Crawlspace (2 page)

My legs wobbled, and even before my mind grasped the identity of that shape, I could feel the thump of my heart accelerate in my chest. The next moment I was smiling and waving to Richard Atlee, signaling him to join us.

Coming toward us shyly like a wary animal, he said he’d come again to look at the gauges. There was something he wanted to check, he said, and there was that wry, secretive smile on his face as if something only he had just seen had amused him. It never occurred to me to ask why he had come from such an unexpected direction—that of the bog.

Once again he descended into the basement and remained there for the rest of the afternoon. It seemed odd, his remaining down there so long. Several times during the afternoon we heard the faint, fight tinkle of his wrench and hammers striking against the pipes. I played with the idea of going down there. Surprising him at his work. Not for a moment did I believe that he was doing anything. He was just playing at doing something, and stalling for time. But still I didn’t go down.

When he finally emerged from the basement, it was once again the supper hour. This time we were not anxious to invite him. But he sat in the parlor and then lingered so long in the library that it became awkward. My wife and I exchanged glances.

He stared fixedly at the table as if he were admiring the plates and glasses, the neat, tasteful symmetry of crockery, silver, and white linen. It was an oddly childish sort of thing—so naked and undisguised. In the next moment, to my amazement Alice once again invited him to stay.

“By all means,” I said. He had looked to me to see if it was all right. “It would please us.” My voice was wa-very and a bit too high.

He went directly to the table and sat down. It was as if he knew he was to be invited; as if the thing had been decreed elsewhere, independent of us, and all he awaited was some small signal or gesture that was guaranteed to come.

I stood there stunned while he sat quietly at the table, hands folded in lap, eyes lowered, waiting for us to join him.

As soon as a plate was set before him, he fell ravenously on the food. All the while he ate, we watched him with the food untouched on our own plates, and I kept thinking about my Blake and mourning its irretrievable loss.

There was no conversation, and Alice—to fill in the gaps—kept thrusting bowls and plates of food at me, a look of desperation on her face and I suppose one of perplexity on mine. At the end of the meal I was still mourning my Blake, and not a little edgy. Finally I spoke, “How’ve you been getting on with the book?”

“What book?”

“The one you borrowed several weeks back.”

He looked at me as if I’d spoken in a foreign tongue. Then his face brightened. “Oh, that.”

“Yes. The Blake. Have you finished it yet?” I looked at him with a vague hope that he might ask me questions.

“Haven’t started it.” He spoke with a full mouth and as he did so his fork reached across the table and speared another chunk of lamb. I felt anger rising in me. “Well, if you’re not going to read it, I’d appreciate it back.”

“Sure.” He smiled, not looking at me. He was busy replenishing his plate.

When he left again, it was well on to midnight. He took several additional books with him.

For a while my wife and I didn’t speak. We were too confused and flustered. Instead we busied ourselves with the task of carrying soiled dishes from the table to the sink. The place where the oil man had sat was in a ruin. It was as if a large animal had pastured there. A good deal of food that had been on his plate was now on the table as well as under it. From an overturned wine goblet leaked a languid trickle of burgundy, creeping its way across the table and blooming suddenly into a large purple blossom.

I looked at Alice peering dreamily into a sinkful of dishes. “Why did you invite him again?” I asked.

She turned the taps on and watched the water rise in the basin and the soap bubbling into suds. “I don’t know. He seemed so alone. So hungry.”

“He works. I’m sure he doesn’t go hungry.”

“He seems half starved.” She tied the ribbons of her apron behind her. “I’m sure he’s all alone and doesn’t look after himself. Did you see his clothes?”

“Yes,” I said, recalling it was the same suit of clothes he wore when he first came to the house.

“Filthy.” Her voice was a mixture of indignation and pity.

“But he tries to keep them presentable—doesn’t he?” I said.

I went back out to the dining room and gathered up the corners of the table cloth with its crumbs and morsels and soiled napkins.

“I don’t believe he’s a day over eighteen,” Alice said the moment I got back to the kitchen. “Nineteen at the most. Seems helpless.”

