The Eaton Page 3

  One of these weekends, Matt, Pete, and Sam had been playing the rule-free game of “dare.” Sam was eight years old, and was finally able to keep up with at least some of the tasks at hand. He was able to drink a sip of water from the brown creek. He was able to throw a rock at a passing car. He was able to make a blowtorch from a lighter and his aunt’s aerosol hair spray. He was even, once, able to swallow a live bug. On this occasion, he was winning “dare” for the first time, as both Matt and Pete had each failed a request, but Sam had not.

  “Ya know,” said Pete, eyeing Sam thoughtfully, “there’s one thing that both Matt and I have done before, that you haven’t.”

  “What?”

  Pete glanced behind his shoulder, motioning with his chin to the low wooden door in the ground behind the house. “The root cellar.”

  “What about it?”

  “You ever been in there?”

  Sam shook his head.

  A slow smile crept across Matt’s face. “It’s dark,” he explained. “And deep. And there are spiders the size of your head.”

  “So?”

  “So, I dare you to go inside, shut the door, and stay in for two minutes.”

  “Five minutes,” Pete modified. “Five.”

  Sam said nothing. Didn’t offer a word of affirmation, or of protest, or of bargaining. He just thought. Could he do it? Would this win his cousins’ respect? And what would be worse—to chicken out now, to say “no,” and have them laugh, or to say “yes,” but then fail, to burst out of the doors sobbing in seconds, to even greater laughter and insult?

  Then again, he might succeed.

  “Alright, guys,” came the eventual, soft reply.

  Matt and Pete grinned. They weren’t expecting this. In that moment, they may have even given Sam a little credit, for they each had been terrified of the decrepit cellar at Sam’s age and even older.

  The three boys walked to the old French-style doors, installed in the ground at a far steeper angle than seemed practical or necessary, and smiled at each other conspiratorially. Matt and Pete each took the handle of a door and opened them in tandem—two lips of a great sideways mouth preparing to gobble its next young victim.

  There were stairs going down into the cellar, but they faded into blackness. The little remaining light of dusk revealed only five or six steps, though Sam was sure there must be more. The darkness was so great, Sam was convinced the pit must go on forever.

  Matt smiled at his little cousin. “Your move, kid.”

  Sam took a step back.

  “Aw, he’s not gonna do it,” taunted Pete. “You chickening out, Sammy? It’s okay. We won’t tease. No one expects that much of you.”

  Sam closed his eyes, silently counted to three, then without thinking, as if commanding his muscles to move before his mind had committed, Sam walked into the cellar, taking each downward step to the beat of a metronome, until he was at the bottom and his feet hit clay.

  He had counted just seven steps. The clay ground just hadn’t been able to reflect light. It wasn’t so deep after all.

  The young boy turned around and looked up the stairs with defiance.

  “Alright, kid,” said Matt, glancing at his green plastic digital watch. “Five minutes starting…now.”

  The two brothers smiled again at each other, and closed the doors. The light, little that there had been, was now gone.

  Sam had a panicked thought. What if his cousins had locked the doors as a prank? Was there even a lock? He couldn’t remember. He tried to picture the two doors, before they had been opened, but all his memory would reveal was an image of the entry already uncovered, the all-consuming blackness staring him down. He closed his eyes to think harder, but realized this was pointless, as his brain could detect no difference in light between eyes open or shut.

  Another thought occurred to Sam. What guarantee did he have that Matt and Pete would count the five minutes honestly? They could make it ten. Or twenty. Or go in the house and have fudge and say they “totally forgot” about Sam, and were “so sorry” he had been stuck in that horrible place for a half hour or more.

  No, they didn’t hate him. They just wanted him to grow up. This was part of growing up. I’m growing up, Sam thought. I’m growing up.

  He could feel his heart beating through his shirt, and imagined he could see it beating, pounding against the fabric, if there was only a little light. He thought vaguely that his eyes should have adjusted by now, but there was nothing to adjust to. There was no nightlight. No filtered blue light from streetlamps seeping in through closed blinds. This was true darkness. Six feet underground.

