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The Thing In The Basement:
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The paneling was not quite straight. It looked straight, the black lines at formerly-fashionable almost random intervals, some of the lines thick, some of them thin, all of them separated by sheaths of wood or near-wood (it looked like wood but was probably particle-board, which was a type of wood, maybe, but not really wood. It can't be wood if it's just sawdust compacted into a shape that looks like wood.)
That was how I felt at the end. Like a person ground into sawdust but then smashed back into the shape of a person.
And the paneling! Why was that bothering him?
You wouldn't notice that it was not straight, not unless you looked closely, where pictures hung, to see that if the picture was level (maybe they weren't?) the paneling was crooked. Maybe it wasn't, maybe the pictures were crooked and the paneling straight, but the whole effect, once you noticed it, was to give you the feeling that things were a little off-kilter.
Well, give you the feeling that things were a little off-kilter. A little! HA! They were a lot off-kilter.
That's why I killed myself. It wasn't the sawdust feeling. It wasn't even the Thing In The Basement. It was because I finally realized that everything just wasn't right.
But I shouldn't kid myself, or you. The Thing In The Basement had a lot to do with it.
What the Thing In The Basement gives, the Thing In The Basement takes away. One way or another.
It wasn't always like that. At first, we didn't even know about the Thing In the Basement.
When we first found the house, I couldn't believe it. Melissa and I had been looking for a house for almost a year. I didn't make very much money, and we had even less once she became pregnant. I spent all of my time worrying about it. All of the time I didn't spend at my job as a copy editor of a series of local papers. Which was becoming more and more, because (I told myself) we needed the money and because (I told Melissa) they needed me at the office, since I didn't want her to feel like she was the cause of the problem. She wasn't.
I would sit, sometimes, at my office, late at night, proofreading a story about a town board meeting, and wonder whether I should even go home. I'd wonder, sometimes, whether I couldn't just go drive the car into the lake.
Then I'd shake it off, go home, we'd eat dinner, and go house hunting.
So when we pulled up at what would become our house (it's not like it's ruining the surprise to tell you we bought it... I wouldn't kill myself in a rental house, you know), and looked at it, I didn't think there was a chance in hell we could afford it.
The realtor was just getting out of her car behind us. "Isn't it lovely?" she hollered.
It was. It was a nice-looking house, a little Cape Cod house (and why are Cape Cods called that when they're located in the Midwest?) with dormer-type windows and a landscaped front lawn that had enough grass to let you know it was a lawn but enough flowers to let you know that you wouldn't be doing a lot of mowing.
The realtor saw my gaze. "The flowers are perennials. They don't require a lot of care." There were tall trees throughout the front (and back) yard, providing shade and showing low, level branches that would easily hold up a tire swing or a tree fort.
Melissa just stared, enraptured. "I hope we can afford it," she said under her breath.
We can't. I thought. I didn't see how we ever could. This might be a waste of time.
Then I stepped on the lawn, at the same time as Melissa. I saw her eyes light up. "Oh, Jude, it's perfect, don't you think?"
See? See what can happen? That wasn't a mistake. Melissa knew (like I did) to not make a big deal about the house because the realtor will use that against you. But she told me later that she couldn't help it. We would be in our first night in the house, a few weeks later, eating pizza over a cardboard box that served as our kitchen table, and she would explain that she had overflowed with happiness the moment she'd stepped onto the lawn.
I didn't. I hadn't. When we stepped onto the front lawn I thought I was going to cry. I almost did. But I held it in and it passed.
We went into the house. The previous owners had left it empty. The realtor didn't know where they'd moved to. She'd had the house on the market only a short time; she thought their lawyer had called and listed it.
If only all we would be dealing with was a lawyer.
The bedrooms, three of them, were small but nice. The rest of the house was small but nice, too. I won't bore you. I didn't notice the paneling that first time through -- didn't notice for a long time. The paneling was in a den, which had been added onto the back of the house and was somewhat recessed or sunken in, so you stepped down from the kitchen and into the den.
I did notice the wall in the kitchen. I noticed because first, when I stood next to it, the hair on my body stood up like it will during an electrical storm.
And I noticed it because it's not that common to have a brick wall in your kitchen, especially an 8' tall, 4' wide brick wall made of red brick that doesn't match any of the other brick in the house.
"Do you like that?" The realtor asked, noticing me looking at it.
I shrugged. "Seems a little out of place," I said. When I touched the brick, my fingers tingled.
"I think it bricked over a fireplace. Would you like to see the backyard?" We walked out through the den into the backyard, where a small vegetable garden was overgrown with weeds and what might have been a zucchini plant. Melissa walked back to the fence with the realtor. I looked around. No firewood or firewood pile. No coal shoot.
No basement windows. I looked at the roof. If they'd bricked up a fireplace, they'd taken out the chimney, too.
When we went back in, I went over to the brick area again. This time, I felt the sadness again, but not as strongly.
"Does it have a basement?" I asked.
"We don't discuss the basement of this house," said the realtor. She turned and began to walk into the front room.
"What?" I said. Melissa turned to me and said "What?" I looked at her. "Did you hear what she said about the basement?"
"What about it," Melissa asked.
"What do you think?" The realtor said. "Shall I give you a minute?"
I looked at Melissa and said "Yes, give us a minute."
"We'll take it," said Melissa. She looked at me.
Look, I married her, all right? She wanted it. I'm not going to argue. "We'll write up a bid," I told the realtor. I figured that would do it; we'd never get it.
I watched for a minute as the realtor sat at the small folding table with Melissa writing on the offer to purchase. They filled in numbers and dates and Melissa signed it. I signed it, and as the realtor began folding it up, my cellphone rang.
"Hello?"
"Jude?"
"Yeah. What's up, John?" John is the publisher of our local papers.
"Tina resigned."
"What?" Tina was my boss, the editor-in-chief.
"Yep. She just now marched into my office and said she was quitting. Didn't even have a letter or anything. Just said 'I'm quitting' and turned around and walked out. I chased her outside, tried to get an explanation, but she wouldn't give me one. Just said she had no choice, got in her car and left."
"Weird," was all I could say. "When did she do this?"
"About two minutes ago. Can you come in?" I looked at Melissa. She was talking with the realtor at the front door.
"I suppose. Why?"
"I'd like you to take over for her."
"What? For how long."
"Forever. If you're not going to just walk out on me. "
"Is this a promotion?"
"Well, yeah."
"So is it a raise, too?"
"It'll have to be, I guess. We'll talk when you get here."
I said I'd be right there and folded the phone. Melissa and the realtor were outside. As I turned to walk, I looked at the brick wall. I walked over to it, and I saw for the first time a tiny crumbled area at the side, about waste down. I bent down and looked. It was a small hold, or chipped area. At the back of it was what looked like a padlock, behind the brick wall.
"Jude, are you coming?"
