I peel the label off the Spam, open the tin and shake the meat out onto the label. This I slide before the dog. She sniffs it, perhaps in distrust or disbelief, then begins to lick and gnaw the pinkish cube.

As I sit beside the dog, her tail now faintly wagging, I hear the sound of a helicopter. Shielding my eyes, I look past the rim of the escarpment to see the small chopper coasting on the ashen sky. A TV reporter perhaps, or an airlift ambulance; someone merely passing over Evendale. That is what Evendale is now, perhaps what it has always been; a place one passes by or through or over on their way to somewhere else. Is this why the exodus Below has been allowed to occur without any outside notice at all? Or is there something other at work here?

“Do you want to come home with me?” I ask my new companion. Every inch of me goes cold once I realize that I have referred to those dank and cultish tombs as home. The dog looks at me with her teary, tired eyes. I pick her up and gently pile her onto the passenger seat. Then I drive to the far end of the road.

*

Dad had been part of that first group that tore the barricades from the mouth of the entrance pipe and breached the mine for the first time in years in search of a supposedly lost child. I only learned this a few months ago from Rita. She told me that the men were glad to have my father among them, for he was the only one left in Evendale to have worked the tunnels when Dunford Inc. was still in operation. I suspect it was more than his knowledge of the shafts that made Dad a welcome member of that search party. He had always been a calming presence in our home, so I can only imagine what a balm it must have been to have his wise and careful suggestions offered in his sonorous voice, especially once they were down in that stinking darkness.

Just what it was Dad saw in that green radiance Below I never came to know. I only know it changed him. The fallout of this encounter was drastic enough for Rita to plead with me to fly home and help her find some means of bringing him back around.