In the autumn of 1881, a cavalry lieutenant and two scouts out of Fort Clamoth in southern Oregon followed the smoke of a dying signal fire for three days through the central Cascades, over the Breakhorse River, and up the long back of a ridge no map at that date carried a name for. On the fourth morning they came out above a cleared pocket of ground that none of the three men had ever been told was anywhere in that country. There were houses in it, nine of them built of dressed cedar and stone, laid out in a half ring around a flat place that had been swept clean to the color of bone. There was a pen with four cows in it that did not raise their heads when the men came out of the timber.

There was a long low shed with the door standing open. And out of the shed, as the three men stood on the ridge and looked down, there came a woman. She walked on her hands and her knees over the swept flat place to a wooden trough. She drank from it.

She did not stand up when she was finished. She turned around on all fours and went back inside the shed, and the door closed behind her by a hand the three men did not see. The lieutenant’s name was Owen Caldwell. He was 28 years old.

He had served in the Modoc campaign nine years before and had seen things in a lava bed near Tule Lake that he did not tell his wife about in 41 years of marriage after. He wrote in his field notebook that morning, in a hand still legible in the Oregon Historical Society in Portland in the Caldwell papers, box 7, folder 4, the following sentence: “The woman in the yard below us is not crippled. She is not hurt. She is grown.

She is doing a thing she has been doing since she was a small child and she has forgotten how not to. ”

They counted 14 of them that first day. Four men, six women, four small ones who had not yet come to the age the family called the age of going down. None of the 14 walked on two legs.

None spoke a word that Caldwell or either scout recognized as English, though one of the scouts, Fletcher Pike, who had grown up in the Willilt logging camps and spoke four native tongues in addition to his own, said at the end of that first long day of watching that the sound these people made to each other—the low throat sound and the small clicks of the tongue against the hard palate—was not a language of any people he had ever heard of, and not a sound of any animal he knew to live in those mountains. They stayed on the ridge for two days and two nights. They watched. On the second morning, an older man came out of the largest house and crossed the swept flat place on all fours to the pen and drank from the trough beside the four cows.

The cows did not step away. When he was finished, he lifted his head and looked up the ridge directly into the place where Caldwell and the two scouts had settled themselves against a fallen hemlock to watch. He looked at them for a count of eleven slow breaths. He did not call out.

He did not run. He turned and crossed the swept place back to the largest house and went inside. Caldwell wrote that night that he was certain the old man had known the three of them were there since the first morning, and that the old man had looked up at them to show them deliberately that he knew. The look, Caldwell wrote, was the look of a man who had been expecting them for a long time, and who was neither glad they had come nor afraid.

They came down into the clearing on the third morning. The old man was waiting at the door of the largest house, on his hands and his knees, on a cedar plank threshold that had been worn in the center into two shallow bowls by many years of knees passing over it. He would not stand. He would not speak English.

He looked up at the lieutenant and showed his teeth, which were the teeth of a man of about seventy years, worn down flat across the fronts—the pattern of wear that follows a lifetime of grinding small stones between the jaws. He made a sound in his throat that one of the scouts later said he thought was a greeting, but could not prove. Behind the old man, inside the long low cedar house, the lieutenant saw a girl of perhaps eleven years standing on her two legs in a cotton shift with her hair cut short against her skull, watching him from the back of the room. The girl was the only person in the clearing he saw that day who was standing upright.

She did not come forward. She did not speak. She stood with her hands folded in front of her and did not look away. Her name, as he would learn eight days later, was Panilla Malikott.

She was the only member of the family who had not gone down. She was the only member who would ever come out of that clearing on her own two feet. She would live until 1943. She would die in a boarding house in Astoria, Oregon, at the age of 72, in a bed with the counterpane pulled up to her chin and her hands folded in the same position she had held them in on the morning Caldwell saw her through the open door.

On the nightstand beside her, when the landlady came up with the breakfast tray on the morning of her death, there was a sealed envelope that bore in her hand the words “to be opened no sooner than the spring of 1971,” and the single additional word in a smaller hand below it, “Panilla. ” That envelope would be opened. What was in it would be read, and some of what was in it is part of this story, but not all of it. A very few of the things Panilla Malikott set down in her own hand before she died have been kept out of the record on purpose by three successive archivists of the Oregon Historical Society, acting on written instructions she left with the envelope.

Those pages are in a locked file in a room on the second floor of the society’s building in Portland. The lock is a Chubb manufactured in Birmingham, England, in 1912. The key is held by one person at any given time. There has not been a photograph made of the pages.

There has not been a transcript. The archivist, when asked, will say only that the pages concern what Panilla Malikott heard through the loft floor of the woodshed on the fourth night she was hidden there, and that she herself requested they remain unread, and that the society continues to think she was right. The family’s name was Malikott. The clearing was called by them in their own language by a word the surviving record transliterates as “Kavvesca,” which the folklorist Dr.

Maud Auster of the University of California at Berkeley, writing in 1971, would translate as “the swept place,” or more fully, “the place where the going is done. ” The clearing sits in a pocket of flat ground on the west slope of what is now called Hemlock County, Oregon, in the central Cascade Range, at an elevation of 3,600 feet, in a geological feature a 1963 Forest Service survey party described as a collapsed lava tube chamber of unknown age, roofed in by a basalt dome 51 feet below ground level, open to the sky only through a single irregular slot in the dome’s north end measuring 4 feet 8 inches by 2 feet 2 inches. The clearing on the surface is 41 feet across, perfectly circular, and in 1881, when Caldwell walked across it for the first time, it was swept to the color of bone. Below the clearing, reached by a sloped stone passage set into the floor of the largest house, is the chamber the family called in their tongue “Noravesh,” which Dr.

Auster rendered as “the floor under the swept place,” or in her fuller gloss, “the floor that was waiting. ” The chamber is roughly circular, 41 feet in diameter at its widest, 11 feet 6 inches at the highest point of its basalt dome, with a flat floor cut and dressed by a hand that was not the Malikott hand and was not the hand of any people the Forest Service survey of 1963 could name. The floor is the thing. The floor is why Dr.

Auster, who had spent twenty years of her working life among the Pueblo of New Mexico, who had seen the kivas at Chaco Canyon and the great house at Aztec and the painted chambers of Awatovi, wrote in her own private journal on the night she first stood on that floor that she had seen nothing in any ancient site in the Americas that resembled it, and did not believe she would see anything resembling it again. The floor is a flat disc of smooth black basalt inlaid with antler. The antler is set into the stone, not laid on top of it, not drilled and pegged, but set with the stone fitted close around it in the way of two things grown together. The inlay is a radiating spiral beginning at the center of the floor at a single polished nub of antler the size and shape of a man’s thumb, and spiraling outward in a continuous unbroken curve to the floor’s edge, where the last turn of the spiral meets the wall of the chamber at an angle of 41 degrees.

