The lantern would fail at any second, and he would be alone in the dark with the squeaking door and whatever was making the door swing in and out. Robby straightened up and stood tall. He didn’t especially want to know what was behind the door, if anything was, but if he had to, he wanted to find out while there was still enough light to see. He took a step towards the kitchen door and then stopped.
“The wind,” he whispered to himself. That was the answer—the wind must be blowing through the back door enough to swing the kitchen door. That would also explain the throbbing of the lantern. It would react to the breeze in the same way. Robby relaxed for a tiny fraction of a second before he remembered his dad closing the back door tight. There shouldn’t be any wind.
“Robby?” his dad called from the hall.
He was afraid to respond. He was afraid that as soon as the thing on the other side of the door heard his voice, it would come for him.
“ROBBY?” his dad called.
He kept his eyes glued to the kitchen door and started to move sideways towards the hall. From his new angle it looked less like the door was moving. He shuffled a little faster.
The lantern went out.
Robby felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder. Robby gasped and struggled to not piss himself.
“Come on, Robby, your dad wants to talk to you,” Paulie said from the darkness.
“Okay,” Robby said. It came out as a whisper.
Paulie led Robby down the dark hall. His eyes adjusted quickly, and Robby could see the outline of the doorway to the privy and his dad’s feet sticking out into the hall. He expected his dad would yell at him for not answering. Instead, he found his dad sitting on the floor with his legs straddling the hole to the cellar. He pointed the light down into the hole.
“I want you to see something, Robby,” his dad said. “I would just take a picture, but we didn’t bring a camera. I figure your memory is just as good as any camera.”
“Okay,” Robby said.
“But there’s some other stuff down there I don’t want you to look at,” Sam said. “I’ll go down first, and then you’re going to look in this direction,” he waved towards the back of the house.
“Okay,” Robby said. “Hey Dad, there might be something in the kitchen.”
“Paulie, can you go check out the kitchen?” Sam asked. Paulie nodded and headed off.
Sam swung his legs through the hole and dropped down into the cellar. He held his arms up for Robby like when Robby was a little kid. Robby sat down on the edge of the hole and slid towards his dad’s arms. Sam set Robby down on the dirt floor and turned him towards the back wall.
The little cellar was carved out of the rock ledge that ran up their street. They stood on a dirt floor and hunched beneath the low ceiling. Sam pointed the flashlight at the stone foundation. On top of the ledge, to even out the dips and sways of the rock, a stone wall held up the back wall of the house. Below the stacked rocks, on a big flat slab of ledge, dark red shapes had been painted on the stone. Robby studied language. Letters and numbers from different cultures fascinated him, but these were nothing he recognized. They looked like a cross between Chinese characters and hieroglyphics. The symbols weren’t in lines, or divided up into words, they were just spread out across the bottom of the wall in random groupings and sizes.
“What do you make of that?" Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Robby said.
“They go from here, all the way to over here,” Sam said. He swept his flashlight across about twenty feet of rock. In places, the symbols were so densely packed, they almost looked like a picture.
“Is it words?" Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Robby said. “Could be, I guess. But I don’t recognize any of it. Except this one here. This one that looks like a guy with his knees up. There’s an Egyptian symbol that either means a god or a young woman, depending on the context. It looks like that.”
“Huh,” Sam said. “Does it just look like it, or do you think that’s what it is?”
“And these two here,” Robby said. “These look like Japanese kanji. Slightly different than the Chinese versions of the characters that mean supernatural power.”
“Is it a code, or a message?" Sam asked.
“Could be,” Robby said. “But I think it would take a while to figure out if it is.”
“Can you remember it?" Sam asked.
“There’s too much. I can memorize parts of it, but I don’t think I could memorize the whole thing. At least not quickly.”
“Well, get what you can and let’s get out of here,” Sam said.
“Dad? What was it you didn’t want me to see? Is this blood?” Robby asked.
Sam put his hand on Robby’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “Don’t worry, Robby. Nothing important. Just see what you can figure from these pictures. Take a few minutes.”
“Okay,” Robby said. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let his shoulders drop. He cleared his mind. It was easy to do with his dad right behind him—he felt safe. It would have been easier to do with an empty bladder, but he managed to relax. When he opened his eyes again he tried to take in the whole picture; he tried to see the whole foundation as one big image. He couldn’t make out the far edges, they weren’t well lit enough, but the center of the wall burned a picture on the backs of his eyes. He opened his eyes wider and let it all sink in.
Robby forgot about the storm, and the house, and the kitchen door, and Thanksgiving, and just saw the wall. His heartbeat slowed and his eyelids dropped slightly. The next thing he knew, his dad was shaking him gently by the shoulder.
“Robby? You got it?” his father asked.
“I think so,” Robby said.
“Good. Let’s go,” Sam said.
Sam backed up and led Robby over to the ladder. He shone the flashlight at the bottom rung, so Robby could place his foot. When he lifted his head to look up, Robby caught something out of the corner of his eye. It looked like a big pile of rope and a bunch of sticks. He didn’t see any colors. The dim light and his peripheral vision turned the objects black and white, but they looked shiny and wet. He climbed up into the dim bathroom and saw Paulie standing in the doorway. His dad followed right behind him up the ladder.
Sam brushed off his pants and then replaced the floor panel and the throw rug.
“Can I use the bathroom first?” Robby asked.
“Will it be quick?” his dad asked.
“Yes.”
“Make sure it is,” Sam said.
He set the light on the counter and stepped into the hall with Paulie. Sam left the door open and waited for Robby to start urinating before he conferred with Paulie. Robby couldn’t hear a word they said.
“You done? Let’s go,” Sam said to Robby.
“Okay,” Robby said. He didn’t flush or wash his hands—standard operating procedure when the power was out. Sam went first down the hall, followed by Robby and Paulie. “So there was nothing in the kitchen, Mr. Carver?” Robby asked Paulie.
“Nothing but the wind,” Paulie said. “I think it blew the back door open.”
Sam stopped. “You didn’t say that before,” he whispered to Paulie.
“Yeah I did,” Paulie said.
“Was the outside door open, or just the one to the mudroom?" Sam asked.
“Both,” Paulie said. “But the outside one was just open a crack, like you left it. And there were no tracks in the new snow that blew in.”
“Good enough then,” Sam said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sam swept the flashlight around the living room one more time before turning it off. He opened the front door. Outside, the sky had grown darker but the snow wasn’t falling as heavily so they could see a bit better. The wind worked at filling in their tracks from earlier; the trudging was difficult.