by Aaron Polson
“Poe practically invented the short horror story,” I said.
“So high school kids have to read that shit?”
“At least they will read it.”
Jerry leaned forward, his lean body somewhat angular and awkward. “Look, basements are creepy, one way or the other. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to get a little spooked. Many ancient civilizations respected the underworld—something I thought a fellow history teacher could appreciate. People have always had a healthy fear of what lies beneath.”
“Yeah, ‘The dead reign there alone,’” I said.
“What was that?” Heather asked.
“From ‘Thanatopsis’,” I said. “A poem by William Cullen Bryant. ‘Thanatopsis’…a way of seeing the dead.”
“You’re a morbid fucker,” Travis said. “Too many scary stories for you.”
Jerry paced to the other side of the room, pulling his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. He stopped, and looked at the doorway to Heather’s kitchen. “When I was a kid—”
“Let me guess: you wet the bed?” Travis snickered.
“No. I was just thinking about the crawlspace under the house. Unfinished crawlspace. Like a pit of dirt. My mother always threatened to make us go down there when the tornado sirens went off. She never did, though.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Spiders. Cobwebs. She was scared of them.”
“I’d take a few spiders over a tornado,” Travis said. “Part of living in Kansas, my friends.”
Heather worked Jerry over with her dark brown eyes. “I’ve got a crawlspace under this place. I don’t go down there.”
Travis climbed out of his chair. “What are we waiting for? You up for it Jerry? Mr. Underworld?”
“I don’t go down there.” Heather’s tone dropped into the room like a stone in deep water.
A moment passed, thick and suddenly uncomfortable. We were all tired. I looked at the paintings on the walls of the tiny living room, canvases stretched over twisted, strange frames, organic shapes with large curves, paintings in three dimensions. Bright abstractions covered each canvas. They were Heather’s work she’d done while in school, and I found something feminine in her paintings, plump but shapely, just like her body. Something full of life and thoroughly out of place in any discussion of death. She was young, mid twenties at most, and had lived in the same house in college. She’d taught with us for only three years, and this was her first job. I don’t know why I looked at the paintings. I don’t know why I tried not to think about the basement. The beer swirled my thoughts in a tired jumble and stirred the quiet attraction I felt for her into something a little more sinister until Jerry interrupted.
“Okay. Fine, I’ll check it out.” He rubbed his hands together. “I’ll go,” he said in a clear, bold voice.
“It’s in the back, a little trapdoor just inside the rear entry.”
Travis chuckled. I threw a pillow at him.
We followed Jerry through the kitchen and bathroom and into the alcove inside the back door. Heather’s coats hung from a makeshift rack, and she brushed these aside. A rectangular line broke the hardwood floor, and, at the near end, a slot had been cut through for a handle. The wooden floor creaked throughout the house, uneven and worn in the kitchen and living room. But the area around the door in the floor was in great condition.
“I don’t go down there,” Heather said again.
“Yeah. Yeah, we know.” Travis raised his beer. “Bon voyage, Jerry.”
Jerry knelt, pulled up the door, and averted his face, eyes pinched shut, as he did so. “A little stale down there. How deep? Is there a ladder or stairs?”
Heather handed him a flashlight. “A few stairs. It can’t be deep, but I’ve never gone down.”
Travis stifled a laugh.
“Of course.” Jerry nodded. He took the light, clicked the switch, and frowned. A few good slaps with the palm of his hand, and the bulb flickered to life. He pointed the yellow beam downward. “Here goes nothing.”
I’d begun to sober and felt a nagging urge to move, to get out of the cramped hallway. Restless. Uneasy. I was tired, too. I looked at Heather, lost for a minute imagining the line of her neck as it traced toward her chest and her round breasts. These weren’t thoughts I wanted to have about a colleague, but as we stood close in the darkness waiting for Jerry’s little expedition—his ridiculous, childish trip into the dark—these were the thoughts which circled my brain. The whole event seemed suddenly so silly. So juvenile.
