by Shock Totem
Curt drank beer with this guy, Ezekiel, who dove for abalone. He was from a normal family and everything, he said, not some crazy tribe of desert separatists. In fact, his folks weren’t religious at all. He was puzzled by Curt’s inquiries about his name.
California, Curt thought.
Anywhere else, this guy would be performing thirty or forty fifteen-minute lube jobs a day or tearing tickets in an ill-fitting tuxedo or sweeping straw-wrappers from an oil-stained parking lot in a visor and one-size-fits-all golf shirt. In Bolinas, he smoked the abundant dope every night and swam with monsters every morning. Before the Devil gave over nighttime, he’d be up and out on his tiny steamer. He’d backflop into freezing water and sink down to the submerged cliffs and canyons that make the northern California coast. Fat white sharks cruised in the distance, dark shadows in the gloom. Porkers, the Australian’s call them (and they are) almost football-shaped, with huge tails like primitive stone blades and dumb doll eyes. Ezekiel then turned his back on them for the next hour or so, chiseling abalone from the undersea aeries. He figured one day, one of those things would decide to give him a good gumming, see if he might not taste just like elephant seal after all. Curt would shiver and sip from his beer bottle, saying a silent prayer of thanks for his goats and his horny, hairy girlfriend.
Curt didn’t know if this was when the dream started, sleeping in that tiny farmhouse, just a couple of acres of hummock and gorse separating him from miles of ocean crowded with inscrutable, man-eating giants. But there was the terrible coincidence of his friend detailing his work and the frequency of the nightmares he had in that ramshackle shelter on the headland bluff. He was comforted more than once in the dark by slick wiry wetness rocking on him while their crude unfinished bedframe rapped the wall.
He was never locked in a basement or closet when he was a boy, though he hated the dark. Doesn’t every child? But now he was a grown man, back in Virginia, with children of his own and an unhairy wife and it was difficult but necessary for him to disguise that he did not want to go in the basement. He figured at a certain point of maturity he would simply graduate—presto!—from any of the wussier fears like, say, spiders or serial killers on the other side of the shower curtain or a silhouette outside the living room window when he clicked off the lamp before heading upstairs. But he did not. These things stayed with him, as did his dream.
The old house he and his wife bought had some bad wiring. Each electrician they had in to explain the rash of blown circuits, which were becoming more frequent as of late, would go down to the basement, aim his flashlight at the black bundles strung beneath the kitchen floorboards and laugh. Curt would go down with him, because that’s what men did, he thought, especially fathers. He’d watch the workmen wrinkle their dirty faces (How did they dirty their faces? Electrical work seemed so clean) and squint, baring teeth. They’d trace the lines with their fingers, twisting the bundles and swearing under their breath before giving up and laughing. They’d look at Curt and shake their heads, as if he were not just a fool for buying the place but also some sort of lace-drawers for moving into this centenarian farmhouse and not immediately yanking out all the electrical and rewiring the place like any American male without serious deficiency would.
Last week, Curt and Molly and their sons, Cody and Fenton, had finished their game of Monopoly by candlelight. Curt pretended it was because he was engrossed. Cody and Fenton, of course, loved it, something about it like camping in the backyard. Fenton used his Count Dracula voice and kept it up long after Molly and Curt stopped laughing. He was an eager boy. But Molly had given Curt a quizzical smile in the soupy light. Theirs was the only dark house on the block. Outside, the others blazed with light under swaying trees. They looked like galleons at mooring. How to tell his wife that there was no way he could compel himself to go down into that dark basement and grope around for the fuse box? How could he tell her he would scream and scream and scream and never be right again if the indifferent beam of the flashlight tripped over something flabby and pale, the glint of tooth, a yellow eye, or shaggy flank? At the first grinding, scraping sound, he would scramble from the basement and leave that house forever. If something did seize him in the dark, how could he not just go limp and offer up his throat? Better to die quickly than struggle and go mad.
