by Bruce Jones
Maybe that was it: the privacy the basement still radiated. The house held a transitional edge Richard felt himself a still-evolving part of, as if something secret, just out of reach and not yet fulfilled, were waiting. Waiting for him, perhaps. But the basement especially—a place he’d feared as a child, especially at night--the basement still somehow contained and jealously guarded the air of decades past, shared mostly by his dead parents. Since moving back from LA, Richard had visited the cellar no more than perhaps half-a-dozen times, and always with the same sense of melancholy loss and bitter-sweet rekindled memories.
Out of these sensations, his father’s private little office emanated the strongest feelings of jealous concealment. And though there had never been a lock on the office door, Richard felt the vague uneasiness of a trespasser as he approached its unpainted sheetrock walls, the same feeling he’d gotten the last time he’d come down here upon moving back. And he hadn’t lingered long then, something drawing him back upstairs, Allie calling him, maybe.
…or maybe the feeling you don’t belong down here…
But that was silly. This was his father’s home.
…yes, your father’s…not yours…
Richard made a scoffing sound. It was just a cellar room, in a little tract home in an old Kansas suburb. None of his memories here were bad ones. He had loved his parents and he had loved this house, including the spooky old cellar. He reached out, bare feet chill now on the cold cement, glass of rum in hand--
…don’t go in there…
--and pushed through the unlocked office door. Pushed through the must of years into air as old and sacred to him as that contained in an archeologist’s ancient tomb. He felt along the right hand wall where he knew the plastic switch to be, found its familiar cover. It came on as it always had, though the single bulb hanging at room’s center glowed valiantly with a dim, cloudy ochre under years of accumulated grit.
The first thing he saw was the heavy steel swivel chair.
It was not at its place under the desk—a place his father had always unerringly returned it to--as Richard had done a few weeks ago fooling around down here. Now, like the basement door upstairs, the old chair sat askew.
Not an especially alarming inanity. Especially in light of the countless variables of possibility: it could have merely rolled a few feet from under the desk with the settling of the old house (unlikely, but not impossible), or Allie could have simply moved it while she was down here last week or the week before, fishing for something or other (also unlikely but more comfortably in the realm of probability); or Richard had himself failed to place it back with the attentive neatness of his father (the most likely of all—a kind of post-adolescent persisting rebellion?).
Richard took the chair’s gray cushioned back in both hands and pushed it gently into its proper position at the center of the big steel desk.
…to see if it floats back out again-- like in a haunted house?…
He felt himself smile at that, remembering the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, his second favorite ride next to Pirates of the Caribbean.
He turned to the south wall, the real reason he’d come down here in the first place. Maybe he hadn’t admitted it to himself outright, but he’d known it all along. He’d come to see the office, specifically the south wall. Which wasn’t a wall at all, really, but a library. That he never tired of gazing upon.
Richard couldn’t remember at time when it hadn’t held a fascination for him, even as a toddler. The brown oak case with its stacks of old books. Shelves of them. Tiers of them. Reaching—it seemed to him as a child—to the sky if not merely the little office ceiling. Big books, slim books, fat books and tall--wine colored spines, jade green spines, blood red spines, some with gilded titles, some so faded with time and handling their covers appeared nearly blank. But all of them antiques. Many doubtless valuable; an antiquarian’s dream. Aged and stately as fine wine, and as well cared for. Art books, travel books, classic fiction and forbidding obscurities, large and small, thick and thin…and most of all neat.
Not stacked lazily in the kind of haphazard maze of order only his mother could divine, these were his father’s collection, fairly radiating care and respect, handed down from generation after generation. Most even looked untouched. If Richard couldn’t remember the little office without the marvelous south wall of towering books, neither could he recall his father ever actually sitting down at the big steel desk with one and reading it. Never. Perhaps out of respect for his forefathers? They were, Richard knew, collected from all over the world through generations of Dennings, though just how far back and with what beginnings he didn’t and probably never would know. What he did know was that, as a child growing up in the Topeka suburbs of the tumultuous sixties, with its race riots and student sit-ins and sudden, soul-shocking assassinations, it was somehow calming and restful to come down here and find the familiar tiers of archaic volumes waiting for him in their shelves, somehow reassuring. Even under the unspoken rule of hands off. These were books to be admired, not to be soiled by the hands of a preadolescent. But he knew his Dad privately prized his son’s company and enjoyed it when Richard came down to visit, even with the unspoken rule of stay a respectful distance from that corner of the basement. He could come in and watch his father work anytime he wished, sit on the linoleum floor and read comics and munch Tootsie Rolls, and leave behind crumples of Three Musketeers and Baby Ruth wrappers--but never, never stroll closer than a few feet from the foreboding tower of ancient, strange-smelling tomes. Just how many times he’d sat there on the floor beside the big steel desk pretending to read comics but in fact gazing wonderingly at the fabled tiers of books, his father would never know. Or perhaps he’d known all along and kept it a secret for them both to share separately, then and now with his departure from this plane. All of that paled beside Richard’s fascination with why he still felt impelled to leave the shelves untouched and to themselves today, as though, each time he approached the neatly stacked tiers, his father’s eyes began boring warningly into his back. And the notion always made him smile, because it was not a hostile warning, just a soft, not unpleasant pressure that brought back memories of gentle, always smiling, always-had-time-for-you Dad. In those times of darkest depression and need, Richard nearly always summoned the same comforting image: himself there beside the big gray desk, his father’s brown pant legs and big Florsheims only a few reassuring inches away. He had done this since his college years and still did it, when needed, to this day. And with the familiar, warm feeling of his father’s presence—his smell of unfiltered Camels and Old Spice—was the other nearly-memorized image of the Tall Tower: the crisply stacked, even rows of antique volumes stretching ceiling-ward. So often glimpsed, so endlessly stared at, the general colors and pattern of order were etched on his retina, he supposed, for all time; what time he had left anyway.
