The Cellar

by Peter Fugazzotto

  Jay huddled in the darkness next to me, his face lost in the shadows, but then he leaned forward and I could see his face, haggard, worn out, drawn with pain, painted in blood, swollen, but beneath all that I could see the face of a boy, my one time best friend, a person I had once thought of as closely as a brother, someone from whom I would never grow apart. The face of the boy was there, beneath it all, but one glance at his eyes and I knew that he was a stranger, a man grown apart, someone who had gone so far down the other path for him that there was no coming back.

  "Nice speech," he said. "But it's all bullshit. Your buttery words. All good to decide to change paths when you made it. Job, money, house. Easy for you to say, let's be good now. You got shit to fall back on. I got nothing. Nothing but my beating heart and my breath, and now you want me to risk all that for friends who have not ever really been friends, only memories of what I once was. Screw that. Screw them. Screw you. Ain't no reinventing myself into some hero. There's only death. Here or twenty years down the road. I prefer the latter. I tried, Skip. I did. But for me to truly live again, I need to walk away from all this."

  "We can be heroes," I whispered.

  "No, it doesn't matter what you and I ever do from this point on." He rose and began walking back towards the front door. "You and I can never be heroes. Doesn't matter what they say. Doesn't matter what we pretend. You know it as well as I do. We're cowards, deep down to the bones. We're never going to be anything but that."

  I felt my breath dwindling in my chest as if all the air were being slowly sucked out of me. I was losing Jay forever. He was walking out of my life. He was severing the thin line to the past that held us together. He was letting me know that what we once had was gone, maybe it never existed beyond what I imagined, and perhaps we had no path forward. I was alone now. No one else could make the decision I needed to make. How I decided would shape who I was.

  He stepped into the doorway, a dark silhouette against the bright, almost blinding mountain sky, so bright that tears formed in my eyes. I am sure the tears were because of the light. I reached out to him, stretching my bloody hand, and the words dammed up in my throat, making my chest ache for all that was lost.

  I reached out for him, rising, believing that I could pull him off the dark path.

  Then the blade arced out of the shadows. A blur. Jay dropped to the ground.

  And the Sandman's hulking shape filled the doorway. "You killed my pups."

  And I fled. Straight back into the cellar.

  69

  It was dark. I nearly tumbled down the cellar stairs. My eyes struggled to adjust to the dim light. Since I could barely see I should have walked slowly, one careful step in front of the other, but instead I ran, blindly descending, hoping my feet wouldn't plunge through the rotten planks or that I would misstep and tumble.

  But I had no time to be careful. The Sandman was behind me. He had just killed Jay.

  I ran that image again through my head. Jay retreating to the doorway. That sinking sensation that I was alone as he left. Then the arcing slash of the blade.

  I was not all the way down the stairs when I was hit from behind and bumped off the steps. I landed hard on the ground, on all fours, the ground tearing the skin off my hands and knees.

  Whatever had smashed into me from behind and knocked me down the stairs lay across my legs. I thrashed and I kicked. But it did not move. It did not react. I kicked again and regretted it the moment I did. It was Jay, or rather Jay's lifeless body. A deep wound penetrated his chest, the pale skin folding in towards a red, bloody, gaping hole. No more torture. No more dragging this out. Just death. That's all the Sandman was giving us now.

  I crawled away, unable to contain the sudden sobbing. This was all too much. I should have never come here. I should have escaped and never come back. I had doomed myself to this fate.

  "Skip ..."

  I turned to the sound. In the center of the room, Tug was strapped to the chair.

  "Oh, god, you're still alive. I thought ... I don't know ... Jay's dead ..."

  "He's going to kill us all. Game is over." Tug coughed up spittle and blood through his swollen lips. "Your face, man ... He messed you up."

  Light streamed into the room from above, pale yellow light flooding down the stairs from the kitchen. The Sandman would come down those steps, the wood screaming beneath his weight. Our time was up.

  The light allowed me to see Lipsky as well. He lay flat on his belly, unmoving. I had no idea whether he was still alive.

  "I'll get you out of here." I began undoing one of the straps around Tug's wrist. I quickly freed his hand, but before I could move around to other side, Tug seized my wrist, clamping it so hard that I felt the bones rub together.

  "No," he said. "Don't undo the other straps."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Let him think that I am still tied up. He won't suspect anything. Then I'll grab him."

  "But then he'll just kill you. Like he did with Jay."

  The floorboards above us creaked and I suddenly trembled.

  "I'll grab him and hold him. You run past. Go upstairs."

  "Oh, god, this is crazy. We could fight him together. You and I together. Heroes." The last word eroded into a bubbling, insecure laugh as if claiming that would somehow transform us. But I knew it was a lie, at least when it came to me. Tug was a hero through and through, standing up for the weak, surviving the hell of war, the one never afraid to back down. Me, the last time I had been a hero was on those long ago days of our youth when I rolled a couple of twenties on the dice and got our DnD party out of a roomful of orcs.

