Detritus

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  The Room Beneath the Stairs by Kealan Patrick Burke

  Andy hated being forced to visit his grandmother.

  As he watched his parents drive away in their battered Taurus, he once again found himself beneath the ivy-choked architrave that led into her terribly small and tangled garden. It made him wish his brother was still alive to do it but this in turn made him feel guilty. Before Steven had died, the task of representing parents who really couldn't be bothered to visit the old woman had been his charge.

  Andy had only been to Gramma West's house a handful of times but it had been enough.

  Even with his family around, he had felt threatened by something lurking in the permanent shadows of the old lady's home but those unseen watchers seemed patient to wait until he came by himself.

  And now he was.

  He quickly made his way up the narrow bramble-bordered path and wished he were somewhere else. Intimidating houses were not the place for a twelve-year-old boy on sunny Saturday mornings. He'd much rather be playing with Jimmy, the boy next door, or watching Transformers on the Cartoon Network.

  Dewdrops glistened and dangled from black thorns like poison from the fangs of serpents. His discomfort seemed to draw the stares of invisible things. He felt a thousand hungry eyes on him, aroused by the scent of adolescent panic, hiding behind blankets of ivy and watching, waiting.

  Lifting the bronze knocker he thumped three times and waited a short forever before the door whooshed open and a florid rosy-cheeked face peered around the opening.

  "Hey, Gramma."

  The old lady swung into full view and made a face that suggested she might cry.

  "Andy! Oh, how good of you to come see your Gramma!"

  Her considerable frame heaved forward and swallowed Andy in an embrace tight enough to make him gasp. Just as he was beginning to formulate a polite protest, she released him and gestured for him to enter the house.

  "Come, come!"

  Beaming at him, she vanished inside with an agility that belied her eighty-three years.

  Andy took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold into the gloomy hallway.

  He followed his grandmother into the kitchen but not before casting a wary eye at the heavy oak door beneath the stairs. A thin shard of hazy amber light seeped through a crack in the wood as if someone was shining a torch through from the other side.

  He recalled the last time he'd been here; the scraping noise that had come from inside the room. Despite his fear, he had approached the door with the intention of flinging it wide to gaze upon the horror it undoubtedly contained, but had scarcely touched the knob when Gramma West appeared behind him. He had almost suffered a heart attack when her pale hand fell on his shoulder.

  "Hey, Gramma?" he asked as he entered the kitchen, pleasantly surprised by the thick aroma of freshly baked apple pies that greeted him.

  "Yes, dear?"

  "What's behind that door beneath the stairs?"

  He half-expected her to tense and turn to look at him, the still piping hot pie slipping from her oven mitt, a guilty look on her bespectacled face.

  "Oh, the devil is locked behind that door, Andy. He keeps me fit and healthy and I feed him little boys who are foolish enough to ask questions," she didn't say.

  Instead, she raised her eyebrows and offered him a cheerful smile that made her cheeks puff up to twice their normal size.

  "Oh, that was your grandfather's workroom. He was always a bit upset that we had no back garden or cellar for him to build a tool shed, so he used the room beneath the stairs. It's plenty big. Surprisingly so."

  She opened the oven door and as Andy took a seat at the large pine table in the center of the room, he asked: "Can I see it?"

  She wheezed as she bent over to slide two more pies into the oven.

  "There's nothing to see in there, Andy. Just junk. I haven't given it the cleaning I've been promising myself I would. Can't bear to face it to be honest. Too many memories of your grandfather."

  She took a seat opposite Andy, who was now picturing trans-dimensional portals hidden beneath stairwells.

  "Some day when I get around to fixing it up, you can investigate to your heart's content."

  Andy nodded. Her attempt at appeasing his curiosity had only further inflamed it, however, and he resolved to make another attempt to peek inside the room before he left.

  "So how are things at home?" Gramma asked, poking the bridge of her glasses back into place.

  He told her everything his parents had told him to tell her. Mostly lies. His home life since Steven's death had rapidly decayed and now their once benign unit had become a somber vigil to a stolen child. His parents went about their daily routine like hollow vessels, acting only on memories gleaned from happier times.

  His grandmother's eyes told him she knew most of what he said had been from a script approved by his parents and that it was okay.

  "I expect they'll end up spoiling you yet, Andy. Parents who've lost a child tend to lavish affection on the remaining one once the initial impact of grief subsides."

  Andy nodded and drummed his fingers on the table. He was already bored and uncomfortable talking about his life with a woman practically a stranger to him.

  "I suppose," he replied.

  She clapped her hands together. "So how 'bout some pie?"

  "Sure."

  As they ate, Andy noticed the old woman staring at him with an intensity that made him squirm. He tried to reason she was simply glad to see him, but couldn't bring himself to believe it.

  "You look a lot like your grandfather, you know," she said at last, breaking the silence forming like a pane of ice between them.

  Andy raised his eyebrows in response, his mouth full of baked apples. He had been stuffing himself almost greedily as an excuse not to talk to her.

  She looked at him with dark green eyes filled with remembrance.

  "When he was young, I mean. Same chin, same ears. You even eat the same way as Ben."

