Dwelling (23 page)

CHAPTER 21

DOWN IN THE CELLAR

Jim

1976

Jim Fetcher could never in his wildest dreams have imagined owning a home as large as the one on 1475 Oak Lee Road. Not with the market being the way it was. Not with economists from New York spewing news of
Armageddon
. Not being turned away by every bank from Kennebunkport to San Francisco. And now, with this oil crisis
bizness
in Saudi Arabia,
no sir, you might as well forget about it!
With the world coming to an end—or so the news would have you believe—who could afford such grandiose
American Dreams
? Yet it happened, somehow or another, it happened all the same. During the early summer months of 1976, the Fetcher family found their very own picturesque two-story white picket-fence house in Jotham, the very soul of Texas, surrounded by tall, golden stalks of wheat. By the end of summer, Jim would wish he never had.

His realtor, a thin
Lurch
type fellow by the name of Mr. Eugene Parsons, a stoic who seemed to favor nothing but traditional black suits, sold the place to him. It was a helluva deal too. Damn near perfect, if not for the basement. The basement had been boarded up by the previous owners and Jim would have left it that way if not for his curiosity. It was almost seductive. The door leading to the cellar was in the kitchen. Not the oddest place to have a cellar door; no, the curious part were the locks and bolt locks and chain locks that had been fastened to the door. And the smell, the sulfur-rot stink that at times seeped through the wood. He was not superstitious nor did he believe in the supernatural, nothing like that, he left that kind of mumbo-jumbo to his hippie sister who’d moved out to San Francisco in 1968. He heard she’d joined some spiritualist church called Peoples Temple and was moving to South America.

Despite not believing in any of that tomfoolery, there he was, terrified to open the door. It was an irrational fear, he knew. The very same fear he had when he was a kid. The basement in his childhood home was dark and seemingly void of life. It was a darkness that could be felt. In his mind he imagined the worst things waiting in the places unseen: large bulbous eyes, sharp, wet teeth, things with a ravenous hunger desiring nothing but to eat him alive. Rationally, he knew no such things existed, at least, not in the cellar. He knew, but yet it would still take Jim Fetcher another month or so before setting one foot on those creaking wooden cellar steps below.

As fall peeked on the horizon, on one late summer day, Jim was alone in the house. He crept toward the locked cellar door. The girls were in Jotham buying new dresses. All the boxes were unpacked, most of which ended up in the attic or out in the barn. The school year was nigh, yet the cellar had remained unexplored. He could have left it alone, but curiosity drove him toward it. His hand twitched horribly as he reached for the first bolt. Certainly, a part of him wished Lucy had gone down there or his girls, sparing him the trouble. None of them had, though.
They wouldn’t go near the damn door.
With a flashlight in one hand, he lifted the other and unbolted the second lock, and then the third. Finally, begrudgingly, he opened the cellar door.

When Jim stared down into the dark abyss, he thought of Glenn Myers, a friend of his late brother who’d told him about Jotham and the house. Glenn Myers was a big John Wayne type. Spoke with the Superintendent. Put in a good word. Jim had some concerns, at first. Glenn
was
as honky-tonk as they came,
but
he had served with Jim’s brother in Vietnam. That meant something. And there was a favor owned to Charlie, about which Myers would never fully go into detail. When Charles was killed in action in 1975 during the last days of Vietnam, the favor owed passed on to Jim. And if you’d ask him, it was the only good thing to ever come out of that war.
Stranger things have happened, I guess.
Jim didn’t ask many questions. He said his ‘
thank-yous,’
told Lucy and the girls to pack, put their shoebox on the market, loaded the family station wagon, and a-way-they-went. Much the way how Beryl Markham had once said something about if you’ve got to leave fast, leave fast, but never look back.

When Jim reached the bottom of the stairs he found the strangest thing. Among the aging, dusty shelves, he discovered a manhole cover. It was weird for one to be in the basement and not somewhere outside on the property. And it was even stranger to find himself opening the damn thing, almost on autopilot and discovering a stone staircase leading beneath his two story white picket fence American Dream.
A bomb shelter perhaps
, he imagined. He recalled such things being popular when he was younger, back in the ’50s.

Jim peered down the stone steps, terrified, yet still curious. Very curious. He held his breath and took the first step down into depths of the strange dark alien world that existed under his home.
Why is this here? What purpose does it serve?
he wondered.
If not a bomb shelter, maybe some kind of hiding place? Maybe leftover from the underground slave movement? If it is, it’d be the find of the century!
The cone shaped glow from his flashlight penetrated only a few feet in front of him, the rest was swallowed in utter nothingness. The cavern was humid and damp, a horrendous stink of rot, sulfur perhaps, or maybe something worse, uncooked meat spoiling somewhere in the places he could not see, festering with creatures he dared not imagine. He clutched a hand over his mouth and nose, breathing carefully as he continued down the pebble and rock littered path.

Who cares what this is. Why am I here? That’s what curious minds want to know,
Jim joked. He had never been the brave adventurer in the family. Even Jane and Darcy have proven more adventuresome, a testament to the lineage of their mother no doubt. Had Jim been acting as his proper self, he’d be locked away in his study, poring over some book, perhaps something by the late great Doctor King or Malcolm X, pretending for a while that the world around him didn’t exist.