The flashlight winked out just then, and Jerry cried out.
“What is it?” I leaned over, squinting into the opening.
“Nothing. Nothing really. Just hit my head.”
A sound of scuffling and patting packed earth came from the crawl space. As I knelt closer to the hole, I noticed how foul the air was, sour and stale and whispering of cobwebs and dirt and mold. I had the sudden urge to vomit. The yellow light blinked and came back, and I staggered to my feet.
I held out a hand and helped hoist him the last few steps. Jerry’s head was wet with blood when he emerged from the basement. His hands were filthy with dirt, with plenty of dark soil packed under his fingernails. I only noticed because I held his wrist, and once he was on steady ground he pulled away.
“I need to clean this cut,” he said.
“Shit, Jerry. What the hell happened?” Travis asked.
Jerry shook his head. “Dunno. Hit a pipe, I guess. I stood up pretty fast.”
He washed his wound, a tiny scratch of about an inch long, but it bled a good deal as head wounds will. The sight of blood, no matter how innocuous, killed the mood, and saying our goodbyes to Heather, I helped Jerry to my car and drove him home. Travis stumbled to his own car, humming the school fight song in a drunken warble. When I pulled in front of Jerry’s place, a wood frame house with limestone foundation like many other older houses in Lawrence, he looked at me, and I suppose I should have seen something in his eyes. It’s no use blaming myself, I suppose, but now, knowing what happened, I feel uneasy about it. Like I should have known. Like I should have asked him to stay with me that night.
“There was a mound down there…like something’s buried,” he said.
“Down there? Heather’s basement?”
“Yes. Buried,” he said.
I glanced at his hands. A little dirt clung under his fingernails even though he washed them while tending his head wound. “Buried?”
“I dunno. I think—I think Heather’s place survived the raid. Quantrill’s raid during the Civil War.” His shoulders rose and fell. A sigh slipped out of his mouth and he nodded, waving a hand toward his house. “Kind of like this old relic I rent. My penchant for history runs deep.” He pulled at his lip for a moment. “Look…I have something I want you to have. Wait here.”
“Sure.” I drummed my thumbs against the steering wheel as he vanished into his house. The purr of the car’s engine nearly lulled me to sleep, and he had to tap the window to get my attention.
“Here,” he said, holding out a black folder, a faux leather portfolio. “It’s some stuff I want to keep safe.”
I took the folder.
“Have a good night, all right? Thanks for the ride and everything.”
“Call me tomorrow,” I said.
He waved and slammed the door.
I woke around three that night. Cotton filled my mouth, at the awful, dehydrated feeling I’d never gotten used to after a night of drinking. I shuffled through the apartment, poured a glass from the kitchen tap, and drank a full twelve ounces. Then I looked at my fingernails. An image of Jerry’s dirty hands flitted through my brain, enough to cause a chill and keep me up surfing late night television for another thirty minutes. I settled on a segment of The Longest Day, the bit where French resistance fighters take on the Germans from a bombed-out nunnery. It’s funny to recall the details, to go through the paces in my memory. I imagined Jerry’s death happened somewhere right around three,
when I woke. The coroner couldn’t pinpoint as much, of course, but placed Jerry’s final breath in the vague, no-man’s land after one and before dawn. Jerry had left one cryptic text shortly after I dropped him off.
they want to be whole
Nothing more.
But I didn’t find out until Monday. None of us did. Jerry didn’t show for school. The secretary called. The principal called. No answer from anyone. He hadn’t phoned on Saturday, the day after our drinking binge at Heather’s, but we were adults. The police had to force his door because his landlord was on vacation.
At the end of the week, Travis and I drove to Chapman, Jerry’s hometown. It was a two gas station town, maybe two thousand residents, and the total included about three hundred spares from the local cemetery. I felt a chill as we drove by the cold, grey stones. The dead reign there alone. Jerry’s mother still lived in Chapman and insisted on burying him nearby. Travis came because Jerry was in his department; Jerry’s mother asked me to be a pall bearer because I was Jerry’s closest friend on the faculty.
