by Darcy Coates
It’s after three in the morning, I reminded myself as I stalked back down the stairs. It’s not unreasonable to set your phone to voicemail at night.
I stood in the hallway, faced with a horrible choice. I couldn’t leave the house at night. The dirt roads leading to the town weren’t exactly clear in normal daylight; if I tried to navigate them in the dark, even with a torch, I was more likely to wander into the woods and starve to death than make it back to civilisation.
I could call the police, but would they be able to help? There was a room with no door. What do you expect them to do? Break down the wall?
Yes, a little, desperate voice in my head said. That sounds like a dandy idea.
And yet, I could only imagine what Mrs Gillespie would have to say when she heard about it. What were my other alternatives? I could go back to bed and sleep with the candlestick clasped in one hand… or I could confront whoever or whatever was inside the impossible room.
I hated, hated, hated the choice I knew I needed to make, but there was no way I was going to fall asleep, and I couldn’t justify calling the police until I was certain about what I’d seen.
The kitchen draws held many knick-knacks, including potato peelers, zesters, blenders… and a torch. I took the thin metal tube out and slowly, cautiously returned to the library.
Everything looked exactly how I’d left it. The candlestick lay on the floor; its wax had dried into a little blood-red puddle. I kicked the stick aside, and it rattled as it rolled along the floor.
“Hello?” I called. Just like that morning, when I’d thought the slamming door had been an intruder, I got no reply. I edged towards the bookcases, turned on the torch, and angled it into the gap between the two shelves. “Hello?”
I couldn’t see anything, but then, I was still standing farther away than I had been before. I crept closer to the shelves, inch by inch, my heart ready to burst from the pressure, until my nose was just barely touching the wood. I raised my torch higher—and saw it.
There was a wall behind the gap in the shelves. On it was a stain that could be mistaken for an eye when seen for a split-second in flickering candlelight.
I thought I might collapse from relief. I sagged away from the shelves, then jumped as the scratching sound started up again.
“Damnit,” I hissed as I accidentally kicked the candlestick a second time. “What sort of infestation does this place have? Rats?”
I picked up the candle and the stick, and cast a frustrated glance at the puddle of cold wax that would need scraping off the hardwood. Tomorrow, I decided, and left the library.
The kitchen clock showed it was nearly four in the morning. I trudged back upstairs to my room, but I could still hear the scrabbling sound. It felt as though it were trying to burrow into my head, to bury itself in a vulnerable part of my brain, and the idea of trying to sleep while encased in that noise made me feel sick. But exhaustion was dragging at me, and after sleeping so badly the night before, I knew I wouldn’t do well if I tried to stay awake.
I settled on a compromise and dragged my pillow and blanket downstairs. The lounge room was quiet, so I bundled up on one of the couches, hugging the pillow and watching the roving shadows until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
THIRD DAY
It took three rings for the phone to pull me back to awareness. My pillow flopped onto the floor as I fumbled to pull the mobile out of where I’d forgotten it in my back pocket. I’d become tangled in the blanket overnight and had to kick it off before I could sit up.
“Yeah?” I mumbled as I pressed the phone to my ear.
“You tried to call me last night?” a crisp, cold voice replied.
I squinted against the light coming through the living room window and rubbed a palm against my eyes. “Uhh…”
The voice sighed, and I realised Mrs Gillespie must have gotten a missed-call notification.
“Oh, uh, Mrs Gillespie. Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“You didn’t,” she said curtly, and I could tell she was waiting for an explanation.
I opened my mouth to tell her about the eye I’d thought I’d seen between the bookcases, but the words died on my tongue. She would think I was being idiotic, of course. I could already tell her patience with me was nearly gone; talking to her about my late-night rovings and hallucinations would do away with it completely, so I seized on the only other explanation I had. “Yeah, there’s heaps of scratching noises in the walls. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Damnit,” she spat, almost too quietly for me to hear. “Fine, that will mean the rats are back. You’ll need to take care of them yourself. They’ll do too much damage if you leave them until I get home. There are rat traps and poison in the storage shed behind the house. Leave them around the kitchen, the laundry, the library, the empty bedrooms on the second floor, and the basement.”
My mind was sluggish from sleep. I rubbed at my face, trying to wake myself up and keep track of the instructions. “Right, okay, kitchen, laundry, library… wait, you have a basement?”
The sigh was back, searing me with its irritation. “Yes, of course there’s a basement. The door is in the hallway, opposite the conference room.”
“Oh. Right.”
“There aren’t any lights down there, so take a torch.”
“Sure.” My mind fluttered to the other lightless section of the house: the third floor, with its half-explored rooms. I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Hey, there’s some pretty old stuff upstairs. What happened with that?”
“You’ve been up there, have you? Those were the house’s original furnishing. The previous owner put them into storage when he renovated the building. When we moved in, we decided to keep the modern aesthetic.”
“That’s such a shame,” I blurted before I could stop myself. “It’s so beautiful—”
“It’s old-fashioned,” Mrs Gillespie snapped. “Look, I have to go now. We have a class starting in a minute. Just put out the traps and poison, okay?”
“Sure. Have fun at your class.”