“What?” I said, startled out of some dreamy preoccupation.

“I said he seems helpless.”

“Oh—Yes.”

“Must be awful—being alone like that.”

“Yes—I s’pose.”

“Why did you give him more books? He hasn’t returned the other.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Well—why did you give them to him?”

“I don’t know,” I said, staring down at the suds. And that was the truth.

We washed the dishes and set them in the drainer to dry overnight. When we finished we turned out all the lights and went up to bed. Somewhere on the stairway she turned to me and said, “He frightens me.”

“We won’t have him here again,” I said.

We didn’t see Richard Atlee for several weeks. Then one chilly morning we discovered we had no heat in our radiators and no hot water in our taps. I went down into the basement to look at the fuel gauge. In the past I’d spent very little time in the basement. I’d go down there for a tool or a piece of gardening equipment. That was the extent of it.

The oil gauge was at the rear of the basement in a somewhat inaccessible area. I had to thread my way through a clutter of cartons and boxes. When at last I reached the gauge and read it, I discovered that our tank was empty.

I turned to go up and just at I did, I passed a cupboard in which my wife keeps Mason jars of relish and preserves. The door of it had been left slightly ajar. When I reached to close it, my eye caught something gleaming on the shelf within. I opened the door and there on the shelf I found several objects I immediately recognized—a small milk-glass angel, a scrimshaw raven, and a jade paperweight I’d purchased in Singapore. The angel and raven came from the curio cabinet in our parlor; the paperweight sat on my desk in the library. There was in addition a piece I didn’t recognize. It was in a small black jewel case. When I opened it I found a Prussian Iron Cross; it lay on a cushion of purple felt—the sort of thing you find in cheap novelty shops. On the shelf below and to the right I found my Blake along with the other books Richard Atlee had borrowed.

There’s a door in our cellar that leads out to the garden in the back. It’s a small door with an uncommonly shallow lintel. Even a man of slightly below-average stature would have to stoop in order to pass through it.

The cellar itself is what is called a three-quarter cellar, which means that three-fourths of the cellar is a solid, full stone foundation; the remaining quarter of the cellar is a crawlspace, some three or four feet in height, which runs out beneath the kitchen. It’s not part of the original foundation, but an extension added on at a later date. It’s a dank, gloomy space smelling of mold and rodents. The Quigleys, who had the house before us, kept cats in the crawl, presumably to keep down the rodents. As a result, in wet weather the stench of rutting cats hovers oppressively over the place.

The entrance to the crawlspace is directly opposite the small garden door with a distance of some twenty-five or thirty feet between them. It’s no more than a black, shadowy square carved into the white limestone foundation about halfway up the wall.

I can’t say what made me cross the short distance to the crawl but I did, in three or four wobbly strides, and then stood directly before the square peering into the dark shade.

At first I could see nothing: I stood there squinting into the darkness trying to adjust my eyes. In the next moment I stood on tiptoes and poked my head through the square. It was something like the clammy sensation you get when you press your face against a cold pane of glass.

I looked around, but still I could see nothing. We kept a flashlight in the basement for emergency use; I found it quickly and went back to the crawl and flicked it on.

Motes of dust swam up and down in the beam of light. Beyond that hung rusty pipes festooned in cobwebs. Sprawled on the ground was an ancient and decrepit extension ladder. In addition, there were some planks of lumber and a random carton here and there. Nothing remarkable.

I was about to turn away when my eye caught a squat, hump-like shape pushed off into a far corner. It turned out to be a mound of dry straw heaped on the ground about twenty-five feet from the entrance, set just below an overhead tangle of pipes and joists.

What struck me so curious about it or why it even caught my attention at all I can’t say. Perhaps it was simply the incongruity of seeing it there. Such an unlikely place for a mound of straw; also, I’d been in that crawl several times before. You had to go in there to turn on the water to the outside taps in the garden, and I was certain I’d never seen such a mound of straw there before.