  Sam wondered what was down here with him. Was it jars of fruit preserves? Was it tree roots? Were there…bodies? Was Aunt Eleanor secretly a serial killer, and used this place to store the skeletons of her victims?

  No. It was just, a cellar. That’s all. To Sam’s knowledge, they never even used it, unless they caught wind of an approaching tornado.

  The room was quiet for a long time. And then, Sam heard the faintest, barely perceptible scratching noise. The kind of sound you couldn’t notice under normal conditions, but stood out when deprived of all other senses. It wasn’t a scary sound by itself—rather like fingernails brushing against an empty drinking glass—but in this place, it popped like a snare drum. Sam caught his breath, waiting to hear if the sound returned…and it did, louder this time, he believed, and maybe closer.

  Sam stood his ground. He wasn’t going to run up those invisible stairs, pound at those invisible doors, be let out and be laughed at. He was going to stay put, and wait, and wait, and wait, even if he pissed himself, a fate which seemed more and more likely with each slow-moving second.

  It had to have been five minutes, hadn’t it? It seemed longer.

  He took a deep breath. He had a moment of complete, sophisticated calm.

  Then, something scampered across his left shoe.

  The shoe was thick, and he barely felt it, but he knew he felt it. In his mind, he thought he even saw it. Something had run across his foot. What was it? One of the head-sized spiders from Matt’s warning? Or something which actual teeth, like…a rat?

  Sam held back a tear, but again he stood firm. If he couldn’t see the rat, the rat couldn’t see him, right? The would-be critter wouldn’t even know he existed. He was just running that way anyway. Maybe had to get to the other side of the cellar in a hurry, for food.

  Then again, perhaps the rat was being chased. Is that why he was running so fast? Was a bigger predator coming after him? Would Sam soon feel the weight of another creature on his shoe?

  For a few desperate seconds, nothing happened. But then, Sam felt tiny hands on his right ankle. The rat was trying to crawl up his leg!

  Sam couldn’t help himself. He screamed, and began shaking and stomping his right foot. He stomped and he stomped and he stomped onto the hard clay earth, trying to hit the creature who had touched him, or at least trying to scare the thing far away, to leave him alone, perchance to die, die, die before it could reach him again.

  All was still for a moment. Sam was trying not to cry. He pleaded with himself not to let tears come. He begged to God, please don’t let me cry. But when he saw those big wooden doors up the staircase open again, he couldn’t help it. He sobbed and sprinted upward, stumbling on the last stair, until he was out in the “light” of the past-sunset sky.

  Matt and Pete were stifling laughter, but there was something different in their eyes. Something approaching respect. Sam knew, without being told, just from their faces, that even though he had gotten scared, even though he had screamed, he had made it the full five minutes. He was sure of it. And they knew it, too. He composed himself, wiping his cheeks, and offered a weak smile.

  “Congrats, Sam,” said Matt. “Even Pete would have shit himself at your age.”

  “Fuck you, you fuckin’ liar!” Pete punched his brother in the arm, and laughed.

  Sa
m managed another smile. He was a big kid now. He had made it. And he’d been braver than Pete—Pete, who wasn’t even scared of playing chicken on train tracks.

  The laughter subsided. Matt looked down at his cousin.

  “So Sammy, what made you scream?”

  Sam looked embarrassed. “I…thought I felt something trying to crawl up my leg.”

  Matt chuckled derisively, but then his eyes drifted down Sam’s body, down his legs, and to his feet. And his playful expression vanished. He took a step forward, toward Sam, staring at his right shoe, trying to get a clearer picture in the dim light of the sky.

  “Shit, dude,” he said. “Holy shit, dude.”

