nook or jumped out of a bush. He had been in the hallway, right by the doorway, just like he had said. There was no other explanation, but I had trouble wrapping my mind around it. How was this possible? All three of us had walked through the damn hallway from end to end. I knew there was nothing that could have blocked my view.
“That’s so weird,” Tommy muttered. “I really couldn’t see you in there.” His gaze jumped back and forth between the doorway and me. “What is this? Some trick like magicians do on TV?”
Stumped for an answer, or any words at all, I just shrugged. This being a trick was the only rational explanation, and at the same time, it didn’t make any sense. I had seen magicians do such tricks on TV myself, when they made people or even buildings disappear. But this wasn’t Las Vegas. There was no reason why anyone would have set up an elaborate stage trick in an abandoned quarry in rural Ohio.
“Let’s swap.” In my preoccupation, I hadn’t noticed that Tommy had come over to me. “I go back in this way, you take the other.” He pointed to the other doorway. “Let’s see if it works both ways.”
I was so perplexed that I barely processed what he said. Was it possible that Augur26 wasn’t full of shit, after all? Maybe there really was something to his ‘flimsy spots’. Not exactly what he claimed – obviously, we were both still here – but it was easy to connect a strange optical illusion that made people invisible to disappearances.
“Are we doing this or not?” Tommy gave me a nudge, and that finally set me into motion.
“On three,” I said when I reached my position outside the other doorway. He nodded, and I began the count.
For a split second, I was relieved to see Tommy on the opposite end, but that didn’t last. A moment later, the reality of what I was seeing sank in. It was only the two of us in the hallway. Baptiste wasn’t there anymore.
“That can’t be!” Tommy’s voice echoed with disbelief. “He can’t possibly be hiding! Where did he go?”
We turned back to the doorways, but I think we both knew that there was no way Baptiste had snuck outside without being noticed. How could he? We were gone for a minute at most, and we had stood right outside the doorways.
“Baptiste? Where are you?” I shouted into the hallway. “This isn’t funny! There’s really something strange going on here!”
No answer.
“Yeah, we’re not joking!” Tommy went a few steps toward the center, then stopped. I could see the hesitation to go farther in his eyes, as if he had reached an invisible barrier he didn’t dare to cross. “Let’s just grab our stuff and leave.”
No answer.
“Let’s switch again.” Tommy tried to sound assertive, but even across the distance I could tell it was a farce. “Maybe that’s how it works.”
I just stood there, paralyzed by the onslaught of thoughts in my mind. This couldn’t be real. Flimsy spots were just a thing Augur26 had made up to get more clicks on his website. It had to be a hoax, just like all the others. We had been to so many ‘cursed’ or ‘haunted’ places, and never found anything remotely paranormal. We had never found the smallest piece of evidence that aliens had visited the alleged landing sites, had never seen the strange lights or shadowy figures that were said to roam abandoned buildings, had never heard the otherworldly whispers and groans Haunted Ohio described. And yet there was no logical explanation for Baptiste’s disappearance from the hallway.
“Come on, man!” Tommy tried again, now more urgent. “We have to do something! Maybe we just need to switch back and boom, there he is!”
He’s not here anymore, I wanted to say. If he were, he could hear us. And if he could hear us panic like that, he’d never be able to keep a straight face. We’d be hearing him laugh his ass off right now. I didn’t say any of that out loud though. I said: “Alright, let’s try that.”
I counted to three, just like before. We exited the hallway, just like before. We swapped doorways, just like before. When we went back inside, we could see each other, unlike before. And there was still no trace of Baptiste. That day, 25 years ago, was the last time anyone ever saw him.
Tommy and I tried everything we could think of. We threw rocks, twigs, and trash from the piles outside back and forth. None of it hit an invisible barrier or vanished into thin air. I rolled my open water bottle through the hallway. I’m not sure what I thought would happen. Maybe I hoped that the spilled water would reveal footsteps or something. Of course, no such thing happened. As a last resort, Tommy took Baptiste’s backpack into the hallway and started messing with it. He rifled through the contents and threatened to spraypaint it, knowing full well Baptiste would have hated that. Had he really been hiding somewhere, that would have lured him out for sure. But he wasn’t hiding. He was gone.