The spiral has eleven turns, each turn wider than the last. The antler used is elk and black-tailed deer in roughly equal measure, cut into short lengths of between two and four inches, and fitted end to end with such closeness that in the lamplight Dr. Auster could not by eye find the joins. She wrote in her private journal that she sat on the floor of that chamber for three hours by her watch and ran her fingertips along the inlay inch by inch and could not find a seam.

She wrote that she thought the stone had opened and the antler had been laid in and the stone had closed again, and that she knew how that sentence would read on paper and that she was going to write it anyway. The antler, when a small sample was taken for carbon dating at the University of Washington in 1973, returned a date of between 11,200 and 11,600 years before present, with a margin of error of plus or minus 120 years. The basalt dome overhead has not been dated by any method, because no method yet available can date a mass of basalt in situ. The Forest Service survey of 1963 recorded in a brief technical appendix that the dome’s inner surface shows no sign of any dressing by human hand, but that the floor plainly has been dressed, and that the dressing of the floor is older than the earliest firm date in Cascade archaeology.

The appendix was removed from the published survey before it went to the printer. It survives only in a mimeograph copy held in a locked cabinet in the Pacific Northwest regional office of the Forest Service in Portland. The man who authorized its removal, District Supervisor Vernon Albright, retired in 1968. In 1970, in a letter to his son, which the son would publish in 1998 in a small Oregon historical quarterly, Albright wrote that he had removed the appendix because he had read it twice, and he had believed it both times, and he did not want anyone else to have to.

So this is the setting. A circle of swept ground on top. A chamber of dressed basalt below with a floor of inlaid antler laid down by a hand nobody can name in a time nobody can account for. And on that ground above and that floor below, from a date the family itself could not have known with any precision but that Dr.

Auster, by cross-referencing Panilla’s sealed account with the carbon record, placed at not earlier than the autumn of 1834, lived a family of white Americans named Malikott who had come up from Vermont through Missouri and over the Oregon Trail in a party of three wagons, settled on a piece of ground they had no legal title to in the central Oregon Cascades, and who had within one year of their arrival begun doing a thing on that floor below the clearing that they would continue to do in every generation for 47 years, until Lieutenant Owen Caldwell climbed over the ridge in the autumn of 1881. The thing they did was called by them in their own language, as Panilla would set it down in a word list in her sealed account, a word which translates by Dr. Auster’s careful hand as “the going down. ” The going down was done at age eleven.

It was done alone. The child, upon reaching the age at which the going down was prescribed, always on or near the night of the first hard frost after the eleventh birthday, descended by the stone passage into the chamber below, carrying no light, no food, no water, wearing only a plain woolen shift cut and sewn by the mother of the family in the pattern that had been handed down. The passage was then closed from above by a cedar plank the family kept oiled and worked smoothly in its slot. The child was left in the chamber for eleven nights.

On the twelfth morning the plank was lifted. What came up out of the chamber was no longer a child in the sense the word is used by people who have not been down there. The child came up on its hands and its knees. The child could no longer speak the English the family had taught it.

The child spoke only the family tongue. The child’s eyes did not reflect lamplight in the way the eyes of a person who has been in the dark reflect lamplight. The child’s tongue, when its mouth was opened, was permanently curled against the roof of the mouth in a shape no voluntary muscle could hold without pain. From that morning forward, until the day of its death, the child would walk on all fours, speak only the Malikott tongue, drink from the trough with the cows, sleep on the floor of one of the houses on a mat of hemlock boughs, and would in time, if it survived to the age of sitting at the floor’s edge below and watching its own children go down, be a parent and then a grandparent in a line that had by the autumn of 1881 been running on that piece of ground for 47 consecutive years and had produced 23 persons who had been laid, as the family said, onto the floor.

Fourteen of those 23 were still alive when Lieutenant Caldwell came up over the ridge. The other nine were buried in a small plot on the north edge of the clearing in graves marked with cut cedar posts into which the family had carved, by firelight on the night of each burial, a single symbol in their own hand that did not match any known script of the world, and that Dr. Auster, after a correspondence with four linguists over a period of fourteen years, could not place in any linguistic family she knew of, or any that any of her correspondents knew of. The old man at the door of the largest house on the morning Caldwell crossed the clearing was Geroble Malikott, born in 1811 in Addison County, Vermont.

Geroble had been 32 years old when he had gone down himself, in a chamber his father had not shown him and he had not known existed. On the second day the family had been in the clearing. By the morning Caldwell met him, Geroble had been on his hands and his knees for 47 years. His palms were polished black and calloused in a shape that fitted the curve of the antler spiral in the floor below exactly.

Dr. Preston Dryer of Salem, who would examine Geroble in a Forest Service tent, would write in his report that he had not previously thought the human skeleton capable of such a slow reshaping in a single lifetime, and that he did not believe Geroble could ever again, by any mechanical or surgical means then known, be made to stand upright on his two legs. The family had come west in the autumn of 1833 in a party that left Independence, Missouri, in June under Marius Keel, a Baptist lay preacher taking his congregation of 31 souls out to a piece of ground in the Willamette Valley. The Malikott party, not of Keel’s congregation but attached at Fort Laramie, consisted of Geroble Malikott; his wife Esperance Thurling Malikott, then 22 and already carrying their first child; Geroble’s father, Levi, who was 61; and Levi’s unmarried younger brother, Obadiah, who was 58.

There was a fourth adult, a hired man named Cressy Luff, who had come on with them in Independence and would travel with them until the Snake River in late August, when he quit the party and turned back east with a mule team heading for Fort Hall. Luff would in time become the only outsider who had traveled with the Malikotts and lived long enough to be asked what they had been like. He was interviewed in his ninety-first year in 1898 by Mr. Harlon Spoon of the Portland Oregonian, in his bedroom in a farmhouse outside Rock Island, Illinois.

Luff was dying. He knew it. Spoon’s notes record that Luff would not sit up and would answer only with his face turned to the window. Luff said about the Malikotts, in Spoon’s handwritten record, the following: “The old man, Levi, was the one who gave the orders.

The old man knew where they were going. He had a piece of paper folded into the lining of his hat. The paper had been drawn by a hand that was not his hand. The old man would take the paper out when the others were asleep and would read it by a candle he kept hidden in a tin.

” Luff saw this on nine separate nights between Fort Laramie and the Snake River. On the tenth night, which was the night before Luff left the party at Fort Hall, Luff asked Levi about the paper. Levi looked at him across the fire a long time and did not answer. The next morning, Luff told the old man he was quitting the party.

The old man paid him his wage in silver dollars minted in Philadelphia in the 1820s. The old man told him, as Luff stood by his mule in the gray dawn, that he had been a sensible man to ask about the paper and a wiser man to quit. The old man said one more thing. The old man said, “We are not going to the Willamette.

”

Spoon asked Luff where he thought they had gone. Luff said he did not know. Luff said he had thought about it for sixty-five years and he did not know. Luff said the only thing he was prepared to put his name to was that whatever place the folded paper in Levi Malikott’s hat was leading them to, it was a place Levi had been told about by someone, and the someone had drawn him a map, and the someone was not any member of the Malikott family.

