by Jack Ketchum
She finished buttoning her blouse.
I told her to sit on the floor and put her hands behind her back. I tied them together with one of the ropes, not too tightly, but enough so that she wouldn't be working them free in a hurry. I wanted this one to stay put, exactly where I placed her. Not like Steven. I wanted her to pay a little. I bound her feet. Then I picked her up under the armpits and dragged her to the closet.
"Hey! Where we going?"
"You'll like it here. Nice and spooky." I opened the door. Then I lifted her again and started moving her inside. She gave me some trouble.
"Hey! Come on! Not in there. It's gonna be dark in there!"
"Sure is."
IDE AND SEEK
"Come on, Danny, please?"
"Sorry, sweets."
There was just enough room for her to stretch out a little. Standing up was going to be tricky, though. Even if she did, she'd find that the door locked from the outside.
"Danny! Daannnyyyyyy!"
I closed the door and threw the lock.
"Don't worry," I told her. "The mice are in the other closet, remember? At least I think they are. Bye now."
I walked away. She could curse pretty well herself. I heard her practicing all the way down the stairs.
EiqffTEB/
It was fun at first.
Where's Casey? Casey in the kitchen?
Nope.
Casey in the living room?
Unh-unh. Casey in the shed?
Then it stopped being fun abruptly.
Casey in the basement.
Oh, shit.
There was a little light on the cellar stairs filtering down from the first-floor windows, but you can imagine how far that got me. Not even off the stairs. And from there on it was a dark such as I'd never experienced before and hope never to experience again. I could almost feel my pupils widening, struggling to accommodate to the idea that this was a whole new ball game for human eyesight.
For a while all I could do was stand and wait. It was wait or grope and I didn't feel like groping. Leave it to Casey, I thought. Down here it was scary. Not like traipsing through the bedrooms. Down here you could fall on your ass and die on the flat of an axe or the tines of a pitchfork. It made me worry a little about that sound I'd heard earlier.
I must have waited five minutes on the stairs. It never got much better than a dull gray, filled with shapes of solid black. I was glad we'd explored earlier, otherwise I'd never have known that heap of
debris was just that or been able to recognize the huge frozen man-shape of the boiler for a boiler. I'd have turned and ran.
It was bad enough to take a step forward and feel spiderwebs along your face and neck. Bad enough to kick something rag soft and feel it curl around your foot like the tiny fingers of a child. Bad enough to smell the smells down there. You didn't need big amorphous shapes to unhinge you any further. But there they were anyway.
And I thought all the while I was upstairs, she's been down here.
No way. You are crazy, Case. A crazy case. Rafferty was right. More guts than brains. Infinitely more.
So get into it, I thought. If she can, so can you. Get a little crazy. Laugh. Giggle a little, like Kim. Kim locked away in the closet. Wish I hadn't done that. Sort of cruel. Like this is cruel.
Get into it, will you? Play bogeyman.
"I'm coming to get you, Casey."
Voice like a dying owl. More scared than scary.
"Where are you-oooo?"
No sound. Just smells. The smell of something rotten. I thought of the mice upstairs. Dead mouse somewhere. I stepped slowly, groping.
Didn't want to grope. Had to. Hands groping, feet groping too inside the shoes. Small easy steps to the worktable. Past the boiler (see?
It's just a boiler). No Casey behind it. Piles of sawdust ahead of me like giant anthills. Feel around for the worktable. Greasy-feeling.
Old sour wood. Used too long, too long between usages. Peer underneath, eyes open wide, full throttle. Just paint cans. No Casey.
I kicked over a box of nails, heard them rattle across the floor. Good work, I thought. Makes walking more treacherous than it already is.
Great. A genius at spelunking, every step a masterpiece.
A pile of something in the right-hand corner. Can't remember what it is, sure as hell can't see. Small steps toward it, hands held out in front of me, waving a little. Like Frankenstein's monster, just learning how to walk. I could feel something slippery underfoot, a grease spot or something.
Rags. A pile of old dirty rags. Even Casey wouldn't hide in there.
The other side of the room, then. Toward the back of the house.
A faint breeze coming from that direction. The smell of rot moving along with it.
I shuffled past the stairway and tried to see inside it through the stilts and crossbeams. It was way too dark.
"Casey?"
No answer. Maybe you had to say gotcha. Damn stupid game.
"Gotcha!"
Then suddenly I had it. I knew where she was. I was sure of it.
The grandfather clock.
I'd noticed the first time we were down that the clock was the cabinet type. You could hide in there. And if I'd noticed it, then you could bet that so did Casey. I thought it would be just like her to find the only item in the house that could remotely be called elegant and use that for a hideout. She was nuts but she had class. It was the clock, all right.