Once we ran out of ideas what we could try in the hallway, Tommy and I regrouped at our backpacks outside. The late afternoon sun was hiding behind ragged gray clouds, and the wind had slightly picked up. Somehow, we convinced ourselves that Baptiste must have snuck out in the brief moment when we were both at the same doorway and I hadn’t been paying attention. I don’t think either of us really believed that, but we ran with it anyway. It was what we wanted to believe had happened. Something normal. Something we could act upon.
And so we searched the quarry. We went back to the substation, searched in and around the container office, climbed heaps of gravel and called Baptiste’s name. We checked every pit in the ground, no matter how shallow. We looked behind every bush and pile of trash. At some point, it began to drizzle and we sought shelter in the container.
Tommy’s cigarette flared in the murky dimness when he took a drag, just before he said: “We should go back to the car.” I didn’t reply. He slowly exhaled the smoke, then: “It’s getting dark. And with the rain now…”
“Yeah, we probably should.” I absently peered out through the door. In the twilight, the quarry looked like an alien planet, a pockmarked landscape with blurred, unidentifiable shapes here and there. “Maybe that’s where he went. Maybe he’ll be pissed that we made him wait for so long.”
Another drag, another gray cloud in the darkness. “That sounds like Baptiste for sure.” Tommy sounded neither convinced nor convincing, but he tried. “He’d stand around for hours just to prove a point. He’s stubborn like that.”
Baptiste was not waiting by the car. We could see that even before we reached the barrier and the old sign. Neither of us said anything until we had walked around the car, as if we seriously expected to find him hiding behind it. Tommy even checked the backseat after unlocking the car, although it was obvious that Baptiste couldn’t have gotten in without the key.
I don’t know which of us came up with the idea that a security guard or cop had caught Baptiste. The barrier didn’t look that old, we theorized, and the driveway seemed fairly well-maintained. It was entirely possible that somebody still patrolled the area, right? Abandoned or not, the quarry still had to be somebody’s property. Phrases like ‘liability’ and ‘safety hazard’ were thrown around; things we had read on warning signs and never given a shit about. All I remember is that the twilight had turned into darkness by the time Tommy started the car, and that the patter of the rain on the windshield had grown louder.
We had talked ourselves into thinking that a sheriff or deputy had seen Baptiste sneak around the car or walk up to it from a restricted area. That he had picked him up and taken him either to the sheriff’s office or back home to his aunt. Baptiste was almost 16, so it could have gone either way, we pondered, but if he had been taken to the sheriff’s office, his aunt would at least have gotten a call. Of course, it was all an act. Deep down, we knew it was incredibly unlikely, but we ran with it anyway and kept pretending to each other that we were sure that this was what had happened. It was the only rational explanation we had left, and we clung to it to smother the truth neither of us wanted to admit: We were afraid.
During the drive home we didn’t talk much. Just a few brief exchanges to add credence to our far-fetched story. Idle remarks that we felt bad about getting Baptiste in trouble with his aunt or, worse yet, the cops. What we’d say in his defense if the sheriff asked about our adventure. How were we supposed to know? The sign doesn’t say it’s a restricted area. There’s not even a fence! We agreed that we’d be more careful in the future, stick to places closer to home, and refrain from pranking each other. Shallow remarks meant to convince ourselves and each other that all would be well in the end.
Baptiste’s aunt only opened after we rang the doorbell at a least a dozen times. She barely listened when we told her that we couldn’t find him, that a sheriff or security guard must have picked him up. Before she slammed the door in our faces, she said spending the night in the sheriff’s office would teach Baptiste a lesson, and warned us to never disturb her again that late at night.