Suddenly I had the distinct impression that I ought to leave. Turn my back on the place. Get out as fast as I could. It’s curious the way you sense things like that. As if some awful disclosure is about to be made to you, and the mind reasons that if you can just avoid having that disclosure made, then the dangers implicit in it will never come to pass. Like avoiding the doctor when you have alarming symptoms.

But I didn’t leave. Some grisly fascination drew me on. In the next moment I’d dragged a small stool over to the crawl and begun to climb in.

The ground over which I walked was cold and hard. It seemed to be made of a coarse sand that had been congealed by dampness and frigid weather. I had to stoop as I groped my way toward the humped shadowy shape. I recall being a little breathless. In the next instant I felt the tip of my shoe brush against straw and I turned my light full on it.

What I saw at my feet was assuredly a straw pallet, the kind of thing you imagine beggars might sleep on. It was not the pallet, however, that troubled me; it was what I saw around it—the bones. Almost a charnel house of them strewn about here and there; clumps of animal fur and feathers; bits of paw and that sort of thing. It looked like the lair of a weasel with the carcasses of all its hapless victims strewn about.

I moved deeper into the crawl, stooping as I went, one trembling hand holding the light, the other clapped over my mouth—coughing into my fist from the dust and dampness.

Before I’d gone another half-dozen paces my foot kicked something else, which went rattling loudly over the hard earth. I swung my light over the ground in the direction of the noise. There at my feet, half in and half out of an old coffee tin, were toilet articles. Some of them had scattered across the ground when I kicked the can. There was a razor, a beaver brush, and a pair of fine old isinglass cufflinks which I recognized as my own.

I must have remained there only a few moments more. Then I quickly gathered up all those strewn articles, replaced them in the coffee tin, and put the whole thing back beside the pallet.

For some inexplicable reason I left the books and all the stolen items exactly where I’d found them and in the next instant I was clattering up the stairs, a twinge of pain at my chest, thinking about getting the police, dialing the number in my head and muttering the story aloud and a little breathlessly to myself. I was planning how I’d present the thing to the sheriff over the phone in a plausible way.

I got upstairs, happy to discover Alice out; down in the garden somewhere, out of earshot. My hands trembled at the directory pages while I made a sickish effort to fight down the panic. For a moment I caught a glimpse of a greenish reflection of myself in the mirror about the phone. POLICE wasn’t listed under P as I’d thought. Then what was it listed under? S for Sheriff? C for Courthouse? Finally I recalled that the police are generally listed under government departments, and so I went on tearing through the tissuey pages until somehow or other I found it.

I started to dial and had even gone through the first three digits when suddenly and quite unaccountably I put the receiver down. The wave of panic subsided, and in the next instant I sighed and sank wearily back into a chair by the phone. “Why the police?” I suddenly thought. What was he that I had to have the police for? A boy of eighteen or twenty. A poor creature who simply wanted to come in out of the cold. And pleasant enough at that, too.

But all the same, I didn’t know the first thing about him. And living out that far you hear some pretty hair-raising tales about vagrants and itinerants and the like. Oh, apocryphal or exaggerated, most of them. I’m sure—

But all the same——

Still, though, this was not the same sort of thing. I knew the boy. Had talked with him. Even sat down with him twice to dinner. He didn’t seem the type to—Still, it was obvious he couldn’t be permitted to remain down there in the crawl. But the police seemed a drastic step. And even if they came, all they’d do would be to put him out. That struck me as an even greater danger. What if he were a spiteful or vindictive sort and I’d had him driven out of the county by the police? What then could prevent him from coming back here some dark night looking for revenge.

So I didn’t call the police. Instead I called the fuel company. It was a small rural business, and I spoke to the owner himself.

“Is Richard Atlee there?”

“Who?”

“Richard Atlee. Your representative.”

“Oh, him. He quit.”

“Quit?”

“Up and left about two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks,” I muttered. There was a pause in which I could hear myself breathing into the receiver.

“Who is this?” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

“Mr. Graves. Albert Graves.”

“Oh. Out on the Bog Road?”

“That’s right. The Quigley place.”