I left. I wondered why the brick wall was hot, but I left.
Later on, while I'm lying in my car, before I get sucked back in, before I go back in, when I'm nearly dead but not quite so, just nearly so, but after Melissa was already dead (and she got away, I think but I'm not sure) I heard a song.
It was The Good Times Are Killing Me by a group called Modest Mouse.
It was on the CD player in the car in the garage. Melissa must have left it in there. She always liked music like that.
I was lying there, slowly falling asleep, and listening to the lyrics and thinking "How true."
But I didn't die for a while. For a long while, as it turns out.
I've ended the suspense, right? You know I die. I told you that in the beginning. Melissa dies, too. Don't worry about that. And Angie dies.
You don't know Angie yet. Angie was our baby girl, our daughter. She dies, too, but you'll probably get to know her. If I tell you about her.
David didn't die. I don't know why.
What the Thing In The Basement Gives, the Thing In The Basement Takes Away, right? Maybe It didn't give us David.
I wish it had a name. It does, maybe. But It didn't. We would have called It The Thing In The Basement, like I am now, if we had called It anything.
And how am I telling you this, if I'm dead, you're probably asking.
That's for me to know. I'll tell you eventually.
So we moved in. We got the house, and thanks to my promotion, we were easily able to afford it, and even some new furniture which did not, amazingly, make the old furniture we didn't replace right away look too dingy.
We moved right in. We had movers help us and we were mostly unpacked. I'd tried and tried and tried to forget about the day we'd put in the bid, about how weird it'd felt to get that call and the hot wall and the way I'd felt like crying when I first stepped on the lawn.
That, by the way, did not go away. (It would never go away. NEVER.) In fact, it got a little worse. The second time I stepped on the lawn, for the pre-closing inspection, I felt dizzy and actually did start crying. Melissa looked at me.
"What's wrong?" She said. She looked pleasantly confused. I like to remember that look especially. Better to remember her pleasantly confused, a slight smile with a question in her eyes, than the look that I remember her most with: the one right before she died. You don't want to be the last person to see someone just as they die. That burns right into your brain and it's really hard, extremely hard, to take your mind off of it.
"I had to sneeze," said, hesitating "and couldn't quite."
"Don't you hate that?" she laughed. She grabbed my hand. She was a little more noticeably pregnant. That makes sense. That was David. So maybe the Thing In The Basement didn't have anything to do with David. Maybe that's why he lived.
If he lived.
Another song would come on the CD, which Melissa had burned on our computer. The Lucky One by Alison Krauss. "You'll be looking at a happy man 'cause you're the lucky one/well you're blessed I guess to never know the road your choosin." That's what she sang.
I know only the worst hack writers use songs to help set the mood or foreshadow. Stephen King has built whole horror stories around songs. Sleepwalkers, I think was one. And he's a hack. I'm not foreshadowing, exactly, because those songs were after the fact. Maybe the Thing In the Basement played them. Maybe it was being ironic.
Melissa grabbed my hand and we walked into the house, that day that we inspected it and the feeling passed pretty quickly. It always would. But each time, it would get worse. I had to brace myself to go home.
Eventually, I would shudder with fear and loathing when I stepped on our lawn.
Eventually, I would sob like a baby in the car for minutes after pulling into our garage.
Eventually, I took to getting out and walking around the back yard, telling my family I wanted to see the backyard and liked it when what I was doing was trying to shake off the images of killing myself.
And it wasn't just me, you should know. I sometimes was crushed, had my soul absolutely obliterated, by other feelings. Visions of Angie being hung by her feet and tortured. Of Melissa slashed apart with a knife, or maybe claws. Things like that.
It made me work a lot later.
That's what I was thinking about, a few months after we moved in, when we were eating dinner together. We were past the pizza-and-cardboard boxes stage. We were eating dinner, a quick dinner of sandwiches. Melissa was about a month away from giving birth to David and we were sitting in the kitchen. Sometimes I could sit there and be fine.
Tonight was not one of those nights. Melissa's back was to the bricked-in wall. I was trying to focus on what she was saying, something about the yard, but I couldn't.
The bricks were sliding around.
They were rearranging themselves. Remember those little puzzles, with fifteen little squares in 16 spaces, in a square, and you would slide the squares around, one at a time into the blank space, trying to make a picture or word or something? It was like that. The bricks were not all the same color or shade; there were variations. Some were redder, some were more variegated or scratched up.
And they were sliding around, rearranging themselves quickly and over and over, jumping past each other and jostling and sliding over and over.
"What's on your mind?" asked Melissa. "Jude?" That jerked my attention away. "I've been talking for five minutes and you haven't heard a word I've said, have you?"
I hadn't. I'd been transfixed by the bricks. I looked down at my sandwich, picked at the sesame seeds on the bread. (We'd been able to afford fancier bread since my promotion. Melissa got this at a strip-mall yuppie bakery. )
"I guess I'm distracted," I admitted.
"By what?" She asked. I couldn't tell her the truth, right? I made up something about my job and kept looking down at the bread because I could hear the bricks still scraping over each other, the slightly-stone clank of bricks getting up and moving and settling back down and they were going faster.
"Maybe your job is too much for you. Maybe you should take a break," she said. "Take a day or two off."
"I'll take time off when the baby's born," I pointed out. The bricks were really scuttling now.
"If you make it that far," she said. "I don't want you getting too stressed out."
I looked at her, marveling at the genuine concern in her voice. Sometimes, the feelings that overwhelmed me when I came home -- which at that point were limited to merely (merely!) a tidal wave of sadness (and I say merely because it became so much worse) were harder to shake off, and the theme at the time, I remember it well, was that nobody cared about me. So the caring in her voice really hit a chord.
But I was immediately pulled away from looking at Melissa's kind, caring face because the bricks stopped. They'd finished. They were arranged the way they wanted to be. The way the Thing In The Basement wanted them to be, I guess.
The pattern was not immediately clear at first. My attention was drawn by the fact that they stopped. I stared long enough to make Melissa turn around, but she must not have been able to make anything out.
I was.
The bricks could spell. The Thing In The Basement could spell. And by rearranging the bricks It had spelled out a prophecy. It said:
Jude Will Be The Last To Die.
Oh, the things we trade.
The things we trade away.
Like a little kid, trading away a Hank Aaron rookie card for someone else because he doesn't like Hank Aaron as much as that other player who doesn't even stick in his memory anymore, never knowing that the Hank Aaron rookie card would have allowed him to live a life of leisure.
Okay, that's not my memory. That one was actually my uncle's. That's the only appearance he'll make in this story, though.
My family was not one of the things I traded away for anything. They were just not a big part of my life anymore.