  "Let me get you out," I said.

  "You run upstairs. Don't stop. My gun. On the kitchen table."

  I shook my head. "Tug, I can't leave you here."

  "No choice left anymore."

  "We always have a choice."

  "If you want to live, you only have one choice. Hide. Now!"

  I did not hesitate. I did not fight against his will. I did not release his other wrist or his feet. I did not free Tug from those ties that bound him.

  I heard the heavy footsteps on the stairs and I scurried like a cockroach, fleeing the light for the safety of the shadows. I pressed myself back against the wall, trying to make myself smaller and wondering if this was just more madness, whether I even had a choice to dash by this monster and make it up the stairs. And what if the gun was no longer there? What if the Sandman was on my heels the whole time? What if I tripped and fell?

  Why was it up to me to be the hero? Me, Skip, the greedy lawyer, the guy who only looked out for himself, the heartless son of a bitch, the father who turned his back on his daughter when she needed him most, the friend who wasn't one to those who most needed one.

  The Sandman stepped into the light of the basement. He still wore that crumpled paper bag over his head, only now I could see his eyes through the holes, glistening as he scanned the room.

  "Where is he? Where's the puppy killer?"

  He clutched a sickle in his hand. Jay's blood dripped off the impossibly sharp end.

  "I ate him," said Tug. "Just like I'm going to eat you. After I cut your balls off and shove them down your throat."

  The Sandman growled, fists clenching, but he turned from Tug and looked right towards the darkness where I hid.

  "Then I'll find your dogs, your pups," said Tug, "and I'll skin them and wear their pelts like a trophy."

  "Sleep!" The Sandman lunged at Tug and slashed down with his sickle.

  Right before the blade hit, Tug shot his hand out and grabbed the Sandman's wrist. "Run, Skip, run!"

  In hindsight, I should not have run. I should have grabbed one of the hatchets or hammers or long spikes and attacked the Sandman. I should have stood there beside Tug and fought the good fight. But all I heard was his command to run, and that's what I did, out of the shadows, across the floor, and up the stairs, only stopping for a moment at the top of the flight to turn, and to see the Sandman
punch Tug's jaw, tear his hand loose, and then smash his sickle straight through Tug's chest.

  My knees almost gave out there but I slammed the door behind me and raced into the kitchen, stopping to stare at the table, covered in grime and fleshy parts, fetid, and nowhere did I see the gun.

  70

  My breath filled my ears. My heart pounded so hard that I was afraid it would crack my ribs. The gun? Where the hell was the gun?

  The sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs made my heart pound against my ribs.

  Gun! Gun! Where was the gun?

  I ran from one end of the kitchen to the other, knocking jars to the floor, sending encrusted plates skittering, blindly groping.

  It wasn't here. Tug was wrong.

  Then I felt everything in me reaching a boiling point, my blood, my nerves, my bones, and I ran, because even without looking I knew he was there right behind me, storming up the stairs, the Sandman, coming for his final victim.

  I ran the wrong way. I should have sprinted past the cellar door and through the hall and out the front door back into the sunlight but the cellar door was between me and the front of the house, and I was not going run in front of him, not risking seeing that sickle out of the corner of my eye, that blood-covered blade flashing in the light in that moment right before it sunk into my flesh.

  Instead I ran more deeply into the house, away from the light, into the shadows.

  I found myself in the study again. With the medical books and posters, the lab coat hanging from the coatrack, and the corpse lying face down on the desk, the person who had given up and put a bullet in his head.

  And there it was: the pistol in the dead man's hand. Not Tug's gun. But a gun. One that had ended a life. I grabbed at the gun. It was nested in the dead man's hand, finger still at the trigger. I seized it. The gun would not come free. It was as if even in death whoever this person was still held onto the weapon as if he still needed to fire one more shot, one more bullet into the center of his head to end the madness and finally stop all the suffering.

  I grabbed the gun and pulled so hard that I tore the fingers free of the corpse and fell backwards, sitting hard on the ground.

  "Daddy?" The Sandman stood in the doorway. He pulled the mask from his head, tears streaming down his cheeks. I looked at his face. He could have been me.

  And I fired that gun right into the Sandman's face.

  An empty chamber clicked.

  "Daddy? He touched you?"

  He lifted the sickle. I saw my reflection, tiny, blood-smeared, along the flat of the blade. The sharp tip of the sickle sparkled like a jewel in the sun.

  I was dead and I knew it.

  I squeezed the trigger, again and again and again, and the gun roared in my hand, even after he fell, even after he stopped moving, and I kept pulling that trigger until only the empty clicking of the trigger thundered in my ears.

  And even after I stopped pulling the trigger, I heard that rasping rhythm, that marking of time, as steady as the beating of my heart, propelling me forward even though I stood there over the corpse of the Sandman, unable to move.

  71

  I found a working phone in the study. It had been right there next to corpse. All this time. Right there. I called 911, and then put on the lab coat to cover my nakedness, less for my sake but more for those that were coming. Blood soaked through it quickly, forming widening circles and long feathery lines that followed the innumerable slashes and incisions that marred my body.

