“Beasly,” said Abbie, in her best drill-sergeant voice, “you get right up there and get that thing untied.”
“Yes’m,” Beasly said. He was a gangling, loose-jointed man who didn’t look too bright.
“And see you be careful with it. I don’t want it all scratched up.”
“Yes’m,” said Beasly.
“I’ll help,” Taine offered.
The two climbed into the truck and began unlashing the old monstrosity.
“It’s heavy,” Abbie warned. “You two be careful of it.”
“Yes’m,” said Beasly.
It was heavy and it was an awkward thing to boot, but Beasly and Taine horsed it around to the back of the house and up the stoop and through the back door and down the basement stairs, with Abbie following eagle-eyed behind them, alert to the slightest scratch.
The basement was Taine’s combination workshop and display room for antiques. One end of it was filled with benches and with tools and machinery and boxes full of odds and ends and piles of just plain junk were scattered everywhere. The other end housed a collection of rickety chairs, sagging bedposts, ancient highboys, equally ancient lowboys, old coal scutties painted gold, heavy iron fireplace screens and a lot of other stuff that he had collected from far and wide for as little as he could possibly pay for it.
He and Beasly set the TV down carefully on the floor. Abbie watched them narrowly from the stairs.
“Why, Hiram,” she said, excited, “you put a ceiling in the basement. It looks a whole lot better.”
“Huh?” asked Taine.
“The ceiling. I said you put in a ceiling.”
Taine jerked his head up and what she said was true. There was a ceiling there, but he’d never put it in.
He gulped a little and lowered his head, then jerked it quickly up and had another look. The ceiling was still there.
“It’s not that block stuff,” said Abbie with open admiration. “You can’t see any joints at all. How did you manage it?”
Taine gulped again and got back his voice. “Something I thought up,” he told her weakly.
“You’ll have to come over and do it to our basement. Our basement is a sight. Beasly put the ceiling in the amusement room, but Beasly is all thumbs.”
“Yes’m,” Beasly said contritely.
“When I get the time,” Taine promised, ready to promise anything to get them out of there.
“You’d have a lot more time,” Abbie told him acidly, “if you weren’t gadding around all over the country buying up that broken-down old furniture that you call antiques. Maybe you can fool the city folks when they come driving out here, but you can’t fool me.”
“I make a lot of money out of some of it,” Taine told her calmly.
“And lose your shirt on the rest of it,” she said.
“I got some old china that is just the kind of stuff you are looking for,” said Taine. “Picked it up just a day or two ago. Made a good buy on it. I can let you have it cheap.”
“I’m not interested,” she said and clamped her mouth tight shut.
She turned around and went back up the stairs.
“She’s on the prod today,” Beasly said to Taine. “It will be a bad day. It always is when she starts early in the morning.”
“Don’t pay attention to her,” Taine advised.
“I try not to, but it ain’t possible. You sure you don’t need a man? I’d work for you cheap.”
“Sorry, Beasly. Tell you what—come over some night soon and we’ll play some checkers.”
“I’ll do that, Hiram. You’re the only one who ever asks me over. All the others ever do is laugh at me or shout.”
Abbie’s voice came bellowing down the stairs. “Beasly, are you coming? Don’t go standing there all day. I have rugs to beat.”
“Yes’m,” said Beasly, starting up the stairs.
At the truck, Abbie turned on Taine with determination: “You’ll get that set fixed right away? I’m lost without it.”
“Immediately,” said Taine.
He stood and watched them off, then looked around for Towser, but the dog had disappeared. More than likely he was at that wood-chuck hole again, in the woods across the road. Gone off, thought Taine, without his breakfast, too.
The teakettle was boiling furiously when Taine got back to the kitchen. He put coffee in the maker and poured in the water. Then he went downstairs.
The ceiling was still there.
He turned on all the lights and walked around the basement, staring up at it.
It was a dazzling white material and it appeared to be translucent— up to a point, that is. One could see into it, but he could not see through it. And there were no signs of seams. It was fitted neatly and tightly around the water pipes and the ceiling lights.
Taine stood on a chair and rapped his knuckles against it sharply. It gave out a bell-like sound, almost exactly as if he’d rapped a fingernail against a thinly-blown goblet.
He got down off the chair and stood there, shaking his head. The whole thing was beyond him. He had spent part of the evening repairing Banker Stevens’ lawn mower and there’d been no ceiling then.
He rummaged in a box and found a drill. He dug out one of the smaller bits and fitted it in the drill. He plugged in the cord and climbed on the chair again and tried the bit against the ceiling. The whirling steel slid wildly back and forth. It didn’t make a scratch. He switched off the drill and looked closely at the ceiling. There was not a mark upon it. He tried again, pressing against the drill with all his strength. The bit went
Taine stepped down off the chair. He found another bit and fitted it in the drill and went slowly up the stairs, trying to think. But he was too confused to think. That ceiling should not be up there, but there it was. And unless he were stark, staring crazy and forgetful as well, he had not put it there.
In the living room, he folded back one corner of the worn and faded carpeting and plugged in the drill. He knelt and started drilling in the floor. The bit went smoothly through the old oak flooring, then stopped. He put on more pressure and the drill spun without getting any bite.
And there wasn’t supposed to be anything underneath the wood! Nothing to stop a drill. Once through the flooring, it should have dropped into the space between the joists.
Taine disengaged the drill and laid it to one side.
He went into the kitchen and the coffee now was ready. But before he poured it, he pawed through a cabinet drawer and found a pencil flashlight. Back in the living room he shone the light into the hole that the drill had made.
There was something shiny at the bottom of the hole.
He went back to the kitchen and found some day-old doughnuts and poured a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table, eating doughnuts and wondering what to do.
There didn’t appear, for the moment at least, much that he could do. He could putter around all day trying to figure out what had happened to his basement and probably not be any wiser than he was right now.
His money-making Yankee soul rebelled against such a horrid waste of time.
There was, he told himself, that maple four-poster that he should be getting to before some unprincipled city antique dealer should run afoul of it. A piece like that, he figured, if a man had any luck at all, should sell at a right good price. He might turn a handsome profit on it if he only worked it right.
Maybe, he thought, he could turn a trade on it. There was the table model TV set that he had traded a pair of ice skates for last winter. Those folks out Woodman way might conceivably be happy to trade the bed for a reconditioned TV set, almost like brand new. After all, they probably weren’t using the bed and, he hoped fervently, had no idea of the value of it.
He ate the doughnuts hurriedly and gulped down an extra cup of coffee. He fixed a plate of scraps for Towser and set it outside the door. Then he went down into the basement and got the table TV set and put it in the pickup truck. As an afterthought, he added a reconditioned shotgun which would be perfectly all right if a man were careful
