by Cory Hiles
The thought of dying down there in the dark, all alone, was as repugnant to me as was the idea of going insane, and proved to be a great motivator in so far as getting my laundry dried and my bed set up for the night.
CHAPTER 10
Night came and went, and morning light was shining through the gap in the door, displaying all of the muted glory of sunlight into my world of blackness. I awoke and set about my routine.
Bathroom duties first, followed by breakfast, followed by cleaning up my mess, followed by setting up my chair, followed by looking for a good book, followed by checking the door, followed by sitting on the third step down, followed by a day spent reading fiction, and finally followed by playing word games in a dictionary.
It was just another day in the dark, another day skipping lunch, another day in which my depression threatened to crush me. Every day, it seemed, was becoming an exercise of mind over matter; trying to ‘keep my chin up’.
I was losing my grip on what the real world was. As a matter of fact, I was forgetting what the real world even looked like. I struggled to remember what things looked like outside the basement, and more than once wondered if there was ever really a life outside the basement, or if that world of light and sound had only been a dream, and the world of darkness and shadow was the only reality I’d ever known.
I still hadn’t gotten dressed. I had been completely naked for two full days and didn’t care. It wasn’t like anybody was going to come rushing into my dark domicile and expose my nudity.
I spent a brief second wondering if I should be concerned about my sudden apathy towards the societal chains that were supposed to separate the human race from that of the lower species.
I quickly decided that I really didn’t care. I was not a part of society. I was more like a beast trapped in a cage at the zoo than I was a functioning member of society, and I had no need to dress to impress, so to say, and besides, naked was far more comfortable and convenient than was the bother of getting dressed, smelling up my clothes, washing my clothes, and undoing my clothes every time nature called.
Lethargy, despite my best efforts was beginning to set in. I knew it was happening, but was powerless to stop it. I began to justify it, in fact. I figured that so long as I didn’t allow myself to go insane, I could, at the very least, allow myself a little self pity. After all, I had been trapped, all alone in the dark by my psychotic mother for five days now, and there was no sign that my situation was going to improve any time soon;
The memory of Joe’s voice continued to flitter around in my head, swimming around in my brain the way a group of moths will swarm around a light bulb, occasionally bouncing off its surface with a slight tinking sound every time contact was made.
I could almost hear the tink every time the memory of the words made contact with my conscious brain. Just as I was powerless against my growing depression, I was powerless to halt that memory from bouncing around inside my head, and was equally disadvantaged when it came to interpreting the meaning of the words.
I didn’t waste too much time actually pondering the meaning of the mysteries that had been laid before me because I had daily rituals to attend to. The book I discovered from my treasure box on that fifth day disturbed me.
I didn’t fully grasp the themes of the book, but I understood enough of them to fear for my own sanity. Lord of the Flies chronicled the events of a group of young boys shipwrecked on an island.
Without any instruction from society, the boys created their own society, and quickly descended into chaos. They turned tribal and began infighting and murdering each other, and discovered the horrible beast that dwells in the hearts of all men in the process.
That beast—that Lord of the Flies—is what disturbed me most. If that invisible monster lurks in the hearts of all men, and if the solitude of the island that separated the boys from society was enough to bring the hidden beast to the surface in such a violent way, what did that portend for me, marooned on my own dark and solitary island?
Lord of the Flies took me most of the day to read, but I still managed to finish off the waking hours of my day by playing in my dictionary. Then the day ended with my evening ritual of supper, bed setting, using the bathroom, (washing machine) and falling asleep while wondering about the meaning of June.
Day six followed day five with a ritualistic normalcy. The very fact that I had developed a “normal” routine for any part of that abnormal existence in the basement could only mean one of two things;
One: I had an unbreakable spirit and determination that would seek to create order in an increasingly chaotic world, thereby allowing me the freedom to live profitably in any circumstance, adapting to the world around me and ensuring my survival.
Or two: I was going insane and had no grasp on just how bad the situation really was.
I chose not to dwell on the possibilities overlong, but simply chose option number one and didn’t question the logic behind the choice beyond the point of telling myself that I was NOT going to be crazy like my mother.
But regardless of the real reasons for the routine, day six was just like day five, which was just like day four. I had no reason to believe that day seven would be any different, and when day seven rolled around, I was not surprised to find the striking similarity to days six, five, and four.
The only thing that was changing from day to day was the title of the books that I was reading, and the incremental level of depression and loneliness that was growing inside me.
When I had first started reading the books on the third step, I was able to associate myself to the many characters and themes within them. As my melancholy grew, however, I wasn’t able to do so as readily.
I began to forget my own identity. I began to doubt my own existence. I didn’t feel real enough to be able to associate myself with anything or anything with myself. The real world for me had become the imagined world in all the fictional books I was reading, and the time spent not reading was more of a dream than an actual existence.