A wall of particleboard divided the basement. There was a switch by the top of the stairs that illuminated the first room, but you had to walk into the second, where the washer and dryer were, to reach the chain you yanked to illuminate the dangling bare bulb. Curt hated even opening the cellar door. He hated standing on the ledge before that yawning black gulf. He hated descending those stairs, the length of the basement slowly revealed. He hated stepping through that doorway laced with cobwebs, all those steps while maybe something watched from shadow. He was afraid of what that sudden illumination would fashion from the muddy blackness. He hated the sounds of his family moving overhead, the shuffling, the creaking. Mostly, he hated that it had to be him, that he was elected for this shitty job. Of course, he wouldn’t send his kids down there if he thought a monster lurked. Maybe he’d send Molly. Wouldn’t that be divine justice after the way she got after him to be a man, be a father, get whatever ratchet doodad he needed from the hardware place and change the oil in the mower, for God’s sake, and when was he going to clear the bird’s nest from the dryer’s exhaust pipe, too, while they were talking about it?
They weren’t, Curt thought.
Curt wondered what particular noise she would make when what leaned against the wall by the washer, looking like a cross between a bison and a silverback gorilla someone had turned inside out, began lurching toward her, tissue glistening, pink eyes fixed. He wondered if she would make a sound at all. He wondered if in those last moments she would be like him, trying to bargain with something that had no reason—if I don’t scream, you won’t eat me. If I let you rub your musty, matted hide on me, then I’m just another animal. Move along. No one here but us monsters.
The power had been just fine the past few nights. Their house was a beacon against the sudden October dark. Curt couldn’t help thinking that come daylight-saving time, night advanced on them, making some sort of headway that might, this time, last an age.
Curt was no weakling. One time, he found a goat that had slipped through a gap in the fence overnight. It had wandered over the moor, among the bracken and burrs, and broken its leg, probably in a mole or gopher hole or twisting it on the roots of one of the scrub pine grown sideways, pressed by the constant wind. Curt’s dog, Fable, had been at it, knew a dying animal when it saw one, knew they were only good for eating, not nursing. Curt wasn’t about to let his sheepdog rip the poor bastard to shreds alive but he couldn’t carry it the several miles back to the farm, either. It must have weighed fifty pounds. So he knelt and shushed it, stroking its side. There was something professorial about the goat’s idiot calm. Its leg was broken, there was a hungry dog nuzzling it to test its strength, and it inclined its bearded chin as if it were about to declaim on the role of the fool in Elizabethan theatre.
He wrung its neck.
It was a long job.
He had to beat back the dog, which was excited by the dying. Curt always thought bloodlust only accompanied blood, but animals know murder and death. Curt dragged Fable away by his collar, so crazed was he with want.
• • •
When it happened this time, Molly was bathing the boys. He heard the splash and tinkle of the water and Molly’s low voice telling Fenton he’d warm quicker if he toweled off instead of standing there wrapped and dripping. Curt was sitting on his bed adjusting the time on his spare wristwatch when the lights and the imperceptible hum of the electronics cut out.
“Fuck a duck,” he muttered and waited in this new silence. A moment passed.
“Curt?” Molly called. “Hon?”
Motherfucking cocksucker, he thought, I ought to burn this fucking place to the ground and piss on its ashes.
“C
urt? A little help, please. Cody, don’t you move.”
“Just a sec.” He sat there. A few more moments passed.
“I will not bathe your sons in the dark, Curt.” Her voice had that do-I-have-to do-everything-around-here? tone.
“Daddy?”
He could not tell which boy said it.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Curt whispered, and then, aloud, “All right. Just give me a chance to find the flashlight, everybody. Damn.”
There was some indignant sloshing from the bathroom.
He opened the drawer to the bedside table and took out the pocket flashlight. It was the size and shape of a deck of cards, the kind you throw away when the batteries die. It wasn’t exactly the sort from which creatures that skulked in shadow would shrink. He walked down the hall to the bathroom and flicked the beam on and off at his family. Cody and Fenton giggled. Molly squinted in the strobe and held up a hand as if he had threatened her.
