A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

  I shrugged, but I didn’t believe him. I thought he did believe in it. All of it.

  “I still don’t understand why Grandpa Samuel sent you away to school after your mom died,” I said, leaning over the bowl to meet a chopsticks-load of noodles. Relentless pursuit.

  “Things were hard for Grandpa. He had Serena to take care of.”

  “Serena said you were taking care of her.”

  My father shrugged again as he picked at his soup.

  “If you were sixteen or whatever,” I pressed, “and you were taking care of Serena, why would Grandpa send you away? Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to keep you around? It would be less work for him.”

  “It’s complicated,” he said.

  “It doesn’t sound complicated,” I countered. “It sounds like you’re leaving something out.”

  “Like what?”

  I stopped eating and squinted at him.

  “Grandma Isobel was sick, and then she died,” I said impatiently. “Grandpa Samuel sent you away after that, and you won’t talk about any of it with me. Serena said your mother had Lou Gehrig’s disease. What exactly is that? I mean, I’ve heard of it, but . . .”

  My father licked his lips and sighed. He set down his spoon and chopsticks, picked up his napkin.

  “ALS,” he said. “It’s a degenerative nerve disease. It destroys everything in your body but your brain, so you’re completely aware of what’s happening—you feel all the pain, you see your body shutting down piece by piece, entombing you in a worthless shell—but there’s nothing you can do to stop it. There’s no cure; there’s no treatment. You just have to wait until enough of you shuts down that you die.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Eventually you can’t move,” he continued. “You can barely breathe. You can’t swallow. But you can see, and you can feel, and you can think, and you can know. At some point you can’t clear your lungs of phlegm anymore. Your lungs slowly fill with liquid, and you drown.”

  He looked into his soup.

  “My mother was terrified of drowning.”

  I, too, looked into my soup. I filled my spoon with broth and lifted it to my lips. I drank the broth.

  “I can’t imagine Mom ever dying at all, especially not when I’m sixteen,” I said. “So for your mom to die like that. It’s really sad.”

  We both looked up. My father met my eyes for the first time, and I saw a sadness in him.

  “Divorce isn’t quite as tragic as death,” he said.

  He had never used the D-word before. Its use at that moment struck me with another wave of sadness.

  “They’re kind of the same,” I said, clinging to my point. “Divorce and death.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “The ending of something,” I said, pushing ahead with my thesis. “Your mother left you. Now Mom is leaving you.”

  “I’m here to get Grandpa to sell the house so we can have some cash.”

  “I don’t think that’s why you’re here,” I blurted out almost involuntarily. And I said it loud enough that the Vietnamese people who ran the restaurant all stopped to look at us. My father set down his eating utensils again and got a cold look on his face. (When he was holding a piece of wood, his face was soft; when he was mad at me, his face was so hard.)

  “You’re here for Isobel,” I said in a loud whisper. “You came to find her.”

  “Is that so?” he asked flatly.

  “You think she’s still here. I saw you waiting for her in the ballroom. Two nights ago.”

  He was ice. He was carved stone. If he hadn’t blinked, I would have thought he had been frozen by Medusa.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.

  “You do,” I said. “I know you do. You haven’t lost your faith; you’re just trying to shove it down. I’m sure of it.”

  “Why are you sure?”

  “Because I’ve seen a lot of things in the past few days. A lot of things. And one of the things I saw was your mother dancing in the ballroom.”

  He said nothing.

  “She was dancing last night,” I went on. “I swear, she was so close I could have touched her. I saw her, Dad. And I don’t think you want Grandpa to sign over the house until you see her, too.”

  He hesitated half a second at most, and then his hand flashed across the table and smacked my face. Not hard, but loud and startling. The older Vietnamese man turned down the volume on the TV. They were concerned, wondering if they needed to intervene.

  I felt the sting, but I didn’t stop.

  “You’re waiting for her,” I said. “That’s why you’re here. You’re waiting for her in the ballroom.”