Now if I could only find the damn thing.
If anything, it was even blacker here. The dim beam of light from upstairs played out completely. It couldn't turn the corners, couldn't slip through the stairs and crossbeams, wasted itself on cans of paint and piles of rags and looming hulks of whatnot. Where are you when I need you, moon? You could hardly tell where the wall began at first.
It was just black. My dilated pupils expanded one last time and then gave up, rolled over in mute surrender.
I proceeded like a blind man. Used my other senses. Touch. (Cobwebs.) Smell. (Dampness, rot.) Hearing. (Somebody in here needs walking lessons.)
a. 0 . < ,
Casey? Out of the clock, Casey.
Silence. I guessed she was going to make me work for it.
Something crawled across my face, and I almost lost it right then and there. I'm pretty sure I screamed. I know I batted at my face until my jaw hurt and I felt something wet and cool smear across my cheek.
I hate spiders. Spiders and snakes.
Spiders and snakes in the dark.
Casey'd pitched me two out of three.
There was a great urge to say fuck this and light a match. I crushed it between gritted teeth.
When I stopped trembling, I moved on.
I was trying to remember whether the clock was to the left or the right, but I couldn't. There had been too much junk there. It numbed the mind. I'd have to do it slowly, by feel mostly. Finally I reached the wall. In front of me was a small plow-at least I thought it was a plow. I felt like one of the old blind men with the elephant in that proverb. ("This here's an anaconda.") But I was pretty sure I had it right.
As I moved to the left, my foot scraped a bucket of some kind. I reached down into it and felt a dusty old belt buckle. There were other pails too. Nails, window fittings. I was beginning to remember.
If I'd been able to muster the patience, I knew my eyes would eventually adjust even to this level of darkness. But that spider had unnerved me.
Memory told me the clock was in this direction. The whole big mound of stuff was to my right. So the clock was left. I kept going.
I leaned toward the wall and felt it with the palms of my hands. The tines of a garden rake. Beside it, as hovel I scraped along slowly There was a tenpenny masonry nail in the cement and, dangling from it, a big brass key. Something that felt like a birdcage beside it.
Horseshoes. Another shovel. A whip. The wall felt cold, rough and slimy.
The breeze was stronger here.
I kicked s
omething hard and metallic, felt it slide away a little. I edged toward it and bent down.
The washtub.
I remembered the washtub. It had been propped up right beside the clock. Now it was down, resting on its base. But that meant the
Right here.
I could even see its outlines now. I reached for it.
The cabinet doors were open.
Inside, it was empty.
Something sour started happening in my stomach, and it wanted out of me. There was too much darkness. It was making me dizzy, the way you feel after a night with too much beer and nothing to eat when you lie down in bed and close your eyes and everything starts to move on you, swirling, rolling like film badly sprocketed in a projector. I couldn't understand it. Where was she? Incomprehension buckled half my brain, and what was left was instinct, and instinct told me the appropriate emotion was fear. I needed badly to sit down, to stop the sudden sweating, the cold sweats that had come on with the urge to vomit. Because if she was not here.
She was nowhere.
Not possible
There was a trick somewhere. Had to be. Remember Kim at the window?
Something fishy. Hoaxing the local kid.
Not nice, Casey. Cut it out. I will wet my drawers if you don't.
"Casey! Goddamn you, Casey! Get the fuck out here, right
NOW!"
You are roaring, son. Like a lunatic. And not a thing has come of it.
Nobody home. No results to your inquiry. Inefficacy. Failure.
"Please!"
You are whistling, so to speak, in the dark.
That part of my mind that was still working told me to get the others, fast, that this was not for me alone anymore and no game. So I turned for the stairs. And forgot the clutter.
I don't know what tripped me. A rake, maybe, a hoe--something with a long wooden handle. But I went down like a sack of flour, flat down on my chest, stomach and thighs, feet flying out behind me. I heard two sounds simultaneously: the thunk of my forehead against concrete and the woosh of air out of my lungs. Then a moment of pain and a slow struggle with unconsciousness. At first strictly touch and go. Out of one blackness into another. I fought it. It cost me a massive effort of will just to sit up, another to check for damages.
There was a wet spot on my forehead high up near the hairline, chilly in the cold draft across the floor. And that was all. I figured I'd gotten off easy.
I was aware of a strong, fetid odor. The smell of old meat spoiling.
I'd smelled it before but it was much stronger now, infecting the cool summer breeze. I thought of death. I thought of a stale shallow tide pool of sea water and rotted bivalves. I thought of skeletons scattered throughout the litter of pots, pans, pitchforks and knives around me. Not the skeletons of mice, either. I saw Ben and Mary crawling out from under. The skeletons of cannibalized dogs.