Or maybe I did trade them away, because I did move away from them. And I enjoyed where I lived. Days like that one day, about two months after David was born. I was driving to work. I'd begun heading into the office a little more in those days, in part because I was busier, in part because I was trying to avoid the house, and what I'd come to think of as The Thing (I didn't really know where it was at that point. Remember, we didn't discuss the basement. Not with the realtor and not with each other. I didn't because... well, you can guess why. And if Melissa was deliberately not discussing the basement, I didn't know it.)
And in part, because I was enjoying the job and enjoying the prospect of better jobs to come.
So I'm driving along that morning and the farther I got from our house the better I'd feel, most of the time. That day I sure did. It was a rare morning. I had the top down on my car -- my new car-- and the sun was shining and the breeze was barely blowing and you could just taste a hint of the ocean which wasn't that far from us after all. The clouds were pasted into the sky like cotton on a kindergartner's project, and hung just that close. There were actually birds singing.
Funny that I remember that.
And I was driving along and enjoying myself. I had the radio on, to a local talk station, but I wasn't really listening. I was sort of contemplating the day ahead and sort of thinking about breakfast and how cute David had looked, and how pretty Melissa had looked even though she was tired.
I pulled up at a red light and stopped for it. The breeze tousled my hair. A few cars turned in front of me and the light turned green. I slowly put the car into gear and began driving forward. And I remember exactly what I was thinking, just then. I was thinking:
This sure is a nice life I've gotten for us.
And the sun twinkled off of the shiny clean hood of my convertible, twinkled right into my eye as a dump truck ran the red light on the cross route and smashed into me, and I was stunned because there had not been a dump truck there just a second ago, I'd swear it, but I didn't have time to think because my car spun around and began to tilt and I lurched forward and fell out as the car rolled over under the push of the truck, and I saw it tilting down on me and I rolled and put my hands up (like that would do any good) and the car didn't hit me.
But it did fall on a little girl, who was riding her bike across the street, who had been to the left of me as I went through the intersection. It fell right on the middle of her back and pinned her down. I sat up, feeling dizzy, and reached for her.
She was screaming and reaching out her hands to me as the truck driver got out of his truck and all I heard was her screaming incoherently and the sound of tortured metal and glass crunching and tires squealing. I crawled forward, and grabbed her hands. I pulled a little. She was stuck and her face was turning pale.
"Lift the car," I yelled or maybe someone else did it. I felt her little hand grab mine. She couldn't have been more than 10. I pulled at her again and people were yelling around me. I leaned in to her.
"It's going to be okay," I said. "Can you breathe?"
Her face went whiter, and her eyes rolled back into her head.
"Don't do that," I said. I'm not sure it helped.
Her head lolled to the side and her hand let go of me. I fell back, just a little, and saw a trickle of blood come from her mouth.
"Pull the car!" someone yelled. "Push the car!" someone yelled. I sat there and felt the sweat from her hand on my finger, watched the blood trickle down to a puddle, her eyes white, nothing moving. The car, my new car, began to rock back.
Her eyes turned black. Black as coal. Blacker, and deeper, like the eyes had been removed and there was a hole there, a deep deep hole. Her head turned towards me, just a little. I couldn't hear anything as the blood rushed into my head, into my ears, I couldn't hear anything except my heartbeat, and then everything went silent and all I could see was her tiny, innocent face, with the dribble of blood down the side, lift towards me, and those black eyes, and she said
I gave it to you.
It sure was a nice day, up until then.
Blood. That was what it looked like.
After a while, the feelings I would get upon coming home weren't remarkable anymore. And the horror of the accident had faded.
David was three when I saw the blood.
David was four, and Angie was one, when I no longer noticed the blood because of the birds.
But first the blood.
It looked like blood.
It smelt like blood.
It coagulated and crusted up and scabbed like blood.
God help me. I can't think of this next part without saying that. God help me, it tasted like blood.
What would Melissa have said if she'd seen me? I'd been seeing the bloo
d for a few weeks. Maybe months. I don't know. Time runs together now and it ran together then. I'd first seen the blood trickling down a hallway. A little stream of blood, right down the center of our upstairs hallway, not more than a quarter inch wide. It had reached the end of the hallway and the first step, and was just about to form a full-fledged drop. I saw the drop forming at the end of the stream as I came upstairs with a cup of coffee in each hand, one for me and one to wake Melissa with.
I stopped, got down on my knees, set down the coffee, and looked. I looked from the drop, growing more bulbous slowly. I saw the rivulet of blood in the hallway, and, leaving the coffee where I'd set it, I crawled forward, looking at the blood. It went straight up the middle of the hall. Halfway down the hall were two doors, one on each side. The one on my left was David's room. The one on the right was a storage room. A trickle of blood was coming from that room and flowing into the center of the hallway. I looked at the door, which was closed. I shifted from my hands and knees to my knees and turned the knob of the door. It wouldn't turn. I rattled it for a second and looked down at the little stream of blood flowing from the crack under the door.
That stream, from the spare room, was not the original runner of blood. It joined a stream. I forgot about the spare room and looked further up the hallway. Standing up, I walked the few steps towards the end of the hall where the door to our room, mine and Melissa's, was closed. The blood came from under that door, pooled a little, and then flowed to the center of the hallway and down towards the stairs, joined halfway by the blood from the spare room. I reached out and touched the doorknob, swiveled it to open the door.
It swung in on its own force and I gasped and jumped back.
Melissa was standing there. "Jude?" she said.
I was sweating. She looked confused. I was confused. How had the door... but she must have opened it, right? That's how it opened on its own.
"What's the matter with you?" she asked, stepping forward.
"Watch out," I said, pointing down. She looked down. I looked down. The blood was gone.
We decided, she decided, that I'd been sleep walking. And was startled by her. I never told her about the blood. Not until now, I guess.
That was the first time I saw the blood. But not the last time. There were new little trickles all the time. There would be droplets of blood on the mirror in the bathroom when I got out of the shower. A pool of blood on the kitchen floor -- a big one, too. I'd be wiping it up and it would disappear, even right off the towel. Once, blood came out of the spigot in the basement by the washing machine, when I was down there loading some clothes into the dryer.
Once I was eating lunch with Melissa and David and blood was pouring out of Melissa's nose. She noticed it; it was dripping onto her food, on her plate. "Oh, for goodness' sake," she said, and stood up, leaning her head back and holding her nose pinched shut. She went over to the sink and began running cold water and wet a washcloth and then stopped. I turned around to see her standing there.
"What was I doing," she said. "Isn't that crazy? I came over here and forgot what I was doing." She took the washcloth and brought it back and wiped off David's face and forgot all about it. The blood had disappeared.
All the while, it would have been hard for anyone to tell that anything was wrong. I'd grown used, as I said, to the feelings that overwhelmed me as soon as I stepped onto the property, feelings that by now included flash visions, horrible visions, disembodied heads and lighting strikes and mutated insects and demons. I'd actually grown used to that although it still sometimes made me physically ill to pull up in the driveway.
