Shed (Dovetail Cove, 1977) (Dovetail Cove Series)

by Jason McIntyre

  I didn’t understand a lot of things back then. I wished that I had. I didn’t understand why Mama and Everett wanted time alone. I didn’t understand why fried chicken was a no-no when we hadn’t had any rain yet by that evening and I didn’t understand why we had to lay there in the dark in our underwear. I was about to pipe up and finally ask Simon to tell me why all of these things had to be when the sump pump motor started up.

  It was loud and grinding and I could hear it sucking up the water and splashing around down in the hole behind Simon’s closet “door.” I’d say it lasted a good minute before it finally came to a halt. The grinding motorized whir and splish-splash of water ended and the silence was almost overwhelming in my head again. I felt Simon tense up, and I instinctively did the same. The sump well was empty. We were suddenly waiting for something...and I had no idea what it was.

  I had to pee right then. I had gone before we laid down but there it was just the same: my overwhelming urge to go again. This always happened when I was nervous. Right now, though, I began to feel more scared than I had ever been. It was the strangest feeling of my whole life, laying there in the dark waiting and not knowing what was to come or when, but knowing that it would come. I could tell from Simon’s quickened breathing that it would be there soon. Looking up towards the ceiling I was aware of my own body again. I told myself to ignore my pressing need to pee, to instead focus on my body, concentrate on my boundaries of space and control my need to shiver. I wanted to so badly; it would have been easy to just let go and feel the wracking shivers course through my legs and my arms, up my back. I wanted to cry out too. I’d never been this scared. I lay there in the blackness with my brother wanting to scream but paralyzed with fear of my own creation.

  The silence was maddening. I didn’t dare ask Simon now. I was all but ready to just let go and empty my bladder when I heard the first faint sound coming from behind the closet doorway. Under the stairs, beyond the little pump hole, inside that long and narrow concrete corridor, there began a hiss unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I held on to myself a little longer and concentrated towards that noise. What was it?

  It grew louder and louder but not above a whisper. It was not a centralized noise and it did not fade, not even for a second. It sustained and grew and as I listened I realized that it contained almost a warble—it sounded to me like several noises at different pitches all moving about. But they were too numerous to count. The darkness continued to press in around us.

  “...Now, Rupe...” Simon whispered, so faint this time that I was barely sure he’d said anything at all. It was the signal he’d instructed me to follow as we’d been pulling the sheets from his bed earlier in the night. I was feeling my vision cloud up with reds and violets and blues all colliding in my sight as I looked towards that ceiling which I could not see. My brain was falling away into an infinity. It felt as though I was going to vanish but I knew better. The fright was in my throat and I felt as though I would choke on it, spewing what little chicken I had eaten at supper across the darkened room. I could barely contain that sheer terror welling up in me but I held. I held because Simon had told me what to do. I stopped my breathing on his command, sucked it all in and clamped my lips down tight. So tight, I almost drew blood. This is what he had told me to do upon hearing his signal.

  The next thing I heard was a sudden increase in the hiss. It sounded more like a high pitched series of squeals now, thousands of them. There was an almost inaudible rustle as the cotton drape hung over the closet doorway, invisible in the darkness, shifted and I could feel myself falling back towards that multicoloured infinity. I closed my eyes and the colours intensified. They swam and swam. I held on and did not dare to look towards that drape of cloth with the baseball men on it. My biggest fear was that I would suddenly be able to see it in the dark, being brushed aside by that terrible thing approaching us.

  Without warning a cool wave washed over me, a sensation that I could not place in my mind as anything I’d ever felt before. I could feel it moving, separating and rejoining, swaying up the walls and onto the ceiling, beneath the bed and across my stomach. It moved about the room as a loose pail of water might slosh about the cabin of a fishing boat tossed across stormy seas, unraveling and combining again haphazardly. It was almost silent except for that variable, high-pitched squeal. It grew louder and fainter slightly as the incongruent waves passed closer to and further from my ears. The wave passed over my body again and again, undulating, resting it seemed near my armpits and my crotch for a split second before moving on. There was a concentration of it around my face and my chest. I fought the urge to look at it. I was terrified of what I would see and caught the words in my mind, the ones Simon had told me before it all began, “At all costs, Rupe, do not open your eyes. Do not exhale until I say so. Do not move.” Do not move. Do not move.