I did occasionally wonder about June, and what possible implications that cryptic statement could have in store for me, but I didn’t have enough self awareness left to give it much serious thought.
All my thoughts became as mist in the wind. Swirling and dancing images behind my eyes, clouding the world around me before being carried off to places unknown by forces outside my control.
By day ten I was no longer leaving my dictionary perfectly aligned on the top step at night. It was too precious to me to leave it lying unprotected so far away from me. I began bringing it to bed with me.
I found strange comfort in the way the plastic dust jacket that protected the hard cardboard cover of the dictionary stuck to my bare skin as I slept. Occasionally, as I moved in my sleep, the cover would rip at my skin, prompting me to sudden alertness, but rather than being an inconvenience, I found it reassuring. I would wake and know instantly that my treasure was with me.
By day thirteen I had no more struggles with loneliness or depression. I no longer wondered about June, I no longer cared when I tried the door at the top of the steps and found it to be locked. I didn’t exist. Nothing existed except the dictionary and the wealth of communicable dissemination carefully guarded within its pages.
I had no mirror in my atramentous enclosure, but I’m relatively certain that by that time I must have looked something like Gollum. I hadn’t bathed myself in at least a week, had been naked for nearly two weeks, and had not even attempted to keep my hair flattened against my scalp. My eyes were always opened to their widest limit, trying to absorb every last miniscule photon that happened to be zooming by—or in other words, trying to see in the dark.
I can only imagine how ghastly my appearance was with my wide eyes, wild hair and greasy, dirty smudges covering the entirety of my naked frame. I’m sure that a glimpse of me at that time would have been more horrifying than a glimpse of my screeching, wedding dress clad mother in the hallway was.
But my ab
ominable appearance was not enough to keep June from embracing me on my thirteenth night.
CHAPTER 11
As day thirteen drew to a close and darkness once again swallowed the oasis of dim illumination at the bottom of the stairs, I fell asleep. I slept just as I had the past several nights, with my dictionary wrapped tightly against my chest with both arms, and my blanket pulled up over my head, protecting me from monsters, ghosts, aliens, and bad dreams.
Not that any of those evils really mattered to me, because I no longer believed that any of them were real, and even if they were real, it still didn’t matter because I no longer believed that I was real.
In reality, I had originally slept that way for the afore mentioned protection, but by day thirteen I slept that way out of habit, and necessity for routine.
In retrospect, routine probably saved my life down in the basement. If I had not developed a solid routine prior to forgetting that I was real, I would likely have starved to death because I would not have seen a need to eat in order to sustain my imaginary self.
So, routine had me sleeping beneath my covers, naked, and cradling a dictionary on my thirteenth night when a noise above me woke me up. By that point in my incarceration, one would have thought that any noise from above would have filled me with hope, but instead the noise inspired dread.
The noise was the dull thudding of footsteps walking through the house. Floor boards creaked in protest, crying out as if they were outraged that they also had been awakened and put to work after so long a respite from the tortures of being walked upon.
The footsteps eventually made their way into every room of the house, pausing in each one, then moving about the room briefly before retreating and moving on to another room.
The footsteps had started at the furthest end of the house—far beyond where the retaining wall stood sentry over its piles of miscellaneous junk—at the far end of the crawlspace where the main entry and living room were situated.
The footsteps worked their way steadily towards my end of the house, however, to where the bathroom (which was right above where the washer and dryer sat) was situated, and to where the kitchen, which was just beyond the stairs, was situated.
The fear that the maddening approach of footsteps inspired in me was, in a way, a wakeup call to reality. The fear brought me back into the real world instantly, bringing with it an understanding that I was, in fact, very real, and that being real meant I could be harmed.
I had not used my brain to think for several days and my thought process had become slow from lack of use, but I was still able to come up with a few ideas for who it might be lurking about in the upstairs.
My first muddy thought was that a burglar had broken in, and was swiftly surveying the house in order to be sure that no one was home and they’d have as much time as they needed to ransack the joint and take all our possessions.
That was a somewhat terrifying thought, because if they decided to check the basement and found me in it, there was no telling whether or not they would be decent enough to release me, or malicious enough to harm me. I certainly did not want to cry out and let them know I was present, for fear of the second idea about their nature.
I argued with myself on the point. On the one hand, salvation from captivity may be just one holler away, but on the other hand, death or torture may also lay one holler away. In the end I decided to wait and see where the situation led to on its own.
I figured I might be able to ascertain their real intent by some sign that they may unintentionally give me, and by that sign I might know whether to conceal my existence or scream my fool head off until they found me.
Of course I could not fathom one possible sign that they could give me that would reveal their nature, short of opening the basement door and asking if somebody was trapped in there. And that didn’t seem likely.
The second fuzzy idea about the intruder’s identity that crawled through my brain was even more terrifying than the first. Perhaps it was my mother. Perhaps she had returned from wherever it was that she had ambled off to in order to finish what she had started nearly two weeks ago. She wanted to kill me.
