“Yes,” I replied. “Yes. People forget things.” Maybe I sounded as cool as a fucking cucumber, and maybe she could hear that I was losing the battle with my anger. I don’t know. The way things turned out, it hardly matters.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “The basement. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I mean, you haven’t been back down there since the day you found Harvey’s book, right? And me, I’ve never been down those stairs. Isn’t that odd, Sarah, that I’ve been living here for almost a month, and I’ve never gone into the basement?”
“No,” I replied. “I don’t think it’s all that odd.” The anger was changing over to panic, now, and I found myself gripped by an urgent, almost overwhelming need to keep Constance from going down to the basement of the farmhouse. I’d started sweating, and my heart was racing. “There’s nothing down there. Just a lot of junk. Junk and dirt and spiders.”
“If I went, would you go with me, Sarah?”
“I’d rather not,” I said, and forced out a laugh.
“Why?” she asked. “Are you afraid? Are you afraid of the basement?”
I sat up, and here it was, the anger bubbling to the surface at last. I heard it in my voice. I felt it leaking from me, felt the release of letting out even the smallest fraction of it. “This isn’t grammar school, Sarah. This isn’t grade school, and we’re not on the fucking playground, making dares.”
“You’re scared,” she said with an awful sort of certainty, and her eyes were still on the floor. Only, I knew then that it wasn’t the floor she was staring at. It was the basement beneath the floor that she was trying to see through the boards.
“Fine. I’m scared.”
Constance picked up the rag (she’d lain it beside her) and started wiping at her hands again.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,too,” she said. “That’s where it all began, down there,” and she stopped wiping her palms long enough to jab an index finger towards that enormous unseen vacuity below us. “That’s where it started, in the cellar. With you finding the typewriter, and then going back—”
“It’s not even half that simple,” I said, cutting her off, and she looked up, glaring at me. Her eyes were different, intent,focused,and they reminded me of something that I am reluctant to put down here. Something, I suppose, I am loath to acknowledge having seen in her face, or in any woman’s face. Many years ago, I was at the zoo in Birmingham, and there was this area devoted to local wildlife. The cages were all out of doors, but they were still cages. Raccoons, foxes, bobcats, owls, possums, a black bear, and so forth. The animals native to northern Alabama. And almost all of them were pacing back in forth in their small enclosures, pacing restlessly, frantically even. Maybe it was nervous energy, or maybe they were stuck in a sort of in stinctual loop, looking for an escape route that must surely exist, somewhere, if only they kept looking. But there was this cougar, just lying in her cage,not pacing, but lying perfectly still. I stared in at her, and she stared back out at me. And I swear to fuck, if animals can hate, I saw hatred in her eyes. As if she understood the situation through and through — the iron bars, the futility of trying to find an exit, her captors, that I was of the same species as her captors, even that I was part of the conspiracy that had made her a prisoner. It gave me a shiver, that day, though it was a hot summer afternoon, gazing into the reddish eyes of that cat, knowing that the only thing in the world keeping the panther from tearing me apart were the bars.
There was the exact same malice in Constance’s eyes. I mean,exactly the same. It didn’t help, either, realizing that her irises were so similar in color to the cat’s. She glared up from her place on the floor, and there were no iron bars in between us, restraining her, protecting me. But then it passed, the expression, that clarity of purpose or whatever, almost before I could be certain what I’d seen. Her eyes were only here yes again, sort of distant, distracted, far away, and she glanced back down and shook her head.
“Now, I’ve made you angry at me,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to. I promise I wasn’t.”
“I’m sorry, but I would rather not go back down there,” I said, deciding it was best not to get into whether or not I thought Constance was trying to get a rise out of me. Better not to question her sincerity, so I simply chose to ignore what she’d said, that and the passing, unfamiliar glint in her eyes.
“Then I’ll go by myself. It’s no big deal. I just want to have a look around. It bothers me, not knowing what’s down there, underneath us.”
I took a deep drag on my cigarette and peered at her through the smoke I exhaled. “Why didn’t it bother you before? Why all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Maybe it did bother me.
Or maybe I just never stopped to think about it.”
“There’s nothing down there,” I told her again, more emphatically than before. “Just junk. A whole lot of junk, sitting around in the dark, gathering dust.”
“Then I’ll see it for myself, and I can stop wondering about it. I can start thinking about my painting again, and get back to work.”
“You won’t just take my word for it? My word isn’t good enough for you?”
“Sarah, that’s not what I mean. Don’t make this into something it isn’t,” and she sighed and ran the long fingers of her right hand through her tangled hair. It wasn’t pulled back in her usual ponytail, and was dirty enough I could believe she’d not washed it in weeks. “I won’t be long. I’ll go down and see whatever there is to see, and I’ll come right back up. Are there lights down there?”
“No,” I replied. “There are no lights in the cellar.”
“But we have a flashlight, right?”
I nodded, then pointed towards the kitchen with my cigarette. “Yeah. A couple of them. In the drawer beside the sink. The drawer on the right of the sink.”
“You won’t be mad at me?” she asked. “If I go, you won’t be mad at me?”
“No, Constance. I won’t be mad at you,” I lied, an easy lie, given how pissed I was with her already. “I just fail to see the point.”
“So, what was the point when you went, Sarah?”
And I wanted to say I’d only gone into the cellar back in June because I was hot as hell and looking for someplace to get away from the heat, someplace cool to read. But then she would have asked why I did more than read, why I ever went poking about, and then, having found the typewriter, why it was I returned to search for the rest of the manuscript. I knew I had no answer that would satisfy her or convince her not to go down there. So, I didn’t bother. The answer, in both instances, was that I was curious, and my curiosity was no more valid than whatever was eating at her.
I think I was a cunt not to have tried harder to stop her from going into the basement. I know I was a cunt for letting her go alone.
I didn’t tell her about the slate threshold with its array of chiseled symbols, or about the archway dividing the basement. I didn’t mention all that space beyond the arch and the threshold that I’d not had the nerve to explore. I certainly did not mention the nightmare I’d had about finding Amanda down there in a Vernean landscape of giant mushrooms.
My fingers hurt, and I’ve got to take a break. Get something to eat, maybe. Go upstairs and see if I can get Constance to talk to me. I know I can’t, but I need to try, anyway.