The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  The fireplace was nearly as tall as she was, and before she realized what she was doing, she reached out and touched it. Behind the bricks, between the chimney and the stairs, was a secret place with no windows and a hidden door. A safe room from the Underground Railroad days. The entrance was on the other side. You got to it from the landing of the stairs in the front of the house.

  The first day Trina had come to Harden House, Lee showed her a panel in the wall halfway up the stairway and told her to push it. Lee didn’t tell her why, and Trina didn’t want to do it, but Lee promised she’d be glad if she did. Trina needed the SafeHaven furlough gig to work out, so she swallowed her suspicions and gave the panel a shove. It fell away, and she stared into a deep, narrow slice of space no one would ever have guessed existed. It looked empty down there, but Trina knew it wasn’t. It was tight, dark and smelled bad, and there was something struggling inside those walls. Whatever, or whoever it was, tugged at her soul.

  When Lee described how the house had once been a station on the Underground Railroad, how whole families had crowded into that hot room with no air, Trina understood who was tugging at her: it was all those folks who had come before. Her ancestors. Trina had never cared much about politics or all that black pride shit the sisters and brothers were always spouting, but she liked thinking about the ones who had had the guts to fight back. That was when she felt proud to be black. Right then and there, she had jumped into the safe room. Just like that. She was hoping to get closer to the ones who made her feel proud, but once she was in there, it wasn’t pride or closeness she felt, it was the pain of remembering.

  The safe room was way too much like that closet he had put her in: smelly and cramped, with a ceiling you couldn’t see but could guess was full of spiders and other scary creatures. It was after he finally let her out of the closet that she stopped going to school and nobody noticed. She never understood that. How could nobody notice? Didn’t the school call or something?

  Standing in the safe room, Trina had felt all those men and women, little children too. Scared and brave. Beat down and hopeful. They were there. Here. Feeling them, thinking about what they’d been through, made her even more certain about getting her own life turned around, even more determined to make it up to Hendrika. Hendrika hadn’t done any more to deserve being dead than any of the lost souls hanging around in that tight little room.

  Beth poked Trina in the side, bringing her back to the present. “Pretty subtle of Gram, huh?” Beth said. “She wants to show us something upstairs. Ha!”

  Trina dropped her hand from the fireplace. The cousin was one of those white folks who figured if they were touchy and friendly, it’d prove they weren’t prejudiced. She didn’t answer.

  But Clara did. “One of the advantages of being old is that you don’t have to be subtle—you’re forthright and direct and everyone’s so impressed when you ‘speak your mind.’” She rolled her eyes at Trina. “Can you imagine what Beth’s going to be like when she hits sixty-five?”

  Trina tried to smile because she liked Clara, but she just couldn’t believe Clara wasn’t seeing what was right in front of her face. Like the cousin ever said what she was really thinking. That girl would say and do anything that would get her her own way. “Kind of scary,” Trina said, meaning it, but not in the way Clara thought. Trina didn’t have any interest in the likes of the cousin. The cousin’s world would never be any wider than what she saw.

  “Now, what can I show you upstairs that you could possibly have any interest in?” Clara winked at Trina. “Let’s go up to my bedroom—I’m sure you’re just dying to see the new dress I bought for Karen’s wedding.”

  “I’m interested,” Beth said. “Where’d you get it?”

  Clara didn’t answer. She just went into the hall. “It wasn’t your interest I was concerned with,” she told the cousin.

  Trina followed Clara up the stairs, trying not to laugh. Clara wasn’t like most white folks—who either ignored you or sucked up to you because you were black—Clara just treated everyone the same. Like, for example, the cousin had never offered Trina a book, probably because she didn’t think Trina could read, and though Lee offered her books all the time, the books were always about some down-and-out black person or some other shit-on group, like American Indians or women in Afghanistan. But Clara gave Trina books just because she’d read them and liked them, and figured if she liked them, Trina might too. Last week, Clara had asked Trina to suggest a book for her to read. It didn’t take nearly as much energy to be around Clara as it took to be around most white folks.