  I paused in the kitchen to drink long and deep from the faucet. I had expected the water to be coppery and stale, but instead it was cold and refreshing, and it tingled on my tongue as if it were charged with magical properties.

  In the bottom of a pan, I glimpsed my reflection. My eyes were nearly swollen shut, black and blue and purple. My nose has been broken at least twice based on the jagged path it ran. Blood caked my hairline. My split lips revealed a missing tooth that I had not even realized I had lost.

  I did not look like myself anymore. Certainly not a hero. More like a monster.

  I hope that when the police came they wouldn't just shoot me on sight.

  I was looking around for a rag to dab at the blood on my face, when I heard the noise behind me. I did not turn around. There was no point. I had nothing left.

  "Skip?"

  I spun around. Lipsky held himself up in the doorframe.

  "I thought you were dead," I said. I broke out in a wide smile. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life.

  "Those shots?"

  "I killed him."

  "You sure?"

  I nodded and told him what happened. He bit his lower lip and shuffled off to the study, returning shortly with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

  "Thank you," he said. "I don't feel real good."

  "Let's get out of here. This place is death."

  We walked together back out into the yard, past the dead dogs. Flies had already descended on them and we had to pass through a black cloud of them but then when were free of them, the warm sun and the cool mountain air playing back and forth on my skin.

  Every step was searing pain. I would not last long. But I did not need to. I just needed to put some distance between me and the house. I needed to get away from there.

  Drops of rain hung on the branches of the pines, and in certain places, at certain angles, the sunlight lit them up so they sparkled like diamonds against the dark forest.

  I was going to say something about it to Lipsky, but he collapsed to his knees weeping.

  We stood there in the yard for a long time before I heard the faint wail of sirens. Eventually I saw the red and blue lights flashing on the undersides of the branches.

  "It's over," I said. "We made it out, Lipksy. We made it out. It's over."

  72

  After the initial trauma care and interviews, they took us down to one of the big hospitals in Sacramento for a week of surgery and recovery. They wanted me to stay longer but I did not want to and neither did Lipsky.

  I saw him off to the airport and he told me I did not need to go with him to the gate.

  "Are you going to be okay?" I asked through the car window as he stood at the curbside with the ticket in his hand. His bag filled with his clothes and the DnD game lay at his feet.

  "I'll probably lay low for a while. Not come into the shop."

  "I don't even know what to do."

  "You go home, Skip. You return to your family."

  I nodded and ground my hands on the steering wheel. "Hard to sleep. I keep seeing him. His face. He could have been one of us."

  "Well, he wasn't. He was a monster. He murdered our friends."

  "I know. I'm just saying. There was something about him, the way he looked, that reminded me of myself. Without the mask, he could have almost been normal. If I passed him in the street or saw him in the supermarket, I would have smiled and said hello."

  "Just another mask," said Lipsky. "We saw who he truly was."

  "Maybe I'll come up to Seattle. Visit. Spend some time together."

  Lipsky winced. "I don't know. I don't think it's a good idea. At least, not right away. What do we have to talk about anyway? All this? I want to put it behind me. I want to wipe it from my head, and right now with the nightmares that's not happening. So I think it'd be best, if you and I don't talk for a while. Maybe check in in a month or two. I don't know. I'll call you. But I gotta go. Don't want to be late for my flight."

  He hobbled into the terminal and the glass doors hissed shut behind him, leaving me to stare at my distorted face in the reflection.

  I spent another few days in a motel in Sacramento, a dive with peeling wallpaper and a bathroom faucet that plinked all night long. I could have afforded something nicer. But this place suited me. The gravelly-voiced lady behind the counter glanced at my face, frowned, and then asked if I had money. After she handed me the keys, she turned back to her soap opera and did not give me as much as another glance.
r />   Finally, I packed my things and drove back down to the Bay Area.

  Bridget's car was gone. Liz's sat in the driveway, a new scrape running along the driver's side panel.

  I found Liz in the kitchen, bottle of wine open in front of her.

  She screamed when she saw me.

  "Oh my god!" she said. "What did he do to you? Your face. You scared me to death."

  I laughed at that.

  She kept to the other side of the counter, keeping it between her and me. I knew she'd never come around to me. The monster she had always seen in me was now exposed to the light of day.

  "Bridget," I said. "Is she upstairs?"

  Liz shook her head and poured herself another glass of wine. "She's gone. Took the car. Money. Credit card charges from New Mexico. She left. It's only gotten worse. She's lost, Skip."

  I left Liz with her bottle and slowly, painfully, climbed the stairs and then stood in front of Bridget's door, even though I knew it was empty on the other side. I needed to find Bridget. I had to let her know that I was safe, that I was finally home, that I was ready and willing to stand beside her and fight the demons that plagued her, no matter how hard it would be. To let her know that we can pull ourselves from the clutches of death.