by Isaac Thorne
There was also the disembodied eye he’d seen as the light from his Maglite died out. Do concussions cause weird visions like that? Maybe. Since he’d awakened, he hadn’t heard any movements other than his own in the darkness. He hadn’t felt any hands reach out from the blackness and latch themselves onto his arms or legs. He was pretty sure that meant he was alone down here. Except for the voice of his dead father in his head, of course.
Ok, he thought. No more talking out loud if that’s just going to bring on my dad’s insults. Have to find a way out of here. It isn’t helping that I can’t see anything.
Time to locate the Maglite. Maybe it wasn’t busted beyond use. Maybe it just needed a good shake to reestablish a connection between the bulb and the batteries. He should have upgraded to an LED model when he was elected constable. He knew that. His old incandescent bulb Maglite had been with him since he’d learned to drive. Usually, he stowed it with the first aid kit behind the driver’s seat in case of roadside emergencies. Lately, it had hung from his hip in a loop on his constable’s utility belt. But he hadn’t upgraded it yet. Therefore it was what it was. In this case, it was one more drop of woulda, coulda, shoulda in a stream of the stuff. He told himself that there was no use crying about it right now, although he was sure the voice of his father would berate him about it later.
Ignoring the pain in his shoulders and his knees, Graham began to feel his way around the dirt floor. His first task was to try to find a corner. He remembered the cellar as a nearly perfect square. If he could locate a right angle, he could provide himself with a solid starting point and a straight line guide to the opposite corner. From there he could continue to feel around the perimeter, testing the floor immediately beside the walls for the metal cylinder indicating he had located his light source. He would need to keep track of the corners in his head, start at one and increment the number each time he encountered another one. When he reached number four, he’d know he was back where he started.
If he didn’t find the Maglite in his crawl around the perimeter, the task would get tougher. He’d heard that people who walk blind typically end up walking in circles. The flashlight had rolled and come to rest against one of the cinder block walls surrounding him. If it didn’t turn up there, he could try to expand his search inward from the walls of the cellar, but he risked losing his place in the dark as he searched. That could end in him repeatedly covering the same ground over and over. The more he searched in circles without finding the Maglite, the more panicked he was likely to become, and the easier it would be to allow his father’s voice in his head to attack again. Alternatively, he could stop crawling around, wait for the next morning’s light, and hope Patsy would realize she hadn’t heard from him lately. That might cause her to call the sheriff’s department and send them looking for him. Except it had been Friday when he’d plummeted from the top of the cellar stairs. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious, or even whether it was still Friday outside the cellar. Assuming it was still Friday, Patsy would not return to her office until eight o’clock on Monday morning. The fact that he wasn’t sure about the extent of his own injuries after the fall was also a good reason to nix that option. It was up to him to conduct the search and maintain hold of his sanity in the process. It was all up to him.
He crawled.
An agonizing amount of time later, Graham felt the tips of his fingers brush against the first of the cinder block cellar walls. A wave of relief washed over him, temporarily replacing the pain and soreness in his shoulders and his head with the endorphins and subsequent euphoria of a breakthrough. The block felt rough and cold against his fingers. It was not a corner. He still needed to locate one of those right angles to get his bearings. But it was a wall nonetheless. If he followed it far enough, he would eventually find his perimeter starting point.
With his right hand pressed against the newly discovered wall and his left planted firmly on the earth, Graham crawled onward, parallel to the wall, using it to guide him. Now and then he plucked his hand from the wall and cautiously groped the air in front of him, seeking the perpendicular wall that would indicate he’d found the corner. The last thing he wanted to do was accidentally head-butt solid block while conducting his search, especially if he might already have suffered a concuthion. The memory of his inability to pronounce the word gave him pause. He waited, wincing and bracing himself for the head-exploding volume of a smart-ass retort from his dead father, but none came. Instead, his mind called forth the image of Judd Nelson’s thug character Bender crawling through the school ductwork in that scene from The Breakfast Club, the one where he’s telling himself a joke about the naked blonde who walks into a bar. It was a joke that had no punchline because Bender falls through the ductwork before he completes the gag. It was a distraction technique, that joke. It was something to fill the space in Bender’s mind while his body propelled him forward through a scary and unfamiliar environment.
Graham started forward again, struggling to remember a joke he could tell himself. Any joke would do. Even one of those stupid knock-knock jokes he heard over and over when he was a kid.
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn’t say “banana” again?
It wasn’t funny. Not anymore, anyway. But it did get Graham three more steps along his wall crawl. Hopeful, he stretched his right hand out in front of him and grabbed at the void as he’d done several times already. His fingertips brushed against a cinder block. Finally. He’d located the first corner. He crawled to it and crouched there for a time, cradling his knees under his chin as dungeon prisoners have done since times out of mind. Now that he’d located it, he felt a sense of safety within it, just as the cellar’s farthest corners had once offered him protection from his father’s violent drunken rages. He wondered how many times as a child he had crouched in this very corner, trembling at the thud of his father’s Wolverines on the floor above him. The memory created an equivalent thudding in his head and ears, the sound of his blood pressure escalating as the emotional recall washed over him. He hoped that was all it was, anyway: just the thud of his own racing heart in his head, not the stomp of work boots over it. He was aware of his hands trembling against his own legs.