Or, perhaps, she was having a moment of lucidity and had returned in order to rescue me from my confines, but could not quite remember where she’d left me because the Sickness had had complete control over her mind when she put me there. That would explain the wandering from room to room that was going on above me.
I was highly suspicious of the second possibility for my mother’s return, for if she was looking for me with a desire born purely of maternal love for her offspring, I would hear her concernedly calling my name. All I could hear was someone who was making very little noise, as if they wanted to surprise me with their presence, or conceal it from me altogether.
I was faced with the same dilemma over whether to scream or not with the idea of my mother above me as I was with the idea of a burglar above me. But it was worse if it was my mother. If a burglar had come here with bad intent, I was unknown to them and they may spare my life if they found me, for I was not their reason for being here. But if it was my mother above me, and she had returned with bad intent, then her only purpose for being here was expressly to kill me.
That line of reasoning firmly cemented in my logical mind that I would be better off to remain quiet as a church mouse until the intrusion had passed. I lay under my covers, not moving, and only barely daring to breathe and listened to the footsteps as they came steadily nearer to the kitchen.
I trembled in my cotton chrysalis as the footsteps entered the kitchen and moved around for a few seconds. The intruder was close enough now that I could hear noises other than footsteps and complaining floorboards. I could hear the light switch click on and cupboard doors opening and closing. I even thought I heard the tinkle of glass jars clinking together when the refrigerator door slammed shut, but that sound may have been my imagination. I didn’t reckon anybody had broken into my house because they wanted a ham and cheddar on rye; hold the mayo, thank you very much.
I heard the footsteps approach the door to the basement and my heart sank. I had to cup a hand over my mouth (much the way Joe used to do) to keep myself from screaming when I heard the deadbolt on the door scraping as it unlocked.
The door creaked open slowly. It was just like a creepy Hollywood cliché, the door opening very slowly emitting a spine compressing squeal as it traveled the entire allowable circumference of its hinges. Whoever was opening the door either wanted to sadistically reinforce the fear of the trembling child lying cocooned in his blanket below them, or they were themselves, mortified of what might lie on the other side of the door.
It seemed to take forever for the door to open fully, and during that eternity I was able to complete countless thoughts about all the horrible ways that I was about to die. It seemed unfortunate to me in that instant that my brain seemed to be recuperating and was thinking more rapidly than it had been a few minutes before.
I could see the light from the top of the stairs even through my blanket, and it hurt my sensitive eyes, even as filtered as it was through the fabric. I wanted to peek one eye out from under the blanket to try and discern what evil presence awaited me at the top of the stairs, but lacked the courage to do so.
Even if I’d had the courage, I’m not sure I would have had the ability. My eyes had become so accustomed to the dark, that I was unable to keep them open, even in the dim light. I kept them shut tightly and listened intently for any sounds coming from the top of the steps.
I could hear breathing, but nothing else. It was as if the intruder was either afraid to enter and was trying to see as much as possible from the top of the stairs in order to determine if it was safe to proceed, or was simply standing there, smelling my fear and savoring the scent.
I waited; they waited. I dared not make a sound; they apparently dared not make a sound. I’m not sure how long that muted battle of wills lasted, but the silence was at last broken by a whisper from the top of
the stairs.
“Hello?” the voice whispered. I jumped a little at the sound but said nothing in return. The voice returned, a little louder this time. “Hello? Is anybody down there?” The voice wavered slightly and sounded scared, or at the very least, apprehensive, and female. It sounded like my mother, yet not quite like my mother. I was confused as Hell and still had no idea whether or not to reply. I stayed silent.
“If you’re down there, I really wish you’d say something. I’m afraid of the dark, and I can’t find a light switch. I don’t want to come down in the dark.”
The voice was now at a normal decibel, and had lost some of its fear, perhaps assuming that there was nobody in the basement after all. The voice had also taken on the sing-song quality that many adults used when talking to small children, accentuating the end of each sentence in a slightly higher octave as if always asking a question.
Thoughts raced through my rapidly unclouding mind. It seemed that a good scare is not just useful for forcing someone to come out of shock, it’s also good for reuniting one’s brain with reality when that brain had recently retreated from such a material place.
If that person were my mother, she would not be ignorant of the light switch’s location, but then again, if it were my mother, she could be lying. But it didn’t sound like my mother, and yet, it did.
I’d never heard of a woman burglarizing a home before, so I assumed that the woman that was sing-songing about her fear of the dark from the top of the stairs could not be a burglar, which led me right back to the ‘it’s my mother; it’s not my mother’ quandary, and I plucked imaginary flower petals in my mind as I debated.
The woman at the top of the stairs spoke again, and stumbled upon the only thing I can think of that she could have said that would have made up my mind about her motives.