Levi, when he spoke of the place at all, called it in English only by the phrase “the ground that is kept. ” Levi had, on one occasion, deep in his sleep by a dying fire west of South Pass, said a word in his sleep that was not an English word, and that Luff had never been able to put out of his mind. Spoon asked Luff if he could still say the word. Luff said he would not.

Spoon wrote in the margin of his field notes that he had the strong impression Luff was afraid, after sixty-five years, to put the word into the air of a room he was going to die in. Luff died fourteen days after the interview. The Malikott party reached the Oregon country in the first week of October 1833. They did not go to the Willamette.

They left Keel’s train at the Snake River crossing that would later be the town of Ontario, and they turned south and west into country that in that year had been crossed by not more than four parties of white men. They were seen on October 11th by a Hudson’s Bay trapper named Angus Bartow, who left in a letter to his brother in Montreal the record of having come upon a small party of American wagons in a pocket of ground on the east slope of the Cascades near the headwaters of the Breakhorse. Bartow wrote that the older of the two older men was reading from a folded paper by firelight when Bartow came out of the trees, that the older man had put the paper away without hurry, had asked Bartow in a direct voice whether a certain ridge visible to the west was the ridge the paper named, had thanked him when he said he did not know, and had offered him coffee. Bartow slept the night at their fire.

In the night, he heard the younger wife weeping softly behind the wagon canvas. In the morning, he asked the older man what the ridge was called, and the older man told him in English that the ridge did not have a name he was prepared to put in Bartow’s mouth. Bartow died of pneumonia in Fort Vancouver in the winter of 1837. His letter was kept in a tin box in his brother’s attic until 1912, when the brother’s granddaughter donated the papers to the McGill University Library.

It was read for the first time by a researcher who understood its significance in 1968, by a graduate student named Elkanah Thar of the University of Oregon. Thar carried it back to Oregon and gave it to Dr. Auster three years before her own book on the Malikotts went to press. Thar is still living.

He has been asked by a half-dozen researchers to walk them into the Malikott clearing. He has refused everyone. He walked it himself once, in 1970. He has written that one walk was enough.

Geroble’s own account, which Panilla would reconstruct from what her father had told her mother on the nights before Panilla’s own eleventh birthday, places the arrival of the family in the Breakhorse pocket on October 17th of 1833. The pocket was found by means of the folded paper. The folded paper, which Panilla says in her sealed account was still in the lining of her grandfather Levi’s hat on the day he died in 1849, was buried with him in the small plot at the north edge of the clearing. Panilla says that her mother told her in the woodshed loft on the fourth night that the paper had come to Levi in 1827 in Vermont, in a cedar box, delivered by a man in a dark coat who gave his name as Mr.

Irwin and who stayed at the Malikott farm for three days and three nights, and ate at the family table, and spoke only to Levi, and departed on the morning of the fourth day on a horse Levi had not seen the man arrive on. Mr. Irwin left no address. He gave Levi two things only.

He gave Levi the folded paper, and he gave Levi a word Levi was to say aloud by himself in his own barn on the night of the first hard frost of that autumn. Panilla’s account does not record what word that was. She writes that her mother refused to say it aloud, and that her mother had been told the word only once in her own life, by Levi himself, at the base of the sloped stone passage in the summer of 1836, when Esperance was 25 and had already borne two children in the clearing. Esperance had on three occasions in those three years been woken in the night by sounds coming up out of the stone passage that she had not been able to account for, and that Levi had told her was the floor speaking in the way the floor spoke, which was not to be feared, which was to be learned, and which she would in time be taught to answer.

Esperance stayed. She bore seven children in the clearing between 1834 and 1853. Four survived their first year. The eldest was a son named Herod, born November 4th, 1834, who was the first Malikott child to go down into the chamber in the autumn of 1845, on the night of the first hard frost after his eleventh birthday.

His going down was supervised by his grandfather Levi, who had, by the record Panilla would set down a lifetime later, descended into the chamber alone, under his own name and under the word Mr. Irwin had given him, on each of the first eleven nights after the family had reached the pocket in October of 1833, and had come up on the twelfth morning on his own two legs, still upright, still speaking his English, but changed in a way Esperance would later tell Panilla she had seen in his face every day of the fifteen years before his death and had never found a word for. Levi was the only Malikott who went down alone and came up still standing. Geroble, who went down on the second day in the pocket at his father’s instruction, came up on the twelfth morning on his hands and his knees.

From Herod forward, every Malikott child who was laid onto the floor at age eleven came up on all fours. Levi, through all forty-seven years of his record in the clearing, remained upright, and remained the only member of the family who could speak the English of the country around them to any outsider who happened to come down the Breakhorse drainage. By the time Caldwell arrived in October of 1881, Levi had been dead for thirty-two years. He had died in the clearing in the summer of 1849, aged 77, of a condition Esperance would describe as a stopping of the breath while sitting at the edge of the floor on the night of a going down.

He had been buried in the small plot. His cedar post bore the symbol the family cut for him. The folded paper had been folded in his hat into the two cedar planks of his grave. The responsibility for the family’s management of the floor had passed, on the morning of his burial, to Geroble, who was then 38 and had been on his hands and his knees for sixteen years, and who had on that morning been lifted onto the plank threshold of the largest house by Esperance, and had sat there propped against the doorframe, and had received each surviving member of the family, who had crossed the swept flat place on all fours and had touched his forehead with his own.

That ceremony of the forehead touching was repeated at the burial of each of the nine Malikotts who died in the clearing between Levi’s death and Caldwell’s arrival. The symbol on each grave post was different. Chosen by the deceased in the hour before death, communicated to Geroble by a pointing of the finger on the hard earth, then cut into the cedar post on the night of the burial by Geroble’s own hands, using an iron knife his father had carried over the trail. The iron knife is still in the clearing.

It was found in 1963 by the Forest Service survey party in a cedar box in the long low shed, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth. It is now in the collection of the Oregon Historical Society, catalogued as Malikott 4, kept in the same locked file as the pages of Panilla’s sealed account that remain unread. The nine Malikotts buried in the small plot by October of 1881 were, in order of death: Levi Malikott, August 11th, 1849, age 77, cedar post bearing a mark Dr. Auster transliterated as “Kai,” which the family translated as “the gate”; Obadiah Malikott, the great-uncle who had come over the trail at age 58 and had never gone down into the chamber at all, having refused on the second day in the clearing to descend when Levi had told him it was time, March 9th, 1851, age 76, cedar post bearing a mark transliterated as “Vor,” “the one who did not go”; Herod Malikott, the first Malikott child to be laid onto the floor, who had, Panilla says, been more at home on the floor than any member of the family before or since, who had, in the fourteenth year after his own going down, drowned in the Breakhorse River below the clearing in a manner the family did not call drowning.