Charles had been the brave one, the adventurer, the high school quarterback, the prom king, the one everyone admired, even in their precariously integrated southern school. When things got bad in Vietnam after 1968, after the Tet Offensive, Charles didn’t even wait for the draft to catch up to him. He volunteered in the U.S. Army, if you can believe that. Gave up a promising football scholarship to the, as of then, prestigious University of Virginia. But no one batted an eye. Nothing out of the ordinary for Charles Fetcher to do such a thing while Jim went off to Virginia Tech. But they had expected Charles to come back. And when he didn’t…when the telegraph came explaining in more or less words that Charles had spilled his guts on the soil of Vietnam, when nothing could be salvaged of him to ship back home, save his dog-tags, well…

Jim buried the memory.

***

Jim had walked for some distance with only the sound of his footsteps and the mental images of his dead brother to greet him back when suddenly the faint echo of
clicking
joined in the gloom of the cave. It started in slow, like a soft rattle, and then grew.

“Hello?” Jim called. “Is someone out there?” He shivered. The yellow cone flickered in his hand, dancing in the dark.

Nothing. Only the soft muffled clinking. The more he followed the path, deeper in the cave, the louder the sound became. It reminded Jim of the insects that erupted into song during the spring months back in Lynchburg.
Cicadas, I think. Down here? Maybe there’s a nest of them hibernating, I’d heard somewhere they do that. Where? National Geographic probably. Funny thing about cicadas, how they make their sounds by flexing their tymbals, their drum-like hallow abdomens, rapidly pulling in and out air, making those terrible eerie clicking sounds. Swarms are worse…how they move together in fluidity. Like a chorus of bloated red eyes glaring at you from tree tops. Sucking sap. Consuming everything…their lifecycles are the strangest thing about them…

Of the biology textbooks Jim could recall from college, entomologists have claimed some species of cicada burrow deep underground, hibernate, and then emerge up to seventeen years later. Seventeen years
…and those are the ones the scientists know about. What if there was a species that slept longer, say for a hundred years or more…an ancient species. An alien species…? Jesus, Jimmy, get a hold of yourself!

He shuddered, laughing weakly in the dark, continuing down the path, creeping farther into the cave.
Aren’t caves supposed to be cold? Devoid of life? But this place is so damn hot and seemingly teeming with life. Yes. Horrible crawling, slithering, compound-eyed, mandible-pinching, clicking life, but life nevertheless.

Jim looked at his wrist where his watch would normally be. He found only bare skin. He brushed away the sweat pooling on his forehead. He watched the shadows. Nervous. The flashlight darted, penetrating the gloom for only a moment before moving on to the next unseen thing.
How far does this path lead?
he wondered.

How far will I go?

Am I still beneath the house?

The soft clicking became louder and fuller with each precarious step into the dark with only the cone of light to guide him. Time was elusive. It felt like hours, while it could very well of been only minutes or seconds. He considered turning back more than twice, but for reasons unbeknownst to rational thought, he kept going, father and farther along. He had to see. Had to know. Had to find what was at the end, if there was an end.
There had to be an end, right? This cave couldn’t go on forever, could it?
Like some grand adventure in one of his books, Huck Finn or perhaps that one by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jim tread on, feeling nothing like Bowen Tyler. Watching the shadows, darting the cone of light at every sudden noise, he felt more like a character in one of Lord Dunsany's tales, falling into some primordial black abyss, and that at any moment Abdul Alhazred, the mad poet, would dash out from the dark and sing:

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.

“Damn Lovecraft,” Jim moaned, glancing at the strange rock formations along the path. “
Damn bugs,”
he whispered. The gloom was scarcely penetrated by the yellow cone glow from his flashlight, yet carefully, every few feet or so, he shone the walls. At first there were only juts of rock and earth, but the farther along he went the more smooth the walls became. Suddenly, he spotted markings etched into the stone. Symbols and drawings he did not understand. Triangle shapes and circles and even a few of the same marking that were on the manhole cover above in the cellar, a half circle with a full circle above that and queer lettering within the sphere. Whatever it was, the shapes seemed to have some meaning, some purpose. More importantly, they were man made. Of this he had no doubt. No bone chewing monster did this. Men, people, persons, someone. He wasn’t sure if that fact comforted him or terrified him. Regardless, he continued down the path, taking glances at the walls, noting all the unusual designs in the rock, of people gathering together for some sort of ritualistic rite of passage or ceremony, he guessed. In one depiction, there was a blade, perhaps Aztec in nature, and four figures gathered near it. Another figure, if that’s what it was, it was a dark shape for sure, with large red eyes. The figure took the blade and then…

Is it cutting the others open? Or are the others cutting themselves? What the hell is this place?
His gut retched at the thought. Jim deplored violence. Fear swelled in his throat bringing his breathing to a high-pitched, raspy whine, but despite the trembling spasm in his gut, the itch to run like hell back home, Jim kept going.
Dear God
, he kept going.

Just go back…go back to the cellar, go back to the house. Get Lucy and the girls and get the hell outta Dodge. Load up the wagon; forget everything else, to hell with Jotham, just get out, get out
, his conscience prodded him over and over, but Jim ignored it, all of it. His strange curiosity remained, burning brighter than his fear, as if pulled by some otherworldly cord, all the way to the end of the line.

The path came to an end. An enormous stone wall stood before him. A massive structure with heights his cone light could not reach. Along the center, a deep trench ran up the length of it, as if it were two differing walls coming together, the way one might imagine a mythical entrance with some famed city of gold laid beyond it, like from that
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
movie Jim had talked Lucy into seeing with him a few years back. But if this monstrous thing before him was indeed a door, he doubted very much anything glorious lay beyond; however, maybe the pit of hell itself or maybe some other cosmic god slumbering, hibernating.

“
I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble
,” Jim whispered, remembering something from that God-awful movie, ogling the impossibly massive door.