  He averted his eyes, stood, and went to the counter. He paid in cash, returned to the table, and dropped two dollars.

  “Let’s go,” he said, grinding his molars until his jaw muscles bulged.

  I looked at my soup. There was more goodness in my bowl. Steak and brisket and onion slices. Noodles and Thai basil and cilantro and broth. I didn’t know what strange spices flavored it, but I could dive into that broth and swim for a very long time.

  I was angry with my father for slapping me. Angry for his not seeing the truth that I saw. But maybe he wasn’t ready yet. Maybe I needed more information to convince him. I stood up dutifully and followed him outside; we crossed the parking lot toward the supermarket. I stopped when we reached the sidewalk, and it took my father two steps to realize I wasn’t next to him.

  “I need some money,” I said, holding out my hand.

  He turned and looked at me, yet he didn’t ask the normal parental question—“Why?” Instead, he took out his wallet and handed me a twenty. I didn’t retract my hand when the bill hit it; I left it out there to extort more. He gave me another twenty. I folded the bills and placed them in my pocket and I turned away.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I have some business to take care of,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  He considered a moment, then shrugged and headed for the supermarket.

  I went to Sears. I found the camping department and purchased a heavy-duty flashlight and a headlamp—the kind rock climbers and spelunkers use. I bought what fit into my budget; it didn’t have the fancy flashing feature or the amber night-vision option so my eyes wouldn’t dilate if I had to go outside the tent to pee at night. When we met up at the car, my father didn’t ask me what I’d gotten; we didn’t speak at all.

  When we got back to the house, I didn’t help him with the groceries. I didn’t wait for his apology, which I knew would come. I went straight to the ballroom, strapped on my headlamp, batteried-up my flashlight, and made my way to the hidden shaft.

  – 23 –

  THE BASEMENT

  I didn’t have a wooden stake, but I did have a head of garlic in my pocket that I had stolen from the kitchen. The flashlight I bought came with one of those cheap carabiners, clearly labeled “not for climbing,” so I used it to hang the flashlight from my belt loop. I reached into the shaft and grabbed hold of a rung with both my hands, then I slung one foot out into the void and found a purchase. I hesitated; it wasn’t too late for me to back out. There was nothing below me. Less than nothing. I clicked on my headlamp; its feeble light was swallowed by the darkness, and I regretted not having extorted more money from my father to buy the fifty-nine-dollar version. I took a breath, swung my other leg over the threshold, and placed it on a rung. I reached out, lifted the hatch into place, and pulled it shut, leaving me in total blackness except for my headlamp. I clicked on the flashlight hanging from my belt, and downward I went.

  The shaft was musty and hot and sweet smelling. The walls, which were constructed of smooth wood, were covered with something slick and unappealing. Every few feet, I turned my head to shine the light around. It didn’t matter if the thing that went down the shaft the previous night was a ghost or a person, something went down there; I was sure there was another exit. About twenty
feet down, I noticed a lip on the wall behind me. It seemed like a hatch door similar to the one I had entered through, but, when I pushed on it, it didn’t open, so I continued on. As I descended, rung by rung, the air grew more stale and more foul smelling. When I looked up, I saw nothing. The walls around me were blank. Below, more nothing.

  I was sweating with fear, but I was good at hiding it from myself; I blamed the humidity. I looked between my legs as I descended, and my flashlight glinted on something below me. A gear or something. A few feet further down, I looked again; I saw a floor with a pulley bolted to it. A big pulley, eight or ten inches in diameter, lying on its side. I realized I was in a dumbwaiter shaft. The dumbwaiter wasn’t operable, obviously; there was no cable attached to the pulley to make it run. I didn’t know if it had ever worked. The hatch in the ballroom wasn’t what you’d think of as a dumbwaiter door—one of those horizontal double doors like you see in the movies—so it may never have been put into commission. But that’s what it was. A dumbwaiter shaft.