Herod had gone down to the river at dawn, had drunk from it on all fours as he had drunk from the trough since he was eleven, had been swept off by a sudden rise of water none of the family had heard coming, and had been found three days later by Geroble and his second son, Thurling, two miles below the clearing, caught in a snag of cedar, floating face down with his eyes open and his tongue, as Panilla records in a sentence her mother repeated to her in the woodshed, straight. Herod’s tongue in life had been curled against the roof of his mouth for the fourteen years since his going down. His tongue in death was straight. Geroble, when he lifted his son’s body out of the water, had wept, which was the only time Panilla’s mother ever told her that Geroble was known to have wept.

The six Malikotts who died in the clearing in the twenty-two years between Herod’s drowning and Caldwell’s arrival were the following: Esperance’s second son, Thurling, aged 27, of a fever Panilla’s mother would not name; Esperance’s youngest daughter, Pensive, aged nine, of the same fever, before she had reached the age of going down; Geroble’s younger brother, Owen, aged 34, of a wound he had taken when a dead cedar had fallen on him; Geroble and Esperance’s eldest surviving daughter, Vesper, aged 33, in childbirth, the child dying with her; Herod’s widow, Nellis, age 33; and finally, Esperance Thurling Malikott herself, who died in the summer of 1879, age 68, on a morning Panilla would remember until the hour of her own death sixty-four years later. All of the family were on their hands and their knees at the moment of her passing, except for Panilla, who was then nine years old, two years short of her own going down, and who was in the woodshed with her mother because her mother had taken her there two months before and had told her that under no circumstances, when Panilla’s own eleventh birthday came in two years, was Panilla ever to walk the sloped stone passage into the chamber below the clearing. Esperance Thurling Malikott had been born in Williston, Vermont, in 1811. She had married Geroble in Addison County in 1832.

She had come over the trail at 22, five months pregnant with Herod. She had borne seven children in the clearing. She had seen the first six of them laid onto the floor and come back on their hands and their knees. On the morning in the woodshed loft when she took Panilla aside at the age of nine, she had not slept, Panilla would write, for four nights running.

She sat the child down on a bale of hemp sacking. She held the child’s two hands in her own. She told the child the following things. She told the child that she, Esperance, had been a mistake.

She told the child that Levi Malikott had chosen her for Geroble in Vermont because he had wanted a strong, broad-hipped young woman who could bear many children on the ground they were going to. She told the child that she had believed, when she had come to that ground, that she was coming to a farm. She told the child that she had found out otherwise on the second night in the pocket, when she had watched her husband of eleven months descend into the chamber at his father’s instruction, and had understood in the hour after Geroble had gone under the plank that nothing she had been told about the trip west had been true. She told the child that she had wept for three days when Geroble had come up on the twelfth morning on his hands and his knees, and that Levi had come to her at the end of the three days and had told her in a quiet voice that she could weep as long as she liked, but that she could not leave the clearing, because there was no going out for anyone the floor had been shown to.

She told the child that she had set her mind to it. She told the child that she had come to love her husband more than she had loved any person in her life before, because Geroble was the only member of the family after Levi’s death who she could still talk to with the English of her girlhood, and because Geroble, though he could not stand upright, and could not sit at a table, and could not drink from a cup held in his hand, was still, inside the altered shape of the man he had become, the young man she had married in Addison County. And because Geroble had known, by sign she had come to read in his face, that he was still that young man inside, and that he was glad she had not left him. She told the child that the six children she had borne and seen laid onto the floor were no longer her children in any sense of the word she could put her mother’s hand on.

She told the child that she loved them. These creatures she had borne in blood and in the breaking of her own waters, these altered things that drank from the trough and spoke a tongue she had learned by the long immersion of 47 years, and that she still, in her own private thoughts in the woodshed at night, could not speak back to without a shudder she had never shown to Geroble and would never show. She told the child that this love of hers was the deepest and the most hurting thing in her life, and that she was telling the child about it because the child was the only member of the family who had not yet been shown the floor, and the child was going to be the one who did not go. She told the child why.

She told the child that on the night of the 11th of August 1879, three nights before the morning in the woodshed loft, Esperance had sat up alone by the trough after Geroble had taken himself inside the largest house. She had sat up because she had been praying for the first time in forty years to a god she had been taught about as a girl in a Williston church house she had not seen since she was 22. She had been praying that God would show her a sign about Panilla, because Panilla would in two years come to the age of going down, and Esperance did not know whether to let her go. And at a moment, somewhere between the hour of midnight and the first beginning of the gray of morning, she had heard a sound come up out of the stone passage.

The sound had been a sound she had heard before, on three nights in 1836 when she had first been coming to live with the family, and on perhaps a dozen other nights since. It was not the sound of the floor speaking, which she had learned to recognize. It was a sound she had always suspected was the sound of the thing the floor spoke to. The sound that night was a slow dragging sound, as of a heavy cloth being pulled over sand, moving around the inside wall of the chamber below in a counterclockwise direction, going around once, and once again, and once a third time.

On the fourth passage of the sound around the wall below, Esperance had heard, through the open mouth of the stone passage, a voice. The voice had spoken a single word. The word had not been a word in the Malikott tongue. The word had not been a word in English.

The word had been, Esperance told Panilla in the woodshed loft, a word she had heard spoken aloud exactly once before in her life, by Levi Malikott, on the night in 1836 when Levi had first taken her down to see the floor. The word Levi had told her that night in ’36 was his own word, his own word only. The word Mr. Irwin had given him in the barn in Addison County in 1827.

The word had come up out of the chamber on the night of August 11th, 1879, spoken aloud in the voice of a thing that was not Levi Malikott, who had been dead for thirty years. And the voice had said, after the word, in English, in the voice of a thing that had been waiting a long time to speak, two further sentences. The voice had said, “I will take the next one, too. ” And the voice had said, “Send me the little one.

”

Esperance had sat by the trough for the remainder of that night. She had not moved. She had not called out. She had understood that the voice was speaking of Panilla, because Panilla was the next, and Panilla was the little one, and that whatever had been under the floor of that clearing since before the Malikotts had come to it had changed, somewhere in the 47 years of it being fed, from a thing content with children who went down at eleven and came up on all fours, into a thing that wanted a child who did not come up at all.

Esperance had told no one except Panilla, whom she had taken into the woodshed on the morning of August 12th, where the two of them had been sleeping on hemp sacking on the loft floor every night since. Esperance would die soon. She had been coughing blood into her shift at night for three months. When she died, Panilla was to continue to sleep in the woodshed loft, to tell Geroble if he asked that she slept there because she missed her mother, to continue to eat with the family on the swept place in the daytime, and to behave as the family’s one standing child in all ordinary respects.

On the night of the first hard frost after Panilla’s eleventh birthday, which would come in the autumn of 1881, Panilla was not to go down. Esperance had, in the two years she had been given to think about it, worked out the following. Esperance had already prepared in the woodshed a hiding place in the roof. The woodshed was a small outbuilding on the east edge of the clearing, forty feet from the largest house, built of dressed cedar.

