Sam reached for the thick throw rug which sat between the toilet and the sink.
He paused just before his hand touched the rug. “Corner is turned under,” Sam said. He grabbed the corner of the rug and pulled. The thick rug hid a panel set in flush with the floor. Sam pulled a metal ring and lifted the panel open. Cold air seeped up from the hole. Sam propped the panel against the vanity.
Sam shone his light down into a shallow cellar. It had a rough ladder built in to the left side, but the dirt floor was only four or five feet down. A light switch was mounted on the right side of the opening. Forgetting the power was out, Sam flipped the switch on and off, expecting lights to come on below.
Paulie leaned over Sam’s shoulder, trying to see down into the cellar.
“Irwin?” Sam called down the hole. Sam swept his flashlight around, trying to see as much of the cellar as he could without committing to going down into the shaft.
He suddenly straightened up, kept his eyes locked on the access hole, but addressed his son. "Robby, I want you to go stand by the front door. You hear me give the word and you dash home, okay?”
“Yes sir,” Robby said. He turned and walked back down the hallway to the living room. He didn’t obey completely. He stayed near the door to the hall so he could listen to his dad talk to Paulie.
“You think that’s blood?” asked Paulie. “Could just be motor oil or something. Hard to tell on a dirt floor.”
His dad replied to Paulie, but Robby couldn’t make out the words.
“Oh, no shit,” whispered Paulie. Robby heard that part, loud and clear.
Sam yelled out to his son. "By the
door
, Robby.”
Robby moved to the front door, wondering how his dad knew. Robby’s eyes danced from the swinging door to the kitchen, then to the hallway, the staircase, and back again to the kitchen door. The living room was bright enough, with the lantern throwing off sharp shadows, but the doorways were gaping black holes. Anything could come out of those doorways. Robby backed up until his elbows pressed back against the front door. He took off his glove and rested his hand on the door knob behind him.
It felt like forever, waiting for his dad and Paulie. As soon as he took his post at the front door, he decided he had to pee. With every second he stood with his back to the door, his need to urinate grew exponentially until he could think of nothing but peeing and monsters coming out of the kitchen doorway, or zombies lumbering down the gloomy staircase.
The lantern on the coffee table began to sputter again. With each pop it flared a little brighter, but then dimmed even more when it fizzed. Robby knew what to expect—they kept nearly the same lantern at home. It took liquid fuel, white gas, and required pumping it up to keep it going. But his dad pumped it earlier, so it would need a refill to stay lit. He knew he only had a few more minutes of light before it would sputter out.
At least the failing light gave him something other than his bladder to worry about. Robby almost welcomed the distraction. The shadows throbbed with each sputter of the lamp; they became deeper, like they were gaining strength. The ebb and flow of the shadows made the door to the kitchen look like it was swinging slightly.
Pop-hissssss-POP-hiss-pop-hisss, Robby felt himself swaying with the rhythm of the lantern. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the kitchen door. It looked like the swinging gained momentum. Robby imagined that soon it would swing open all the way, and Irwin would be standing there.
Robby shook his head and tried to look away from the door. It had to be an optical illusion making it look like the door was swinging; just a trick of the wavering shadows cast by the failing lantern. When he first heard the squeak, he almost ignored it. It made perfect sense—it sounded like the squeak of a rusted hinge, in perfect time with the apparent movement of the door. But that would mean the door was moving. Robby tried to remember if the door squeaked when they had entered the kitchen earlier. He couldn’t recall.
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?” asked Sam.
“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?” asked Sam.
“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?” asked Sam.
“Could be,” Robby said. “But I think it would take a while to figure out if it is.”
“Can you remember it?” asked Sam.
“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?” asked his father.
“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?” asked his dad.
“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?” asked Sam.
“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.
Robby grabbed the back of his father’s jacket, and Paulie grabbed a handful of Robby’s. They formed a train and slogged up the hill towards the house. Their feet fell in rhythm. Robby pushed back his hood and looked to the side as they marched. He could make out the outline of their neighbor’s house.
They followed the picket fence of Mrs. Lane’s yard. Only the tops of pickets still poked through the snow drifts. Robby watched this house closely when he passed. He hated this house. It had expanded through the years, long before Robby’s time. It started out as a just a summer cottage, and you could still its humble roots in the structure. A big belt of a beam wrapped around the middle where the first floor roof had been raised to two stories, and then two-and-a-half. On each side of the roof, dormers poked out, looking like angry devil horns.
The cottage belonged to the Lanes and had since settlers moved to the island. In fact, Robby’s road used to be called the “Lane Cottage Road,” but constant postal errors shortened to “Cottage Lane.” The Lanes never appeared on the island after Labor Day, but Robby watched the house carefully anyway. Its big black front door, surrounded by windows, looked hungry.
The roofline of Lane Cottage cut a black shape out of the gray sky. As Robby watched, a giant black form rose from one of dormers and floated across the peak of the roof and settled on the other dormer. Robby stumbled and fell into his dad’s legs. Paulie, still gripping Robby’s coat, came down on top of the boy.
“Straighten up back there," Sam said. He turned and hauled on Robby’s arm, pulling him to his feet. Paulie pushed himself up and brushed the snow from his jacket.
“Dad, look,” Robby said. He pointed to the dormer of the cottage. He looked as he pointed and saw what his father saw—nothing but the dormer.
“What was it?” asked Sam. Paulie leaned in close to hear too.
“I saw a big black thing up there,” Robby said. “But it’s so dark, I guess it could have been nothing.”
“Move fast," Sam said. He took Robby’s right hand and moved with determination. Paulie grabbed onto Robby’s hood and they trudged double-time. Robby’s only choice was to keep up. He felt like if he lagged, his father would pull his arm out of its socket. Sam drove his legs up and down, pumping at a furious pace.