“Uh-uh,” Jenn said. “I’m not going.”
“You’ll feel better if you do, I think.”
Nick agreed. “I know I’d feel better if I saw it. Let’s all check it out. Safety in numbers.”
Reluctantly, Jenn nodded. But as the key turned in the lock a couple minutes later she said, “I don’t believe we’re doing this.”
“Well, last week I wouldn’t have believed we’d hold a seance,” Kirstin pointed out.
Jenn opened the door. Under her breath she mumbled, “Don’t go in the basement.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s creepy,” Nick said, staring at the bat. “What do you think it means?”
“Means?” Brian repeated. “I’d say it means they killed a bat and nailed it to a wall. Just a guess.”
Kirstin laughed, squeezing him tighter. “Very literal of you.”
“If her aunt was a witch,” Nick said, ignoring his friend, “presumably this has some meaning. It’s a totem or some channeled natural power or ward.”
Brian laughed. “You been studying witchcraft yourself?”
“No, I just watch a lot of TV.”
“C’mon.” Jenn smiled and stepped forward, braving the first step. But when she felt around for a light switch, there was none on the stairway wall. “No lights,” she announced. Who didn’t have lights in their basement?
“Maybe there’s one at the bottom,” Brian suggested. “Do you have a flashlight here?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Jenn replied. “But we could light a couple candles.”
Kirstin volunteered to get them and ran back to the front room. She returned a minute later with four tapered candles from the fireplace mantel and a book of matches. Jenn held hers out to be lit, then started down the stairs.
The four candles barely cut the darkness as they moved into the bowels of the house, the flickering flames reflecting off the narrow stairway walls just enough so that they could see the next step down. And then, without warning, there were no more steps. They were in the basement.
Nick held up his candle, and the beams of the unfinished ceiling were revealed. He pointed at a string hanging down just in front of them.
“There,” he said. “Classic basement lighting. The bare-bulb model.”
Brian pulled the string, and the basement grew brighter. “I can’t believe they didn’t put in a switch,” he complained.
“Actually . . .” Nick walked over to the slat of wood that served as a banister and pointed out the second string that hung from the light and then followed the wood most of the way up. It was tucked through small circular guides. “They did. We just didn’t see it.”
“Well, now we know for next time,” Kirstin said.
“Next time?” Jenn answered. “I’m not coming down here again.”
“What, you don’t want to make use of this amazing fruit cellar?” Nick had walked over to some shelves where a mess of mason jars were stacked, picked up one filled with red sauce and another with something green and solid. “Check it out,” he said with a laugh. “You’ve got homemade canned tomato sauce and . . . pickles or something. I think your dinner menu is really going to expand.”
“Yeah, how long have these been down here?” Jenn made a face. “They could be fifty years old.”
Kirstin spoke up. “I thought canned stuff lasts for, like, ever?”
Jenn shook her head. “They usually date them. They’re good for a couple years, I think, but not forever.”
Nick looked at the tomato sauce lid and his face screwed up. “Oh,” he said. He held the jar up to the light briefly before quickly setting it back. He did the same to the pickle jar, then reached out to look at another jar from a different shelf. The contents of this one were darker, brownish. Maybe mushrooms, Jenn thought, as she saw him look inside.
“Fuck,” Nick said finally.
“What’s the matter?” Jenn asked.
“I don’t think you’re going to be eating this shit.”
“What is it?” Kirstin asked.
He held out the jar and slowly rotated it.
Brian whistled. “Is that an . . . ?”
“Eyeball,” Nick said. “It’s a jar of eyeballs.”
One floated to touch the glass just right, and Kirstin shrieked as it seemed to look at her. “Ewwwwwww!”
Nick put the jar back.
“That wasn’t tomato sauce either, was it?” Jenn asked quietly.
Nick shook his head. “The label says blood.”
“And the pickles?”
Nick made a face. “Frogs.”
Brian laughed. “Blood, eyeballs, frogs? Proper little witches’ cupboard down here.”
Jenn nodded. “All ingredients for spells, I suppose.”
Kirstin’s voice held a tremor. “Does it say . . . what
Nick shook his head and picked up another jar. “Anyone for ‘Bone Powder, Ground at the Hour of the Solstice’?”
“Pass,” Brian answered.
Kirstin stepped forward and held up her candle to illuminate the jars better. Some held clear liquid, others the leaves of a single plant suspended in yellow liquid. Still others were dense with what she had to assume was blood. The rest held more macabre contents.
“Is that . . . ?” She pointed.
Brian stepped up next to her and lifted the jar. “Human finger, 1993,” he said. “Nice, that they dated it. I wonder what the expiration period is.”
“Gross!” Kirstin said. She backed away from the shelves.
“I have a better one,” Nick said, and he held up a different jar.
There was a small form inside. It was barely an inch long, and it floated in a clear broth. Jenn could see the sprouts of tiny arms and legs. A head was clearly visible, and she supposed the dark spots were eyes. A chill ran down her back as she considered how her aunt might have come into the possession of a tiny fetus.
“Put it back,” she said quietly and began to walk farther into the basement, away from the jars. “Let’s keep going.”
Kirstin joined her, and soon the guys did as well.
The rest of the basement seemed typical: boxes of forgotten storage were stacked against cement walls, an old yellow refrigerator stood in one corner, its door open to ensure it wouldn’t grow mold. A modern washer and dryer took up the wall next to the furnace, which looked to be of the same vintage as the kitchen appliances upstairs. Original.
Brian bent down to look at the rusted green main box of the furnace and asked, “Do you have to shovel coal into this or what?”
“We haven’t had it on yet,” Jenn said. “Maybe it doesn’t even work.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” he agreed.
They walked around the room, pulling the strings on two more bare-bulb lights and finding old furniture, a coat rack and more bric-a-brac before Kirstin discovered a hallway.
“Where do you think this goes?” she called, and the others stepped from various points in the basement to see what she was talking about. At the far end of the room, hidden by a clothesline still festooned with old laundry, Kirstin fronted a dark opening. It was lost to the shadows unless you stood right before it. Which, presently, the foursome did.
“Let’s find out,” Brian volunteered.
The cement walls changed to rough-hewn stone as they all stepped through the narrow arch. The cement of the floor also changed. Jenn relit Brian’s candle, as he had blown it out when they’d first found the lights. The passageway looked to have no electric illumination.
They moved several yards with the light of the basement growing fainter behind them. The tunnel got increasingly tight, and Jenn found her hips bumping Nick’s as they walked. He had to duck his head several times as