In the dark, he felt like a stranger in their house. He could not guess what each plastic truck or backpack was until the beam roved over it. Already, he felt a tingling where his throat descended into his chest. Try as he might to stifle it, he imagined what it would be like to suddenly feel hot breath on his neck, if a hand reached out and encircled his wrist. Somehow it was desperately important to see what was right in front of him. He oriented himself in relation to the open space of rooms. He knew when his back was to the wall, when he was on a threshold, when the expanse of hallway was behind him.
He stumbled over some shoes. The light went haywire.
He righted himself. “Fucking Fenton.” His chest heaved. “Goddamn it, boy, pick up your things.”
In the kitchen, their new stainless steel refrigerator did not purr. The icemaker did not tumble a load into the reservoir. The digital clock on the stove and microwave were blank. His light wandered over the sink and counters like a blind hand, and he saw mugs and plastic tumblers captive in the glass-paned cabinets. Curt pulled open the drawer that held the pliers, a spool of twine, the phonebook, one of each type of screwdriver, and a roll of duct tape that had dwindled almost to nothing.
His Big Daddy flashlight was not there.
The thing was a monster—four thousand candlepower with a trigger and a five-inch diameter lens. In the backyard, the beam was a physical thing, a white rail that penetrated his neighbors’ shrubs and peered in their windows. He had to be careful where he pointed it.
“Boys!” he shouted. “Where’s my flashlight?”
Silence.
“Fenton! Cody!”
Slapping feet on the hardwood floor upstairs. A reedy, innocent voice wafted down. “Your flashlight?”
He gritted his teeth and indulged a brief and satisfying fantasy of doing violence to his sons. He told himself, as before, that imagining was harmless; he could do as he wished. In this particular fancy, he applied the mini blowtorch his wife used to melt sugar on crème brûlées to the bare soles of their feet.
Wasn’t he forever fucking telling them to put things back where they got them? His own father had been an ogre about tools, even (perhaps, especially) when Curt was old enough to know what to do with most of them. Some weird grown-up fundamental tension divided them in Curt’s adulthood; some fear, on his father’s part, of Curt supplanting him. Curt was benevolent by comparison—use anything, anything at all on my workbench, from my closet, in the garage. Just please, for the love of sweet baby Jesus, put things back where they go. He spent half his life searching for shit he just put down.
He walked to the basement door and undid the chain. He waited. Very possibly, something might be on the other side. Maybe he would bump it when he pushed open the door. He exhaled and slid the lock back in its hasp. The door creaked open unopposed. The darkness was so thick it had substance. It seemed to lap at his toes. Curt looked out at the cheery lights in living rooms and kitchens across the neighborhood. A mother would cross the glass here, a father framed momentarily there. Maybe he would let himself out the back, cross the yard, and drink in the human warmth those glowing rectangles threw.
There was humanity—elsewhere.
He could leave Molly and the boys. Hell, they could all turn in and wait until morning. He could flip the circuit breaker in daylight. What was it eight-thirty, nine o’clock? On the goat farm, he was in bed by nine every night, bone-weary and stoned. Plus, there was incentive to get to bed early out there.
The basement was silent, and why shouldn’t it be? What the hell was he expecting, a brass band? He shone the light down the stairs and it seemed to get swallowed up. It was like turning high beams on in dense fog so you had a clear view of the obstruction. He took one step down. No matter the house, the basement stairs always sounded hollow. They were treacherous, insubstantial, just waiting for the opportunity to dump him down in the wallow with those shifting things. Curt craved the sound of machinery, the warm and gentle heart of his house—the furnace clicking on, the susurrus of the fridge compressor, any throb saying, Man lives here.
“Can’t you find it?” Molly called.
He didn’t answer. If he were already in the basement, he wouldn’t be able to hear anyway. Of course he could find it. It’s not like the circuit box flitted around. That was Molly’s wishy-washy way of saying, Hey. What the fuck’s taking so long? Bungler. Inept. Total fucking zero. Yeah, you. You’re on the clock, asshole. I’m watching. Don’t think I’m not.
