Just Like Home(50)
It’s so heavy. Francis can hold it up with one hand, no problem, but Vera’s not sure if she can. She uses both hands just in case.
When she gets back to the basement door she has to use her foot to open it again, and she slips inside, using the obstacle of her body to keep it from shutting too hard behind her.
With the door shut, the basement is darker than a closed eye. Vera tells herself that she is not afraid of the dark, but this kind of darkness feels aggressive and smothering, like icewater closing over the top of her head. She isn’t supposed to be here, and that frigid darkness knows it. She’s holding her breath, and when she finally induces herself to exhale through her nose, the sound of it seems to come from all around, like the room is sighing with her.
Hugging the flashlight tight to her chest with one arm, Vera snakes a hand behind her back to find the doorknob. She turns it, pulls a little, and turns it back again; with that the cellar door is shut behind her, all without a sound. She twists the knob again to confirm a suspicion: the door has locked automatically, even from the inside. She will need her key to get back out.
The flashlight comes on as soon as she thumbs the big black rubber-covered button on the handle, a trembling white beam illuminating her feet. The basement isn’t as warm as the rest of the house, but it isn’t cold enough to make her tremble like this—it’s all nerves, all excitement, putting a shiver into her arms.
When she lifts the flashlight and aims the beam at the stairs, they become a grayscale tunnel down through the darkness, leading to the cement floor of the basement.
Vera hadn’t known that the floor of the basement was cement. Brandon’s basement has a dirt floor that’s packed just as hard as cement but still always messes up her clothes. But this floor—it’s so much nicer than that. This floor is poured and sealed, as shiny as the floors at the hardware store. She keeps the flashlight beam trained on the bottom of the steps as she picks her way down, stepping onto each stair with both feet like a little kid.
There is a scraping, rattling noise coming from the darkness outside the flashlight beam.
She pauses, her chest rising and falling fast beneath her pajama top, the flashlight beam shivering along with the tremors in her arms. A low, muffled growl comes from that darkness.
Vera takes another step. She’s planned so thoroughly. She can’t go back now.
Tonight is the night. It has to be.
The bright circle described by the terminus of the flashlight’s beam grows smaller and brighter as she approaches the bottom of the steps. She pauses when it’s pointed at her feet again, her feet on the cement floor in that little puddle of blinding white light, the cement floor her father laid with his big strong hands. It holds her up, steady and strong.
She studies the light and the floor and her feet, listening to the scraping and the growling, to the soft wet animal sounds that come from the place outside the beam of the flashlight.
She hugs the flashlight to her chest again, freeing her right hand just long enough to snap her fingers four times. The darkness doesn’t abate, but it becomes less oppressive, less frightening; the darkness down here is now the same as the darkness under her bed, the same as the darkness behind her own eyelids. Because this darkness is here, Vera is not alone.
She takes a deep breath, curls her toes against the floor. Then she grips the yellow plastic handle of the flashlight with both hands and swings it up, pointing the beam into that friendly, familiar darkness.
First, the beam illuminates a wall, made of the same cement as the floor but matte instead of shiny. Then a toolbench, one her father built out of redwood. The front of the toolbench is all drawers, and the handles are the same as the ones on the kitchen cabinets upstairs. There are no tools on the surface of the toolbench. The drawers are all shut. Francis Crowder is a very tidy man.
The next thing the light finds is a big X made of wood. It’s taller than Vera’s father, taller by quite a lot. The wood is unfinished but weathered, discolored in places. Vera smiles at this X the way she would smile at an old friend. There is a latched box at the foot of the X, and she approaches it, taps the top of it with one sockfoot. She wants to open the box, to touch the smooth metal of what she knows is inside—but she’s worried that if she disturbs anything in the basement, she’ll give herself away. The last thing she needs is to get in trouble for being down here.
She turns then, fast, because she knows she is almost out of things to see and because she knows she shouldn’t press her luck by being in the basement for too long. The flashlight beam whips across the floor, catching on something red and wet before it finds the thing in the room that is making those thick slippery sounds, the rattling and the growling and the scrabbling. The thing that she is really here to see.
The thing sees her back with wide brown eyes. The whites of the eyes are red. There is a froth of saliva on the chin, and the froth is pink because of the blood that seeps from the cut-wide corners of the lips.
The thing is a man.
The man is on the ground, his arms and legs spread in an X just like the big wooden one.
He is trying so hard to scream.
Vera points the flashlight at the thing’s middle, instead of at his eyes, so as not to blind him. The light illuminates his face, though. The formerly-white cotton that gags his mouth is stained brown and red and pink. It is jammed deep into his mouth, so deep that only a little tongue of it hangs from between his lips.