The Room Under the House

The Room Under the House

She turned around and went fast out the back door into the yard.

I went after her the way a man goes after somebody he doesn't want to be seen following. I stopped at the far end of the back porch, in under the roofline where the light didn't reach, about 40 feet from where the car was parked. The wind was coming up off the river and running through the pines along the property line.

She had the driver's door open and was standing in the dome light with the phone against her ear. Nothing came back through it that I could hear. The wind took most of what she said and left me pieces.

"...past where any of us can—" "...found it on his own, I swear I didn't—" "...quick, before he gets through the wall."

He found it on his own.

That one closed the question. The woman who rubbed the oil into my neck every night was also the one keeping the door shut. And I had just turned up a key.

I had the phone out and the keypad up before I decided anything. Nine. One. My thumb stayed over the last one long enough for the screen to dim.

Thirty-one years on that file as the boy who might have done it, and what I had to report was that I had measured my own house and come up seven feet two inches short. Then they would ask what I meant to do about it. The answer was take a bar to the back wall of the house where it happened, which is still an open case with nobody charged. I put the phone back in my pocket.

I didn't wait.

I went back out to the shed and took a three-foot pry bar off the wall and a four-pound hammer off the bench, both of them under a layer of dust from sitting through the seasons. I carried them into the living room and stood in front of the smooth cream-gray panel.

"James! What are you doing? Stop!" Emily came in from the yard. Her voice went thin and split apart on the last word when she saw what was in my hands.

I didn't look at her. I set the claw of the bar against a seam in the paint about chest high and drove it in with the hammer.

Crack.

The sound was flat and papery and smaller than the room. The board split along the stud behind it, and white dust came off the tear and hung up in the ceiling light.

Emily made a sound and went backward to the living room doorway with both hands over her head, watching me the way you watch an animal that has gotten off its chain.

I didn't stop. Second bite. Third. Fourth.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

The bar went in about two inches on the first bite and four on the second, and after that I quit setting it and just swung. The board was half-inch drywall with paper on both faces, and it came apart in wedges along the framing. The studs behind it ran 16 inches on center the whole way across.

It was ugly, stupid work and it went slowly. I sweated through my shirt. Broken board came off the studs in sheets and went down the wall in a dry rush, and the torn paper backing came with it. My palms went raw inside of 20 minutes, and when the blisters opened against the wood handle it got slick, and I had to keep stopping to wipe the grip down the leg of my pants.

I worked it in sets. I sat down on the floor twice, once for water and once because my right arm had stopped holding the bar level, and both times I got back up and went at it again.

I tied a dish towel around the right hand and worked with the left up on the head of the bar. White dust settled on the water I had left standing in a glass on the sideboard and I drank it anyway. The thermostat in the hall read 68 when I started and 71 when I went past it, and the register under it was blowing cold.

Behind the board there was a course of hollow block, laid dry, and the hammer on it rang like something being hit in another house. Gray dust covered me from my hair down, and I worked in a living room that filled up with broken block around my feet.

Somewhere past nine o'clock the last of the block went in all at once, and there was a space behind it with no light in it at all.

Cold air came out of the opening and crossed the room. It carried the smell of rust and the smell of something that had been shut in a long time, and it moved the warm air out of the living room ahead of it.

I dropped the bar on the pile. My hands were blistered and bleeding and they would not stay still.

Behind the broken block was a steel door, painted gray, thick enough that the hammer marks on the edge of it had gone nowhere.

I went closer and put my flashlight into the gap. The chain padlock hanging off the handle had been cut through. The cut was flat and clean and the metal inside it was still bright.

The lock had not been cut from the hallway side.

It had been cut from in there.

I pushed the steel door.

Screeeee...

The hinges came open on a note that ran a long way up. Behind the door was a narrow stone staircase, wet, dropping down at an angle steeper than any stair I'd been on.

I went down one step at a time. Each foot came down on wet stone and the dark gave it back, tock... tock... The air down there had been closed up for years, and it smelled of rot and of old blood.

The flashlight went around a room of about 190 square feet.

No treasure. Nothing anybody would want.

There was a thin mattress in one corner, yellow with age and flattened down to nothing. A plastic bucket with a crust in the bottom of it. A round bulb, burned out and black inside, hanging from the ceiling on a cord that had been looped once around itself.

What I had come down for was on the four walls.

Four gray cement walls, covered over with writing that had been cut into the stone with something sharp.

They were sentences. Whole ones. There were periods and commas in them and clean breaks between the paragraphs. Thousands of words lay across thousands of other words, layer over layer, years of it, until the cement underneath had gone black.

I went up to the wall on the right and put the flashlight against the stone.

"...Night 412. The herb smell doesn't work anymore. It's up again. It wants to go outside. It says it wants to write..."

"...It writes about Elm Street. It writes about the maple leaf birthmark. I can't stop it..."

"...Night 431. Counted at the wrist for a full minute against the drip in the corner. Thirty-four. Counted it again with the other hand and got thirty-three. I am not cold and I am not asleep..."

"...Night 455. Opened the left thumb on the edge of the block at the third step. Still going at the four hundredth count. Wrapped it in the sheet and it came through the sheet and I counted to four hundred again..."

"...Night 470. Pressed all five onto the glass of the bulb and held them and lifted them off and turned it until the filament came up behind. There is nothing there. Did it again with the hand wet and there is nothing there..."

I backed up a step and put a hand on the wall behind me.

The pages. The manuscripts. They had come out of this room.

I turned around and swung the light onto the wall facing the steel door.

There, in the middle of the cement, one line had been cut deeper than everything else. It had gone in far enough that dried blood had worked into the grooves and dried brown there.

The line ran from the ceiling down to the edge of the floor, repeated a few hundred times.

JAMES. JAMES. JAMES. JAMES. JAMES. JAMES...

Then I brought the flashlight around to the darkest corner of the room.

An old Parcheesi board sat there on the cement, squared up and clean.

Four wooden pieces painted yellow stood on the start squares, all four of them, in order. There was no dust on the board at all. As if somebody had been sitting here and waiting on me to come down and finish the game we left 31 years ago.