  Andy blushed, juice leaking from the corner of his mouth.

  "You have the same hands too — a craftsman's hands. Elegant in a rough sort of way."

  The boy dropped his gaze to his long, thin fingers. He quite liked her description of them. He had always just thought of them as... well, as hands. Now they were something much more. Now he had craftsman's hands. He smiled.

  "There was nothing your grandfather couldn't make with his hands. When we were younger and moved into that terrible rattrap on Haybury Street, he made it into a little palace. The landlord refused to charge us rent for the next few months after he saw what Ben had done with the place. I imagine he was quite pleased when he thought of how much he could charge for it after we moved out."

  Her eyes glazed over and Andy continued to eat, aware she wasn't actually looking at him anymore but using him as a focal point for her trip down memory lane.

  "He built cabinets, tables, and chairs. Anything we needed and couldn't afford, he went out and chopped down a few trees from his father's place and made himself. By the time he was finished, the house looked nothing like it had when we first moved in."

  She smiled, revealing polished dentures, and put her hand atop Andy's. The boy resisted the urge to pull away and secretly chided himself for being so cruel. Although he didn't know her and her house made him uneasy, she was still his grandmother. Plus, the pie was terrific.

  "Another thing about Ben was that he was a pleasant character and made friends easily, whereas I was perfectly happy to stay at home, cooking and cleaning. I doubt there are very many women left these days who'd be so content with that!"

  She chuckled and Andy grinned awkwardly, the humor lost on him.

  "He began to do work for his friends, a favor here, a favor there, until word began to spread about the quality of his work. Soon the jobs were pouring in and so was the money. We went from being a struggling couple, held together by love and not much else, to a relatively well-to-do couple that could afford things we'd on
ly dreamed about in the past.

  "We moved out of Haybury and into this fine house, with plenty of money left over to think about starting a family. And so, we did. The day your father was born changed everything for us."

  She stroked Andy's hand with her forefinger, a rueful smile on her face. The boy found his interest piqued despite himself and he abandoned his study of the cobwebs in the far corner of the room.

  "We knew raising a child would not be easy and as Ben was up to his neck in work he'd been contracted to do, I was left with the task of bringing up your father. However, there were times when my husband would find himself summoned from his much needed slumber to deal with the wails of a hungry baby. Even when the child was distressed and filled the house with screams, Ben's hands would soothe it back to sleep. There was nothing he couldn't do. More pie?"

  Andy was confused for a second by the change of subject and, when he realized what she was asking, shook his head and thanked her.

  She nodded and continued to stroke his hand. Her skin was soft and supple on his.

  "This went on for a year or so. If I was so tired that I wouldn't wake immediately, Ben would go to the baby and feed him, change his diaper, or stroke him back to sleep. I should have known at the time that he would not be able to continue like that without it having some kind of adverse effect on him."

  "Adverse?" Andy interrupted, now so engrossed in the tale he didn't want any of it to pass him by.

  "Bad. I knew it would end in disaster. We never argued. Well, not enough to worry about anyway. So when he began to grow irritable, I put it down to the long workdays and the inconvenience of having to tend to the baby whenever I deserted my post."

  She took her hand away and clasped them together beneath her chin.

  The sunlight that filtered in through the kitchen window to Andy's left made her eyes glisten and he found himself hoping she wouldn't weep. Such an outburst of emotion from his grandmother would leave him embarrassed and helpless.

  "But it eventually came to a point where I was beginning to question whether or not he loved me anymore. His bouts of irritation turned to anger too fast for me not to be concerned. His hours grew longer and longer until seeing him home at all became a rare treat. He told me he'd been given a lot of work at the Fallon Mansion where that weird old guy Howie Phillips lived. For much of the time, your father kept me distracted, but lying alone in bed at night I had plenty of time to worry.

  "When I confronted him about his hours, he would fly into a rage as if he thought I was accusing him of something. The arguments would end with my questions unanswered and my heart more wounded than ever. As for Ben, he would storm off and lock himself into the room beneath the stairs, where he would continue to work long into the night. As you can imagine, the clamor of his labors upset the child and I would be left dealing with a cranky baby the next day. I grew miserable and lonely."

  When Andy spoke, his voice was tiny. "What did you do?"

  Her eyes seemed to brighten at his obvious interest and she grinned slightly. "The only thing I could. I walked in on him in the room beneath the stairs and locked the door behind me, blocking any attempt he might have made to escape me."

  Andy's eyes widened. A needle of fear pricked the back of his neck. "You didn't..."

  Gramma West looked shocked. "Oh Dear Lord, no! I would never have done anything to hurt him. You must understand, Andy, that despite the fact he seemed to have lost all love for me, I still cared for him as much as always. The thought of losing him was unbearable and because he wouldn't speak to me, I imagined all sorts of unpleasant things he might be doing while not in my company.

  "That night, he was outraged at my invasion of his sanctuary and tried to throw me out. I stood my ground, more out of shock than defiance. I could hardly believe what my eyes were showing me. But when he noticed that I had seen the fruit of his labors, he seemed to slump, and for the first time in months he spoke to me like the Ben I remembered, the man I loved."