In retrospect, it’s obvious she just wanted to get rid of us and go back to her blaring TV. That evening though? Tommy and I heard what we wanted to hear. Baptiste had been picked up by the sheriff. His aunt had been informed, and she had just decided to leave him to stew in the sheriff’s office overnight. Against all odds, our wishful thinking had turned out to be the truth. And we stuck to that for the rest of the weekend. When we went back to the house the next day, Baptiste’s aunt didn’t open – and we assured each other that she had gone to pick him up from the sheriff’s office across town. “He’ll probably be grounded for a few weeks.” I can still hear myself say that on our way from the porch back to Tommy’s car. Baptiste had never been grounded for a day in his life. His aunt was glad for every moment he spent outside her house, but I somehow banished that knowledge from my mind that weekend.
Of course, it all fell apart on Monday when Baptiste didn’t show up to school. Unlike Tommy and I, he didn’t have a habit of being late or skipping days, so Mr. Stevens immediately took note of his absence. At first, he didn’t say anything, but he looked up with irritation when we answered the roll call and Baptiste didn’t. During the first period, Mr. Stevens kept glancing over to us with a quizzical expression. After math, when everyone else went outside for recess, he made us stay in the classroom. Apparently, Tommy and I were not as good at pretending as we thought. Mr. Stevens said we’d been acting strange all morning and asked if that had anything to do with Baptiste’s absence. Tommy being Tommy, he snapped at him, saying that it was none of Mr. Stevens’ business. Thanks to a lack of sleep, my reaction was a lot calmer and less coherent. I stumbled over my words when I tried to explain that Baptiste had been grounded for staying out too late, and Tommy interrupted several times to point out that it wasn’t our fault.
I don’t think it’s surprising that our disjointed story raised suspicions. My nonsensical claim that Baptiste’s aunt was so strict about curfew that she grounded him even from school, paired with Tommy’s defensive behavior, sure looked like we had something to hide. It was obvious even then that Mr. Stevens didn’t believe us, but he let us go without asking further questions. He did something about the situation though. As sad as it sounds, he probably cared a whole lot more than Baptiste’s aunt. I later learned that Mr. Stevens called her and she brushed him off, and only his persistence finally made her file a missing person report – three days after Baptiste’s actual disappearance.
What followed was a weirdly short investigation. A deputy came to talk to Tommy and me a few days later, and we told him our story. That we didn’t know the quarry was a restricted area, that there were no signs or fences, and that we lost sight of Baptiste while exploring. We had agreed to leave out the part about the ‘flimsy spots’ and the weirdness of the hallway though, thinking we wouldn’t be taken seriously if we mentioned it. I guess a part of me was still hoping against hope that Tommy and I had just imagined the circumstances of Baptiste’s disappearance. Or that by some twisted logic, everything would be normal in the quarry if the cops didn’t know there was supposed to be something strange. That they’d find him and all that really happened was that he had gotten lost in the forest and ended up at the old campground without a way to get home.
Tommy got more creative with his recount. It probably wasn’t his best idea. He told the deputy that we had seen a police car speed off when we came back up the driveway, and that’s why we thought Baptiste had been arrested for trespassing. Nothing I said backed up that claim, and of course, this mismatch cast doubt on our statements. Ultimately, that wasn’t the reason the sheriff barely looked into the case though. Baptiste’s aunt was. She told him that Baptiste had ‘always been trouble’ and likely ran away to live with his uncle in ‘Pennsylvania or Indiana or wherever that damn deadbeat had moved after their divorce’. The sheriff had probably already decided to run with that story before he sent the deputy out.
It didn’t come as a big surprise that Tommy got expelled shortly after. In school, rumors that he had set Baptiste up to this or even helped him get to his uncle made the rounds. Baptiste had never even mentioned this uncle to us, but that was the story the newspaper printed and our classmates believed. That Tommy got expelled only confirmed it to them.