  And I didn’t. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t. I wanted to get up from the bed, push the doorway curtain aside in a flurry and run. I wanted to scream. I wanted so badly to be in my mother’s arms bawling and carrying on about what had been down in that basement, the terrible slick wave of air that washed over my tummy and over my eyelids in the dark. I wanted to not be there. I wanted to be in my own bed, not knowing any of this.

  It felt as though my chest was going to explode. The air I’d sucked in pressed on the insides of my chest, threatened to tear it apart in one violent stroke. This wave couldn’t have been in Simon’s room for more than two minutes but I could feel my head again swimming away from Simon and the bed. But I suddenly wanted more than anything to show Simon I could hold my breath until he said to let it go. I just couldn’t though. I knew that any moment I would have to let it out or the burning in my chest would cease and I would simply be crushed by the weight of my own breath. I couldn’t hold on to it any longer.

  I was about to give in when I felt the mattress shift at the foot of the bed, The wave that was flowing all over the walls and ceiling felt it too. My ears and my skin could sense it flinch and before I knew it the insides of my eyelids were bathed with bright orange light. I thought that I had passed out or that my chest had finally given way under its own efforts.

  But it hadn’t. I was still conscious and alive. And I could no longer hold back the urge to open my eyes. In that instant when my eyes fluttered open, I was met with a vision that made my mind sway towards unconsciousness again. I saw Simon’s room, completely lit up as though someone had let a firecracker go in the rafters a moment before. That second I saw the worst, more that I’d dared imagine: The walls and the ceiling were covered with a thousands-count swarm of small dark creatures. Their bodies miniature and round, like little beads of polished camel-bone. They were black as pitch, oily and smooth but the intense light didn’t reflect from them in a sheen, it was instead absorbed by them. Each had several legs, maybe six, maybe eight, maybe more, and used them in unison to cascade across the brightened walls almost like a thick silky liquid. It felt to me in that flashing moment that there must be thousands of them scouring across our bodies and over the wall board, scavenging, picking at the surfaces with their tiny mandibles at a rate I could barely fathom with my own eyes. This hive, this swarm of tiny beasts, was covering my almost naked form, seeming to float across the flesh merely by clutching the tiny hairs in my skin with delicate black claws. I wanted to scream out. The creatures were scouring me and I felt the suffocation of finally knowing that they were really there, climbing across me. The terror welled up but the creatures had each begun to react to the white light burst: the realization swept through them and they spilled off the walls and off my body, the mass of them bleeding towards the space under the stairs.

  Before I could scarcely understand what my eyes had seen, the ordeal was over and the light was gone. Were the stragglers gone? I could see nothing now. My eyes met the sea of black and I couldn’t trust my body to move, couldn’t trust my mind to believe there weren’t more of them still there, still on my stomach or my kneecap. We l
ay there again in the darkness, and I realized that I was not only sweating in the coolness that had just moments earlier been responsible for making me feel cold, but I had also let my bladder go. There was wetness all around my crotch and on the sheet beneath me. I could smell it. My body stung there too, a bit like vinegar under an opened fingernail. The urge to scream out to Mama was overwhelming, but Simon was suddenly on top of me with his hands over my mouth. “Rupe,” he whispered next to my ear with determination. “The hard part’s over. We’re home free for tonight. Do you hear me? We’re home free. It won’t be coming back. Just--just don’t cry. We can change the sheet...Please, Rupe, just don’t cry.”

  6.

  If I had cried, or had run up the stairs bawling to mama, like I so desperately needed to do, all of Simon’s efforts would have been wasted. He sat up in bed and I felt the mattress shift again with his weight. He got off of it and stepped onto the carpet scraps on the floor. I couldn’t see where he went but I could feel that he was still in the room.