The hiding place was in a space between the roof shakes and an inner false ceiling of cedar planks Esperance had cut and fitted over fourteen months of night, which she had told Geroble she was spending in prayer. The false ceiling could be reached only by a trap cut into the loft floor under the hemp sacking, invisible to any eye that had not been shown it. The space above was eleven feet long, three feet wide, and twenty-two inches high at the highest point. Esperance had stocked it with eleven days of hard biscuit kept in a tin can, with two quart jars of spring water sealed with wax, with a cedar pot for the body’s necessities, with a quilt Panilla’s great-grandmother Perity Thurling had quilted in Vermont in 1820, with a candle in a tin and a tinder box, and with Esperance’s wedding ring, a plain silver band marked on the inside with the initials of her maiden name and the date of her wedding in Addison County in 1832.

Esperance told the child that on the night of the first hard frost after the eleventh birthday, the child was to go up into the hiding place at sundown, after the family had eaten, after Panilla had kissed her father on the forehead in the way the family’s one standing child was permitted to kiss the family’s crawling patriarch, after she had said her prayers in English. The child was to climb into the loft, lift the hemp sacking, lift the trap in the loft floor, climb through it into the hiding place, lower the trap behind her, lay the sacking over the trap, and sleep up there for eleven nights. The child was not to come down. The child was not to answer any voice that called her, in English or in the Malikott tongue or in any other voice.

The child was to make no sound. The child was to eat only one biscuit a day. The child was to drink only four swallows of water a day. The child was to keep the ring in her hand and press it to her chest when she was afraid, which Esperance told the child she would be, and told the child she would not die of.

On the twelfth morning, if the child was still alive, she was to listen for the sound of men who were not of the family entering the clearing. Esperance did not know what day they would come. She knew only that the family could not continue in that clearing with the voice from under the floor demanding what it was now demanding without being found out, and that the men who found them out would come. When they came, the child would hear them, because the woodshed stood near the swept place, and the men would walk across it and call out in English.

The child would come down out of the hiding place and walk to them on her own two legs. She would not speak the family’s tongue to them. She would not kneel. She would stand upright and tell them that she was Panilla Malikott, aged eleven, and that she had been hidden in the woodshed on her mother’s instructions, and that the men were to take her out of the clearing that day by any means, and that under no circumstances were the men to allow her to be taken back into the stone passage below the largest house.

That was the plan. Esperance died on October 14th, 1879. The family buried her in the plot. Her cedar post bore the mark the family read as “kept her head above the floor,” which Dr.

Auster would translate as “the woman who refused the last going. ” Panilla stood by the grave with her hands folded. The rest of the family crouched around on their hands and their knees. Panilla did not weep.

When the burial was done, she walked back to the woodshed, climbed the stair to the loft, lay down on the hemp sacking, and did not come out for eighteen hours. Geroble, in the morning, crawled across the swept place to the foot of the stair and called up to her in English, in the voice she knew from her father’s teaching her the words of the Vermont scripture when she had been smaller. Geroble said, “Child, come down. It is time to eat.

” Panilla came down. She ate with the family on the swept place. She did as her mother had told her. The two years and two months began.

What those two years were for the child, in the clearing, in the woodshed loft at night, Panilla would set down in the sealed account at a length of 41 pages. The pages are the longest single section of the account. They have been read by the three successive archivists of the Oregon Historical Society and by no one else. Dr.

Auster, when she was preparing her book in 1970, applied to read them. She was refused by the archivist then holding the key, Mrs. Idra Pell. Mrs.

Pell told Auster that she had herself read the 41 pages, had wept over them, had slept badly for a week after, and agreed with Panilla’s assessment that no good purpose was served by anyone else reading them. Auster asked her one question. The question was whether the child had been loved by the family. Mrs.

Pell took a long time to answer. She told Auster that the child had been loved more deeply by the twelve crawling adults than any child Mrs. Pell had ever heard of being loved in any family, and that this had been the thing in the pages that had made Mrs. Pell weep.

The one short passage of those pages that has been published, by Mrs. Pell’s permission, in Auster’s 1971 book reads as follows: “I lay on the hemp sacking under the quilt my great-grandmother made, and I listened to the clearing. On many nights I heard nothing I had not heard every night of my life before my mother brought me to the woodshed. The wind in the ridge pines, the crackle of the long low shed cooling, the call of the small grey owl who lived in the hollow of a cedar snag at the north edge of the plot.

On other nights I heard something coming up out of the stone passage under the largest house. I will not describe what I heard. I will say only this. On the nights I heard it, I did as my mother had told me to do when I was afraid.

I pressed the silver ring to my chest. I did not answer. I did not make any sound, and I lived. ”

The first hard frost of 1881 came on the night of October 11th.

Panilla climbed into the hiding place at sundown. The trap closed behind her. The sacking fell back into place. The family came for her.

And a little after full dark, Geroble himself, as the patriarch, crawled across the swept place to the woodshed, up the stair the family had modified in Obadiah’s time to accommodate their manner of crawling. He called out in English and in the family tongue, both. Panilla, in the hiding place, did not answer. He called again.

She did not answer. He did not come up into the loft. Panilla had wondered, in the two years of thinking about it, whether he would. He did not.

Panilla in the sealed account would say that she had thought later that he might have known, in the manner people in the family had of knowing things, that she was there and would not come down, and that he had chosen, by not climbing the stair, to grant her mother’s plan. Geroble crawled down the stair of the woodshed and back across the swept place. He said something in the family tongue to the eleven other adults and the two crawling grandchildren who were waiting at the mouth of the stone passage. The eleven adults and the two grandchildren crawled into the stone passage and down to the floor.

Geroble came last. The cedar plank slid shut behind him from above, by the hand of Nellis’s younger sister, Marles Malikott, who was 54 years old and was the only member of the family who was deaf, and had been deaf since birth, and could not hear the voice that spoke from under the floor, and had always, by family practice, been the one to slide the plank over the mouth of the passage on nights of a going down. Marles did not know a child was in the woodshed loft. The family thought that Panilla had entered the stone passage ahead of them.

The family was waiting for Panilla to say the word each Malikott child had been taught in the week before his or her own going down—the word that opened the eleven nights and allowed the family to withdraw up the passage and leave the child alone to the floor. Panilla did not say the word. Panilla was not there. The family waited.

What happened in the chamber in the hours that followed, Panilla would not know for certain until the morning of October 22nd, when Caldwell came down into the clearing. Panilla, in her hiding place, in the dark, with her hand around the silver ring and the quilt pulled up to her chin, heard two things. She heard, around midnight by her best count, a sound she would in the sealed account describe as a sound that was not possible in a chamber of basalt dressed by human hands or by any other hands she could put a name to. She would not describe it further.