  The stairway was real narrow, turned on itself twice, and ended in a small landing. Trina had never been up this way before; she’d only come up the back stairs one time when Clara asked her to fetch some papers from the bedroom. At each side of the landing was a bedroom, and Trina knew there were these two smaller bedrooms too, but the only way to get to them was by going up the back stairs or by walking through one of the front bedrooms. The house was smaller than it looked from the outside, and the way the rooms were set up wasn’t too practical. Trina winced at what she was thinking. Like she knew anything about houses and what made them practical.

  Trina followed Beth into Clara’s room because she didn’t know what else to do. It was nice in there. Lots of windows and a painted floor with these small rugs that looked as if some little kid had made them. Clara picked up a stack of books from a chair and told Trina to sit down in it. The cousin frowned and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “As long as we’re here, I might as well show you the dress,” Clara said. She pulled a black dress from the closet. It didn’t look like much.

  Beth stood up to feel the fabric, and Trina tried to look interested, but she wasn’t. The furniture was all real old, and some of it looked like it was ready to fall apart, but she could see it was quality. Antiques. The kind they auctioned off for thousands of dollars to people who already had too much furniture. Trina thought about morning group at SafeHaven. No one in that room ever had too much furniture.

  Trina noticed a small dressing table in the corner she hadn’t seen the first time she was in the bedroom. On the top, in the middle of a mess of brushes and powders and perfume bottles, was a jewelry box. The bottom drawer was pulled open, and a bracelet was laying half in and half out of it. It was a beautiful thing, sparkling in the sun. Must be real diamonds. And emeralds. It was so little, couldn’t weigh more than a bit, but it had to be worth a fortune. A year’s rent. Maybe more.

  Trina looked at the bracelet and thought about morning group again, about how none of those sisters would ever have enough furniture or a year’s rent. She wondered what the chances were, even if she managed to stay clean and keep herself out of prison, that she would have enough furniture or a year’s rent.

  When Trina looked up, the cousin was staring at her.

  The entrance to the cellar was under the back stairs; it had been dug at the time of the kitchen addition, an afterthought judging from the steepness of the wobbly risers and the narrowness of the top of the stairway—only children could descend facing forward; for adults, sideways was the only way down. The original house had been just five rooms: dining room/kitchen and two parlors on the first floor, two bedrooms up. A full kitchen and two rear bedrooms were added sometime around the turn of the nineteenth century. No one seemed to know how access to the cellar was gained before the addition. I didn’t care much. I hadn’t been down there once in the year I’d been living with Gram.

  Michael pressed the latch of the cellar door, but the door stuck. He kicked the bottom panel; the door lurched forward and a musty odor blew into my face. The cellar smelled just as it always had: of dampness and mold and all sorts of things dead and decaying. The rat’s skeleton was probably somewhere under the stairs—or worse, his living descendants. I took an instinctive step backward. Michael cupped my elbow and smiled indulgently, as one would at a child who’s afraid to go down the playground slide.

  I pointedl
y withdrew my arm from his grasp. “I know there’s no such thing as the woman with the iron teeth.”

  His smile widened. “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  I started down the stairs, lifting my chin and turning my shoulders with a false bravado that was probably just as telling as my hesitation. But I didn’t swagger for long: after the cramp of the top two steps, the wall dropped away, and there was no railing and little light. I slowed and pressed my hand to the damp fieldstones to keep my balance. I didn’t know what was worse, touching the slime-covered stones or falling headlong into the gloom.

  Michael snapped on his large flashlight and focused the beam on the rickety stairs. The light helped, but it also emphasized the creepiness. I took a deep breath and slowly made my way down to the hard-packed dirt floor. When I got there, I turned, crossed my arms, and looked up. “Coming?” I asked.