I'd been promoted again at work and our secondhand furniture was slowly being replaced with first-hand furniture and new appliances. Oh, the things we trade away, and I didn't even realize it at the time. The house was bleeding me!
Not the house. The Thing In The Basement.
You're probably wondering about the basement itself, by now. Why haven't I mentioned that?
Because the blood comes first. I'd actually gone into the basement. But I had to tell you about the blood first.
The last time I saw the blood was late at night. I'd jerked awake and couldn't get back to sleep. My heart was racing. I laid there and tried to remember my dream. Why was I so excited, upset? I couldn't think of anything in particular, and that should tell you just how bad things were that I didn't think that visions of death and destruction, thoughts of suicide, pools of blood, were anything in particular to get excited about. I'd seen the basement, of course, by that time.
I looked over at Melissa, who was sleeping peacefully. She had never given any sign of noticing anything about the house, and neither had David. They both loved it. They did not have the signs of gray hair I had, the heartburn, the insomnia, the worries. Melissa was happier than ever. She talked about putting David into a private school and maybe having another child. Private school! Something she'd always wanted but had never dreamed she could give to her children, she'd said.
I would have done anything for her. I tried to, anyway.
So I went downstairs, that night. I walked around the front hall, the living room, the kitchen, all quiet and mostly dark in the moonlight. I shuddered a little as I walked by the brick wall and heard them shift slightly, and I even glanced down, but they hadn't opened up this time so I wasn't allowed down there. I circled the kitchen table and was about to head back upstairs but something stopped me.
A slight glint of light, of white, from the counter. I walked over there.
One of the knives was on the counter. Out of the holder, those wooden block things you get at Target nowadays. It was the biggest knife. It was like an axe, almost. It was laying there.
We'd had grilled cheese for dinner. I don't think Melissa had used this. I looked at it, afraid to touch it. I leaned closer. My breath clouded the blade where it was shiny. But not where the blade was dark. I clicked on the light over the stove, bathing a small area of the counter in soft yellow light.
The knife had blood on it.
I still didn't want to pick up the knife. I've seen those type of movies a millions times. Pick up the knife, get your fingerprints on it, then go upstairs and find your family slaughtered and you're hauled off to prison. 20 years later your story will be told as a weak horror movie with James Garner in a cameo role as the judge.
So I didn't pick up the knife, right away. But I had to. It was vibrating. I could see it vibrating, the sides slightly blurred, shaking and shifting ever so slightly. It rattled just a bit, so I picked it up and it stopped vibrating. The blood ran down the blade towards my hand. A little of it dripped onto my hand and it was cold, so cold I dropped the knife with a clatter.
The knife hit the counter with a clatter and disappeared. We never did see it again. There was no blood on the counter, but there was blood on my hand, flowing more freely as though I had a cut.
I stared at my hand and without knowing what I was doing, well, without knowing why I was doing it, licked my hand.
That was the last thing I remember that night. I don't remember going back to bed. I don't remember Melissa waking up, and trying to wake me up. I don't remember the police officers coming to the door holding David, who had somehow gotten out of his crib and out of the house and was walking down the center of the street four blocks away. And I don't remember David kicking and screaming in Melissa's arms as he was brought back into the house and put into his bed, screaming and crying like he was being burned alive until he got so tired he couldn't stay awake anymore.
I was told about it, but I don't remember any of that. I remember the blood.
It wasn't until after Angie began preschool that things got bad.
Imagine that.
Imagine how bad things would get. Up until then, all I'd had happen to me were visions of blood around the house. Suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Crushing depression. Threats spelled out on the walls of the house. And a horrific murder that happened in front of my eyes.
I don't know when I began to think of it as The Thing In The Basement. Maybe it was when things began to talk to me.
Not just the walls spelling, but the things around me talking to me.
Remember Son of Sam saying the mailman's dog talked to him? Or whatever it was he said? I don't think he had it as bad.
Just so you know I'm not crazy, I'm going to tell you a little bit about that, and a little bit about what I saw in the basement.
Things were getting out of hand for me by the time I went in the basement. It was before David had the screaming fits that began the night he walked away, the night I tasted the blood, although those concerned me.
Melissa didn't seem concerned.
Melissa didn't seem to notice.
You'll begin to think you're crazy a lot faster if nobody around you notices the things you notice. I wonder where I learned to handle things like that? I never mentioned them to Melissa, and I certainly didn't want to mention them to a doctor, or a friend (if I'd had one. Which I didn't.)
Melissa never seemed to even notice that screaming fits. Melissa didn't seem to notice any of the things I noticed. (Maybe she did, judging by what she said at the end.)
But the basement. I don't know why I get so distracted. I can't seem to focus. Being dead will do that to you, I guess.
You know, you guessed, right, that the basement door was behind that brick wall. By the time I went and faced the brick wall that night, I had about had it. I was getting home later and later as time went on. I told Melissa it was because of my new job-- another promotion -- and I tried to make it up to her. We bought her a new car. We had a plasma TV by then. She had jewelry; I'd always promised her jewelry.
I couldn't stay away, though. When I wasn't there, I worried about Melissa, and David, and Angie. If it, whatever it was, couldn't work on me, would it start on them?
Silly me. It had reached out and killed a little girl just to remind me who was in charge.
The night I went to look at the basement door, I tried to force the issue. I'd woken up with blood dripping down onto my forehead, just little drips. That hadn't happened before. I hadn't repeated the little episode of tasting it. This woke me up, of course. I sat up, and looked over at Melissa. I always checked her, to see if it was after her.
It wasn't. Yet.
The blood dripped faster and faster, became a stream, and was splattering all around me. I finally gave up, got out of bed, and was wiping the blood out of my eyes and off of my face trying to walk out of the bedroom. It was stinging, running into my mouth. The floor was slippery with blood. I leaned on the wall, leaving bloody handprints, bloody grip marks on the doorknob, which I could barely open. I walked out into the hallway. I saw blood flowing from Angie's room-- the room that had been the spare room. Not from David's.
I walked down the hall, nearly killing myself trying to navigate the stairs. The blood kept following me, like those rainclouds that hover over cartoon characters. It was almost ankle deep in the house when I heard the howling. It sounded like wolves. Large wolves. It echoed around my house and split through my ears.
I was downstairs. I was in front of the kitchen. The bricks were motionless.
"What!" I yelled. It was meant to be a question, but didn't come out that way. "What! What! What!" I didn't care if Melissa heard. (Why didn't she hear?) David started yelling, screaming in his sleep. I kept yelling it: "Whatwhatwhatwhat!"
The bricks shifted slightly. There was a small gap, almost waist high. A small doorknob sat there. A dull, brassy doorknob. The blood stopped. The wolf howls continued.
I reached out and touched the doorknob. I expected it to be hot. I expected electricity. It felt like a doorknob. Nothing happened. The wolf howls kept going.
I slowly twisted the knob.
I don't know if I can describe it yet.