Which is why, standing here now in t-shirt and pajama bottoms--cement floor freezing his bare feet, glass of rum beginning to freeze his hand--it was such a shock to look up at the familiar shelves and discover the three or four inches of black open space between two leather-bound volumes midway up the wall.
Richard stood there for a long time just staring, no longer feeling the chill of the concrete floor.
A missing book?
It seemed beyond unlikely. It seemed impossible.
His first thought was of his wife. If Allie had indeed been down here by herself--perhaps curious about the number and possible worth of the literary treasure buried here that Richard had never bothered to speak of, to inform her about—perhaps she’d taken a book or two down—
…and not put it back? Unlikely…
He had to concede that. He could not picture such an event. Not at all. In the first place, Allie was the type of woman who would surely have mentioned the incident. If only in passing. She was also the kind of outgoing but always decorum-conscious person who would have asked permission first, or at the least mentioned her intent beforeha
nd.
He stood there in front of his father’s old bookshelves slowly shaking his head. Anyway he turned it he couldn’t shake the very real sensation that something was askew, something was not quite right, not quite the way, the angle, the precise location and texture of the previous week or even yesterday. Someone had been down here.
…someone or something…
Yeah, and you can just knock that shit off right now. Even at his age he was not incapable of getting the creeps from a cobwebbed old cellar. So, he warned his inner-mind with finality, you can just stop with the—
…get out of there…
It wasn’t even a competed thought.
More like a hot current of warning to his synapses. His abruptly very jumbled synapses and the direct wiring to his legs.
…get out now!…
Still, he refused immediately to give in to it, taking a quick—all right, trembling—gulp from the tinkling glass first. Then turning--turning at his own leisure and volition, thank you very much--from the ancient tiers and leather volumes to the little office door.
--almost colliding with the pulled out chair.
“fuh—“ Richard croaked.
Meaning to say “fuck!” But the rum and Coke got caught in his constricted throat so he choked on it, gagged on it a second before backing away balefully from the old swivel chair, eyes wide and tearing from need of breath.
“All right…”
He made himself stop backing up, forced his numb feet still.
“All right,” he told the room in no uncertain tones, not liking at all the sound of his own voice, which was not self-reassuring in its croaky tightness, “all right, all right,” and he raised both palms and patted the air before him like a man reasoning with invisible forces, “all right, this is bullshit…this is just plain bullshit, now...”
The invisible force didn’t answer. Or already had, maybe—by pulling out the damn chair that way again?
“Nobody pulled it out,” Richard ordered the little office. “No one touched the frugging chair except maybe me…or maybe Allie! This is just bullshit!”
The ensuing silence inside the little office seemed to confirm this.
Richard nodded, put his hands on his hips and made a little snorting sound of affirmation at the chair, the stupid gray steel swivel chair of his old man’s and its stupid old casters that kept moving about on this stupid old, obviously uneven basement floor whose cement foundation was clearly settling after all these years. He lifted the trembling, tinkling Old-Fashioned glass to his lips and knocked back what remained of the rum and turned to the office door—
--and saw the figure standing there.
It screamed at him.
Or maybe it was he who screamed—screamed back at the figure in his sudden terror.
Screamed back and jumped back so his legs tangled with that goddamn frugging swivel chair and caused him to swivel with it--off balance and flailing, dropping the Old-Fashioned glass in an attempt to seize the edge of the desk for support--but missing, just by inches, and crashing down heavily on his hip with a little yip of pain, hearing the stupid swivel chair rattling away again as he lay curled in agony on the cold floor, heart up around his neck. Finally the pain receding so he could reach up again, regain his support and lever himself upright.
To stare with wide-eyed fear at the office door again…
…and find it, of course, empty.
No figure there now, nothing there at all now. All in his mind. In his overtaxed, slightly inebriated imagination.
Idiot.
