Some nights, whatever was scaring Simon so much would be so terrible that he’d bang on that locked door until I came to open it for him. I just couldn’t stand to hear my brother bawling against the door he could do nothing against. “PleeeeeeeeeeEEEASE… PLEeeeaaaaasee….” he’d cry out, but Everett would never come and unlock the door. You can be sure, though, Simon would get whipped with a belt the next morning for his carrying on.
Mama, I think, was too scared of Everett to come and unlock the door herself. She’d tell me, with as strong a voice as she could, sometimes behind red eyes glazed over with wetness, that Everett knew best and we shouldn’t question his methods. He was a good provider for this family and we had to abide by his rules. Just the same, she’d also make sure that light switch was turned on. She’d try and reason with Simon about staying down there and not making Everett angry, and I heard him trying to explain to her, as she cooked dinner one night, why he couldn’t stay down there in the basement. Just as every other time he brought it up, Everett intruded. This time, he rushed into the room and grabbed Simon by the scruff of the shirt, got right in his face and yelled that his talk was all nonsense. It was all in his head. He should grow up and try to act like a man for once.
Get in line, he told him. Get in line.
2.
The morning after my first experience with the skittering wave of black creatures in our basement, Simon and I headed for the field behind our house. The sky was a brilliant blue dome above our heads and the only sounds that could be heard were a slight rustle of the sweet grass beneath our feet as we walked and a similar rustle of the sycamores and willows off in the distance towards the boundaries of the island power compound. We set out for Daddy’s old work house, beyond the field just this side of that power plant. It was an old stone building on Predis field that Granddaddy had paid rent on some years back. Old man Predis let them use the building because he’d had no use for it. When he died it went to Granddaddy out of common law because Predis had had no living relatives. The rest of his property went back to the township and his estate fell into the public coffers. The workhouse, somehow, stayed with us, maybe as a helping hand from town council for the tougher times when the electrical work went appreciated but under-utilized. Likewise, that stone house went to Daddy after Granddaddy’s death and he continued to store his electrical supplies there. He’d tinker around with power boxes and the like in that old sagging building, always had something on the go, always had one or two projects to keep him busy. Simon and I hadn’t been out this way in quite some time. Least, not this far towards the compound. The last occasion that Simon wandered this way was three and a half years ago, the afternoon of the funeral. Just like that day, I knew he must have a lot to say.
People like Simon need to warm up before they say much of anything. Their innermost thoughts take a while to cook, a bit like a meal in the oven. He didn’t offer these up too often, but when he did it required a certain frame of mind on his part—and a certain patience on mine. Setting the stage with an appropriate backdrop for him to begin his thoughts was also needed. I suspected that Daddy’s old shed was to be an adequate location and this long walk out there was the path to his ‘certain frame of mind’.
He began telling me the straightforward bits, the stuff I’d been curious about for the better part of two years—and the answers to questions which were inevitable after last night’s ‘encounter’.
That first night, two years earlier, when Simon had blown up the stairs like a hurricane to Mama and Everett’s bedroom bawling like I’d never seen before was the first time he’d seen that throng of beady-looking things crawling out of the sump hole and into his bedroom. He’d heard them coming, that high-pitched squeal was quieter back then but still audible, certainly just as real. When he had pointed the flashlight Mama had given him in the direction of the shifting fabric hung over the closet doorway, he must have almost peed himself. There were just a few early on but, he told me, as the summer wore on, there came to be more and more black visitors each night.
They didn’t come when it was cool though. Simon found that out right away. Nor when it was too damp. I suppose the little critters didn’t care for the water. When the sump hole was filled up past the cement corridor that ran off into the ground outside the house, they stayed completely away, and Simon was able to rest easy. He learned quickly when they would be coming and when they wouldn’t. That noise they make as a collective brood, crawling through the corridor and up the sump hole into the space under the stairs was a good indicator and Simon eventually heard it in his sleep so often that he sometimes couldn’t tell the dream sound from the real one. He’d wake up in a panic, his heart pounding with the prospect that the creatures were returning twice in one night. But the fates were easy on this one point: the creatures only came once a night. One visit per night was it and after it cooled off to a certain point, if they hadn’t come yet, they wouldn’t.
Naturally, after Everett had taken his frustrations out on Simon for his crying and carrying on that first week, Simon felt that he was utterly alone in his situation. His was truly a secret that no soul wanted to hear. Of course, he never tried to tell me. But I suppose that, like he had always done, especially in the time since Daddy had left us, he was trying to look out for his little brother. Like the Fitzgerald brothers at school, this must have been another set of bullies he tried to shield me from. But unlike the teachers at school, Everett and even Mama, I didn’t dismiss his abnormal behaviour, the bags under his eyes, and all the small, thin cuts on his body as simply an inability to adjust to his father’s death. I knew something was going on.