In school, I became a loner. After the first buzz over Baptiste’s disappearance died down, everyone just went back to normal. They carried on as if nothing had happened, as if Baptiste had never been there. A few classmates asked me if I had helped Baptiste plan this, if we had visited his uncle during summer, if I knew where he lived. Stupid questions, and I had only answers that didn’t satisfy them. The teachers now called me ‘disinterested’ and ‘aloof’ instead of ‘disruptive’. For the most part, they just left me in peace. With Tommy gone and me living in my own little world, they finally got the orderly classroom they always wanted.
I still hung out with Tommy after school. Of course, we talked about what had happened, but we dropped the pretense that there was a rational explanation. We went over all the what-ifs and what-could-we-have-dones, and I shared the meager results of my research in the library. Since Tommy wasn’t allowed on the school premises anymore, I had to do all of that by myself. Some days, I sat at the computer for hours and searched for clues on Haunted Ohio. I took notes of everything that seemed remotely connected to disappearances in the area, but other than Augur26’s website, there were no mentions of ‘flimsy spots’ or the quarry. My note in his guestbook – the only way to get in touch with Augur26 – remained unanswered, just like the two messages from other visitors that told him they enjoyed his website and to keep up the good work. With so little to go on, Tommy and I ended up going in circles, discussing the same bits and pieces of information again and again, until we ran out of things to say about them.
The one thing that never came up was what might seem to be the most obvious: going back to the quarry. I’m sure we both thought about it, but neither of us made the suggestion. In fact, we stopped exploring abandoned places altogether. It was a silent agreement. I simply didn’t look for new destinations on Haunted Ohio anymore, and Tommy never asked. We didn’t need to scavenge anymore, we told ourselves, because Tommy now had a real job at the junkyard.
We stayed in touch after Tommy was expelled, but our lives slowly drifted apart over time. The work at the junkyard kept him busy during the week, and without our weekend trips, our hangouts were often filled with long silences and not knowing what to do with ourselves.
I barely graduated high school. College wasn’t really an option, but I knew I had to get out of this town, away from the past and its unanswered questions. It felt like everyone but me had moved on from Baptiste’s disappearance. At the time, I thought maybe I too just had to accept it and get on with my life. I couldn’t change what had happened anyway. So I did what one does when there are no other options. I joined the army as soon as I turned 18. While it wasn’t really for me, it at least put some distance between me and the nagging questions neither I nor the sheriff nor Haunted Ohio could answer. If nothing else, it gave me some structure – and paid well enough to afford a small apartment in Columbus after I left the army.
Augur26’s website disappeared at some point. One day, as I passed by a building that bore an eerie resemblance to an abandoned store Baptiste and I had explored years ago, I just couldn’t stop wondering what had really happened to him. After mulling over my thoughts for days, I finally turned to the one place that might have answers: an internet cafe.
It took me a while to find our old hunting grounds, and when I did, I was a little surprised the webring still existed. Haunted Ohio was a shadow of its former self. Over the years, many websites had stopped working and nothing new had been added. Augur26’s journal of ‘flimsy spots’ was still there, but it had obviously long been abandoned. Updates had become less and less frequent, images had been replaced with placeholders, and the entry about the quarry was gone altogether.
When I checked again several months later, the url returned a ‘404 page not found’, along with a popup that informed me that the host had discontinued its service.
For a good few years, it felt as if I had gotten my life together, against all odds. I found work in construction, met a woman I got engaged to, but ultimately didn’t marry, and only went home for holidays. Sometimes, when the family gatherings became too insufferable, I met up with Tommy. It always played out the same way. We caught up on our uneventful lives and jobs over some beers, realized there wasn’t much to talk about, reminisced about the good old days instead, and inevitably got to the day Baptiste disappeared. Then the conversation died down, we got drunk, and tried to forget again.