  The cellar was actually two cellars: the one under the original house (the “old cellar” was what we had called it as kids) and the one under the kitchen (the “new cellar”). Both had low ceilings and dirt floors—and bugs and spiders and rats and, for all I knew, snakes. The cellars were connected by a tall and narrow hole cut through the old field-stone foundation.

  I forced a smile as Michael came down the stairs. “The safe room’s above the back of the old cellar, isn’t it?” Of course I knew it was, but I was hoping that somehow the house’s architecture had been rearranged since the last time I had looked. I really hated the old cellar.

  “Yup.” He nodded toward the opening. “Shall I lead the way?” he asked gallantly. “Or is it ladies first?” If he’d been wearing a hat, I’m sure he would have removed it and placed it over his heart.

  I thought of Gram, Beth and Trina, two floors above in the sunlight, probably giggling about me at this very moment. It was thrilling to be able to provide everyone with such amusement. Michael waited patiently, and the annoying twinkle in his eye reminded me of Richie.

  To get into the old cellar, you have to bow your head, twist your shoulders and step up, all at the same time. I flawlessly executed this maneuver, and, although it was darker and mustier and nastier—and was the actual home of the woman with the iron teeth—once I crossed the threshold, I felt better for my blustering. The old cellar was maybe thirty by thirty, a perfect square, just as the original house had been. It, too, was divided into two parts, split down the middle by the foundation of the fireplace above. We were under the dining room. My head barely cleared the ceiling. Michael was hunched over.

  He let his flashlight play over the room, illuminating the serpentine cracks that broke through the mortar and the spider webs holding fast to every corner. A sawhorse. Some bulky construction equipment. A jumble of old cartons lying amidst puddles of standing water. Neatly stacked piles of lumber. More tools. Michael’s light lingered over a particularly fierce-looking tool, a gun-like device, which rested on a belt ribbed with very long, very pointy nails. “Maybe you can use the nail gun to protect you from the woman with the iron teeth,” he said with a reckless wave of his light. “Or there’s always the portable drill.”

  I brushed imaginary dirt from the front of my jeans, and moved a step closer to the flashlight.

  Michael grinned. “Want to take a look?” When I didn’t answer, he motioned for me to follow him over the uneven ground. “The problem is that the floor of the safe room’s rotting and unstable. Lots of those heavy old beams were never properly supported, and they didn’t meet the Park Service specs.” He waved at a dozen concrete piers uniformly jutting from the dirt floor. “These footers are for the new support members.”

  I tried to look interested.

  He pointed above his head. “See the light coming through those cracks? That’s from the safe room.”

  Although I knew the cracks were a bad sign—and that they were going to cost my grandmother a lot of money—it was still good to see the sun. I imagined the air smelled fresher. I kept my eyes on the light.

  “I’m going to replace a bunch of the rotted joists in the ceiling,” Michael explained, “and when the metal support members are set on these piers, it should be just fine.”

  I wasn’t much interested in support members and rotting joists. “What’s the deal with the foundation?”

  Michael pointed his flashlight at the rough rectangle chiseled through the foundation on the east side of the house; it was about five feet high, ten feet wide and a couple of feet deep. The mysterious piles of dirt grew all around it, and behind it, on its back wall, an opening had been dug out of the dirt.

  “Did you ever hear anything about slaves being hidden down here?” Michael asked.

  “It’s an old root cellar. Gram calls it the ‘root closet.’ She says she remembers shelves in there when she was a girl.”

  “But what about the tunnel behind it?”

  I wasn’t going to tell him that the collapsed tunnel in back of the root closet was the home of the woman with the iron teeth. I pressed the toe of my sneaker into one of the dirt piles, and wondered what Beth and Gram were doing. They had been playing their game long enough.

  “It’s very unstable—dangerously unstable.” Michael waved his flashlight over the entrance of the tunnel. “But interesting. Someone went to a lot of trouble to get through there.”

