Going home.

It's hard to imagine this neighborhood ever having been inhabited; harder still to envision a time when it was crowded with families and kids. Now it's shit. The buildings are gutted and empty; a few have some floors still but mostly they're just walls and windows surrounded by fields of rubble and glass.

Tommy and I stood on the sidewalk in front of our old apartment. He couldn't seem to bring himself to look at it, but I couldn't take my eyes off it. Just looking at it brought back so many memories, flooding back like ghosts. Meanwhile Tommy stood, hands in his pockets, kicking at the weeds that grew out of the cracks in the sidewalk, looking anywhere but behind him at the skeletal building that glowered over us. Neither one of us could find anything to say, either, so we stood silent.

Finally Alex arrived. He pulled his Beamer in between Tommy's dirty Ford pickup and my Civic and got out. He stood at the driver's side for a moment, looking up at the building with his hand shading his eyes, then came over and gave Tommy and me each a quick, stiff embrace. We still couldn't seem to find words that didn't seem out of place and awkward, so we just stood there for a moment not saying anything at all.

Finally we turned back to the building. Tommy was the last one to look at it and even after he turned, he kept his eyes down several seconds before finally lifting them to confront it.

It was weird, that moment: the three of us standing on the sidewalk looking at that old burned out husk. I've never held much truck with people trying to make things out like humans (Alex once told me there was a word for that, "anthropomorphising") but it sure felt like those empty windows were staring at us, accusing us. It was quiet, too - quiet enough that I could hear a plane lifting off from the airport across the bay and a distant boat horn. Nothing else though. It felt like everything was waiting.

Tommy broke the silence.

"I've got a bolt cutter in the truck. I'll grab it."

He seemed eager to move away from the building, even if just to take a few steps to his old truck where he lifted a long-handled cutter, a pry bar and a couple of small spades from the back. We approached the rusted gate that stood in front of the front steps and Tommy snapped the padlock with a loud popping sound that made us all look around nervously. Force of habit I guess - it'd been ages since any of us broke into anyplace but you never lose that guilty sense when you cut a lock you didn't put there yourself. Tommy swung the gate open with a shriek of hinges that hadn't moved in years, and we walked through and up the steps and between the busted doors that hung crookedly from the beaten doorframe.

I got a strange chill as I stood in the entryway; it felt like it hadn't really changed much at all. I wish I could say it was because it hadn't suffered too badly but the truth was it had always been a dump. Half the mail slot doors had been broken out and grafitti covered almost every wall. Rubble was strewn all over the floor, and there were piles in the corners that we had learned as children were better left unidentified.

We walked through the entryway and back to the stairwell. I wouldn't have tried to go up those shattered stairs for half of Bill Gates's fortune, but the way down looked pretty intact and relatively safe. We snapped on our flashlights and began carefully descending.

The first floor below ground level was more apartments - they were only about three quarters underground and had little windows in wells on the street level that let some light in - or at least they did before they were boarded up. Tommy once told us when we were kids about how he'd climbed down into one of those window wells and watched Mrs. Trevino taking a shower - and how she'd known he was there and had given him a real show. Of course we knew Tommy was full of shit - if anything, he probably caught a glimpse of a bra strap and crapped himself and ran. Tommy was always good at turning bullshit into a good story.

We kept moving down, deeper into the darkness. Pretty soon we reached the basement. There was about an inch of water standing in the stairwell, oily and dark. We waded through it (and I noticed that Alex didn't even seem to care that his polished Bostonians were pretty much getting ruined) over to the boiler room where Tommy rolled the thick metal door open.

There are times when darkness can seem like more than just the absence of light, when it can feel like a thick and present thing, like fog. Nights at my Aunt and Uncle's place upstate, out in the country, it would feel like the darkness was oozing out from between the trees like a vapor. It felt the same way in that boiler room - it felt like the darkness there was so thick that the only thing that might cut through it would be to peel the building back like a rotten log and let the full midday sun shine on all the creeping things that lived there in the blackness. As it was, I felt somehow certain that there were corners in that room that would stay black and shadowed even if I shined my flashlight right directly into them.

"Shit," Alex muttered, then repeated, "Shit."

"Come on, let's go," Tommy said, a little too loud for my preference. He clutched the pry bar in front of him like a weapon and advanced into the room. We followed him in and we all moved to the back corner of the room where the hatch was.

There have been plenty of things in my life I haven't wanted to do. I remember having to climb out of a helicopter in Viet Nam with artillery shells thundering overhead and AK-47 fire raining down from the hillside overlooking the LZ - my legs were rubbery and my head felt far away and faint. It took all my willpower to not just sit down right where I stood and flop over to one side, but I managed to get my ass in gear and run to a nearby foxhole.

This was worse.

As we moved into that hellish room where the shadows ate our light I could feel my heart trying to break free of my chest. I don't know how I made myself go over to that coal hatch; I know sure as I'm alive that if Tommy and Alex hadn't been there at my side I could no more have taken two steps into that darkness than I could walk on water. But somehow we made it to the hatch.

It was pretty much like we remembered it: rusted an unused, it probably hadn't been opened since the last time we went through it, forty years ago. As we stopped at the hatch Tommy moaned,

"Oh man, I don't want to go in there, I don't want to."

I reached over and grasped his big shoulder (as much to comfort myself as him) then fumbled down to give his calloused hand a quick squeeze.

"It's gonna be okay, Tommy" I said, though I knew it was going to be anything but okay. Not by a long shot.

"I know," he replied, "But damn, man - I'm so..." he trailed off, too ashamed to say what we were all feeling.

"Come on," Alex said, and took the pry bar from Tommy's shaking hands. He tried to lever the hatch open but the years had sealed it with rust and grime. Tommy and I grabbed the end of the pry bar and added our weight to it, and the hatch popped with a shower of rusty flakes.

We had to kneel to get through the hatch. When we'd come out the last time it had been a lot easier for us - no aching joints or lower back pain, only the crushing weight of our own guilt. Alex went through first, the filthy floor shredding the knees of his slacks. I went through next, but only after making sure Tommy was going to follow.

The coal well was like an iron silo built into the bottom floors of the apartment. Somewhere up above on the street level was another hatch where trucks would back up and dump whole loads of coal down into the darkness, but the building had stopped burning coal back before any of us were born and the well had gone unused. The floor was a thick bed of crushed coal powder; it seemed hard as concrete but once you broke through the crust it was soft as chalk. Easy to dig into. Easy to bury something in.

Alex and I handed Tommy our flashlights and took the two small shovels and walked to the far edge of the well. The rusted wall and black floor reflected almost no light from the flashlights, but I could just make out Alex's face staring back at me.

"You okay to do this?" I asked him.

"No, I don't think I am," he replied, but then he bent to start digging. I joined him, and we quickly broke through the thick glasslike crust and began lifting shovelfulls of the ancient coal dust.

It didn't take long. I caught a glimpse of a dark swatch of cloth and told Alex to hold up. We knelt and cleared the rest by hand, moving the dust off the ratty blanket that I had stolen off one of the clothes lines behind the building. It had been stained black by the coal. Pretty soon we had it completely clear, but I found I couldn't go any further and I stood up fast and dropped the spade.

Alex looked up at us with anguish in his eyes but neither Tommy nor I could move. Finally Alex reached down and slowly peeled back the blanket to reveal the fragile bones wrapped in a faded polka-dotted dress.

Behind me in the darkness Tommy let out a gulping sob.