She would say in the account only that it had been the first and the only time in her life she had ever heard the floor speak in a voice she had understood as a voice directed at a particular person, and that the person it had been directed at had been her father Geroble, and that what the voice had said to her father in those hours she did not know in words, but had understood in the general shape of the thing being said. She heard, around three hours after that, a sound of the family coming up out of the stone passage. She counted. She was very good at counting.

The family had gone down numbering 13. She counted 11 come up. The next morning the family did not eat on the swept place. No one called her down.

Panilla stayed in the hiding place. She ate one biscuit. She drank four swallows of water. She heard around noon the sound of her father crawling across the swept place to the pen and drinking from the trough.

The family did not come for her. The family had understood, somewhere in the hours before coming up out of the passage, that Panilla had not gone down, and that the voice from under the floor had taken, in the child’s place, something else of theirs. The family would never speak to Panilla about what had been taken. She would guess in the 41 pages at the shape of what had been taken, and the shape of what she guessed is one of the three things Mrs.

Pell wept over. Panilla stayed in the hiding place for eleven days. She ate the eleven biscuits. She drank the water.

On the twelfth day, which was the morning of October 22nd, 1881, she heard three men coming up the ridge road into the clearing. She knew them by their voices before she saw them. The voices were speaking English. The voices were not of the family.

One was giving quiet orders. One was asking a question about tracks. One, the deepest, was reading aloud a passage from a leather-bound field notebook. The passage was a description of the clearing as seen from the ridge two days before.

She lifted the sacking. She lifted the trap. She climbed down out of the hiding place. She walked down the stair of the woodshed on her two legs, which had not been under her weight in eleven days, and shook as she set her feet on the planks.

She walked out onto the swept place. The three men stopped where they stood at the edge of the clearing. The deepest-voiced of them, who was Caldwell, took off his hat. Panilla crossed the swept place to him.

She stood in front of him. She said, in the English her mother had taught her and that she had not used aloud to any living person in eleven days, the following sentence: “I am Panilla Malikott. I am 11 years old. I am alive.

Take me out of here. Do not take me under the house. ”

Caldwell wrote that sentence in his field notebook within the next five minutes. The entry is dated October 22nd, 1881.

The entry is the only entry in the Caldwell field notebooks written in a hand that is not quite steady. Caldwell wrote, after the sentence, the following note: “The child is upright. The child is clean. The child’s eyes reflect the morning light in the ordinary way of children.

The child’s tongue is in its proper place. The child is the only one of them. We will take her out this afternoon. I will not go under the house.

I will not permit any man of mine to go under the house. The matter of what is in the chamber below will be a matter for the geological office and the War Department, and that party, when it is summoned, will not include this officer. I have seen enough of the clearing above. I will not see the floor.

”

That was Caldwell’s position. It was the position he kept under considerable pressure in Washington in the two years that followed, until he resigned his commission in 1884 to go into a quiet law practice in Portland. He took the child down out of the clearing that afternoon on his own horse. He left Fletcher Pike and the other scout, Jem Throney, in a camp on the ridge above with a mandate to prevent anyone from entering or leaving the clearing until he returned.

He crossed the Breakhorse with the child in front of him on the saddle. He covered sixty miles in the next three days. He delivered the child to the officer in command at Fort Clamoth on October the 25th. He filed, within the hour of his arrival, the longer of the two reports that would come out of the Malikott case in the public record.

He asked for a party of thirty men, with four surveying officers and two geologists and a medical man, to be sent back to the clearing within the week. The party was sent. It reached the clearing on November 4th, 1881. It found the 14 Malikotts.

It found no sign of struggle. It found Geroble Malikott on the plank threshold of the largest house, propped against the doorframe on his hands and his knees, teeth bared, tongue curled, eyes open. It found the eleven other adults in the long low shed, laid on their mats of hemlock boughs in a half ring around the walls, awake, watching the officers come in through the door, making no sound. It found the two grandchildren in the pen with the four cows, lying in the straw, asleep.

The 14 Malikotts were taken out of the clearing in a line of three army wagons on November 6th to Fort Clamoth, kept there seven weeks under medical observation. Dr. Preston Dryer of Salem examined each of the 14 individually. Dryer’s report found that each of the 14 was in all the ordinary measures of medicine in good health.

Each had sound teeth worn flat in a manner that was uniform across the family, and that Dryer wrote he could account for only by the chewing of some substance he had not identified. Each had the thickened shin bones, polished palm callus, and permanent curling of the tongue against the hard palate. Each had eyes that in daylight were clouded white across the center of the iris and that in the darkness of a closed hospital room restored within about twenty minutes to an ordinary color. Each refused to stand upright.

Each, when offered food on a table, would not take it. Each, when offered food on the ground, would. Each spoke among themselves in the Malikott tongue. None spoke a word of English to Dryer or to any member of the party in the seven weeks at Clamoth, or in the 31 years that followed, during which each of them lived out his or her life in the care of the state of Oregon, in a facility built for them on a piece of ground outside Molalla, where they were housed in cedar cabins laid out in a half ring around a swept flat place that the facility’s director, Mr.

Francis Lindseed, had ordered built in the shape he had understood from Dryer’s report to be the shape in which the family would be most at ease. The last of the 14, Geroble’s granddaughter, Winfred, died at Molalla on June 11th of 1913, aged 43, with her hands folded on her chest in the only approximation of the standing posture any of the 14 ever made in their years at Molalla, which was the posture they adopted at the moment of dying. What the party of 30 found in the chamber below the clearing is the other half of the Malikott case, and the half the government record is thinnest on. The published portion of the party’s report, which came out in the spring of 1882 as a 61-page bound octavo document, contains eleven paragraphs devoted to the chamber.

Those paragraphs describe the dimensions, the dressed basalt dome, the sloped passage, the inlaid antler spiral, and the condition of the floor on the afternoon of November 5th, 1881, when four officers of the party under lamplight descended for an inspection that lasted one hour and 41 minutes by the pocket watch of the lead officer, First Lieutenant Haskell Grebs of the Corps of Engineers. The eleven paragraphs do not describe what the four officers heard. They do not describe why only three of the four officers came up the passage at the end of the hour and 41 minutes. They do not describe what happened to the fourth, who was Second Lieutenant Thomas Alton Ren, aged 26, of Buffalo, New York, graduate of West Point, class of 1877, who went down the passage with Grebs and the other two and did not come up.

The unpublished portion, filed as a sealed appendix to the office of the Secretary of War in April 1882 and which remained sealed until its declassification by routine review in 1961, describes what happened to Lieutenant Ren in a passage of three pages written in Grebs’s own hand. The three pages have been read by a small number of researchers since 1961, including Dr. Auster, including Elkanah Thar, including a doctor Austin Shaw of the Smithsonian, who read them in 1994 and has not, when asked, agreed to discuss what he read. The three pages describe the following.

