She moves on to the dining room, the hallways, before wondering if it’s not the house screaming, but her.
When she makes it to the kitchen, she shakes with fatigue. Dust fills her lungs as she stumbles to the mouth of the pantry and pauses, trying to force her exhausted brain to decide what to do next.
A cold thread of air wraps about her bare ankles and her eyes snap to the pantry, wild and feverish. It’s a small walk-in room off to the side of the kitchen, lined with whitewashed shelves and mostly empty thanks to their inability to cook. There should be no airflow coming from it.
He said they had no basement, casually, easily, as if he is so used to lying.
A tremulous energy runs through the floorboards as she creeps into the pantry, the circular saw heavy in one hand, electrical cord floppingbehind her like a dead snake. She rests the saw on the pantry floor between her ankles as she glances around the tiny area. With the light switched on, it remains bare and uninspiring.
She steps forward and rests her palm against the very back of the pantry wall where there are no shelves, just hooks for aprons and tea towels. One knock, two.
It rings hollow.
“Oh, fuck you, Bren,” she whispers as her fingers trace the poorly lined caulking around where there used to be a door. The sloppy whitewashing, the way he didn’t plaster it over and then paint, all says this was done in a rush.
Perhaps because he brought her to his house much sooner than he thought he would and he still had things to cover up, to hide.
This is the basement that he said they didn’t have.
Why the hell did he need to hide it?
Because the house is alive alive alive and down there is its beating heart where all the things begin to slither out and whisper to your son and take your son and murder your son your son your son—
She is manic and feverish as she fumbles to plug in the power saw again and level the blade to where the doorknob has been hastily unscrewed, the hole stuffed with putty before it was painted over.
When she cuts into it, mist hits her face like a fine spray of blood.
She is shaking as she cuts around the door and it swings inward with a rusted wail to reveal cement stairs swirling into blackness.
This is a dark that picks its teeth with children’s bones.
It whispers to her, calls.
She has to go down there.
TWENTY
She knew it from thestart, how this perfect life could not be real. She was never Alice in Wonderland, frightened and sinking in pools of her own tears; for her, it was always blood.
Her toes touch the first cement step down into the basement.
Darkness ripples around her and she can only see two steps ahead before the black pitches to a shade so deep and absolute that it feels like dying. A frigid cold sweeps up the basement, a moist, earthy weight twisted through it that makes breathing difficult. Winter has opened a vein down there, or maybe this is where it lives.
Her fingers tighten on the grip of the circular saw, her thumb resting on the faulty button as if this is her weapon against everything monstrous he has locked away. It occurs to her that whatever he hid down there is now, effectively, loosed.
Whatever this is, she can’t unknow it.
She takes another step down and her heel squishes into something soft and wet, liquid seeping out the sides. The cavernous mouth of the basement yawns around her and she reaches for a handrail that isn’t there. For a second, she is unbalanced, her stomach dipping as she reels herself back in. This time, she goes slow, feeling her way down stairs that unroll like a lolling molasses tongue.
Her breath catches, her lungs protesting the thickened foulness in the air, and she presses her sleeve to her mouth to cough.
The last step sinks away to nothing and she pauses, shivering as she peers into the gloom. She feels out with one foot and her toes slide into a sheath of liquid. She draws back, but it’s all over the cement floor, viscid and congealed, worming between her bare toes and lapping up against ankle bones. Water? It can’t be water. But she doesn’t want to think what else it could be.
A stringy outline of something dangles from the ceiling and she reaches out, hesitates, then brushes it with cold fingers. A light bulb’s cord. She tugs and receives a dead click in return, but on her next desperate yank, the bulb crackles to life with a fitful burst of electricity. If there is light, there can’t be monsters. That’s how it works in all the bedtime stories.
Around her, the basement is piled with centuries’ worth of clutter: boxes and crates, old suitcases stacked to the ceiling, broken antique furniture with splintered wooden limbs. There’s an old spindle, a greened copper tub, a wooden cradle filled with broken porcelain dolls, a toolbox with rust flaking off like loose skin. Spiderwebs lounge over every corner and beetles scuttle between boxes. The vast cavity is so stuffed it is overwhelming to take in. Only a narrow walkway has been left cleared to the back of the basement, where a long workbench sits, the wall lined with tools so broken down with rust, they must disintegrate to the touch.
Look down, look down.But she doesn’t want to. She squeezes her eyes shut for the barest second and then glances at what she’s standing in.
