The Basement Dwellers

by Thomas Willits

part 2 of 3

The next evening he began nodding off early.

His head slowly collapsed onto his chest and then jerked upward once more. Margaret saw this and shook her head.

“You need to go up to bed, Ralph,” she scolded. “That’s the third time you’ve started to fall asleep.”

Now, fully conscious, he turned to his wife. He knew she was right, but he also understood what would happen after he walked all the way upstairs, brushed his teeth, changed into his sleeping attire, and finally laid down for bed. He’d be staring at shadows on the ceiling for at least two hours.

“No,” he said firmly. He shook his head in complete disagreement. “It’s too early. I’ll just lie awake until ten or eleven.”

Margaret didn’t bother arguing with Ralph. He was stubborn just like a mule.

The show they were watching ended and gave way to the nightly news and that gave way to Letterman. He had managed not to nod off any more during the last two hours. David Letterman was reading the night’s Top Ten list and about halfway through Margaret rose to her feet.

“I’m going to bed,” she announced. “Why don’t you come on up? You look done in.”

“After Letterman,” he responded, mostly listening to the TV. He laughed at Number Six and then turned to his wife. “After Letterman, okay?”

She sighed, then nodded and headed for the stairs. Ralph laughed once more at the final two items on Dave’s List.

He stopped abruptly, hearing something eerie from somewhere close by. He seized the remote and adjusted the volume down, on the screen small yellow boxes slowly disappeared to the left as the volume receded. He tilted his head and listened hard.

Definitely not Margaret, he thought.

She was already up the stairs. But it was the voice he had heard which distinguished itself from his wife’s. A man’s voice, and creepy sounding at that. The voice reminded him of living in an apartment for ten years. Ralph couldn’t count the number of conversations he had overheard from the apartments above and below him.

Those days were well behind him now but what he had just heard sounded exactly like that. Someone talking normally on a different floor. Not shouting, not whispering but just speaking at a regular decibel level. He stood up, quickly, ready to track down the noise. It was time to go to work.

Just as quickly, the voices stopped. He slowly stepped across the room on the balls of his feet and let them gently sink into the carpet. Each floorboard underneath was nailed firm and offered no give for any creaks or squeaks. He made it to the stairs and then stopped. Upstairs he could see the light was off; even the bathroom was dark.

The voices returned and he cocked his head to the side, trying to zone in on the source.

Not upstairs, Ralph thought. The basement.

The basement door was closed. It stood right next to the stairs. He reached for the knob and then hesitated. A flood of ideas rushed through him: What if someone were down there? What if someone... broke in... and has been hiding down there with a knife or a gun and wants to rob us?

He snapped his hand back quickly.

Listening closely he could faintly make out some of the words. But they were broken up. Some words were clear and then others weren’t. Then another voice would begin and he’d have to try to decipher them as well. It was like trying to listen to people talk on the television with the volume nearly all the way down. Confusing, and yet frustrating to say the least.

”Vermin... spilled... fresh... eating...” one voice went on — the deeper voice. Masculine, Ralph was certain of it. “Lavish the... worth — divine... pure of heart.”

Then a softer, perhaps feminine: “Atrum Erus.”

He stepped back from the door. He started to go up the stairs to get Margaret and then stopped. He turned back, realizing the voices had ceased for the moment, then clutched the side rail with both hands with enough strength he thought he could snap it in two.

“This is nonsense,” he muttered. “Margaret bought a new radio and left it on when she did the laundry. She forgot to turn it off.”

That’s all, he thought. That’s all it is. Ridiculous.

He stepped back down and started for the kitchen. There he would grab the flashlight and proceed down to investigate. He wasn’t going to be scared off by a brand new radio that Margaret had neglected to turn off. He had a half-notion to go up and ask her why she didn’t tell him about the new purchase but since she was already in bed it didn’t seem necessary.

He brushed past an old photo of Margaret hanging of the wall. She was much younger in the picture and he noticed how happy she was. But there wasn’t time to admire photos right now. He had a case to solve.

He opened the drawer and fished through the envelopes and other clutter that had somehow managed to all end up inside this one drawer. He spotted the yellow handle and pulled it out. He depressed the black button and a bright yellow beam filled his eyes.

“We’ll just go have a look down there,” he told himself quietly but also with a tinge of hesitation.

He didn’t like going down there. It was not that he was afraid of the basement. At least he hadn’t been since he was a child. At the age of eight he had had an incident in an old farm house he had grown up in. He had gone down into the basement to find one of his old snow boots when suddenly the power shut off.

Being eight years old he hadn’t known all the monsters, but he had had a fairly broad fix on some of the worst. Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, The Mummy. All of these weren’t that scary after he’d seen the films a few times over and over, but in that moment when the lights had gone off and he struggled to see his way back to the steps and back up to safety, he could see they were indeed as grotesque as they had implied.