I don't know if I can tell you what I saw that night. I'm pretty sure that was the night I began to think of it as The Thing In the Basement.
I wasn't the only one who called it that. The knives in the kitchen, for example, called it that.
I told you that, right? That things, things, began talking to me? I told you that. The knives talked to me. Food talked to me. The trees in the yard talked to me.
Mostly they talked about death. I'd walk out to my car in the morning, and my keys wouldn't jingle, they'd curse: Kill you rot in hell pick your eyes out with our teeth. The trees would snicker.
The knives called to me. They'd sit in the kitchen and call my name when I walked by. Jude take us with you use us take us to see The Thing In The Basement. But I could never go there armed.
I guess I could tell you what I saw. Telling you about it can't be any worse than actually seeing it.
The first time I saw The Thing In The Basement I tried to gouge out my own eyes.
The second time I killed myself.
The first thing I noticed was the paneling.
The paneling I mentioned at first, remember? The crooked paneling, the stuff that made you feel slightly off-kilter?
It was disconcerting. I had turned the knob expecting, I don't know, a stairway into the depths of hell, or a bottomless pit, or maybe just a giant mouth waiting to swallow me. While I wasn't truly prepared for those, I also wasn't prepared to see... a rec room.
That's what it was, more or less. It had the paneling, clearly installed by someone not a professional, and those carpenter steps that are put in when a house is built and not taken out by people that don't expect to use their basement. These had been altered to be carpeted, somewhat, by the use of oddly-colored carpet remnants poorly tacked down.
I walked down them carefully, not just because I didn't want to trip, but because -- remember -- this was where I expected to meet The Thing In The Basement.
This was all before objects began talking to me. I'd piece it all together later (I have lots of time now, being dead) but not at that time, I hadn't, and I'm not going to give it all to you here. I have too much time, and you're listening, aren't you, so I'm going to take up that time.
I wonder where we'll all go?
Oops. I'm giving it away.
So I walked down the stairs, and turned the corner. I was ready, I thought, for anything. I was prepared.
I won't say the Thing In The Basement doesn't have a sense of humor.
What I saw was a robot.
I knew you wouldn't believe me. But it was... off-kilter. That's the only way I can describe it. That's part of what led to me feeling that way. Here I'd been having visions and troubled thoughts, suicidal and homicidal thoughts and my kids were waking up screaming or wandering around the house, and that was before the animals started dying in our yard but you get the general picture, and I finally went down, was allowed down into the basement, and saw a robot.
Not a robot like from the Star Wars movies or something. I should be more clear. I had a little wind-up robot when I was a kid, one of those little toys you get for like a dollar and it has the two little feet that slowly walk forward. It was like a little shiny cylinder with orange claw feet and a glass bowl on top. I'd had it when I was a little kid. I instantly recognized it.
The basement was bare except for that. There was the paneling around the walls, the carpeted stairs, and a cement floor that was empty, bare, except for this little inch-tall robot slowly walking across the floor.
I stood there, as shocked as I could have been with anything else. That's why it was so perfect, I guess. The sense of humor -- such as it is - -might have manifested itself in other ways, from what I've seen and heard from the few people who will still talk or listen, but for me it was that robot, which was not just funny (to the Thing) but also strange enough and unsettling enough to be scarier than if it had been a giant mouth. I guess, by that point, the strange, evil, scary things were expected. They were still strange, evil, and scary, but they were losing their shock value like in a slasher film when by the fourth or fifth time someone opens a closet and the killer is there, you might jump but you're no longer really shocked.
But this shocked me. Maybe because it was so unexpected, so anticlimactic.
Or maybe because the robot was walking, so it had been wound up, and I couldn't see anyone so I had to think that there was something else hidden even though the basement was small and well-lit by the overhead bulb. I couldn't hardly take my eyes off the robot but I'd shoot glances around the room, waiting for the demon or zombie or whatever was going to kill me now that I was distracted but it didn't come.
Or maybe it was because the robot had been buried so deeply in my mind. I'd had it when I was six, maybe, and hadn't thought of it in years and years, but the Thing In the Basement had pulled it out as easily as what I'd eaten for lunch that day.
I walked towards it, about as fast as the robot walked. It was making that little grinding noise, which I could hear, barely, over the whooshing of my pulse in my ears.
I stood in front of it, towering over it. It was walking towards my foot. I kept shooting glances around, looking over my shoulder, but there weren't even eerie shadows, just this little robot walking across the floor.
I squatted. It kept coming forward.
I looked at it more closely, and finally reached out my hand to pick it up.
You knew it wasn't really there, right? Or it was but I'd never be able to pick it up. I reached out my hand but never made it there. Because the robot disappeared and I was surrounded. Surrounded! Buried in a sea of people all rushing and milling around me.
People?
Hardly. Corpses, it looked like, or rotting people, maybe those zombies. One guy didn't have a head. I spun around and around, looking everywhere at the hundreds of people who were standing around me, or milling around me, or shuffling towards the stairs, or trying to push each other.
The guy without a head was a body just walking slowly with his neck truncated off and a splash of blood over his shoulders and down his front.
There was a lady who sat against the wall with her neck cocked at a strange angle and her tongue hanging out. Her face was blue and red. Her arms twitched spasmodically and periodically her legs kicked.
There was a man with no lower jaw, just ragged shards of skin around his mouth. He turned towards me and I saw through the lower part of his face through the back of his skull. His head had trouble staying up because there was no spine there. He dragged a shotgun behind him.
A wet young child, spitting up water, with shampoo in his hair, lying on his back.
Someone twitching and jerking, his skin smoking, his eyes rolled back into his head. I couldn't figure him out, and didn't want to look, but I saw in his hand what looked like a lamp cord. He tried to stand, would jerk himself to fall over, and tried to stand up.
There were more, all with missing limbs or missing faces or missing heads, some carrying weapons, some wet, some with hand prints on their throats, I couldn't keep looking at them. They had clothes from years gone by and clothes from yesterday.
I saw the little girl, too, the one from the car accident, still covered in blood, her chest caved in, still trying desperately to gurgle at least a little oxygen through her sodden, collapsed lungs, and she wasn't walking. She wasn't able to, because her legs were crushed. She pulled herself towards the stairs, slowly, using her arms, pulling with all her might as though the car was still resting on her legs.
I fell back from them and in doing so, walked through them. They were spirits, shadows, ghosts, souls, call them what you will. They had no corporal bodies, no physical presence. But as I watched them, as I backed through them and tried to avoid them and finally pressed my back up against the wall, I saw that though they had no bodies, they could still feel. They were standing, sitting, lying, walking, crouching, in my basement, spirits, endlessly reliving the pain of their deaths.
That was when I had to cover my eyes, and when I did, I could still see them. They were not physical, so they could not be blocked out by physical things. With my eyes closed, with my hands over my eyes, I could see them, their slack jaws gaping at me, their eyeless heads slowly turning towards me, their hands clawing at the kitchen knives buried in their necks and chests and backs.