Like the day before, she hung up without saying goodbye. I pursed my lips at the phone then put it to one side and stretched. I felt sore from hunching up on the couch, but at least the scratching noise had stopped.
“Jeeze, imagine not wanting those gorgeous paintings or chairs,” I grumbled as I slouched into the kitchen and put on the kettle. “Why stay in a house like this if you don’t like the way it’s supposed to look?”
I’d had no idea there was a basement. I must have missed the door in the hallway when I’d explored the lower level.
After breakfast, I changed out of my nightclothes and into jeans and sturdy boots. Then I went outside to find the shed. It turned out to be the first of the two shabby buildings between the house and the vegetable gardens. I got onto my tiptoes to peer through the widow, careful not to touch the spider-infested sill. Inside, a jumble of pots, boxes, bags of dirt, and garden tools were piled haphazardly on shelves and the floor.
The door was unlocked but fastened with a rusted bolt, and it opened without too much trouble. I couldn’t see any light switch, so the only illumination came from outside and was tinted turquoise by the old window. The smell of organics and dirt filled my nose as I picked my way through the cluttered room.
The rat poisons were up the back, taking up two of the four shelves. “Damn…” I looked at the collection of what must have been nearly a hundred traps and a dozen boxes of poison. “Just how bad is this rat problem?”
There was too much to carry in my hands, so I picked a plastic pot off the ground, knocked it against the shelf to get the dirt and spiders out of it, then filled it with a dozen of the traps. I also took one of the poison boxes then hurried back outside.
Once again, I found myself glancing at the bay window on the second floor as I passed it. The curtains were still, undisturbed by the breeze, and the room’s depths were as impenetrable as ever. I looked farther up, above the roof of the hou
se, where the sky was still covered in clouds. The day before had simply been gloomy, but now the clouds were roiling, frothing, and painting the sky a dark grey that threatened rain.
Back in the house, I tried to remember where Mrs Gillespie had wanted the traps left. In the kitchen… the laundry… did she want some put in the library, too? Ugh, I should have written it down.
I ended up leaving a couple of traps and a plate of poison in half the downstairs rooms. When I got to the library, I saw the puddle of red wax on the floor and cringed. The previous night felt as though it had happened a long time in the past, and I suddenly felt incredibly embarrassed for mistaking a stain behind the bookcases for an eye.
When I’d finished setting the traps and poison in the room’s corners, I got down on my knees and used a kitchen knife to scrape the wax off the floor. I was lucky the wooden boards were polished; most of the wax popped off in chunks, and by the time I’d finished scraping up the final pieces, it was hard to tell anything had been spilt there at all.
I looked in my plastic pot—I still had four traps left. “That’ll do for the basement, I guess.”
No wonder I didn’t notice the door before, I thought when I finally found it. It’s like a wooden chameleon. The door, halfway along the hallway that ran down the length of the house, was set between two cupboards and painted the same colour as the rest of the wall. Even the handle, a grey-cream plastic, was hard to see.
I juggled my pot and poison box under my left arm then turned the handle and let myself into the stairwell. There weren’t any lights, like Mrs Gillespie had said, so I pulled my mobile out of my pocket and swiped it on to turn the screen into a makeshift flashlight.
I’d thought the upstairs rooms were dark, but that had been nothing compared to the smothering blackness of that stairwell. I walked slowly, measuring my steps, eyes fixed on the floorboards so I wouldn’t trip.
While the edges of the steps were a dark tar-painted colour, the centres were worn to a dark sandy shade. Just how often did people need to come down here?
I counted the stairs as I climbed. Five… ten… twenty…
At last, after thirty-two steps, the floor levelled out. There was no luxurious dark wood there, only dirt-covered bricks. I scuffed my shoes at the grime, a little disgusted, then raised the mobile to see the rest of the room.
I’d expected a storage area like the upstairs rooms, possibly filled with boxes and antiques and furniture covered with drop cloths. There was nothing like that in the basement. To my left was a low, wide table, and on top of the table were four stacks of woven mats. The mats were square and about two feet wide. I counted them quickly; there were twenty of them, but I couldn’t guess what they’d been used for.
Opposite me, at the other end of the room, was another smaller table. A box and a candlestick sans candle sat on it, and behind it was a chair. Beyond the chair, something large and cloth-covered was fixed to the wall.
The rest of the room was empty.
I paced along the basement’s length, phone held out in front of me to ward off the darkness, and stared at the expanse in wonder. It was at least as big as the ballroom, and every surface was covered with thick grime.
I walked around the table to look at the cloth-covered item on the wall. The blanket thrown over it was dirty and had its fair share of cobwebs, though the spiders seemed long gone. I pulled at the corner of the cloth then recoiled as it slid to the ground, revealing its terrible ward to my light.
A giant metal skull, distorted and leering, gazed down upon the room with empty eyes. At least as tall as a human and built out of dark wrought iron, probably the same iron as what surrounded the cemetery, the metal bones seemed designed as a mockery of what a skull should have looked like. My first through was that it might have been intended as art, but I couldn’t imagine any person who might have wanted such a grotesque abomination in their home. Its position behind the desk, fastened to the wall so that its sightless eyes could watch over the room, made me think it was supposed to serve a purpose.