  Sam, nervously, let his eyes fall to his feet as well. At first he saw nothing. Just his tennis shoes, and the dirt and patchy grass beneath them. But soon, he saw the eyes. He blinked, convinced it was just an illusion, a trick, something in the ground. It wasn’t. There were two small, black eyes, popped violently from their sockets, hanging on by gooey threads from the flattened face stuck with blood on Sam’s right foot. And Sam realized at once what must have happened. He had stomped on and squashed a small, grey field mouse, whose bleeding corpse had caught in the treads of his shoe, and whose crushed skull was now staring up in anguish at the little boy who had slaughtered him.

  Sam’s mouth opened wide to scream, but no sound came. His body convulsed in disgust and terror. He tried to scrape the animal off, on the ground, on the dirt, but those bulging, dangling black eyes wouldn’t leave, they wouldn’t stop following him, staring accusingly, hatefully up at their killer. Sam twisted, tripped, and fell, and finally kicked off the shoe altogether, hurling it into the night, then ran crying with a limp into the safety of Aunt Eleanor’s warm cabin.

  But worse than anything, worse than the fright, worse than knowing he had killed a living creature, worse than the shock of finding the carcass embedded in his shoe, worse than the panic he felt when it couldn’t be scraped off, far worse than these things, was hearing Matt and Pete roar with laughter behind him. Sam could hear them howling, screaming, guffawing at his expense, every second that he was running, all the way to the safety of the house, and could still hear them laughing, muffled, after he shut the big door behind him.

  He was not brave. He was not one of the big kids.

  He was an embarrassment.

  *

  In the station, Sam stared down at the steps below him. They were wooden, and seemed a little steep, but not in disrepair. Although he couldn’t see more than five or six steps before they gave way to the blackness, he could see they flared out a bit as they progressed, and there were handrails starting at about the third step down. As his eyes adjusted, he could even see the floor. It was not bottomless. It was just a cellar. That was all.

  Sam took a deep breath, trying to drown the voice of the knot in his stomach urging him to flee, to get outside this creepy place, back into the sun. The cellar at Aunt Eleanor’s consumed his thoughts, but he was determined not to show fear in front of Sarah. He straightened his back, and stared down the challenge.

  “Vaughn,” he said abruptly, taking charge. “You have your van here, right?”

  “Uh, yeah man.”

  “Your equipment?”

  Vaughn didn’t see what he was getting at. “You wanna hear some tunes?”

  “No, your lights. You still have those battery-powered LED things?”

  Vaughn got it. “Oh, yeah dude, sure. They should be all charged up and everything.”

  “Get them.”

  Vaughn took a long, slow look at the pit, then left to get the equipment. He returned with two battery-operated American DJ spotlights on small metal tripods, and flipped them both on.

  “I have a flashlight here, too,” offered Janet, retrieving a small but bright keychain-light from her purse. It, too, boasted the hideous realty logo.

  “Alright,” said Sam, taking one of the spotlights from Vaughn. “Are we all going down?”

  Sarah stepped closer, and rested her hand on his shoulder in affirmation. Al said “well shit, I’m not going to miss this.” Janet nodded, somberly, but fascinated.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Sam led the way, wielding the closed metal tripod light like a club in one hand, and holding Sarah’s hand with the other, as they stepped down together into the basement room. Vaughn followed close behind, then Janet and Al, until all five had traversed sixteen full steps, landing on a wood floor of similar style to the room before.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Janet complained. “These ceilings must be twelve feet high. For a basement?”

  Sam and Vaughn panned their spotlights around the room. It wasn’t a large space, but it was oddly empty—no shelves, no furniture, no boxes. It was completely bare. The walls had the same wood paneling of the upstairs rooms, with one noticeable exception: an arched, boarded-up doorway directly in front of their path. As it seemed clear to Sam, and everyone else, that the designed purpose of the staircase must be to direct people through that doorway, the boards would have to be removed.

