From The Dark

Heather Blakey asks in the Man Hole Cover Exercise:
What is behind your manhole cover? How does the symbol of a manhole cover resonate for you? How does it help you understand your writing life? How can it help you contain your inner work?


(This picture is from the Seattle Underground Tour and this room and chair really exist below the streets of Seattle.)

My manhole cover is in an alley where several years ago a terrible thing happened; innocent people were shot and killed by robbers in a little club with a Red Door.

Now the ghosts of those people haunt that club whose red doorway is less then five feet away from the cover I can see in my head but refuse to photograph or draw.

Let me then describe it to you.

The iron cover has little fishes swimming around its edges and in the center is an Indian in full headdress that looks in stern reverence at the door in front of the building where the angry spirits live.

Respect for spirits is taken very seriously in this part of Town and the site is feared so much that the door to this place isn’t locked because no one goes in.

This is the place where my manhole cover exists and that is what I had to face every single time I would try to lift the Cover with a crowbar or when I tried to pry it loose from the brick road with my bare hands.

As if that wasn’t frustrating enough the entire time I worked at lifting the cover I was afraid that the Red Door would swing open and something would see me.

Maybe it would even talk to me.

I didn’t find the thought pleasant but it didn’t stop me from trying over and over again to lift that cover.

Then one day I looked up and saw to my left, across the way from the Red Door a boarded up window and next to it a door that was opened just little.

How simple it was just to walk into the corpse of my favorite store.

Years ago you could purchase exotic fish and plants and remedies for luck and love and revenge in this little shop. You could find children’s toys and woman’s gowns crafted from silks and embroidered with beads and jewels and kitchen utensils and candies and exotic fruits, and vegetables from all over the world all stacked in no particular order on wooden shelves.

You could also find things on those sunlit shelves that existed in the dark everywhere else.

The store never displayed a name or had an address. Its windows weren’t covered but that didn’t matter because you didn’t look in unless you had business there. I don’t know, I guess it was considered bad manners to look in when others were shopping.

At least that’s the feeling I had.

No one ever admitted that they shopped there but if the truth be known we all shopped there at one time or another.

It closed a few days after the tragedy happened.

You see it was only two days after the murders that people started seeing and hearing the Spirits in their last horrible moments of life.

Someone told me that they were shopping for gifts and decorations for their New Years Celebrations when they heard the gunshots and screams and saw a ghost woman crawl into the alley.

They watched the poor ghost woman die with her face against the manhole cover.

People stayed away from the Alley after that.

I’ve never seen her but I know its true. You would know it too if you looked down into that alley. Then you would have stayed away like the rest of us after becoming so sure of something that should have been impossible to believe.

On the day I went through the open door all I found were the shadows of the inventory that use to be on the shelves and in every corner in each room I could hear whispers and laughter and conversations and even music.

Then I found the doorway in the very back of the shop.

It was an old door with a drawstring latch and stamped on the door was the word
“ Exit”

I reached out and traced the raised letters with my fingers and then I pushed at the letters and the door slid open and I looked down a set of wooden stairs held against the walls by rusted spikes.

What sort of exit I wonder is downstairs, in the dark?

I found out.

I used those stairs eaten up with wood rot and I went down into that darkness, I walked under the streets and then I found myself in this room with the vaulted ceilings and red brick walls and warped cement floors.

I come here often and sit in this high back chair and in my lap is the china doll with no face.

This is where I learn my stories and this is where I come to write my tales and some of it I make up…and as for the rest? Fact or fiction?

Well, that's my secret.

Come down here sometime and maybe you’ll be able to figure it out for yourself.

I dare you.