The Night Nesha Hid Us Under the Lawn

Nesha's mom and dad were both out for the night, which suited us just fine. Her dad was working late, and her mom was spending the weekend over at her sister's place.

We got dinner delivered, queued up a show neither of us actually watched, and I spent half the evening rewinding the same clip because Nesha swore I had missed the funniest part.

The rest of the night was just us talking — gossip from school, things we had really done over the summer, and a few stories where the truth got stretched a little.

Just past one in the morning, Nesha's phone buzzed. I caught her dad's name along the top of the screen before she flipped it toward herself. She read the message a second time, darkened the screen, then glanced up at the clock hanging beneath the TV. A couple of minutes later she picked the phone up and checked it again. She had been sprawled sideways against the couch all evening, but now she was sitting straight up, dragging one thumb along the side of her finger.

"Nesha?" She didn't answer. Then she started cleaning up. She went upstairs, traded her pajamas for jeans and a sweatshirt, and when she came back she set my shoes down directly in front of me like the decision was already made.

"What the hell is going on?" I asked. "Please," was all she said. My phone was still plugged in on her nightstand, so I just followed her down the stairs.

She didn't switch on a single light. She unlocked the back door and stepped out into the yard.

Behind the property ran a narrow strip of maple and cedar that divided the two rows of backyards. I had walked through it a few times in daylight, and it had never taken me more than a minute to get across.

At night, though, the trees swallowed everything past the lawn. The trunks closest to us were easy to pick out, but beyond them they stacked up darker and darker until I couldn't tell where the fences were or which shapes were the houses behind us.

Nesha walked about halfway across the grass, then veered toward a maple beside the side fence, stopping well short of the tree line. I went along with it because I was still convinced this was some prank she had cooked up to scare me. The grass was wet under my shoes, and the branches kept shifting overhead whenever the wind moved through them. I kept glancing toward the trees as we crossed the lawn.

Next to the maple, she dropped into a crouch and started digging her fingers beneath the grass. A square patch of turf came up with a sheet of plywood under it, and for one strange second it looked as though some enormous burrowing spider had dug its tunnel right beneath the lawn.

The opening was barely wider than her shoulders. She swung herself down through it without even glancing back at me. When I knelt at the edge, I could see her about four feet below in a pocket of dug-out earth, the walls and roof propped with short lengths of lumber.

She reached her hand up toward me. I nearly turned around and walked back to the house — but then I saw her fingers trembling, and before I could think I took her hand.

My shoes dragged against the sides of the shaft as Nesha pulled me sideways, and I landed with my knees folded almost up to my chest. The chamber was tighter than it had looked from above. The only way I could sit upright was hunched forward, and Nesha had to angle one leg aside so mine could fit between hers.

She reached for the cover and I pressed my palm against the plywood. "Please, no," I said. For a few seconds neither of us moved. Then I felt her shaking beside me, and I let my hand drop.

She dragged the lid across the opening, and just as I had feared, the hole went completely black. I kept blinking, waiting for my eyes to catch up, but they never did. I could feel her shin under my calf and the edge of her shoe against mine, and when I tried to shift my right leg my knee knocked into the boards above us.

Neither of us spoke. The position turned painful within minutes. My left foot went numb, and when I tried to flex my calf it cramped so hard I had to knead the muscle with my fingers without moving anything else. Every small adjustment pushed part of me into Nesha or into the dirt wall.

She was shivering hard enough that her knee kept tapping against mine. I started feeling above me for the rim of the lid. Nesha shoved my hand back down between my knees. Her palm was clammy, and she kept it pressed over mine afterward.

I tried counting to keep track of the time, and somewhere past two hundred I lost my place and started over from one.

My back began throbbing from the hunch, and there was no position I could shift into unless Nesha moved first. After a while I just stopped trying. Her knee kept knocking into mine.

Then she leaned in close enough that I could feel her hair against my cheek. "I'm so sorry," she whispered. "This doesn't happen very often, and it really wasn't supposed to happen tonight." I waited, and the darkness suddenly felt like it was pressing on my chest.

"My parents are usually here when it does. I've never had to do this without one of them." I pictured her dad folded into this hole beside her. He was taller than either of us. I thought about her mother, who was not a small woman either. Imagining all three of them squeezed down here at once made me want the lid off so badly that I lifted my arm again. Nesha caught my sleeve with both hands and pinned my arm back against my chest.

Then she brought her mouth right up to my ear. "Dad saw it on the camera. He texted me the second it came out of the trees." Her grip tightened. "It hunts at night. It comes from the grove." Her voice sounded so thin and frightened. "It can't smell our fear through the ground."