  Andy found himself leaning forward slightly, eager to hear what his grandfather had hidden in the room he, himself, was so curious to see.

  "He had been in the middle of carving something. A figurine. From what I could see of it, it looked to be a rendition of a woman. It would go perfectly well with the thousands of others piled around him. Some of them were scattered about his feet, others stacked against the walls so high they squeezed beneath the slope of the stairs. All of them were carved from a light wood, maple perhaps, but not all of them were the same.

  "As I scanned them in disbelief that he should be forsaking his family for such a repetitive hobby, I noticed that, amid the stacks of wooden men and children, there were monsters. Here was a representation of a woman with her hands to her face, screaming. There, an ill-formed, man-shaped thing with lovingly carved tentacles sprouting from its chest.

  "Some were cowering wolf-like creatures with mouths full of jagged teeth and wild eyes. Others were so vile it hurt my eyes to look at them. And in the center of them all with a work-in-progress clutched tightly in his fist, stood my husband.

  "He told me I should have stayed away from things that were none of my concern. This made me laugh out loud, Andy, it really did. I told him he was my concern and that I had only come to his little room to find out what was keeping him from his family, what was so important to him that he preferred their company to ours."

  She sighed and fingered a curl of silver hair, her eyes boring through the kitchen table and Andy found himself wondering if his grandfather had made it.

  "He had fallen in love with his own ability to create. And still, I tried to rationalize what I was seeing. Perhaps he had fallen into debt and been forced or consigned to produce thousands of odd little figurines in return. Perhaps it was just a large order he had received from someone, someone like Phillips. I thought these things and tried to tell myself that it had to be something that innocent. Only the look of shame and fear in my husband's eyes convinced me otherwise. That, and the sinking feeling in my bosom that whatever had taken hold of Ben wouldn't ever let him go.

  "Eventually he told me everything."

  She let her eyes drift around the room, settling on the window as she spoke.

  "He told me it was his hands. He told me that the very things he relied upon to keep his family content were now responsible for trying to take them away. I didn't understand and I told him so. He sat down and hung his head, looking defeated and exhausted, and I went to him. When he flinched at my touch, I almost cried, deciding in that instant that I would fight his demons for him if it came to a point where he was unable to do so himself.

  "His love for his work had died almost without him noticing, but he had snapped to attention one night in the middle of carving one of the figurines and realized that he had been in a daze, a trance of some sort and had made almost three-hundred of the ghastly things in an hour. He was up to his ankles in wood shavings with no recollection of ever carving them. He said that some of the statues were imitations of the child and me. Others, he didn't know quite what they were, but they were all things he had seen in dreams... or nightmares.

  "He was being driven by some unwanted compulsion, what he called 'an outside influence,' to carve these things, and it scared him half to death whenever he came back to himself and found he had made a hundred more. Would it continue to make him work until they filled the house, the streets, the town?

  "He had no answers for his own questions and I could not answer for him. I was just as scared by his revelations but not for the same reasons.

  "I was beginning to doubt his sanity, you see. I thought that perhaps he had overworked himself into a fever and the threads of his composure were beginning to unravel. I felt guilty not believing him, but who would?

  "His story continued in the same vein. He was not in control of his hands. A higher power was using him as a tool to make these ugly wooden statues. He did not know why but suspected its motives were not entirely wholesome. He begged me for help
and as I held him in my arms in that small little room beneath the stairs where my husband carved out his madness, I promised I would help him."

  She looked back to Andy, who was hanging on her every word. He had already made up his mind that if his grandmother had a vault of such stories he would be back again to hear them. These tales, undoubtedly embellished but no less powerful because of it, were like some of the stories he read in his brother's Weird Tales magazines. Gramma West's stories were a lot scarier though, simply because their roots were buried in truth somewhere. Half the appeal for Andy was not knowing how much was real and how much was made up.

  "I took him from the room, his workshop, and brought him upstairs to bed, where he slept fitfully for a few hours and awoke weeping. I sat vigil by his side watching the sleeping pills take effect and his hands carve figurines above his chest. My own tears were silent as I watched whatever sickness held him in its grasp using him like a puppet. At times he would wake screaming, howling unintelligible phrases at the ceiling. As he slept, his hands would carve, and sometimes his nails would peel the skin from his hands until I gently pried them apart and set them on his stomach.

  "I watched him die, Andy. I watched the terror his mind inflicted on him act itself out in one final display of shrieked gibberish and wide-eyed panic until his heart gave out and he collapsed back onto the bed leaving his final breath hovering in the air above him."

  She leaned closer to Andy and he swallowed.

  "But that's not the worst of it, Andy. Not by a long shot. The worst of it was that, as I watched over his body that night, as I prayed and wept aloud at last, as I rocked myself back and forth and listened to the baby cry in the next room, I was fascinated. Fascinated by his hands, that they could continue to carve their images from the air even as he lay dead beneath them."

  "Whoa," Andy breathed. "Is that why you didn't want to show me the room? Because you kept the figurines, right?"