You’re panicking. Control it. Or else you really won’t be able to get out of this corner.
He sighed, positioned his left palm on the ground and the other against the cinder block wall, and reminded himself of another joke from his childhood. What’s black and white and read all over? I don’t know, what? An embarrassed zebra? No! A newspaper! It was time to move. Gingerly, he felt along the wall with one hand and along the ground with the other as he made his way toward the second of the cellar’s four corners.
After a few more advances, the fingers of his left hand brushed against something on the cellar floor that felt a lot like a piece of wood. One of the newly splintered cellar steps, maybe? He felt along its length until he bumped the side of his hand against an upright object attached to the wood. This object was narrow, cylindrical, but far too small to be his Maglite. He guessed it was a nail. Carefully, he pinched the cylinder between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and ran those fingers up the shaft of whatever this was. Sure enough, there was a sharp point on the end of it. A broken tread had wrenched free of the staircase when he fell and had landed top-down, resulting in an upward-pointing nail that he could not see. Graham was suddenly glad he had so far had the patience to take his search slowly. The last thing he needed now was tetanus.
By the time he reached the second corner of the cellar, however, that patience had begun to show signs of wear. Graham had to repeatedly force himself to slow down, to thoroughly search the darkness
in front of him for not only his Maglite but any other spikes that might be protruding from the cellar floor. Aside from the single tread, he found no others before he rounded the second corner and was on his way to the third. At one point, Graham’s left palm landed on a small and smooth rectangular object that he eventually determined was a nine-volt battery. It had probably been dislodged from the antique police radio when it hit the ground. His Maglite required three D cells. The sheriff’s department had bequeathed him the radio. Most likely, the real law enforcement officials in Hollow County had modern rechargeable radio equipment. His looked like it might have been from the Seventies.
He could feel no evidence that the remains of the device lay anywhere around where the battery had landed. He plucked the nine-volt from the ground and placed it in his shirt pocket anyway, just in case he found the radio mostly intact while he continued his search for the Maglite. If he found the receiver, and it was serviceable, and he was able to replace the battery, he might be able to call for help regardless of whether he was able to locate the flashlight.
That glimmer of hope rekindled his urgency, which he again forced himself to swallow before crawling forward along the cellar wall. After two more advances, the fingers of his left hand found another cylindrical metal object laying on the cellar floor and nestled in precisely the spot where the wall and floor met. This object was much too big to be a nail.
Graham sat on his haunches and gripped the cylinder in his right hand, hefting it from the cellar floor. It sure as hell felt like his Maglite. His left hand groped along the shaft of the object until it widened some and then ended with a flat surface. Yes. It was the Maglite. Fresh hope welled up from the middle of his chest and spread throughout his body, raising gooseflesh on the back of his neck. The flashlight had a simple pushbutton on the smooth part of its shaft, near the neck. Graham searched for it, found it, and pressed it. Nothing. He gripped the light in his left hand and twisted the battery compartment access clockwise to ensure that it was firmly closed. Then he rotated the beam focus mechanism on the head counter-clockwise to maximize the beam’s width. He pressed the button again, and suddenly the lamp flooded the area in front of him with warm yellow light.
“Oh, thank God!”
From inside his head came the sound of ear-splitting laughter followed by the booming voice of his father: GOD AIN’T HELPING YOU OUT OF THIS ONE, BOY! He clapped his hands to the sides of his head, smacking himself painfully with the shaft of the Maglite in the process. He managed to hold onto it, however, and its light did not wane. Graham kept his position, eyes squeezed shut, and hands clamped at his temples until the railroad spike in his head withdrew again. When it did, he sat with his back to the cinder block wall where the Maglite had been resting and shone it around the room.
His radio, with its battery compartment exposed and its rectangular case entirely split open, lay a couple of feet farther to his right. It looked bad but appeared to have not been deprived of any of its electronic components upon impact. Graham snatched it from the floor. He fumbled the nine-volt from his shirt pocket and reconnected it. It was the kind with the lightning-shaped black cat leaping through the loop in the numeral nine for a logo, an Eveready.
Here’s hoping you are.
There was a barely perceptible hiss from the radio’s speaker as power serpentined its way through the device, but nothing else. Graham verified that the receiver was still tuned to one of the Hollow County emergency frequencies, then keyed the mic.
“Hello?” he managed. His tongue and lips still felt thick and uncooperative. “Consthable Gordon here. I need help.”
It occurred to him then that no one from the sheriff’s department had bothered to train him on the proper use of a police radio, or ten-codes. It was one more indicator that his elected capacity really held no power or esteem at all among the population of Lost Hollow, much less the rest of Hollow County. If this was his fresh start, it so far felt like a start from the bottom rung of the ladder. He released the mic button and waited, but no reply came.