  “You think this could have something to do with the Underground Railroad?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. So I checked it out. Did a little digging inside yesterday. Paced it out outside. But I didn’t come up with much. The tunnel starts to collapse about five feet back and the rock gets solid a few feet beyond that.” He swung his light up to the ceiling. “It runs under the front yard, heads toward the road, which doesn’t make any sense if it was used for running slaves. What would have been the point of digging a tunnel in that direction? Where were they trying to get to?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t always the front yard? Maybe the road wasn’t always so close?”

  He looked pleased with my question. “I took a look at some of the old plot plans. One was dated 1841. That road was there then.”

  “Still …”

  “I know it’s not as romantic as you might like it to be, but my guess is that this hasn’t got anything to do with runaway slaves—someone just started to make your root closet larger and never got to finish the job.”

  I didn’t like his tone or his wording—it’s not as romantic as you (read: female) might like—and I inched a bit closer to the opening. The tunnel was three feet above the ground and a couple of feet around. The far wall was a mess of rocks and twigs and fallen dirt. It smelled bad. “Why would anyone want a root cellar that deep?”

  “A ten-by-ten root cellar wasn’t all that uncommon,” Michael said as if he were some kind of root cellar expert. He picked up a shovel and knocked it against the edge of the rectangle. “And this front end could go any time. It’s a real hazard,” he added as if he were some kind of engineering expert.

  I knelt down and looked more closely. A few pebbles fell in front of me. What did Michael know? He wasn’t a historian any more than he was an engineer. History surrounded this house, was a part of its very fiber, its every post and beam. How could he be so sure fugitive slaves hadn’t been hidden here? Hadn’t escaped through here?

  “I’d been hoping to match the fieldstone and patch it right,” Michael said, “but I haven’t been able to find the right stone, and the Park Service won’t pass us unless the foundation’s completely sealed. I know it’s anachronistic, but I think we should go with concrete.”

  I rocked back on my haunches. What kind of contractor used a word like “anachronistic”? “I thought you were so into the ‘correctness’ of historic preservation—wasn’t it you who told Gram you were going to restore the house, not renovate it?”

  “If I believed this was an actual Underground Railroad tunnel, I’d say to hold off, but getting the house into the Park means a lot to your grandmother, and I don’t think we’re losing much here to do that for her.
”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I can’t,” Michael said reasonably, “and that’s why I’m presenting the options. You can double-check my take on the tunnel or I can get the concrete guys out here and keep us on schedule for the inspection. But I’ve got to fill the tunnel first to buttress it before the concrete’s poured, so someone’s got to decide pretty quick which way you want to go.”

  I wondered if Gram and Beth were ever going to get down here, and listened for their footsteps. I didn’t hear anything, so I peered into the dark hole. It pulled me and repelled me. “You want to fill it with dirt?”

  “That would be the cheapest.”

  I poked my head in a bit farther.

  Michael lowered his voice ominously and said, “Don’t go any closer or the woman with the iron teeth will get you!”

  I threw a glance over my shoulder. “Did you know I skydive?”

  “Really?”

  I had actually only gone skydiving once—and it had scared the shit out of me—but I was annoyed by the surprise in Michael’s voice and the disbelief on his face. I turned back to the hole, took a deep breath and crawled into the tunnel on all fours.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Double-checking your take.”

  Another pebble pinged to the dirt in front of me, and I was suddenly reminded of rats and spiders and the possibility of snakes. Jumping from an airplane was terrifying, but at least it was full of air and light and space. The only thing crawling into this tunnel and skydiving had in common was the terrifying part.

  I heard a low rumble and sensed that, the air had become thicker, somehow dirtier. Then the walls began to tremble, to shiver and dissolve around me. Dirt skidded down the side of my face, along my back, over my legs. Rocks. Dirt. More dirt. I tried to push backward, to free myself, but before I was able to move, an even more powerful wave of dirt crashed over me, pinning me flat on my stomach. I was covered by dirt, surrounded by dirt, smothered by dirt.