over on its side.
I went to the door.
It was double-locked, a Segal lock and a bolt type. I turned the one
and threw the other. Casey led them in and I closed the door behind
them.
"Lights on," she said, and her beam and Kim's joined mine.
Directly in front of us was the stairwell leading to the second floor,
right off the kitchen. The planking looked solid enough. The
banisters seemed to have been replaced recently.
I was beginning to realize that I hardly recognized the place. For
one thing, I didn't remember any stairwell at all. Maybe there had
been too much going on that day. And I'd been pretty young. Maybe the
place had done some shape-shifting in my memory since then.
I realized it must have been the kitchen where they'd found the
bodies.
Inside, though, the house lost a lot of its ominous quality. Except
for Casey, I think we all were glad of that. You couldn't get too
worked up over fruit-and-berry wallpaper.
I walked past the stairwell into the living room. Casey followed me.
Kim and Steven had a look inside the kitchen.
The living room was pretty empty. A single over-stuffed chair and an
old couch with half the stuffing ripped out of them in tiny chunks and
scattered all over the floor. I wondered if that was mice. Mice would
eat nearly anything, or try to. Then there was another end table, this
one still standing, beneath the window to the rear of the house. If
you opened the shutters and looked out the window, off to the right you
could see the dark weathered boards of the woodshed.
There was a fireplace in the room, and an old set of andirons. A
standing lamp and a single straight-back chair made of pine, with one
of the dowel spines missing. That was all.
Steve and Kim appeared in the doorway. They leaned into the room and
looked around.
"Not many places to hide," said Steve. He turned and deposited a brown
bag with two six-packs of beer inside on the kitchen table.
"We'll find places," said Casey. "There's upstairs, and Clan says
there's a basement. There's a woodshed right outside this window, if
anybody's interested."
Kim made a face. "Yuchh."
"Did anybody find the basement?"
"There's a door off the kitchen." Steve looked slightly em bar
"That's probably it," I told them. "I didn't notice." We went into
the kitchen. The door was built into the internal wall off to the left
opposite the back door to the house, so that the steps ran under the
stairwell. I saw why I hadn't noticed it at first.
Standing at the window you were blind to it. The door was tiny- only
about four-and-a-half feet tall. It looked more like a storage
closet.
It was locked.
Casey dug into her book bag. "Try this," she said and handed me a
screwdriver.
"You're very resourceful."
"This is news to you?"
The fit between the door and the molding was uneven, so it was easy to
slip the screwdriver between them and pry, and I guess the groove was
worn away pretty badly, because it gave almost immediately.
"There you go."
"Our hero," said Kim. There was nervous laughter.
The door fell open. Our flashlights played over the old rotten stairs.
There was a rough railing constructed of two-by-four pine reinforced
with irregular lengths of cheap planking, dark and weathered, as though
it had been pulled off some barn and tacked hastily in place. Off to
the left you could see the stained, rusted hulk of a boiler.
It was hard to see the rest through the cobwebs.
"I think they're growing 'em big down there," said Steve.
Kim put her hand on Casey's arm. "Do we really have to bother?"
"Of course. It's hideous. Come on."
I offered her the flashlight Steven had appropriated hers when she'd
gone digging for the screwdriver. She gave me an ironic look and took
it from me and stepped carefully down the stairs. Halfway down she
turned around. The three of us stood there like passengers waiting for
a train. I was leaning against the doorframe, a little hunched over,
scratching my chin. Kim stood behind me with her arms folded over her
chest. Steven wasstaringatthe ceiling, tapping his foot impatiently.
We imagined the view from where she stood and broke out laughing.
"You guys," she said.
I turned to Kimberley, ignoring her.
"You hear anything?"
"Nah. Nothing but spiders down there."
"I must have heard spiders, then."
"Big, imperious ones."
"I'm giving you five seconds," said Casey, "the three of you, and then
I start screaming
"Coming, Mother," said Kim. "Don't scream.
"Jesus, no," said Steve. "You'll wake the spiders!"
We started down the stairs. Casey held her light for me so wouldn't go
crashing into her. Suddenly, with four pairs of feet on the staircase,
things got very noisy.
It's funny how when you're a little scared noise helps.
Maybe you figure that if you announce yourself, the goblins cut and
run.
We looked around.
"Gross," said Steven.
It had been a kind of workshop once; you could see that much. Beyond
the boiler, against the wall to the far left, was a long, broad wooden
table covered with dust and grime, warped and rotting away in places,
cluttered with debris from the broken shelves above it. Spilled boxes
of nails, broken mason jars that had probably held screws and fittings.
A rusted wood plane and a broken rusted hacksaw. The spiderwebs were
thick here. I wondered if the doctor
There was a strange thick smell in the air. I guessed it was mold and
mildew, some of it wafting up from a greasy, almost liquid-looking pile
of rags off to the far right corner, and some of it from the piles of
wood shavings that surrounded the table like gray-yellow anthills. Some
of them were near three feet high.
I could also smell paint or varnish, but I couldn't find its source at
first. Then Kim brought her flashlight around beneath the table and I
could see cans and cans of them, tumbled and spilling all over, their
contents freezing them together like some crazy sculpture.
There was another smell too, but I couldn't figure that one.
Kim straightened up. "I take it they weren't big on housekeeping."
"Guess not."
The area toward the back of the house was worse. It looked like the
debris of generations there. There was a big grandfather clock, its
face broken as though someone had smashed it with a
Jsledgehammer, its works spilling out over the cabinet ledge to the
floor. The double cabinets themselves looked dusty but in pretty fair
condition. Propped up beside it was an old tin washtub big enough to
bathe in, its underside rusted clean away.
Here, too, were all the old accoutrements of farm life. I guessed
there hadn't been much lost when the barn burned down. Most everything
was in here. A small plow with a broken handle, hoes, rakes, a couple
of pitchforks with splayed and broken tines. In one corner a mound of
scrap reached halfway up the wall- shovels, an old harness, horseshoes,