Instead of taking the beatings from Everett, Simon grew wary of even attempting to make them all believe that there was something down there. Instead, he shut his mouth and retreated into a world of his own. He tried to fend off the hive with every breath he could muster. There had been just a few at first, so he tried to beat them and kill them as they marched forward on him in the dark of his room at night. I remember hearing the thump of the Louisville Slugger of Daddy’s, the one he’d actually gotten signed by Reggie Jackson himself on a trip to the mainland when the Yanks had played the Orioles at Memorial Stadium. He struck the wallboard and the cement block floor with that wooden bat early that summer, in a series of dull thuds in the middle of the quiet night. And I finally understood what Simon had been doing. Of course Everett raised a stink over that, so the thuds stopped the very next night. My brother didn’t want another beating, that’s for sure.
Simon continued to tackle the problem in various and inventive ways. At the time that he related these details to me I didn’t understand them all, but in retrospect, I see that he was indeed a smart and determined boy. He was quiet, that’s been said, but he was also decidedly meticulous. He tried everything to defend himself from these nightly visitors and he inevitably learned a great deal about them in the process.
Killing them didn’t seem to work. They only returned the next night in greater numbers. That, plus Everett’s threat to wallop Simon for his continued thuds in the basement each night compounded to force Simon into quieter methods.
At first he tried various ways of blocking the creatures from even getting into his room.
With Daddy’s tools, ‘borrowed’ from Everett’s steel toolbox, and some spare lumber from the woodpile out back by the pit, he built a wooden box to fit over the sump hole. The swarm chewed through that the first night. Then he waited until Everett was working late and welded together a small cylinder with Everett’s spare welding torch. He used the cylinder as a makeshift plug, whacking it into the corridor with a mallet. It worked for a few days until the water backed up around the foundation enough to settle in puddles around the exposed portion near the back screen door. Everett had been concerned about all the rain that week and he almost blew a gasket when he saw the standing water. The last thing he wanted to be doing was patching goddamn foundation leaks during his time off and if that water continued to gather
around the foundation, fine cracks would inevitably come next. He flew down the stairs to the sump hole in a fury one afternoon after his shift, because his first intuition was that the pump engine had seized. After all, he hadn’t heard it run in the night for more than a week of wet weather and he hadn’t given it the usual overhaul that spring. I thought for sure that Simon was going to be in for the beating of his life when Everett not only discovered the plugged up corridor but that Simon had been using his tools, his welding gear taken from his toolbox, to create the plug itself.
I don’t know what transpired in that half minute as Everett clambered down those squeaky basement stairs to Simon’s room, but when he got there the metal plug was nowhere to be found and there was a steady stream of water flowing into the sump hole where the engine was humming and sputtering away. He looked at Simon with this deep and cutting glare and knew the boy had been up to something but couldn’t pin it on him. I guess his exhaustion after a day of work had gotten the better of him because instead of raising his hand as he was prone to do, he went past Simon and got a beer from the cellar and went upstairs. He didn’t lay a hand on my brother...not that night.
Simon tried putting that plug in just before bed on nights when he expected the wave of creatures was going to pay a visit but he soon learned this would not work either. They must have spat something out of their mouths, he told me, some kind of toxic venom, because that same night Simon heard the high-pitched squeal from under the stairs, the room filled with a horrid stench. The sound grew and the stink intensified. It got so bad that Simon could barely open his eyes. His throat and his eyes stung and itched. He thought he would throw up. The creatures were there in the room then, surging up the walls as they had on many previous nights—only this time, they were more agitated. When they scoured across his body, he supposed they still had remnants of that acid on their bodies. It burned his pale skin. It was all he could do, he told me, to stop from crying out. Somehow, he had managed to keep quiet, because we didn’t hear a peep that night. That morning, he had more of those thin cuts across his body than any other night. There were tiny black dots across his flesh, where the drops of acidic venom had eaten away at him. Like the cuts from before, though, it all vanished after a few days and left no scarring. Until then, he just covered the tell-tale signs with his clothes and dirt. To teachers, he explained away the rest as falling off a fence or sliding into home plate at recess. I guess no one really wanted to think the worst.
3.
Simon discovered the remnants of his welded plug the next morning, along with his burns and scratches. It appeared to have been eaten away, almost as if it had been exposed to the potent acid, the venom, that he guessed was produced by those little black creatures with mandibles and thin wiry legs. In the previous week, he supposed, the water had backed up enough to prevent the hive from even getting to it and melting it away in such a manner, but Everett’s panic over getting new cracks in the house’s foundation called for Simon to pull his makeshift plug and let that blessed water spill out of the corridor. On the last night, the corridor was empty and the shiny surface of the plug, shoved into the corridor had been exposed enough for the hive to get at it. Those little critters could do a lot of damage. They could chew through inch-thick wood with their collective mandibles. They could even melt sheer steel with their spit. But one thing was for certain, the damn things couldn’t swim.
After trying to stop the creatures from coming in through that corridor, Simon tried drowning them out. At first he tried removing the cork sinker that controlled when the motor would run. Inadvertently, Everett didn’t make this too easy. Not only did Everett begin checking on the pump motor at different times almost every day, but the fact that it was so dark down there made if difficult for Simon to even remove the sinker quickly and quietly. Simon needed a pair of needle-nose pliers to attach and remove the cork sinker and he simply couldn’t fumble around with them in the dark with any kind of success. In addition to that, he’d have to creep across the cold floor in the dark and replace the pliers in Everett’s toolbox so he wouldn’t know they’d been moved. Touching Everett’s tools was grounds for a ‘talking-to’.