I could still see them and I couldn't stand it. I clawed at my eyes and tried to pull them out of my head.
I wasn't successful. But that's probably lucky for me, all things considered.
You're not getting tired of listening to me, are you?
Like you could do anything about it.
I'd like to tell you it wasn't all bad, during those years. I'd like to tell you that there were plenty of nights that Angie and David sat with Melissa and me and watched TV, or played Monopoly, or just listened to music or ate a nice dinner.
We must have, right?
I can't think of them right now, though. I can't remember those nights. The nights that stick in my memory, the things I can remember, seem to be dictated.
The Things I can remember are dictated by the Thing In The Basement. Ha. That's rich, right? But they are.
Is she looking at me?
Never mind.
I do remember the night that things started talking to me. I remember that night, which started out normally enough. We were, in fact, playing Monopoly. Melissa and David and I were playing. Angie was not old enough to play, so she and Melissa were on a team.
Like now, you might say.
I don't remember if I was winning or losing. There's an apt look at how things turned out. Did I win or lose? I was, in fact, the last to go, but I don't feel like I won. I usually never won at Monopoly, either. I was probably not doing good. Doing well? I don't know. Doesn't really matter anymore.
Maybe someday we'll get out.
That was when the things started talking. I'm pretty sure. That was the day things really started talking to me, or at me. They usually didn't answer me when I would talk to them, so they were not talking with me.
The dice were the first things I remember talking to me. I was about to pick them up and they said "Why bother." I swear, they did. I thought maybe I hallucinated it, but as I was rattling them in my hand, one said to the other "Make it a three. I'll go two." And I rolled and one was a two and one was a one.
I had to be imagining it. That's what I would have thought. Stress, that's the usual excuse we give for weird things.
Remember by that time I was well past thinking I was hallucinating anything. By that time, I'd seen the blood and David had walked away and I'd watched a little girl die in front of me simply because of what I'd thought.
So I didn't tell myself I was hallucinating. I thought "Oh, shit. A new one." It was always something new. I used to say that you could get used to anything. I said that the human psyche could adapt to anything. I gave an example: if I punched you in the face, you'd be shocked and hurt. But if I did that to you once a day for 10 years, by the 3,651st time, you'd say "Oh, there's my punch in the face."
That was how the Thing In The Basement made it worse, I guess. I could get used to, or at least tolerate, what it threw at me. I could adapt to the horrifying images. I could get used to the crushing depression. I could walk through the rivers of blood with only minimal revulsion. So it made things talk to me, or made me able to hear things talking that I couldn't hear, or it talked to me through them.
Maybe I could ask it...
It doesn't matter, does it. Plenty of time to adapt now. Maybe death will be just sameness over and over.
I thought I saw...
Never mind. I can't.
And the dice kept talking to me throughout the game. They started talking more directly to me. Taunting me. "You never win at this, do you?" "Nice move. Maybe you should keep your day job." Silly things. I was being teased by a pair of plastic cubes. And it was hard to hide.
Then they got mean. I handed them to Melissa at one point and they said "Maybe you'll cut off her hands first." I dropped them like they were hot, messing up the board. Melissa gave me a weird look. I was used to that, too. Although she didn't seem to notice most of what I was up to, she noticed enough to occasionally raise concerns.
David did, too. I'm glad he got away. As sad as I am about Angie, at least one of us got away. I wonder why.
I have to keep talking. I'm glad you're listening.
David wandered away more than just that one time. Each time he came back. He was never comfortable living there. He had a haunted look about him. He had bags under his eyes and a reddish tint to them that came from never having a good night's sleep. He would sneak out over and over, at 7 and 8 and 12. And he always came back by hook or by crook. Never willingly. We should have had social workers involved by that time, but they never were. How many times can the police bring a kid back, or a concerned neighbor, before someone gets involved?
That was probably more of the Thing In The Basement's doing.
I was thinking of that because David left that night, and the dice told me he would. When he scooped them up to put them into the box at the end of the night, one said "He'll escape." The other said "Yeah, he'll get out tonight but not for long." The first said "No, I meant in the long run." The second said "Oh. Right." The first one said "Not like the little girl. What a way to go."
And I thought at the time they were talking about the poor little girl in the car accident! I thought that as Angie toddled up the stairs holding Melissa's hand talking about how she always likes to be the dog in the game and who'd want to be the shoe?
I lay awake that night, wondering if the dice were right. I finally got up and walked downstairs and sat down on the couch in the living room, within sight of the door. I didn't turn on any lights. I just sat there, staring at the stairwell.
It wasn't long before I heard the rustling. I thought it was the leaves in the trees, but it wasn't. It was whispering. The things around me were whispering. The couch cushions, the lamps, the books, the bookends, the throw rug, the ornamental glass vase on the coffee table, the coffee table itself, were all whispering. I held my breath and listened.
"What's he waiting for?" "Is tonight it?" "Can't be." "He's not ready." "He is. Have you seen the eyes?" "Not yet." "I think it's tonight."
I thought then they were talking about me. I still think that. But maybe they were talking about the Thing. That was the night I saw it, too.
David came down the stairs, finally. It was about
David came walking down the stairs and the whispering stopped -- finally! I'd been listening to it for hours. It had moved on from speculation to descriptions, half-caught snatches of conversation:
"...ripped her arms off..." "On fire, most of his body," "Both of them soaked in blood," "Fell right on him" "Pulled the left eye out first" "Choked the life out of her, right where that couch is"
"... then shot himself right in the mouth with the shotgun,"
That kind of thing. At least I didn't have any trouble staying awake.
David walked down the stairs slowly. He didn't hold the railing, which I thought was odd because he usually did. We had wood stairs that were kind of slippery. He walked right down the center of them, not looking left or right. He didn't look at me. He didn't wave. He might not have even seen me.
I was going to let him just go out the door. Why bother stopping him? He was always brought back, one way or the other. And if he escaped, so much the better. If he could stay away, maybe he would be spared. (Even then I might have had an idea how this would end. The visions had always focused on one thing.)
I sat there. There was no whispering at all. David walked towards the door and put out his hand in a lurching sort of move. That was when I saw it.
It clung to his back, like a backpack almost. It was only about a foot tall, and just about as round. It had a short tail, with an actual point on the end. It had two little horns and a ridge of spikes down its back. It had claws for hands and clung to David hard enough that it was poking through his pajamas and I could see droplets of blood.
I thought back for just a second to earlier in the year when we'd gone to the community pool. David had opted not to go in, leaving his shirt on all day. Melissa asked him if he wasn't hot, and he said no, he was fine, he didn't want to get sunburned. He did that quite a few times.
I'd never thought much of it, naturally.