Richard felt the stone floor grow icy under his numbed feet. The cold began to spread up his ankles to his calves. He lunged for the door. But skidded to a halt halfway there in the broken glass, not feeling the painful bite of it at all, skidded to a halt before the office door, hearing himself saying, “Okay, okay, wait a second now, wait just a damn second…” in tight, shivery breaths, because what if the figure or monster or whatever it was crouched waiting for him out there? Waiting in the shadows just on the other side?
“This is just…” somebody began, and it turned out to be himself, “this is just nuts, I’m…all right, just tired, that’s it, tired and maybe a little drunk…and fuck this, fuck this shit, I’m going up to bed, going up to bed right now goddamnit!”
He hit the door hard, pushed out of the little office, blood rushing like an ocean tide in his ears, plunged back into cellar shadows and found he couldn’t see, couldn’t get organized for a second, couldn’t seem to remember the way back to—
“Okay, okay…where’s the goddamn stairs…?”
…it wants you trapped down here…
He couldn’t seem to navigate his way around all the high, laughing mountains of stacked antiques and looming shadows, like the legs beneath his pajamas were rubber legs, were someone else’s legs…and then he saw the corner of the wooden cellar stairs clear over there in the wrong place—
…it was trying to lead you astray….
--saw the dim shape of the stairs finally, the dim hope of survival, and lurched toward them thinking: It’s possible that I only thought I’d pushed the chair back against the desk…that in the act of doing so, I felt foolish and merely left it standing out where it was...the same way I feel foolish now running across this freezing goddamn cellar floor!…
He reached the bottom rung of wooden steps and felt an urge to look back—the dark figure was behind him, right behind him, he just knew it, reaching for him—but the urge was cancelled immediately by the much more insistent urge not to look back but just keep on moving, steadily moving ahead up the wooden stairs, the friendly old warm old wooden stairs….
As a child he had many times—when asked by his mother to fetch this thing or other from the dark bowels of the cobwebbed cellar—found and grabbed the requested object as quickly as possible, walked even more quickly to the base of the stairs, not looking back over his shoulder, and hurried quickly up them. Hurried but never run. Convinced, somehow, that if he started running, it would start running too and, because it was faster, it would catch him. So he merely hurried instead—hurried very quickly ahead of the imaginary sounds of pursuit behind him until he was safely out the Dungeon of Fear and back into the warm light of upstairs sanity.
Tonight, though, Richard was an adult, not a child.
Not a child.
And the adult Richard ran…
NINE
Saturday morning.
A new day and a Saturday. Which meant no work.
No work for Allie, that is, at the Wagner Real Estate office off Topeka Blvd. She had gotten her license in California before she knew him; it seemed logical that she would revert to selling houses when they moved back here. At least, it seemed logical to Richard.
And for Richard Roland Denning, Saturday was just another day of the week.
In the old days, those oh so long ago fondly remembered industrious days of both morning and afternoon and sometimes, depending on the deadline, the early evening, it was different. Seated before his PC at the little house in San Diego or the big house in Sherman Oaks, typing, typing, typing like there was no tomorrow. Before finally knocking off—or being literally dragged away by his wife—to walk on the beach barefoot and toss little white ruffled-edge sea shells at the breakers and watch the Point Loma lighthouse wink coyly at them against the gull-chattering horizon before the sun drowned itself once more in the sea. The old, nearly forgotten days of yore, when voluminous typing bought voluminous amounts of rent and grocery money. And his biggest medical worry was a slight case of Carpel-Tunnel Syndrome in his left elbow. In those dear departed days Richard often worked Saturdays. Sundays too. “Just another day,” Hollywood writer pals would tell each other with complete justification and not a little pride. Just another day at a time when nearly every day but Christmas and his birthday was a writing day.
No more.
This Saturday he’d sat all morning in his white terry cloth robe—not yet taking his morning show
er--reading and rereading the one story he’d written since moving from the golden days of California to the gray days of Topeka. Funny how he would always associate them with shades of color when in reality, Topeka was no more or less gray than any other city. Except perpetually sunny LA, of course…
Reading and rereading. The one story he’d written just the other day, which came to almost five whole pages. Exactly the number of years since he’d written anything of any real value at all.
Including this story. This dumb little anecdotal short story about a dog. A story that had neither beginning, middle or—he’d just discovered—any real kind of ending. Meaning that to think of it as any kind of story at all, any kind of accomplishment, he supposed he’d have to sit here all day--a perfectly lovely, sunny August morning—wasting yet more precious weather indoors—and try to finish the damn thing. Here. In his parents’ house. The dark, more and more cramped-feeling, somewhat vaguely haunted house of his childhood.
And to what purpose? Why none, of course. The short story market was even deader than the novel market, which was nearly as dead as the TV market since “reality television” came to stay for a season and hung around for years. And why was he thinking about that anyway when he was too old and over the hill to take meetings and get TV work anyhow? Him with his loosening jowls and deepening crows’ feet and spreading—
--he’d been about to think spreading bald spot but he’d have to scratch that one from the list. Maybe start another list, maybe a local headline: Miracle! Topeka Man Grows Hair while Battling Cancer!