At approximately 41 minutes into the inspection, the four officers were standing on the floor at four roughly equidistant points around the edge of the spiral, lanterns raised. Ren was on the north side, nearest the single irregular slot in the basalt dome overhead. Grebs was on the east. The other two, Lieutenant Mirik and Lieutenant Hoke, were on the south and west.

Grebs’s account states that at that moment a sound came up from under the floor. The sound was not a sound of settling stone or of water moving in a cavity below. The sound was the sound of a voice. The voice was speaking a language Grebs did not know.

The voice was speaking, Grebs wrote, in the direction of Ren. The young officer, Grebs wrote, did not react in the manner of a man surprised. Ren stood very still, his lantern lowered a few inches in his hand. He spoke in a quiet voice in English to the floor.

He said, Grebs wrote, a single sentence. The sentence was, “I have been thinking about you since the night I was 11 years old. ” The voice from under the floor made no answer that Grebs or the other two officers could hear. Ren set his lantern down.

He took a step toward the center of the chamber. Grebs called out to him. Ren did not look up. He took another step.

He was then standing on the fourth turn of the spiral from the center. Grebs called out to him a second time, by rank and name, in the voice an officer uses on a drill ground. Ren took a third step. He was on the second turn.

Grebs began to move toward him across the floor. Grebs’s account states that he had taken no more than two steps himself when Ren crossed the final turn and stood on the center polished nub, and that at that instant the lantern Ren had set down behind him went out, not by any wind, there being no wind in the chamber, and that in the sudden shortage of light, Grebs’s eyes required an instant to adjust, and that in that instant Ren was no longer there. Ren was not in the chamber. His lantern was on the floor, cold, with a wick that had been burning in the ordinary manner thirty seconds before, and that was now, when Grebs picked it up, dry of any oil the lantern should have held.

His hat was on the floor beside the lantern. His two boots were on the floor beyond the hat, laced to the top as they had been on his feet, standing in the ordinary posture of a man upright on his feet, the shins of a man who was not there extending up from the boot tops into the ordinary air of the chamber for about four inches before the shins also were not there. Grebs wrote that he and Mirik and Hoke had stood in the chamber for a count of eleven slow breaths, not moving, not speaking, and that at the end of the eleven breaths the two boots had settled slowly, with some structure inside them having given way, onto the stone floor beside the hat. Grebs wrote that he had then given the order to go up the passage, that the three of them had gone up without conversation, that he had sealed the plank over the mouth of the passage with his own two hands, and had placed a sentry over it every night the party remained in the clearing, and that the chamber had not been entered by any member of the party again.

The three pages conclude with the following paragraph, quoted in print only once, in a monograph by Dr. Auster published in 1977. Grebs wrote: “I do not know what became of Thomas Ren. I knew Thomas Ren at West Point.

I knew Thomas Ren well. He had told me once in our first year that he had been raised in Buffalo by an aunt and uncle, his own parents having died when he was small, and that he had, on one occasion in his boyhood, had a dream that had never left him. He had dreamed that he had walked across a flat place of swept dirt in a clearing in a forest at night, and had gone down into a chamber of stone, and had stood on a floor of inlaid bone, and had been spoken to in that chamber by a thing that had been waiting for him. He had dreamed the dream on the night of his eleventh birthday, in his aunt’s house in Buffalo, in a bed by a window overlooking a backyard that had no clearing in it, no chamber below, nothing at all of what he had dreamed.

He had told me he had never forgotten it. He had told me he suspected the dream to have been a thing shown to him by someone who had been looking for him, and that he suspected the someone was still looking. I did not request Thomas Ren by name for the inspection party. He was assigned to me by the office of the Secretary of War.

I have thought about this fact in the years since until I have had to put it aside in order to continue in my duties. I set it down here for the record in the hope that someone who reads this document after my own death will think about it longer than I was able to. ” Grebs died in Washington in 1915, aged 57. The three pages remained sealed for 52 years after his death.

The routine declassification of 1961 was carried out by a review clerk named Edgar Prime, who had not read the file, who had been working his way through a backlog of War Department sealed files, and who had opened the Malikott appendix on the morning of September 11th, 1961, in a reading room in Suitland, and who had read the three pages, and who had, by his own account later given to his wife and set down by her in a letter after his death in 1982, slept badly for the rest of his life. He had written a short memorandum to his supervisor requesting that the Malikott appendix be returned to the sealed status it had held since 1882. His supervisor had replied in a note of two sentences that there was no procedure by which the file could be resealed. The file was placed in the open stacks.

The clearing in Hemlock County was abandoned by the government in the summer of 1882. The nine houses were ordered burned by Major Vaughn on August 3rd, the burning carried out by a detachment of eleven soldiers under the command of a Lieutenant Perendac. The soldiers burned the eight small houses and the long low shed and the pen. The soldiers did not burn the largest house, over the orders of Perendac, who had refused on arrival to permit any fire within fifty feet of the stone passage.

The largest house still stands. The roof has fallen in. The walls have weathered to the color of ash. The plank threshold is still worn in the center into two shallow bowls.

The sloped stone passage is still open. The cedar plank Marles Malikott slid shut over the mouth of the passage on the night of October 11th, 1881, is still in its slot. The plank has been lifted four times in the 145 years since. The first was by Grebs’s inspection party in November 1881.

The second was by the Forest Service survey of 1963. The third was by Dr. Auster’s party in 1970. The fourth was by a team from the University of Oregon geology department in 1991, which descended with lamps and with a video camera and came up again within 22 minutes, the recording unusable.

The lead geologist, Dr. Carson Vetch, writing in his field notes afterward, that the chamber was not a place for cameras, and that he had understood this within three minutes of standing on the floor. The plank has not been lifted since. Panilla Malikott herself, the one standing child, the one who did not go.

She was taken from Fort Clamoth, after an interview conducted by Major Vaughn in the first week of November 1881, to a boarding house in Portland run by Mrs. Jennis Cap, where she lived for seven years. Mrs. Cap was a widow of fifty, a plain, practical woman who had never had children of her own, engaged by the War Department through Caldwell’s recommendation.

She would, in the seven years Panilla lived in her house, teach the child to read in English more deeply than her mother, Esperance, had been able to teach her, to write in a hand Mrs. Cap herself called a scholar’s hand, to sew, to keep accounts, and to attend a small Methodist church on Clay Street on Sunday mornings, where Panilla became known as a quiet, polite girl of whom nothing of the clearing was said. Panilla left Mrs. Cap’s house in the spring of 1888, age 17, to take up a position as a bookkeeper in a shipping office in Astoria on the north coast of Oregon.

She would keep that position for 42 years. She would retire in the spring of 1930, aged 59, and would move into the boarding house on Commercial Street in Astoria, where she would live out the remaining 13 years of her life. She never married. She did not visit Molalla, by her own written statement in the sealed account, because she had been told by Caldwell on the ride down from the ridge, and had come to believe over time, that the 14 would not be helped by the sight of her, and that she would not be helped by the sight of them.

