EiqffTEB/
It was fun at first.
Where's Casey? Casey in the kitchen?
Nope.
Casey in the living room?
Unh-unh. Casey in the shed?
Then it stopped being fun abruptly.
Casey in the basement.
Oh, shit.
There was a little light on the cellar stairs filtering down from the
first-floor windows, but you can imagine how far that got me. Not even
off the stairs. And from there on it was a dark such as I'd never
experienced before and hope never to experience again. I could almost
feel my pupils widening, struggling to accommodate to the idea that
this was a whole new ball game for human eyesight.
For a while all I could do was stand and wait. It was wait or grope
and I didn't feel like groping. Leave it to Casey, I thought. Down
here it was scary. Not like traipsing through the bedrooms. Down here
you could fall on your ass and die on the flat of an axe or the tines
of a pitchfork. It made me worry a little about that sound I'd heard
earlier.
I must have waited five minutes on the stairs. It never got much
better than a dull gray, filled with shapes of solid black. I was glad
we'd explored earlier, otherwise I'd never have known that heap of
debris was just that or been able to recognize the huge frozen
man-shape of the boiler for a boiler. I'd have turned and ran.
It was bad enough to take a step forward and feel spiderwebs along your
face and neck. Bad enough to kick something rag soft and feel it curl
around your foot like the tiny fingers of a child. Bad enough to smell
the smells down there. You didn't need big amorphous shapes to unhinge
you any further. But there they were anyway.
And I thought all the while I was upstairs, she's been down here.
No way. You are crazy, Case. A crazy case. Rafferty was right. More
guts than brains. Infinitely more.
So get into it, I thought. If she can, so can you. Get a little
crazy. Laugh. Giggle a little, like Kim. Kim locked away in the
closet. Wish I hadn't done that. Sort of cruel. Like this is cruel.
Get into it, will you? Play bogeyman.
'I'm coming to get you, Casey.'
Voice like a dying owl. More scared than scary.
'Where are you-oooo?'
No sound. Just smells. The smell of something rotten. I thought of
the mice upstairs. Dead mouse somewhere. I stepped slowly, groping.
Didn't want to grope. Had to. Hands groping, feet groping too inside
the shoes. Small easy steps to the worktable. Past the boiler (see?
It's just a boiler). No Casey behind it. Piles of sawdust ahead of me
like giant anthills. Feel around for the worktable. Greasy-feeling.
Old sour wood. Used too long, too long between usages. Peer
underneath, eyes open wide, full throttle. Just paint cans. No
Casey.
I kicked over a box of nails, heard them rattle across the floor. Good
work, I thought. Makes walking more treacherous than it already is.
Great. A genius at spelunking, every step a masterpiece.
A pile of something in the right-hand corner. Can't remember what it
is, sure as hell can't see. Small steps toward it, hands held out in
front of me, waving a little. Like Frankenstein's monster, just
learning how to walk. I could feel something slippery underfoot, a
grease spot or something.
Rags. A pile of old dirty rags. Even Casey wouldn't hide in there.
The other side of the room, then. Toward the back of the house.
A faint breeze coming from that direction. The smell of rot moving
along with it.
I shuffled past the stairway and tried to see inside it through the
stilts and crossbeams. It was way too dark.
'Casey?'
No answer. Maybe you had to say gotcha. Damn stupid game.
'Gotcha!'
Then suddenly I had it. I knew where she was. I was sure of it.
The grandfather clock.
I'd noticed the first time we were down that the clock was the cabinet
type. You could hide in there. And if I'd noticed it, then you could
bet that so did Casey. I thought it would be just like her to find the
only item in the house that could remotely be called elegant and use
that for a hideout. She was nuts but she had class. It was the clock,
all right.
Now if I could only find the damn thing.
If anything, it was even blacker here. The dim beam of light from
upstairs played out completely. It couldn't turn the corners, couldn't
slip through the stairs and crossbeams, wasted itself on cans of paint
and piles of rags and looming hulks of whatnot. Where are you when I
need you, moon? You could hardly tell where the wall began at first.
It was just black. My dilated pupils expanded one last time and then
gave up, rolled over in mute surrender.
I proceeded like a blind man. Used my other senses. Touch. (Cobwebs.)
Smell. (Dampness, rot.) Hearing. (Somebody in here needs walking
lessons.)
a. 0 . < , _
Casey? Out of the clock, Casey.
Silence. I guessed she was going to make me work for it.
Something crawled across my face, and I almost lost it right then and
there. I'm pretty sure I screamed. I know I batted at my face until
my jaw hurt and I felt something wet and cool smear across my cheek.
I hate spiders. Spiders and snakes.