  I reached the compartment roof and tapped my toe on it. I tested it with some weight. I couldn’t imagine it was sitting at the bottom of the shaft, but it was hard to judge how far down I’d climbed. The dumbwaiter seemed solid enough, so I set my other foot on it and gave it most of my weight. I held on to the rungs to be safe, and then bounced up and down a bit to get a feel for my security. With a loud bang, the compartment let go beneath me. My own plunging weight tore my hands from the rungs; I toppled backward and fell.

  Down into the darkness. I only had time to picture the gruesomeness of my demise as I was soon to be impaled by rusted steel bolts and rods and bleed to death in a dumbwaiter shaft, my bones broken and shattered. But then I heard a horrible screeching sound and felt an intense braking sensation. I did not slam into the bottom of the shaft in an explosion of splintered wood and flesh. With a great groan of metal fatigue, the dumbwaiter compartment simply stopped.

  Somewhere in the fall I had lost my headlamp. I unhooked the flashlight from my belt loop and aimed it upward. The light flickered through the fine dust kicked up by my fall. And still, I marveled, I was not dead. Those Riddell House designers—God bless their souls—they had put a braking device in their dumbwaiter, a narrowing of the shaft or something. I wasn’t dead!

  I was on my back and contorted in a grotesque way in the narrow shaft. I tried my best to look around and right myself, but everything hurt. I noticed a mechanism on the wall near my head—a latch—so I reached behind and blindly grabbed at it. Two horizontal doors slid open magically like a mouth. I climbed out and onto the floor outside the shaft. It was quite dark, but not impossibly so, and my flashlight offered something. I glanced around as I got to my feet. I was in the basement.

  I found a light switch in the room. It twisted like an old kitchen timer, and a naked bulb sparked to life above my head, casting a dim brown glow. I didn’t know when electricity was put in the place, but it had never been updated. There were wires and porcelain knobs everywhere, and they looked dangerous. The room was maybe thirty by forty feet and remarkably empty and clean. I saw a door, and I used it to reach another room, a bit smaller, but clearly designed with an agenda: meat hooks were suspended from the ceiling, and there was a drain and spigot in the center of the room. Along two sides were long butcher block tables. Business had been conducted there, obviously: I found a rack of old carving knives, cleavers, tenderizing hammers, and handsaws, to which my healthy imagination added the sound effects of saw cutting through bone. I aimed my flashlight at steps that led to something resembling cellar doors to the outside. I tried the doors; they didn’t open.

  I continued through the basement, making my way to another room with a workbench and tools and a wall of supplies in neat wooden boxes. The handyman’s workroom. And there, leaning in the corner behind a tool chest, I noticed an ax. I approached it warily, although I didn’t suppose it would leap up and attack me by itself. I touched its worn wooden handle, dark with the stains of many hands, and its intimidating blade, which showed the grain of a sharpening wheel on it. Was it the ax that Grandpa Samuel had used to cleave the hand from the newel?

  The next room housed a gigantic iron boiler, its arms sprawling from it like those of an octopus, connecting with a central steam shaft that ran the length of a dark corridor, which must have been eighty feet long, or who even knew how to estimate in the darkness? Adjacent to the boiler room was a smaller room with a coal-fired furnace, opposite which was a coal chute about six feet wide, and a smooth concrete slab that angled up to more cellar doors; yet those, too, were locked from the outside. I wondered if I would ever be able to find my way out.

  But I knew I would, because there’s always another room.

  If I made horror movies, I would make one in a basement like that. Dozens of little rooms, all with stone floors and thick brick walls. Cold, like a catacomb. Ceilings of irregular heights, heavy pipes randomly crossing through passageways, an unexpected step down that jammed my heel and snapped my teeth shut, a five-way intersection, and occasionally the grunt of an animal that could have been a rat. Or maybe it was a Minotaur. That place had all the makings of hell. Including the rickety staircase that led out but had collapsed into a pile of rotten wood. Part of it was still intact, but when I pulled at it, it groaned and gave way and crumbled with a sickening clatter. I looked up, and, oh, that door was so far away! I saw the crack of light far above my head and I heard voices and I smelled something good. I smelled cookies, which I knew Serena was cooking while gliding about the kitchen with her blue toes. I shouted for help, but no one answered; no one came.