Grey clouds clotted the sky during the service, but the rain held off. After the funeral, after the brief but intimate graveside service, after we put my colleague and friend in the earth, we shared bland potluck fare in the nearby church basement with Jerry’s extended family.
His mother approached me, clasped my arm, and said, “Thank you, Aaron. Jerry always spoke fondly of your friendship. He has a few things at the house…I thought you might like to have. He told me once you both collected old LPs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Please stop by, after the dinner.”
Jerry’s childhood home rested at the end of a quiet street in a quiet town, another ranch style house with half brick façade in the front, but with one distinction which marked it different. The house was recessed, with the first floor sitting two or three feet below ground level. I didn’t notice when we came to the front door, but realized as we descended a small staircase to the left. Jerry’s mother led me to his room while Travis phoned an assistant coach.
A small collection of LPs, most in near mint condition and some still in plastic cellophane, lay arranged on the bed in Jerry’s room. A series of posters lined the wall, bands and movies popular fifteen years ago, and I suspected the room hadn’t seen much redecorating since Jerry had been in high school.
“Feel free to take anything you want.” She hesitated at the door, her blue eyes misting with tears. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me. I’m…well, I’m tired.”
I pulled a few albums from the assortment, including Neil Young’s Harvest and an older, rather rare copy of Kind of Blue mastered in stereo, and was just about to return downstairs when I noticed a small bookcase. As a lover of books, I couldn’t help perusing Jerry’s old collection, even though it was mostly what one would expect—Twain, Bradbury, Dickens, standard high school fare—but I found a black, three-ring binder which reminded me of the folder he’d given me on the night he died. I laid it on his desk, opened it, and found pages of clippings from newspaper articles, some photocopies, and a few glossy magazine cuttings. None of the material was about Jerry, or even from the local paper. Jerry had collected articles about strange archeological findings, especially burial sites, around the world, and he’d filled the margins with scribbled notes. I surmised his love for history started early, and made nothing else of it at the time.
Travis called up the stairs as I was engrossed in a piece about funerary mounds on an island south of Sumatra. I glanced at the stack of LPs I’d collected, buried the folder inside the pile, and left Jerry’s room with my contraband in hand. We said our goodbyes to his mother, but I stopped before climbing into Travis’s car.
“Mrs. Larson?”
“Yes?”
“I notice your house is sort of recessed. Do you have a basement?”
She scratched the side of her face. “Well…we have a crawl space. Just dirt and enough room to crouch down.”
“Can I see it?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Travis whispered.
“It would mean a lot. Jerry talked about it—he said I should take a look if I ever had the chance. Said it was like something out of one of the stories I teach the kids at school.”
She nodded, slowly. “I…I suppose so.”
The trip under Jerry’s childhood home lasted all of two minutes—dust and the overwhelming staleness of the air kept me from deeper investigation. At the time, I wasn’t sure what possessed me or what I was looking for, exactly. Perhaps a mound of dirt, like Jerry described under Heather’s place. A burial mound, maybe, thinking of the folder I’d taken almost unconsciously from his bedroom. I found nothing, but didn’t stay long enough for a thorough investigation. The air was heavy down there, heavy and thick as though it was alive.
The dead reign there alone.
Riding home, I ruminated a little on Jerry’s odd collection of article clippings, and started to feel more uncomfortable about his death. Not just sad. Uneasy. Healthy thirty-year-olds just don’t die.