The Thing was riding him out the door. This little homunculus, this little lizard, puke-green and black thing with glowing eyes was clinging to him like a reptilian leech and obviously controlling him. It was going to take him out into the night, it had done it before... I didn't even think.
I knew this was the cause of the troubles. I'd finally seen IT. I leaped at it, snarling deep down in my throat. Deep down inside all of us is still that primal human, the one that first learned that a sharp rock could kill another one of us and learned that by doing it and that part of me leaped at the Thing! I attacked it!
And it turned as I did that, and threw itself at me and the force of it knocked me down on the ground and as it touched me I felt a shrieking pulsing wail inside my head, not so much heard it as felt it in every cell in my brain, and I fell back, and the Thing looked its red eyes into mine and it bared its teeth, rows and rows of tiny razor-spikes, and I felt its claws on my chest, and it ripped its teeth into my throat and pulled out my aorta and half of my tongue. I felt the blood gurgle up through the hold in my chin and neck and felt my heart beat just once before it gave up.
I saw the Thing jump back on David's back and go out the door.
I laid there. I was not dead. I couldn't move. My heart wasn't beating. That was scary enough; you get so used to it beating. I couldn't even close my eyes, or move them. They were still turned down somewhat, where I'd been looking at the top of the Thing's head while it ripped out my life. It happened that I was looking at the door. I couldn't move my hands, or my toes. I could feel the blood- it was warm and I was not-- dripping down what was left of my throat. It pooled under my arm.
After some time, the door opened again. David came walking back in, calmly. He didn't look at me again. But when he was about to go up the stairs, he stopped (I could just make him out on the periphery of my vision) and the Thing suddenly landed on my chest again with a thud. It walked up to my face, on its hind legs, or legs, since I guess the other two were arms. It stood on my chest, just shy of my tattered neck. It leaned over into my face. I wanted to shudder and look away. It had a face that was half-human half toad, with those sharp teeth, and sunken eyes that no longer glowed. They were the color of dried blood now. It had a long tongue that snaked out and licked its lips. It had flaring nostrils and heavy, scaled brows.
It leaned in closer. I couldn't even close my eyes. I was paralyzed, or dead, or both. It put one hand up to my eye, and held out its index finger. I saw the claw on the end, sharp as a nail and speckled with blood. The sunlight caught it and glinted. It jerked and poked the claw into my eye. I could feel that! I tried to scream, but had no throat. I could feel the liquid, the vitreous part of my eye flowing down my cheek like thick tears.
I felt it move a little, and felt its breath on my other eye, but I couldn't see it. I felt a claw tap my eyeball, but I couldn't see the claw. Then it pulled back and left that one. Then it began fumbling around and poking and doing something on my neck.
Then, out of my still-good eye I saw David lurch a little and start up the stairs. His pajamas were bunched as though they were gripped by something, but I couldn't see anything on them. Anymore.
With a gasp, I realized I could breath, and sat up. There was a pool of blood around me, down my front and on the floor. I felt my throat. It was cold, but fine. I felt my eye, and turned them both ways. I could see everything. I covered first one eye, then the other, and could see out of both of them. I could see everything.
I thought back to David going up the stairs.
I could see almost everything.
It couldn't go on long after that. I knew, you know, everyone knows.
I could go on a long time. I could go on forever. I could give you detail upon detail upon detail.
I've got nothing but time.
But, then, you know that, don't you? You're a good listener. I guess you've got the time, too.
But there couldn't be much after that.
After that night that I saw the Thing I never saw it again. I never saw the blood, either. I never saw the bricks moving again.
I could still hear things. I just couldn't see things. Whatever it had done to my eye, I couldn't see the things I used to.
And I couldn't talk about anything, really, but the most innocuous things. I know because I tried. The night before, I tried.
The night before what?
The night before I killed myself.
I was lying in bed, lying awake. I could hear the things rustling around me. I could hear the flowing sound of blood like a river outside my bedroom. I guess I was grateful that I couldn't see them.
But I could hear and I didn't like what I was hearing.
"Tomorrow's the day, isn't it?" That was a book on my nightstand. I hadn't read in months. Years maybe. The book was just lying there. I looked over at it.
"I think it is." I didn't answer it. I tried not to do that. It was answered by a painting on our wall. A painting of a sailboat off the coast of
I heard a rustling from David's room. He was probably waking up again. I'd seen him leave a few other times, sometimes coming back on his own, sometimes brought back. Each time, he'd had a shirt on, a shirt that seemed to be pulled down and scrunched up as if something was sitting on it. But I couldn't see it.
"How do you think he'll do it?" That came from the lamp.
"Violently." That from the rug. There was a general murmuring of assent.
I listened and listened to them talking about it. They didn't get specific, but I thought I knew what they were referring to. The Thing was going to kill us. It had to be us. Us. I remember because it said that I would be the last to die.
I had to try to do something. I remembered the car accident. The visions. The spirits I'd seen.
I leaned over and in the dark of the middle of the night, as quietly as I could, I whispered her name. "Melissa," I whispered. She shrugged. I said her name again. Quietly. I don't know why I thought that I could avoid the Thing hearing; it could read my mind. It could do anything.
Still I whispered, shaking her slightly until she awoke. "What," she said, too loudly and groggily. I heard a thump from David's room. I put my hand over her mouth.
"Mmmf," she said. I shook my head, put my finger to my lips.
"I can't take it anymore," I whispered. "I've got to tell you something!" How long had we lived there at that point? Five years? Seven? Longer than most people make it, I know now.
"What?" she asked. Maybe she could see it in my eyes. She could see something, because she was quiet and stared at me. In the small sliver of moonlight that made it through our skylight I saw her eyes. She licked her lips, nervously.
"Since we moved in here," I began.
I couldn't talk. I felt the air suck out of my lungs. I felt my eyes water. I felt the pressure change in my head, like when you dive underwater and go too far down before leveling off. I couldn't even think for a second. I saw spots.
"What is it, Jude?" She looked scared. I shook my head.
"I'm okay," I said. "I just need to tell..." and it stopped. Again, the air was sucked from me and my vision went temporarily black.
I heard a laugh. A cackle.
"Jude," she said, more urgently. "What's going on?"
"Nothing," I said. I noticed I could talk about anything but what I wanted to talk about. "I guess I just couldn't sleep," I said, and looked around the room. There was still a low snicker from David's room as I heard the sound of David putting on his shoes. Clumsily. He was asleep.
Her hairbrush said "It's definitely tomorrow" and my resolve crested. I turned to tell Melissa again and began to talk, and felt like something had kicked me in the stomach. My skin went cold. I felt my head spin and I felt nauseated. I leaned over and threw up. The door opened to our room. It was flung open.
"Don't try to tell her" I heard. The door closed again. Melissa looked from me to the door to me and stood up out of bed.