The floor was wet, slick to the touch. I pushed myself up. I reached into my pocket for a match. The game was over. I lit one and held it in front of me. I cupped the match in my hands and stared into the breeze. I thought of what Rafferty had told me about long ago, a quiet warning none of us had heeded.
I moved along on hands and knees. There was no sound but my own scraping sounds and the relentless gentle wind breathing at me. I crawled in the dark. No more falling. In the match light I had seen it well enough-a rough circular hole broken through the wall, no more than two or three feet in diameter. Room to crawl through, or out of, but no more. I followed the current of air, the damp scent of it, slowly.
I approached it like the doorway to hell.
I knew she'd gone inside.
The smell wouldn't bother her, not for the short duration it would take for me to find her. The darkness, the smell, the fear-all that would make it more attractive. You fool, I thought. You damned idiot.
Make me mistaken.
I lit a match. I examined the opening. It was a tunnel cut or scraped through the foundation. The clock was angled in such a way that, standing, that and a pile of newspapers hid it partially from view.
Lying to one side was the old metal bucket. Was that what Casey had tripped over the sound I'd heard upstairs? I pushed way the papers and leaned inside.
I looked more closely. I saw broken concrete heaped to one side. As though the hole had been dug from inside the tunnel.
Beyond the foundation work the tunnel led back a few feet through solid rock and then turned a corner, so that the rest of it was blind, its depth unknowable.
I didn't want to go in there.
I seemed to know two things about it instinctively. There was something dead in there and something else alive. I could smell the death. Whoever or whatever was alive, it wasn't just Casey. I don't know how I knew that, but I did.
The match went out. I lit another, cupping it against the breeze.
"Case?"
Holding the match in front of me, I took a deep breath and held it in my lungs and worked my way carefully into the hole. It died before I'd gone two feet. I lit three of them together and got almost to the corner before they died too. The wind was stronger now. In the dark it seemed thicker, seawater damp. The rocks above and below me breathed moisture. My throat was bone-dry.
I lit up the rest of the pack and lurched ahead, holding the matches like a torch in front of me, and rounded the corner. It illuminated only three feet or so of what appeared to be a long tunnel, utterly black beyond the glow. But it was enough. Enough to see.
The green book bag lay almost beneath my hand.
I reached for it, gripping the tough cloth, something clean and fresh in that foul place, and dragged it toward me. I heard a rattle of lightweight metal. I reached inside. Two of the flashlights were still there.
I pulled one out and turned it on and threw its beam down the tunnel.
Like a child I wanted very much to cry.
The third flashlight lay five feet away from me, abandoned.
Beyond it I could see nothing but emptiness and sweating gleaming rock.
Twenty feet on there was another blind turn. I listened.
There was something alive out there.
Something alive on the wind beyond my beam of light.
I listened to it. And I knew it was listening to me.
It wasn't that there was any sound, just a presence. But a powerful one. Something that told me I dared not call out to her again, dared not move forward or even back. I froze. Whatever it was, it would be happy to kill me. I knew that. I knew it on some basic animal level where we all are hunters and hunted, where there are
still savannas and jungle moonlight. It was there, just around the corner. An intelligence that was not the same as mine. Measuring me.
I did something purely instinctive. I think it saved my life. I doused the light.
And waited. The smell of death in the air, mine or Casey's or perhaps its own. I would meet it in a matter of seconds now, and then one of us would see.
I waited. And for a longtime I didn't move at all. I tried to breathe evenly, quietly, calmly. And still I felt it measuring me, testing the air for the shrill scent of fear in me. I tried to shepherd the fear back to some deep place inside where calm could protect and shield me and maybe breed an uncertainty of its own. Moments passed.
While I waited, Casey could be dying.
There was no choice. I knew what I knew.
I heard it breathing. Shallow, moist and heavy. As though through clotted blood.
It was possible to imagine anything in there.
In the dark.
For a long while I was only a heartbeat. Then I sensed a change.
I waited to be sure.
Whatever it was, it was gone.
I didn't even bother turning on the light. I backed out the way I'd come. Fast.
With the flashlight in one hand and her book bag in the other, ran for the stairs. I sprinted them two at a time.
I remember only silence from this. Not the sounds of my own footsteps not the so
unds of my own heavy breathing. Only silence. My own strange motion through the hall and up the second flight of stairs.
Down the corridor to Steve.
I think he must have taken one look at me and known everything.
With badly fumbling fingers I untied his wrists. It was no surprise that he'd already rid himself of the rope around his ankles. I blurted out the story. I watched his eyes get wider and wider.