  When I realized that the only exits to the outside were securely blocked, and the only staircase I’d found to the inside of the house was inaccessible, I started to panic, but I worked to keep calm. I could always go back the way I came. I swept the area with my flashlight and noticed something shiny winking at me. I cautiously approached the dark corner, which was partially obscured by old wooden crates. I shoved the crates aside, and when I flashed my light in the brick corner near the floor, something glinted.

  I worked my way into the corner and crouched down. Near the floor was a cubbyhole of sorts. Not very big at all, maybe the size of my hand. It was hard for me to squeeze past the wooden crates, which seemed to multiply as I made my way toward the cove as if they had some need to protect it. Still, I wanted to see, so I reached past the crates with my arm at full extension. I got my hand to the lip of the pocket in the wall, and I stretched farther, turning my face away so I could reach a bit more, and I felt something cold and hard. A ring? I was able to tip it on edge and slip my finger into it and retrieve it. I brought it to my face and held the light to it. It was my father’s wedding ring.

  Excited by the discovery, I worked to shove the clustered crates aside. I pulled them apart to make space so I could get closer to the trove. I dug my hand into the space and found something else: Serena’s cake server. And another thing: my missing watch. And another: a silver locket on a chain. I held my flashlight up to the locket and fingered it open. It contained two small, faded photographs of children. A boy and a girl. Jones and Serena.

  Someone had been hiding these things here. But who?

  I thought I heard a thump from close behind me and turned quickly, flashing my light around the room. I was startled enough that I dropped the locket. I quickly stood and prepared myself for battle, though I had no idea what against. I pocketed my father’s wedding ring and my watch; I didn’t worry about the other things. It was time for me to get out of there.

  The dumbwaiter. I could climb the ladder in the shaft up to the ballroom. I rushed back through the rooms. Through the intersection, past the long corridor. Up the step, around the corner. I was almost there, and I picked up the pace in anticipation of finding the empty room with the dumbwaiter, and around another corner and—pow!—I cracked my head on an iron pipe so hard, my legs buckled. My flashlight dropped with a clatter and went out as I collapsed on the floor o
f the basement. I didn’t even know if I could see straight because it was so dark. My head was rocked with pain, hard and throbbing, and my jaw hurt and my eye sockets ached and there was a ringing in my ears.

  I’d been hit that hard once before, I remember thinking at that moment. In fourth grade, I got hit square in the face with a football—a perfect spiral thrown by Kenny, whose last name escaped me. I remember wanting so badly to remember Kenny’s last name. But in my wooziness, everything else came back to me about the fourth grade—all of the details. He’d launched a long ball, but I wasn’t looking, and then someone called out, “Ball!” and I turned to see an immaculately spiraling orb, so pretty, arcing toward me with the inevitability of a meteor; it hit me on the bridge of my nose and knocked me backward four feet. Blood was everywhere. When I staggered into the class, my shirt covered with blood, my teacher was mad that she had to take me to the nurse’s office instead of giving the class the spelling test. She gave wicked hard spelling tests that everyone would fail and she would yell at them for not studying, but I aced her tests every time because I read a lot of books and didn’t even really have to study, even though I did, and I knew that if you study for a spelling test even a little, you can ace it.

  She took me to the nurse’s office and did that sigh-groan thing disappointed adults do, shaking her head.

  “There’s no point in giving it now,” she said to me about the evil spelling test she had so looked forward to administering.

  We were alone for a minute, waiting for the nurse to call my mother so she could come pick me up from school and take me to the hospital for X-rays to make sure my skull hadn’t cracked open.

  “You can still give it to them,” I said of the test, trying to make my teacher, Mrs. Minorchio, feel better.