  My eyes had just began to readjust to the total black again after the sudden and overwhelming bright white light; Now some light returned to my eyes but it was dim this time—only enough to illuminate the most basic features of the room. I realized, as shapes gradually faded back into recognizable objects like the doorway and a poster of Reggie Jackson, that Simon was standing across from me near the dresser where his baseball mitt and some scattered baseball cards lay. Above him, where he had just reached with one arm, was a row of three unlit light bulbs protruding from the wall. The wall board had been removed in that section from just below the top of the dresser right to the ceiling. Beneath it were three light fixtures screwed into the studs with wires flopping out behind them. I had helped Simon pull off the section of wallboard that night before we stripped most of the sheets from the bed. We had taken three bulbs from the bottom of his dresser drawer and unwrapped them from their hiding places in a couple of old tee-shirts and then screwed them into the hidden fixtures. There was a fourth bulb which had its own fixture in the open wall lower and nearer to the dresser. Just now, after the oily black hive had disappeared back down the sump pump hole underneath the stairs, Simon had used one of those old tee-shirts to partially unscrew those first three hot bulbs and screw in the fourth which was of a lower wattage. He had done this in the dark, carefully, silently, instinctively knowing where they were located against the sides of the wall studs without his eyesight to help him. The shift in the mattress just before the thousands of tiny creatures flinched and seeped back into the sump hole was Simon tugging on a string that had been tied around his ankle. Jerking on it in such a manner had pulled it taut, allowed for the circuit to be completed between the blaring light bulbs and the wire that ran up to the breaker box in the kitchen.

  My heart was beating so fast. Still. It felt almost as though my held breath hadn’t allowed my heart to beat at all for those terrifying minutes when the wave was washing over our bodies. Now it seemed to be making up for it. In the moments since Simon had let the string around his ankle go slack to shut off the three lights, I realized that my body was sweating. I was stuck to the sheets in my own pee and I was overtaken by the tremendous tremors I had been fighting off since we had lain down in the dark stillness.

  I looked towards that pinstriped sheet of cotton hanging askew over the closet doorway, expecting to see traces of those tiny creatures, or even expecting to see them return from underneath it. As I did this, Simon came towards me with that old blue tee-shirt of his. He dabbed it at the side of my forehead and I realized that I was bleeding. I put my fingers to the spot and traced them across a tiny line that was already starting to scab. It was a fine scratch, caused by the claw or the mandible of one of those little black demons. They had felt smooth and light as air, but this tiny line of blood was proof to me that they could do more than just pass almost unfelt over my body.

  “Oh...they got you a little here, Rupert.” Simon whispered to me as he dabbed at the cut. He looked concerned, but relieved. “Don’t worry. These scratches heal up pretty quick. They won’t notice. I used to get them all the time near the start...Mama just believed me when I told her I fell playing ball or--” He cut himself off, dabbed once more at my forehead, then near my crotch and on my legs where other fine lines of blood were beginning to clot. “Happened to me too, Rupe. The pee. It’s warm. They can sense the warm.”

  I couldn’t speak to him. I simply couldn’t bring myself to speak. I was shaking and had begun to cry—as quietly as I could, mind you. Simon held me and pressed that blue shirt to my head. He pulled one of the covers off the floor and back onto the bed and eased me back to my pillow. Simon drowned out my stiff, jerky sobs against his shoulder and I must have fallen asleep because I don’t remember the rest of that horrible night. I wonder if I really understood at that point, when I fell asleep in my brother’s arms after it all, that things were only going to get worse.

  PART II

  Thrive

  1.