He flicked on the light. For one wild joyous second, he thought it might actually work.
It didn’t.
But he left it on so that when he flipped the breaker, he might reside in the motherfucking light once again, praise Jesus. He took another step and the darkness gulped him to the waist. His breath came shallow. At this level, something could reach up and clutch his ankle. And he would fill his pants and shriek. But nothing did. He thumped down the rest of the stairs like ducking under very cold water.
At the bottom, the darkness was total. His boot soles rasped on the concrete. The house settled over him, the creaks and far-off slams. Curt smelled mildew and the copper odor of the water heater. He could step forward and tumble into oblivion for all he could see. He could have wandered through some wormhole and be entering a torture chamber, a pit used for the rites of some ancient religion like in some Lovecraft story—the Ones Who Wait. Watcher in the Dark. He shivered. His feet scraped and it sounded like hooves on filthy floorboards.
Curt stuck his hand out and tried to focus on what his light lit—the shelves, Molly’s and his outdated tennis rackets in their dusty leather sleeves, the exercise bike Molly bought and never used, the boys’ old Big Wheels.
Suddenly, he felt disgusted. He decided to impersonate a confident, sensible adult, someone who realized the only danger in the dark was breaking your neck. And you know what? It felt pretty good. Jesus Christ, was he going to be a kid forever? The circuit breaker was shot to shit. That’s all. It was not conspiring to deliver him into the dark, among the animals, among the matted, loping, blind, yellow-toothed things. He walked through the door to where the washer and dryer stood. Yup. His flashlight confirmed. Where he left them. No monsters. No twisted, ruined bodies dangling from chains, no scorched and torn babies on a black slab altar. He crept over to where the box ought to be and played the light up and down the wall searching for box or the metal pipe that led to it. Damn this tiny light. If only he had Big Daddy—
Curt froze. He swore he heard a snort.
Nothing. Silence.
Then, movement by the far wall. Something was there. Something big. Something that shambled when it moved and was blind from being penned in the dark so long but it could smell...oh, its nose was like eyes, like the patient, certain homing of a bat, like the pinprick beam of a cheap pocket flashlight.
Curt reached out and banged his knuckles on the corner of the metal box. The thing in the dark with him moved. He heard the hiss and imagined the ridge of bristles on its crest shivering as its shoulders twitched. He heard its saggy hi
de thump against the wall like a carpet being turned back. It sniffed again. In his direction. Curt fumbled with the cabinet and ran his hand over the switches. Which had tripped? It had to be the main, but which was the main—the snuffling came again—top or bottom? He ran his hand over them, row after row of switches—for the laundry, the den, the kitchen, the driveway floods—all obediently thrown. He was reminded of the children’s game that had always seemed sinister—this little piggy went to the market, this little piggy stayed home... It was a story of separation, isolation, of denying the benefits of the tribe. What was the phrase, that most excellent euphemism? Natural selection. That meant one lived and one died. One survived by escaping the predators, not by celestial design, but evolutionary whim, cosmic hiccup.
The thing snorted. It had scented him.
His fingers lit on the aberration among his fellows in the box and clicked it on just as he smelled the thing’s putrid odor, like eggs and piss and spoiled fruit, bad enough to make him choke.
The lights came on. There it was. And it was worse than he had ever dreamed. Filthy, deformed, hulking, tusked.
I’m going to die but I am going to go crazy and suffer first. And insanity will make the pain last forever and forever is soooooooooooooooooo long I won’t be able to take it but I’ll have to, I’ll have to, because there is nothing else and nowhere to escape—
And it was gone.
Curt heard faint cheers sift down through the floorboards. He sagged against the concrete wall and felt the black earth’s chill sweating through the foundation. The basement was silent. The light fortified him. The contents of the room were innocuous—washer, dryer, rack for drying delicates, wastebasket, cheery orange carton of detergent.