I reached for a wad of packing paper and scooped the dead birds up with it, setting them back in the box among the others. Each one was as weightless as a Christmas ball. The shoe box was like a mass grave. There were about nine birds squeezed in there. What kind of child—
Of course, I was accosted by a vision from my own youth, hiding out behind the shed with a frog trapped in my hands and the nest of baby birds I’d swatted out of the shrub behind the garage. How I squeezed each one until sticky yellow fluid bubbled out of their rectums and their tiny beaks opened wide. I felt sick to my stomach.
“Fuck this.” I replaced the lid on the shoe box, closed the cubbyhole door, and took the shoe box to the kitchen where I slid it into a garbage bag. Then I took the bag out to the yard and dumped it in one of the trash cans.
The basement was a schizophrenic jumble of chairs, boxes, and randomly discarded objects that no longer fulfilled their purpose. It appeared that the previous owners, the Dentmans, had hastily erected Sheetrock walls to section the basement off into various rooms, transforming what had once been a wide, yawning expanse of low-ceilinged open space into a honeycomb of secret pockets, mazelike walls, and right angles.
I located a flashlight in my toolbox and took it around with me, casting the beam into each little room—one of which was no bigger than a tiny closet—as I went around. My original notion was that the Dentmans, or whoever had put up these walls, had intended to finish the basement. But on closer inspection it became obvious that the layout was atypical. There were six of the makeshift rooms in all, the Sheetrock old and gouged in places, nailed directly against the studding of the house. None of the rooms had their own electrical outlets, which suggested very poor planning, and two of them had a panel of Sheetrock as the ceiling instead of the open beams and tufts of pink insulation like the rest of the basement. In one of these rooms I bent down and focused the flashlight on a wall where chunks of the drywall had fallen away. The cement floor was coated in a powdery white film. I felt the gouges in the wall.
“Bizarre,” I mumbled, moving back into the open area to address the boxes stacked in the center of the room. Yet I paused just outside the doorway to the tiny makeshift room, my flashlight beam reflecting off a series of small puddles on the concrete floor. I hadn’t noticed them before, but they were quite evident now. I flicked the flashlight’s beam toward the ceiling where a network of copper pipes ran in every direction. It occurred to me that if there was a leaky pipe somewhere, I didn’t even know where to find the goddamn water shutoff.
But the pipes looked dry. To make sure, I ran one hand along them, my palm coming away caked in bluish-gray dust but dry as bone. I dipped my fingers into one of the puddles. Ice-cold water. Casting the beam farther along the concrete floor, the puddles seemed to suggest a vague alternating pattern.
Footprints. Wet footprints.
The puddles negotiated the length of the basement, then ended directly in front of one of the slabs of Sheetrock nailed to the wall. Vanished into nothingness.
I was tweaked temporarily as the world around slipped a notch. Too easily I could recall my childhood fear of Kyle slinking back from the grave to claim my soul, dripping foul black water in the hallway of the little duplex we had all happily lived in together. In my head, the sounds of his feet on the hardwood floor were the empty soulless beats of a vampire’s heart.
I shocked myself by uttering, “Kyle?” The instant the word left my mouth, I felt my blood run cold and my body begin to quake. Surely I was scaring myself for no good reason. Surely I was creating something out of nothing.
Just water . . . just puddles of water . . .
I grabbed a towel from the laundry room and mopped up the wet footprints, all the while trying to convince myself they weren’t footprints at all. One was even crescent shaped and bore the suggestion of five splayed toes . . . yet I still managed to talk myself out of it.
I spent the better part of the afternoon unpacking countless boxes and transporting the items to various locales throughout the house, as well as dumping a good number of things by the curb for bulk pickup, until sometime later I heard the front door slam upstairs. Jodie entered the house and tramped across the floorboards above my head. Aiming the flashlight at my wristwatch, I saw it was ten after two. I was suddenly hungry for lunch and wondered if Jodie might be interested in accompanying me into town to check out the local scenery and grab a bite. Anyway, I was exhausted and didn’t want to spend any more time in this lousy dungeon mausoleum.
I clumped up the narrow staircase and crossed the kitchen where a pot of coffee was overpercolating on the stove, coughing steam into the air and spitting gouts of black sludge onto the stove top.
“Goddamn it.”
Grabbing a dish towel from the kitchen counter and wrapping it around my hand, I yanked the coffeepot from the stove and shut off the burner. The pot still burped and bucked in my grasp. I set the pot in the sink and wiped the stove top with the dish towel.
Upstairs, Jodie thumped her foot down twice to get my attention.
“I know. I know. The coffee’s burning. I got it.” I cleaned up the remaining residue with the dish towel, then wrung it out over the sink.
Two minutes later, searching the second-floor landing, I could not find Jodie. I checked the bedrooms, the bathroom. They were empty. Yet I knew I had heard her. Back downstairs I went to the front door and found it locked. I called her name but she didn’t answer. Momentarily, I stood at the foot of the stairs, staring up into the well of risers climbing to the second floor, until I realized I was alone.
Later, in the lazily falling snow, I wandered outside and trekked down the snowy slope of the backyard to retrace my steps from last night’s bizarre little escapade. Despite the evidence of the wet pajama bottoms and a pair of frozen Nikes left by the front door, I could almost convince myself all that had happened by the lake had been a dream. Yet the footprints in the snow leading around the side of the house, down the sloping embankment, and through the trees toward the water was proof beyond refute. Hugging myself in my parka, I hiked to the foot of the lake where the frozen surface was accumulating a dusting of fresh snow.
I paused here and fished a pack of Marlboros from my jacket pocket while looking out at the floating staircase protruding through the ice. Though still enormous, the daylight betrayed its mystery, exposing it for the joined bits of rotting wood, nails, and splintered planks that it was. More careful of my footing than I had been last night, I got as close to it as I could—close enough to examine the graying skin of the staircase, the weathered and warped planks, the bone-like suggestion of the thing. I didn’t realize it right away, but the preliminary stirrings of a story were yawning and stretching in the far recesses of my brain as I stood there, my hands stuffed into my pockets, a Marlboro smoldering between my lips.
I turned north along the lake and followed its perimeter until the slope of the land became too treacherous. I stared down at the lake from a plateau perhaps fifteen yards above the frozen water, the ground below covered with twiggy undergrowth and sharp, biting rocks that rose out of the snow. The trees were all barren, their branches providing sturdy handholds that I held on to before I lost my footing and spilled over the edge. Those sharp rocks below would tear me to pieces like crocodiles awaiting a careless gazelle.
From this vantage I could make out the entire circumference of the lake. It was larger than I’d originally thought, the view from my house impeded peripherally by tall pines bookending the perimeter of my property. From here, the view opened up and was even more spectacular; I could only imagine what it looked like in the summer, with all the trees in full bloom, the sun burning a brownish-red smear on the horizon, the sky crowded with scudding cumuli and heavy with birds. The odd wooden staircase looked like the tower of a submarine breaking up through the ice.