"Melissa," I said, and choked again. I was having trouble seeing anything but spots before my eyes. I heard David's clumping footsteps going down the hall. I heard Angie wake up, yelling "Mommy," and then "David?"
Melissa looked at me again, and I tried to talk. I felt a shooting pain in my head and throat and fell out of bed.
"I'm calling an ambulance," she said, as Angie screamed "Mommy!" Melissa turned around and ran out of the room.
I stood up and tried to breath. I could barely get air into my lungs using all my willpower. I gasped for breath and staggered towards the bedroom door, to where Angie was crying and Melissa was trying to calm her down.
I walked, unsteadily, to Angie's room. I knew what was going on in that room and I knew what I had to do.
I swung the door open, and saw Angie hugging Melissa. Melissa was saying "it's only a dream" over and over. Angie was gasping and sniffling the way younger children do when they're almost worn out of crying. She sucked air between words.
"Standing . . . by me. . ." Angie said. Melissa rocked her back and forth.
One of the most common visions I had was of the Thing In the Basement in Angie's room. It was standing over her while she slept. It stood over her while she lay on her stomach and bit out the back of her head, blood spurting all over.
Imagine seeing that almost every day for years.
I saw Melissa, too. I saw the Thing going after her. It held her down and clawed and chewed at her face, shredding and tearing her skin off of her a little at a time.
I looked around the room for the Thing as I opened the door. Melissa was only half-turned towards me. Angie had her head buried in Melissa's shoulder. I knew I wouldn't be able to see the Thing, but I thought I might see signs of it, where it was standing, or something. I darted my eyes around and took another step into the room.
Angie opened her eyes and saw me. She screamed and wouldn't stop screaming. At that, I heard the rush of blood from the hallway, and felt a wet, cold wash on my feet. I heard Angie screaming and looked around wildly.
"Where is it?" I yelled. Melissa turned around. I yelled again. "Tell me where it is! Where do you see it?" Melissa yelled something like "see what" but all the things in the room were talking and Angie was screaming and there was the river of blood and my heartbeat and a cackling. I didn't quite hear what she said.
I didn't quite hear what she said, and it was the last thing she ever said to me.
Angie kept screaming and I ran towards the window to close it and trap the Thing in the room, but the door was open and I turned around and began to go to close that. A weapon. I needed a weapon. I grabbed Angie's lamp off her dresser and pulled the shade off of it as I closed the door behind me.
Angie was still screaming. "Come out," I yelled. Melissa yelled something. "Come out," I said again and now Melissa and Angie were both screaming and crying and I couldn't stand knowing that the Thing was going to get them the way it got that little girl and would get me. I looked around trying to figure out where the cackling was coming from and began swinging. I swung and swung the lamp. I hit everywhere I thought it could be. I smashed the bulb and the dresser and the base of the lamp eventually was a set of tattered pieces held together by the cord. My hands were bloody and bruised and everything in the room was torn apart and upside down and broken.
I sat down, crumpled down, on the floor. I looked around, trying to catch my breath.
Angie was lying face down on the floor in front of me. There was a patch of blood-soaked hair on the back of her head. I held my breath. I reached out my hand. I felt her little arm. It was limp. And colder than my hand.
I looked around more.
Melissa was laying on her side. She looked terrified and her chest heaved. I fell forward onto my knees, looking from the back of Angie's head to Melissa. As I did, she tried to push back from me and rolled onto her back. The left side of her face was mangled and torn. There were bits of light bulb hanging from what was left of her cheek and a pool of blood underneath her head.
I heard, as if through a tunnel, the front door slam shut. Melissa gasped and stopped moving.
Angie still wasn't moving.
I didn't even bother trying to save them. I knew then that the Thing had won, and that it would be back shortly to get me. Its sick prophecy would come true.
I got up and walked out of the room. I went downstairs to the first level. That level looked normal, except for the bloody footprints I left as I walked and got the car keys.
It would not get me.
I walked out to the garage. The paneling in the hall by the garage was the same as the paneling in the basement, a little crooked but not so's you'd notice right away. You'd have to look at it a while to see that.
A long while.
I walked out to the garage. I opened the door to the car and got in. I rolled down one of the car windows and started the car.
My CD was in the player. The one with "The Good Times Are
It would not get me.
I sat there a long while. The music played. The CD repeated itself, in fact. I began feeling more and more sleepy.
For the first time in a long time, I had no visions. Nothing talked to me. Just sleepiness and music.
My eyes grew heavy.
It would not get me.
My head fell onto my chest. I jerked it up. It fell onto my chest again.
I heard a cackle.
I died.
And as I died, I felt something pulling, tugging, dragging at me. I actually felt my soul leave my body. I always thought that would be peaceful, although in this case I didn't expect that too much because I had killed my wife and daughter and was going to Hell, but the Thing had not gotten me, at least.
I was sucked out of my body, out of the car, through the house, like a handkerchief through a magician's hand.
Into the basement. I was thrown, sucked, tossed into the basement, with all those spirits.
I landed in the middle, with those other souls lurching and tumbling around me. People who'd hung themselves in the house with ropes still around their neck in the afterworld. One guy who'd slit his wrists, pale and limp and dragging himself by his elbows with his hands flapping uselessly. All milling around and looking at me, some with a little more vitality than others.
I looked around and around, bewildered. We all do, when we first get here. It took me a few moments to realize, and I didn't realize until I saw them.
In the corner were Angie and Melissa. Angie had her back to me and her head buried in Melissa's shoulder. Melissa had her head down and was patting Angie on the back. They were both crying. I felt a surge of hope. Was it a nightmare? Had they survived? Was it just another vision?
Melissa looked up at me. Her face was mangled like it had been in Angie's room. Skin hung off of it. Her jaw hung slack. She sagged to the side where there were bones broken. She hunched over in pain. As I watched her, she stared at me with a look of such hatred that I could almost feel it. I started to stand up and go towards her, but she dragged herself away from me and in doing so was so clearly in pain that I stopped.
Angie wouldn't look at me. Has never looked at me. And that's worse because God if she would just look at me at least I wouldn't always have to see that spot on the back of her head where I crushed her skull.
I don't know how long we've been down here, now. New people come in, like you, and occasionally I can talk to them. I'm one of the lucky ones, I can talk a bit. Some of them can't because of the way they died. If you can call it lucky to be stuck in a basement for all eternity watching some little goblin thing come and go and new mangled spirits arriving while your wife and daughter constantly remind you that they're here, and in pain, because of you...
Was she looking at me now? I'd give anything to just talk to her, to tell her I'm sorry.
Not that it matters.
Prior stories:
The Deal: Jake is tormented nightly by a demon. Why won't his parents help him?
Click here to read the story on this site, and here to read & download it on Scribd.
Astrid Forever: Astrid's been dead for three days, and coming to visit Ted for two, with one simple request: Love me. But what will that mean for Ted? Click here to read the story on this site, or here to read & download it on Scribd.
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