  I suppose that when you live with a secret every day, as Simon did, it affects your life every day. For two years he had kept a secret from every living soul. I suppose that he figured I wouldn’t understand. Was I just too young? After his first night down in the basement two summers ago, I suppose Everett and Mama wouldn’t have either. Everett didn’t take well to waking abruptly in the night and four nights in a row after he’d moved into the new basement bedroom, Simon had come screaming to the top of the stairs, bawling about the dark. Everett, I imagine, had all that he was going to take of Simon’s middle-of-the-night outbursts. The first night, he was merely irritated, the second he yelled at Mama to take care of it—‘the situation’ he sometimes called things—and the third night he screamed at Simon loud enough to make the boy fall backward against the bedroom wall. He hit his head and began bawling even louder.

  But the fourth night, Everett tried to be rational with Simon about his childish behaviour. In fact his voice was so calm that I almost wasn’t sure what was happening. He reasoned it like this to Simon, standing over the boy after knocking him across the room and against the wall with the back of his closed fist: His work was important and his paycheque paid for Simon and me to eat and have a roof over our heads. Do you want to have Harvey’s every so often? He asked casually, as Simon put a heel of his hand to his bloodied nose and swollen eyes. Well, if you do, you’d better get in line. In order to get to work and be productive there he needed a good night’s rest. Interrupting that night’s rest didn’t allow him to be productive at work which might mean that he wouldn’t get a paycheque. In turn, Simon and me wouldn’t have a place to live or be able to eat Harvey’s. As he hit Simon again and again that night, he tried to make his reasoning clear. Mama held me, clutched me tight against her, crying and begging Everett to stop hitting my big brother. He’s only eleven, she bawled. He can’t take that like me. Everett responded that Simon needed to fully understand what he was telling him. That Everett wouldn’t stand for this night after night just because his sissy son was afraid of the dark. That his sissy son wouldn’t get in line and that his sissy son wouldn’t take care of his own ‘situation’. But Simon was only a boy, he went on, and boys at that age are stupid. He had to make sure Simon understood his higher level reasoning. Everett, on the other hand, was smart and without him as our father we’d be homeless. We’d be lying in a gutter starving to death. That would be our ‘situation’.

  When he finally let up on Simon, Mama and I went to him. He was bloody and his eyes wouldn’t open. His arms and legs had already begun to swell up. He was past tears, past his wailing, past even having the ability to piece a sentence together. Mama carried him to the bath tub and poured as much ice as she had in there on top of him along with cool water. Everett went back to bed and we stayed up with Simon all night. I asked Mama why Everett had done that and she couldn’t explain it to me. Only tears came, and stifled words that made no sense to me. I wondered if they made sense to her. In the morning, she m
ade Everett breakfast and sent him off to work with his steel lunchbox. He acted as though nothing had happened and even gave her a kiss on her tear-stained cheek.

  And so it went on like that for most of the summer. That first time was the worst, though. Simon had stayed in our old bedroom for several weeks before coming out to play ball with me and the other kids. Even then his skin was still puffy and bruised in some spots. Mama didn’t want the neighbourhood kids seeing him when it still looked really bad and school had already let out. I guess he was lucky that way.

  But soon enough, Everett questioned why Simon’s bunk had been moved back up to the old bedroom. Mama had said that Simon found it difficult to climb up and down the stairs in his condition, but before long Simon was in the basement again. He did the best he could. Determined not to bawl again in the night, I’d hear him creaking up those betraying steps to the kitchen snivelling and crying but trying not be heard. Everett would be there soon enough, scolding him for being such a pussy excuse for a son. He’d hit him. Not as hard as that first time, but enough to scare Simon into staying down there all night.

  Eventually, night after night, Everett would actually lock the door at the top of the stairs so Simon couldn’t come back up until morning. He told him that it would teach him to be a real man. When he was tucked in at night, Simon would always ask Mama to leave that solitary light on for him, the one that hung over the workbench on the other side of the basement. She would. As discreetly as she could, she’d hit the switch on her way upstairs nearly every night. And if she couldn’t manage to turn it on then, she’d tell Everett that she was going back to the kitchen to check and make sure the screen door was hooked securely over the inside one. Every single night, my Mama would make sure that light switch was on. His silence was his thank you.