  “Al,” began Sam, “do you still have…”

  “Way ahead of you, Sammy.” Al had the crowbar out and began to remove the first long plank blocking the entrance to…well, whatever the entrance was to. But after a few boards, it became apparent that there wasn’t a hidden door or hallway behind the barricade, but a large, iron cage. The bars of the cage were vertical and tightly packed, and at first seemed to be uniform, but as Al continued to work, ornamentation was revealed near the top of the bars, of the same “e” pattern of the parquet in the previous room.

  “Uh, Sam,” Vaughn said, uneasy. “We just pried open a hidden section of the floor, revealed this creepy-ass room, and Al here is pulling off boards covering up a big fucking cage. I know this is your digs and all, but don’t you think it’s possible that maybe the previous owners knew something you don’t? And, maybe, we should keep those boards right where they are?”

  Sam didn’t reply, but saw Janet stepping closer, her eyes wide.

  “Guys, it’s not a cage,” said Janet in disbelief, as Al finished one of the last large barrier boards. “Look inside. Look at the buttons.”

  They all peered in.

  Sarah gasped. “It’s an elevator!”

  The group was silent for a long moment. Even Al had taken a break from removing the final large board at the bottom of their new discovery. They stared at the row of circular brass buttons on the far wall of the cage, which was indeed, quite clearly now, a rather ornate turn-of-the-century elevator car. The numbers were elegantly carved into the brass, and legible even from their current distance. But what really struck Sam, and the others, into a prolonged state of silence, more than even the sheer impossibility of finding an elevator in the basement of a basement-less building, was the fact that there were not merely one, nor two numbered buttons, but twelve.

  four

  No one said anything, but Sam reached for and found Sarah’s hand, clutching it for support. While he had dreamed as a child of finding hidden passageways, as all children do, Sam found he wasn’t quite prepared for actually discovering one. His heart beat faster, but he couldn’t determine whether it was from excitement or fear.

  “You know, it’s not like this could be functional,” Vaughn argued, breaking the silence and gesturing to the elevator car. “I mean, what’s more likely—that someone installed an old replica down here for safe keeping, or that it actually goes twelve stories down.”

  “Oh, down!” exclaimed Janet. “I was trying to figure out how we missed an adjacent eleven-story building.”

  Vaughn blinked. “You’re kidding.”

  “Yes,” Janet admitted. And after a pause, defensively: “I’m really quite funny.”

  Al stepped forward and tried opening the gate. He figured out the mechanism, and it became clear there were two gates, perfectly aligned, one connected to the walls of the room, and the other to th
e car itself. He slid both gates to one side, allowing entry, and entered.

  “Wait! Dude.” Sam placed an arm on Al’s shoulder across the divide. “That can’t be attached to anything anymore. It could fall straight down. And besides, I told you, power doesn’t even get turned on for a few days.”

  Al said nothing, but gestured upward. Sam poked his head into the elevator car, and saw a dim amber light glowing above the number “12.”

  “That’s…not possible,” was Sam’s eventual, paradoxical response.

  Sarah peeked in to see the light as well. “Well, this doesn’t make sense anyway. Shouldn’t the floors be ‘B1,’ ‘B2,’ and all that? Wouldn’t the numbers increase as you get deeper?”

  “She’s right, Al,” Sam agreed. “Why would they call the floor we’re on ‘12,’ if we’re at ground level? Below ground level, even.”

  “Guys,” said Al, offering a helpless, open wave with his arms. “I don’t have any answers here at all. This is your baby, Sam. But we’re definitely on the twelfth floor according to these numbers, which means there’s eleven floors beneath us. I say we grab those party lights and check them out.”

  Sarah shot Sam a panicked look, unmistakable even when obscured by the spotlighted shadows of the room. There’s no hurry, she seemed to be pleading. Let’s go upstairs and talk about this. But her boyfriend’s unease had melted away, and he now seemed drunk with curiosity. Sam’s eyes had opened wide at the revelation of the lighted number, and had stayed wide, joined now by a goofy grin. While Sarah may have been thinking this is dangerous, Sam was thinking this is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. Which, admittedly, made Sarah a little jealous by comparison.