I thought of the steps, worn down from countless feet. What was this room?
My eyes settled on the wooden box sitting on the desk. It was a little larger than my hand, and two metal clasps held it closed. Logic told me to leave it be; the smart, safe thing to do would be to lay the traps and get out of the basement—but curiosity pressed me to open it and see what was inside.
It was a short battle. I put down my mousetrap pot and poison box then flicked up the box’s metal clasps. They were rusty and stiff from disuse, but still, they opened. I raised the lid, my heart beating hard from a mixture of fear and anticipation, but my anxiety had been unwarranted. The box was empty except for a slip of paper.
I didn’t want to touch the paper, so I lowered my light to read it better. It was written in a neat, precise cursive in what looked like red ink:
The Book of the Others now lies
With Jonathan Gillespie
May the Lord have mercy on us all
“The Book of the Others…” I repeated. “Huh, sounds like a fun read.”
I snorted at my own stupid joke, and the sound echoed through the room. Curiosity still niggled at me. What was in the Book of the Others, and why was it kept in the basement? However, the leering skull behind my back and the dark, chilly room were making me jittery. I dropped the box’s lid closed and hurried to place my traps and poison in the room’s corners, then I jogged for the exit and ran up the stairs.
Getting out of the oppressive darkness, even into the house’s regular dingy light, was a relief. I closed the door behind myself and went to return the empty flower pot and half-full box of poison to the shed.
The clouds seemed to be darkening. I felt a spit of rain land on my exposed arm and quickened my pace. The shed’s door creaked when opened, and I dropped the pot back onto its pile in the corner, replaced the poison box on the shelf, and bolted the door behind myself.
I hesitated then, glancing past the garden beds towards the little cemetery hidden by the trees. Jonathan Gillespie’s final resting place…
I could return to the house, make a hot drink, put together some lunch, and spend the afternoon trying to purge my mind of the metal skull and empty room below my feet with a good book… or I could try to sate my curiosity about Jonathan Gillespie and why his family had felt they needed to beg for mercy from the Lord.
My mind was made up in a snap. I jogged past the dead, cold garden beds and across the patchy grass until I reached the thicket of trees hiding the wrought-iron fence. Just like the day before, I skirted the edge, looking for the gap that led to the gate. When I found it, I pressed the ancient iron barrier open as far as it would go and slipped into the cemetery beyond.
The stones stood just as I’d left them: worn, cold, and chipped, a last testament to a family that had died within a year of each other. I walked carefully, reluctant to step on any ground that covered a coffin. The air tasted cold and crisp on my tongue.
Jonathan Gillespie’s mausoleum stood in front of me, its slate-grey door arched like the entrance to a cathedral. A church for one.
A wooden bar stretched across the front of the door, its edges embedded in metal brackets. It was old, eroded by rain and wind, but had been made out of thick, heavy wood.
I didn’t want to damage any of Mrs Gillespie’s house, no matter how little she nurtured it, so I took as much care as I could when I set to wiggling the bar out of its brackets. The decayed edges stuck in their holders, so it was harder than I’d expected. I ended up crouching beside one end, putting my shoulder under the wood, and pushing up with all of my strength. The bar groaned, there was a splintering noise, and then it scraped upwards, finally coming loose.
I repeated the motion with the other side and was rewarded when the entire bar finally slid free. I pulled it out of its holder and carefully lowered it to the ground. It was heavier than it looked, and it hit the dirt with a hard thud.
My chest was heaving from the exe
rtion, but I was too excited to rest. I put both hands on the icy stone doors and pushed. They gave a little under my hands—not much, a centimetre at most—then ground to a halt. I put my head down and pushed harder, straining every muscle in my arms and back, but the doors wouldn’t move so much as a millimetre.
It’s locked. I sagged back, resting my hands on my knees as I panted. Something cold stung at the back of my neck; I reached a hand around to feel it was water. The rain had started.
If it’s locked, then where’s the keyhole? The doors were a smooth barrier with no handle or fingerholds. It’s not… locked from the inside, is it?
More cold prickles hit my back and arms. The sky above me groaned as thunder rolled through the dense black clouds, and a faint patter in the distance, quickly growing louder, told me it had started raining in earnest on the forest.
“Damn.” I bent to lift the wooden bar.
It felt even heavier to get off the ground. I lifted one end first, bracing it on my shoulder and pushing it against the door as the stings of icy water hit me more frequently. I got the first end into place, half inside the bracket, then lifted the other end. My back ached under its weight, but I got it up, pushed it against the door above the bracket, then began to lower it into place.
The doors burst forward with a horrific crack. It wasn’t enough to break the seal on the inside, but I felt the cold stone hit my shoulder. I staggered, trying to regain my footing, my ears ringing from the booming sound—but the force had been enough to knock the wooden bar out of my hands. It hit me, throwing me off balance. I fell to the ground. The wood landed on top of me, its edge slamming into my skull just below my hairline.
I lay on the ground, staring at the swirling sky as fat drops of water landed on my face. How strange, I thought as shadows crept in at the edges of my vision. It didn’t even hurt that much.