I still remember the last time we caught up in vivid detail. It’s been over two years, but when I think back, it feels like we talked just the other day. Thanksgiving had brought out the best in my folks. Mom was stressed, Dad was drunk, and a gaggle of distant kin I hadn’t seen in a decade pestered me with questions only to talk over my answers. I had given Tommy a call a few days before, just to let him know that I was in town and see how he was doing. He wasn’t surprised when I showed up late in the evening. We plopped down on the porch of his late grandmother’s house, cracked a cold one, and fell into old habits. After the usual banter about work and life in general, we landed on the subject of our youth once again.
I had a head start of three to six beers, which is probably why I broached a subject I could never bring myself to mention on previous visits. I had often ruminated about it by myself, but it felt wrong, almost taboo, to say anything to Tommy. People had always blamed him for Baptiste’s disappearance, and sometimes I got the impression that he blamed himself, too. He didn’t need me to add to that, so I had kept these strange thoughts to myself. This time around, however, my buzz overrode that feeling.
“Do you ever wonder which doorway Baptiste went through before he vanished?”
At first, Tommy didn’t answer and kept staring across the overgrown plot of land behind the house. “Sometimes, I guess,” he then said and turned to study the beer can in his hand. “Doesn’t really matter though, does it?”
“I don’t know.” I crushed my empty can and tossed it to the others before I reached for a new one. “Maybe it does.” For a long moment, there was only the rustling of leaves and the chirping of crickets, then the alcohol made me say out loud what I had kept to myself for so many years: “Maybe we’d know if he went to heaven or hell.”
Tommy sat up straight in his wicker chair, as straight as his intoxication allowed anyway. “What do you mean? You think he’s dead?” I could feel his glare, glassy as it was, pierce my temple. “We looked everywhere, man. We called for him. If he fell into a ditch and needed help, he’d have answered. We-”
“No, not dead,” I cut him off. “Just… elsewhere.” I cracked the can and drank a sip. The wind had picked up and a light drizzle was falling on the wilderness beyond the porch. “The graffiti, you know? ‘This way leads to heaven.’ Sometimes I wonder if it meant anything.”
Tommy didn’t react. He just kept staring at me with an unspoken question in his eyes. Even in my drunken state, I realized what I was about to imply. That both graffitis meant something. That they had opened gates to other dimensions; flimsy spots between worlds, just like the website had claimed. That it was Tommy’s fault if one doorway led to hell, and that Baptiste may have entered it and…
“It’s just a stupid phrase,” Tommy jolted me out of my thoughts. His voice was firm, verging on angry. He knew exactly where I was going with this, as vague as my insinuation had been. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I quickly said. “It’s just a stupid thought that pops in my mind when I had one too many.” I toasted to Tommy and took a swig from my beer, already regretting I had said anything about the damn graffiti. It was an absurd idea to begin with. Heaven and hell. Who even believed in that stuff?
For a while, we silently stared into the night, then we picked up a different subject and talked for another hour or so without saying much. That late November night, two years ago, was the last time I spoke to Tommy.
The following year, I skipped the holiday visits and instead spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in Columbus, with a woman I had started seeing earlier that year. It was a short-lived affair. By the time I went home in September, it had already long run its course. I hadn’t planned to visit this year either, but my old man had finally managed to drink himself into an early grave. For the sake of my mother, I attended the funeral. Once there, I got the distinct impression that she couldn’t care less though, and so I left the reception early.
I tried to call Tommy, to no avail. It was only afternoon, so I figured he’d still be at work and swung by the junkyard to maybe set up something for later. I didn’t find him there either. Instead, I learned that he hadn’t shown up all week. “Probably skipped town.” Old Stan Bentley sighed and took a drag from his hand-rolled cigarette. “Had some trouble with the law again. Never said a word, of course, but I’ve known the boy for so long, I can tell.”
I thanked Mr. Bentley and left. Unsure what to do with myself, I just wandered around town and let my thoughts drift. Few things had changed since the days of my youth – time simply moves slower so far from the bustle of big cities. The corner store where Baptiste and I had bought comics and candy, and nobody had ever asked for Tommy’s ID when he bought cigarettes, still looked exactly the same as back then. Peeling white paint with faded blue trims, a testament to the owner’s questionable Greek heritage. Across the street, the gas station that had often been the last stop before our excursions hadn’t changed either, although it looked closed.