The uneasiness began to eat away at the edges of my consciousness, to nibble on my imagination, even at school, over the next few days. For the first time, I opened the folder he’d given me the night he died and found more article clippings, similar to the folder I’d taken from his house, but the articles were more recent, some printed from the internet. At night, I found myself poring over Jerry’s scrapbooks, searching, I suppose for an answer to a question I didn’t know. Several long gone civilizations, a veritable who’s who of buried cities—Çatal Hüyük, Skara Brae, Copan, Chichen Itza—with references to human sacrifices, rituals in which victim’s bodies were mutilated and eviscerated, entrails offered to the gods. Jerry left notes about how each civilization disposed of their dead. The ancient residents of Çatal Hüyük left their loved ones on the roofs of their homes until the vultures pecked away the flesh, and then they buried the bones under their floors. Mass pits of suspected human sacrifices were found in China…Italy…elsewhere. This was the stuff of nightmares, dark speculations of ancient religions. From the article dates in the folder I found in his room, Jerry had been collecting them since he was nine or ten years old.
I called an old college buddy, Chris Steiner, a few days after the funeral. He wrote for the Journal-World on the police beat, a thankless job which kept him running at all hours, often late into the night. But he knew some contacts at the hospital where the police took Jerry’s body. He had friends in the morgue.
“Look, I’ll see what I can do. No promises,” Steiner said after I explained the reason for my call.
Maybe I nabbed an hour or two of sleep a night that week, most of it with the lights glaring because of a healthy dose of childish fear of the dark. Reading Jerry’s macabre research hadn’t helped my overactive imagination. My work suffered. Students found all the right buttons and pushed without mercy. I handed out more detentions in five days than I had in the five years prior. Heather came down to my room on Friday after school.
“You look like hell,” she said. “From the rumors around here—and you know how much I like to believe the kids—you’ve been a bit of a hard ass, too.”
I could have told her about the articles. About Jerry’s last message to me: they want to be whole. I could have told her about the theme of human sacrifice and bodily mutilation, ancient Egyptians removing organs from their dead before mummification, all of the grisly detail in Jerry’s notebooks. Jerry had been scared of something as a kid. Whatever it was scared him again as an adult. He scribbled little notes in the margin. They want to be whole, he’d scribbled again and again along with one other word: underground. Underground as in basements—even if the basement is a tired, over-wrought trope. Poe buried more than one character in a basement wall, some while they still breathed. But that was fiction. Fiction. Jerry’s last message: they want to be whole. He didn’t just die. He’d been killed, murdered.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” I said.
Any other time, yes. Yes, Heather, I want to meet at your place and have a drink. But the thoughts of two weeks ago, the notion of being alone with Heather, alone with motive and opportunity to do more than imagine the two of us, together, had been buried under a mountain of black stone and Jerry Larson’s body.
She frowned before I spoke. “Jerry, right?”
“Of course. He was afraid, Heather. I think he knew he was going to die.”
“It was unexpected. A tragedy.”
“He knew. He sent me a message,” I said.
“What’d it say, ‘I’m gonna die’? That’s nuts.”
I frowned. they want to be whole
“Look, I’m sorry about Larson. He was a helluva guy.” She touched my arm. “When you get your head on straight, the drink offer is still good.”
I glanced at the floor. The students had long since cleared the halls. “I think something came out of his basement.”
She pulled away, crossing her arms. “Look, don’t play at this horror bullshit anymore. It isn’t funny.”
“He had all these articles, back in his bedroom, where he grew up. He gave me another notebook the night he died. Two scrapbooks of articles…some mentioned ancient civilizations. Burial rituals. Human sacrifice. Jerry left some notes. Some of the—”
“What? Aaron, that’s National Enquirer crap.”
“No...he found something in your basement. Said your place had been there since before the raid. He had a few articles about Quantrill’s Raid. Right here in Lawrence during the Civil War. One article spoke of a woman who was killed, the only woman to die in the massacre. Her body. What was left of it was buried in the basement of a house on your street—”
“Forget it.” She started to walk away. “Get some sleep. Get over this, okay?”
Certain things, like the unease which had begun to fester in my stomach, to grow and nearly develop a life of its own, were not simply “gotten over.”