She did go back to the clearing once. In the summer of 1928, at the age of 58, she took the train from Astoria to Portland, and from Portland south to a station on the Southern Pacific line, and from there a stage into Hemlock County, and from there on foot with a hired guide over the ridge and down into the pocket of ground that had been her first home. The hired guide, a man named Ollie Apprentice, who kept a small outfitting business eleven miles east of the clearing, walked her down into the pocket on a morning in late August. He stayed on the ridge above.

Panilla crossed the swept place, which was by then grown over with cheat grass and wild hemlock seedlings, the shape of the 41-foot circle still visible through the pale yellow of the grass. She went to the north edge of the plot. She found her mother’s cedar post. The post was weathered down to the color of bone.

The mark that read “kept her head above the floor” was still legible. She knelt by the post. She did not pray. She took the silver ring off her left hand, where she had worn it since the morning of her mother’s death, and pressed the ring into the earth at the foot of the post, and covered it with a handful of the soil.

She stood up. She walked back across the swept place. She did not go near the largest house. She did not approach the stone passage.

She did not lift the plank. She climbed the ridge path and rejoined Apprentice. She rode the stage out of the county the next morning. She never went back.

Apprentice himself, interviewed by Auster in 1970 at the age of 83, said he had asked Panilla in the stage waiting room on the morning of her departure whether the trip into the clearing had been what she had come for. Apprentice said Panilla had looked at him for a long moment and had answered him in her careful bookkeeper’s voice in the following words: “I went to put something back. I went to tell my mother I had done what she had told me to do. I had never been able to speak the thanks to her face, because my mother died before I had the words to say them.

And so I had carried the thanks for 49 years, and I have left them with her now in the ground above the floor, and the floor can keep them for her, since the floor could not keep her. The floor can have the thanks, Mr. Apprentice, since it did not get me, and since it did not get my mother, and since it will not get, so long as there is breath left in me to prevent it, any descendant of the Malikott family, or any blood or marriage kin of mine. I am 60 years old.

There will be no such kin. I have seen to it. Thank you, sir, for your service. Good day.

” Apprentice said Panilla had then boarded her stage and had lifted her gloved hand in the small polite wave he had seen a hundred bookkeepers make, and the stage had rolled. Panilla went back to Astoria. She lived in her boarding house. She did not speak of the clearing to any lodger.

Panilla did, in the 13 years of her retirement, do one thing of consequence. She wrote the account. She wrote it longhand in a bound ledger book she had bought from the stationer on 14th Street in Astoria in the autumn of 1930. The ledger was 411 pages.

She filled 394 of them. The landlady, Mrs. Owina Doane, had asked her once what she was writing in that book she carried out of her room at meal times and down to her writing desk in the parlor. Panilla had told the landlady that she was writing a letter to a girl who had been born in a mountain pocket in 1870 and who had never been given anyone to tell her story to, and that the letter would be a long one, and that it would be sealed when she was done, and would not be opened until after her own death.

The sealed envelope on the nightstand on the morning of Panilla’s death on April 11th, 1943 bore, in addition to the instruction about the spring of 1971, a smaller line in her hand that read: “Upon opening, deposit all pages with the Oregon Historical Society at Portland in a locked file under the hand of the archivist and permit no copy to be made, and permit the reading of pages 22 through 63, which concerned the two years and two months of my life in the woodshed loft at the clearing, by no person at all, and the reading of pages 174 through 181, which concerned the voice that spoke from under the floor on the night of August 11th, 1879, by no person at all, and the reading of pages 367 through 374, which concern a dream I have had on three nights of my adult life, by no person at all. ”

The envelope was opened in the spring of 1971 by the archivist then holding the key, Dr. Clement Burge. Dr.

Burge read the account in full over a period of eleven weeks in a locked room on the second floor of the society’s building. He granted Dr. Maud Auster of UC Berkeley access to the ordinary pages on June 1st, 1971. Auster used the account in the writing of her book, which appeared in 1977 and remains the only full-length published treatment of the Malikott case.

The key passed to Mrs. Idra Pell in 1989, who held it until 1999. The key then passed to Mr. Rory Pemberbrook, who holds it now.

Mr. Pemberbrook has declined to say anything about the sealed pages beyond what has already been published in the Auster book. He has, in his most recent letter, added one further sentence. He has written: “I will tell you this.

I have held the key for 27 years. I have read the sealed pages twice. I will not read them a third time. The pages are not a thing you read for information.

The pages are a thing that is read for the sake of someone having read them. Someone has. That is the whole purpose. ”

The floor, the chamber, the clearing.

The United States Forest Service continues to administer the pocket of ground as a piece of the Mount Hemlock National Forest. There is no road into the clearing. There is no trail. The ridge path over which Caldwell came in 1881 has not been maintained in forty years and is no longer shown on the service’s topographical maps.

The pocket is a blank square on the current map. A permit is required to enter. The permit is granted by stated policy to no one. The one exception in the 63 years since the service took active management of the parcel was Dr.

Auster’s party of 1970. There have been eleven applications since. All have been denied in a form letter signed by the district supervisor’s office in Portland. The applications have come from three universities, two documentary film companies, one popular press author, one geological research consortium, one evangelical ministry out of Boise, Idaho, that stated an intent to pour concrete into the stone passage, and three private individuals.

The plank over the mouth of the passage has not been lifted in 35 years. The chamber below, with its spiral of inlaid antler laid down by a hand nobody has yet named in a time that carbon returned as more than 11,000 years before the present, has not been entered by any human being in 35 years. The floor is still there. Whatever spoke on the night of August 11th, 1879, in a voice Esperance Thurling Malikott heard once and set down in her own daughter’s ear in the woodshed loft two years and two months later, has not been heard by any ear anyone has reported to the Forest Service in the 35 years since the plank was last lifted.

Whether it is still there to be heard, this correspondent does not know and will not undertake to find out. There are things that are not for the finding out of a man working alone with a notebook. And the chamber under the Malikott clearing is one of them. And the author of this account has come to think that Lieutenant Owen Caldwell, standing on the ridge above the pocket on the morning of October 19th, 1881, with his field notebook open on his knee, writing the sentence about the woman at the trough being neither crippled nor hurt, but grown, and doing a thing she had forgotten how not to, had been given in that one quiet morning the whole of the understanding that it is good for any man to have of the place.

If you walk a quiet ridge above a pocket of flat ground tonight, and the ground is swept to the color of bone, though you can see no broom and no hand that keeps it so, do not walk down into it. Do not call out. Do not lift the plank in the floor of the house that still stands. The floor below has waited for its people, and its people are no longer coming to it.

And the thing a floor does when its people stop coming is a thing you do not want to find out by being the next person who stands on it. Walk back the way you came. And when you get home, press your hand flat to the floor you grew up on, which is the floor your own blood knows, and say a quiet thanks to the person who kept you off any other floor. Someone did.

Even if you have never known their name, someone somewhere kept you upright.