Lost in thought, I found myself standing outside the fenced premises of my old high school at some point. The fence was new, some of the graffiti on the gym had been removed – or at least an attempt had been made – and the bushes around the red brick building had become larger. My eyes were drawn to a row of second story windows though. I couldn’t say if they were still the same as back in my day, but I knew what was behind them. The school library. For a moment, I wondered if there were kids in there right now, pretending to study or do homework while browsing strange websites.
I tried to shake those thoughts off and continued my aimless stroll, and a little while later, I reached the shabbier parts of town. Once upon a time, these streets had been familiar, and in some way, they still were. I recognized some of the rundown homes and neglected yards, could even place names and match faces to them. However, the trailer homes were gone and in their place, there was now a large construction site that didn’t look like anybody had worked on it in a while. One eyesore replaced with another. We’d have had a field day with that, I caught myself thinking, and my eyes instinctively scanned for tool boxes and valuable metal.
Further down the main road, I stopped again. A short distance ahead was the house I had been to so many times in my youth. It looked better maintained than I remembered. The grass of the once-overgrown front yard was cut, the hole in the porch roof had been patched. For a moment, I was tempted to go over and ring the doorbell. I had no illusions that Baptiste would open, but maybe his aunt still lived here. Maybe she had heard something. Maybe the sheriff had-
I froze when the door moved. A part of me, in spite of all reason, expected to see Baptiste walk out, wave and smile, ready for a new adventure. Would I even recognize him? It was the first time I fully realized that he’d have grown up. In my mind, he had been 15, almost 16 all through the years, and I had never tried to picture him as an adult. When the door opened, I knew immediately it wasn’t him who walked out. It was a young, white woman with a stroller, followed by a young man who carried their bags.
There was nothing unusual or strange about them, but the sight was devastating. It wasn’t them, it was what they represented that hit me so hard. This family had probably been living in this house for years. They had fixed the roof, mowed the grass, lived their lives without any knowledge or concern for the significance this place had to me. As I stood there and watched them walk down the sidewalk with their stroller, a familiar numbness set in. The same feeling of nothingness I had felt back when people stopped talking about Baptiste’s disappearance, when life moved on, and I realized that nobody but Tommy and I cared to remember.
And now, I am here again. It’s a dirty midwestern late summer day, and it looks like it’s going to rain later. The old quarry sign looks almost exactly the way I remember. Just the smaller letters are now faded beyond recognition. There’s only one other car parked in front of it, a beat-up truck with local license plates and scrap metal in the bed. The barrier is gone, but the two concrete cones are still here, overgrown with lichen. The forest left and right of the driveway has grown thicker, so much that the crater landscape of the quarry is barely visible until one walks halfway down the slope.
The container office must have succumbed to the elements long ago. In its place is just a pile of rusted metal, half-hidden in a field of weeds, thistles, and nettles. Wind and rain filled the shallow pits with dirt and gravel, and the small substation lost its roof. One of the safety doors is still on the ground, but there’s no telling which. Somebody must have moved it because it’s a good distance from where we found either door back then.
A part of me expected the graffiti to be gone, either faded or defaced by another vandal’s artwork. But they are both still there, as if no time passed at all outside those two damn doorways. This way leads to heaven. This way leads to hell. A trail of cigarette butts leads toward the latter, and there’s a bunch of crushed beer cans just outside. They can’t have been here for long.
The wind has picked up, and I can see the first drops of rain hit the gray gravel. Looks like it’s going to get nasty out here soon, so I’ll stop recording now and head inside. Hopefully, that granite slab offers some protection from the weather. I doubt anyone will come looking for me, but maybe my phone will be found one day, and with it my story. Maybe one day, we will be remembered.