Basements, in a way, were not unlike dungeons. There was only one way down and one way up, usually by route of a single stairway. This in itself could be somewhat unnerving. For a boy of eight who had seen all the horror films and had been caught down in this dungeon and amidst the darkness and what he could not see, he fathomed he could fear these monsters.

Dracula no longer looked black and white and emotionless — but vivid in every detail, from his pale, toneless skin, to the blackness of his eyebrows and hair and the empty glare of his pupils. In the dark he could see Dracula and why the movie had indeed been a horror picture as it claimed to be and not the comfort film it might have become from his watching it repeatedly on Saturday nights.

A boy of eight, trapped in the dark in the basement of his childhood farm house had stood frozen in his two bare footsteps, unsure whether to feel for his way back to the stairway or to wait for the lights to come back. The time trudged onward and there was no power, no light to bring him to safety.

Suddenly he had seen Frankenstein and Wolf Man and The Mummy. They were all down there. They had been all around him the entire time. Eventually the power did come back on, but not until fifteen minutes of eternity had elapsed, and in all that time Ralph stood his ground and didn’t move. He couldn’t.

He had thought about feeling his way back to the stairs, inch by inch, but he kept thinking he’d brush against something hairy and with long claws (Wolf Man?) or something covered in what might be stiff rags (The Mummy?) or even his worst fear: something that felt like a draping black coat (Dracula?) and what would he do then? So he had waited. He waited for the nightmare to be over.

An incident like this would be hard to forget for someone eight years old. Maybe Ralph had pushed it away the rest of his life but it hadn’t been completely forgotten. Rationally, now that he was more than sixty years old, it hardly made sense to be afraid of the dark or a basement, but partially the fear was there, if only as a childhood memory. Gone, but not forgotten as they say.

But in all truth he didn’t fear his own basement. He went down there at least once a week for a dozen different reasons. If he still had this fear from his childhood, it had long since been suppressed. And Margaret, his own wife went down there practically on a daily basis to do the laundry or put away the extra canned goods.

Ralph would perhaps consider that their basement was undesirable. It was the only thing original in the house after the other two floors had been reconstructed. The basement was virtually untouched, looking much as it had nearly a century ago. The concrete floor was always damp, not completely, but enough to make it uncomfortable to spend much time down there. The walls were gloomy and damp as well and the lighting substandard. Each time he had gone down there he spent each moment wishing to leave.

But what really made the basement undesirable was a bearing wall constructed of mortar and brick down the center almost shaped like an L. The stairs opened up into what they used as a laundry room. There was the washer and dryer on the left and the the hot water heater and furnace on the right.

Where the stairs came down were six shelves for storing their canned goods and Ralph kept a small work bench in the corner to make repairs when the time called for it. All of this was on one side of the masonry wall.

The wall ran down the center separating off the other side, which they had never used, and Ralph could only remember going back there once or twice. He had been on that side when he first inspected the house for purchase and maybe one other occasion to work on some of the old plumbing. In order to get to that side you had to walk the length of the center wall which was about twenty-five feet and then swing around the L-shaped end for another four or five feet.

Ralph had installed a light fixture on a switch at the bottom of the stairs and he flipped it on before opening the basement door. For now the voices were silent, leaving Ralph to believe the radio station’s signal might have cut out.

His hand tightened around the knob and he turned it until it clicked free. The light greeted him from below and he tried to see if the stairway was vacant — just to make sure there wasn’t anyone waiting for him on the other side of the door or maybe at the bottom of the steps.

He envisioned this very vividly as the door swung open and the fresh stench of basement odor drifted upward. There would be a man dressed in some dreadful garb, dangling mangled flesh, and standing at the base of the steps. He would peer up at Ralph with two empty eye sockets where maggots nested and harvested their larvae. And then suddenly he would... stroll off into the dark.

He shivered, thinking about it.

But there was no one there. And there were no voices down there when he listened for them. Each side of the stairway was filled in with sheet rock and he couldn’t see anything below until he descended at least four or five more steps. He swallowed a large breath and held it. Then he exhaled slowly and proceeded down.

About two steps further he thought about the risers on the staircase he had never put in. Behind this staircase opened to the opposite side of the bearing wall, and the only way under the staircase was to walk all the way around the basement and come up underneath the stairs.

Ralph knew the real reason he never put the risers in: he didn’t want to go around to the other side of the basement, although he’d never admit it to anyone.

The staircase wasn’t boxed in with studs or walls on the other side, it was left open for extra storage space. He remembered they had a few items in that location since they had moved in. He started to turn around but stopped short of glancing through the missing risers and into the dark abyss. He couldn’t do it; fear had consumed him.

He imagined from under the stairway two giant claws covered in black hair suddenly grasping him by both ankles and then ripping them violently backwards under the staircase. His heartbeat sped up its pace and he was having second thoughts about coming down here.

Perhaps morning would be better, his mind suggested. My curiosity can wait.

A lie. The Sleuth part of Ralph rebutted. This cannot wait.

Proceed to part 3…