“Hello?” he said again after pressing the button. Then his dead father’s voice was thundering in his ears once more. Graham started, dropping the radio so that he could grab hold of his head before the pressure within sent it soaring like a bottle rocket off his neck.
THE DAMNED THING IS BROKEN, FUCKWIT! CAN’T YOU SEE THAT? THEY’RE NOT COMING. A little quieter but still with that scythe-like malicious edge, the voice added, YOU’RE STUCK WITH ME. GOTTA HAVE YOUR OLD DADDY BAIL YOU OUT AGAIN. YOU’RE NOT A MAN. YOU NEVER WERE. HELLO? HELLO? PUSSY FUCKWIT.
Graham curled himself into a fetal position on the cellar floor, the still-glowing Maglite cradled against his chest. He lay there for some time, waiting for the railroad spike his dead father had buried in his brain to dematerialize. It didn’t want to go. Before, the pain had lasted only a minute or two after the voice went silent. This time it lingered longer, an ice cream brain freeze that was more iceberg than spoonful, the throbbing in his head more thundering bass than heartbeat. As he writhed against the pain, an old familiar feeling arose in the back of his throat. He was going to be sick.
He heaved twice in the fetal position but brought nothing up. He rolled onto his knees, crouched on the cellar floor as he had been in the dark and heaved a third time. This one emptied his stomach of whatever had remained there from the day’s (Friday’s?) lunch. The foul liquid made a wet smack sound as it hit the hardened earth of the cellar. Some of it splashed from there onto the knees of his trousers and onto the cellar wall beside him. His throat felt raw and cut from the force of the expulsion, but at least it had eased the pain and throbbing in his head some.
When he was able to think again, Graham lifted the broken radio from the cellar floor and clipped it as best he could to his belt. It was useless now, but perhaps the sheriff’s department would allow him to return it to them for an upgrade when he finally found his way out of here.
IF I find my way out of here, the unwanted thought arose. He attempted to replace it with another joke. What are the three fastest forms of communication? Telephone, telegraph, and tell-a-girl. Ouch. There’s a funny that definitely wouldn’t fly anymore. Not because the telegraph was long dead, but because of the apparent misogyny. For Graham, it served its purpose, however. His mind was off on a new tangent, and he could continue to investigate his predicament with some detachment.
He allowed the Maglite’s beam to illuminate the corner of the cellar opposite his position. There was the half-splintered staircase, the last tread of its upper half hanging in space, connected to nothing at that end. The lower treads had all broken off. Most of them lay scattered directly below the cellar door. The single exception seemed to have been the one that could have impaled his hand while he was crawling through the dark. Both of the staircase’s stringers were still attached to the cellar door frame. Graham thought he could shimmy up one of them and launch himself through the door at the top after he reached the unbroken treads. It might be worth a shot, as long as he didn’t manage to bring the remaining section of the staircase down on his own head in the process.
He shone the flashlight around the remainder of the cellar, the parts he had explored on his hands and knees and the parts he hadn’t. There was no sign of another person down here. No makeshift bed. No remnants of meals. No tools or playing cards. There was no evidence of his dead father or his eyeball, as he thought he’d seen just before the flashlight died and he’d lost consciousness.
Graham directed the Maglite’s beam back to the stringers that ran from the cellar floor to the door frame. The cellar staircase had been a narrow one, less than the width of a man shoulder-to-shoulder, he figured. That meant he could probably straddle the open space between the stringers, using each one as both a hand-hold and a foot-hold for scaling until he reached the remaining treads that were secured between them. There were multiple obstacles to that end. Chief among them was maintaining his light source during the climb. He’d have to tuck the M
aglite in his belt somehow so that it continued to shine a light on his path without the need for him to hold it in a hand as he tried to climb the stringers. Then there were his sore muscles, the not inconsiderable weight of him, and his general lack of dexterity to consider. Combine those problems with any yet untold damage he’d caused to the staircase on his way to the floor, and you have a potential recipe for a sequel to the disaster that landed him there.
Still, he had to try.
With the Maglite snug in his belt at his hip and pointed in a generally diagonal upward direction, Graham situated each of his hands firmly on the ridge of one stringer. He placed the toe of his right boot on the right-hand stringer, near the bottom but close enough to his right hand to allow him to shift his weight to his right. The leverage allowed him to raise his left boot from the cellar floor and plant it on the left stringer, slightly higher than the right. From there, he shifted his weight to his left, sliding his right hand farther up the right-side stringer while clenching his left hand on the ridge of the other. When he found new purchase with his right hand, he raised his right boot and planted it higher than the left.
It’s working. Hot damn! It’s working!
He was careful to not say it aloud. His dead father’s outburst, if Graham were careless enough to vocalize his thoughts again, would startle him. It might cause him to fall. Or it might be more painful next time than it was when he yakked up his lunch, perhaps even painful enough to kill him this time. Why did the boy bring a ladder on the bus? he asked himself as he slid his left hand upward on its stringer and then followed it with his left boot. Because he was going to high school! Again he shifted his weight and slid his right hand upward, followed by his right boot. Hey, what do you call a funny mountain? Hill-arious!