I could only imagine Simon on his hands and knees under the stairs with a pair of pliers in one hand, bent over the hole, reaching down towards the cork sinker. What if he suddenly heard that hissing sound? What if the sudden presence of that noise was enough to cause him to fumble his grip on the pliers and drop them into the sump well, all the way to the bottom. I had this hideous vision of Simon reaching all the way down to the bottom of that narrow hole to retrieve them. He’d know that if Everett saw them down there Simon would be in for the beating of his life for tinkering with the motor yet again and for taking them out of his toolbox. He’d have to be taught a lesson for things like that. He’d have to be ‘put in line’ and the ‘situation’ would call for a ‘talking-to’. Simon was just a boy, after all. And boys are stupid. What if those creatures crept up out of the hole as he was right there, his arm straining down into the hole to retrieve the orange-handled pliers? They’d tear him apart with those mandibles and claws, climb up his arm to his face and tear away at his eyelids. Or maybe they’d spit their hideous saliva on his face so deep the scars would never go away. I think this picture in his mind, plus the fact that Everett often came downstairs now to check the pump motor without notice led Simon to not try removing the cork sinker each night.
He came up with a new idea that seemed much more feasible. If Everett was going to go and check that the sump hole wasn’t overflowing, Simon would instead disconnect the motor’s power cord in the cellar where it went up through the floor to the breaker box. Everett would see the untouched pump, but he’d never check its power cord. He just wasn’t that thorough.
Simon would then empty the hole using a bucket each night. The idea was that he could remove excess water so it wouldn’t flood the basement, but still leave the water at a level above the corridor. The water level wouldn’t allow the creatures entry into his room at night, and the motor would appear completely intact to Everett’s prying eyes. It seemed like the perfect plan.
So, Simon severed the power cord for the sump motor which was wired directly into the circuit box upstairs. His plan worked for several days, as he occasionally took a pail of water out of the house, dumping it when Everett wasn’t around. It worked, that is, until a storm swept across the island one afternoon. Simon sat in his desk at school fidgeting and staring out the window at those big fat drops of rain hitting the muddy puddles on the playground. The look on his face was utter despair. Finally free after the school bell, he ran home full-throttle to find the basement flooded, the bottoms of his bed sheets wet, the scraps of rug thoroughly soaked, and even Everett’s collection of dirty magazines, stacked in a pile beside his work bench, drenched. I’ve seldom seen Simon so sick with worry as he sobbed and sobbed that day after school, trying desperately to clean up the flooded basement with pails and rags and Mama’s mop. I knew how this episode would end and I helped him as best I could in those few frantic minutes before the back screen door squeaked open on rusted hinges and banged shut against the jamb at the top of the stairs. Completely wet from the waist down and red in the face from all the crying, Simon looked up at Everett who stood over us in the half-inch deep water. Apparently all the rain had also flooded Ethan’s low-lying welding shop so he had no other choice but to let his men go for the day. Why oh why had Everett gotten off early just that one day? Simon hadn’t even had a chance to re-attach the pump’s power cord to the breaker box and I can’t imagine how his heart jumped into his chest looking up at Everett who had his greasy, wet hair hanging down over his eyes.
Needless to say, Everett let him have it that afternoon. It was a somewhat subdued ‘lesson’ that time, but only because Simon had school the following Monday. His punishment included cleaning up the water the next day and sleeping in his wet sheets that night. Simon never disconnected that sump pump again.
4
.
It was a hot day, the kind we’d usually spend exploring the north end up past the power compound or playing an elaborate game of pirates with the other boys. But on this Saturday we spent most of the morning in Daddy’s old work house, out there in the overgrown sweet grass. Simon had opened his floodgates and the words just kept flowing. He tried to explain the presence of the creatures, as well as their effect on him and Everett as best he could to me. But I was young and I didn’t get all of it.
As I mentioned, the temperature itself had a strong impact on whether the creatures would appear in Simon’s room. It was much cooler downstairs than upstairs, but it was the hot weather outside that seemed to make the difference. The first summer, Simon always seemed to have mysterious scratches and marks all across his body after the terribly hot nights. Mama questioned him about them but all he said was that they were from playing in the brambles and raspberry patch out in Predis field. But I knew that wasn’t the reason because I never had scratches and I was always with my brother after school.
The hive, he assumed after all his dealings with them, were scouring the place for food. Almost any food would do—even Simon. But they didn’t have eyes, near as he could tell from the early corpses he’d battered with the baseball bat—the one with Reggie’s scrawl—and later studied in the light of day. Instead they seemed to be scavenging around searching in the dark humidity for warm objects. Warm objects and anything that moved. He guessed that they were initially attracted to his room by the warmth of the running sump pump motor in the middle of the night. Once there, they surely discovered the little eleven year old boy’s warm presence laying on his mattress. Early on, however, he found that they avoided him more the cooler his body was and the less he moved about.
Shed Page 3
