by Dan Alatorre
His final soiree was a jubilant, black tie affair, with many top literary names in attendance, but that night he was the star of the show. And while he didn’t likely set out to give a lecture, he never shied away from one, either; and, if called upon, he would deliver. On this occasion, he was merely talking with a younger writer who’d come with a friend Grubenstein knew, and the beautiful novice asked a question.
For whatever reason, Grubenstein—who could be quite arrogant toward lesser talents—didn’t dismiss the naïve question nor its asker, possibly because he thought they might entertain each other in a different, more horizontal manner, later in the evening. In retrospect, that may have been the motive behind a number of Grubenstein’s lectures.
No, he answered her, and in some detail. And as he did, others gathered to hear more, asking him to elaborate, and before he knew it—which was always the case with Grubenstein—he was holding forth, giving a sweeping statement to the room—and foreshadowing, we would later learn, quite a bit about the night’s events.
“By being successful,” he said, “you will immediately be accepted by all other authors.”
His young questioner nodded in agreement. It was, after all, quite an obvious statement of fact, as were all Grubenstein pronouncements until disproved later with the rising sun and the onset of sobriety.
“Equally,” he waved his glass, “you will be despised. Authors are a jealous bunch. We love you until you are selling better than we are, then we are insanely jealous and want to kill you—even though we love you—and we will enjoy seeing your blood dripping down the walls.”
This brought a chuckle from his party guests.
“As for me,” our host stepped away from the grand piano and sauntered to the center of the room, his mesmerized protégé in tow. “I couldn’t care less what other authors think of me—they aren’t usually the people who buy my books. I care what my fans think of me. But you and I probably have different circumstances, don’t we? You may actually have lots of people buying your books . . .”
That got a blush from his new lady friend and another laugh from the group. Grubenstein was no stranger to a failed book launch. None of us were.
“So, with the understanding that they don’t matter, really, be friends with other authors and win them over!” He raised his glass. “Life’s more fun with friends. Invite them over and show their work to people. If you want a friend, be one. People will help you the more you help them, blah, blah, blah. But it works, and it can open doors, too.”
Grubenstein pretended to whisper. “Remember that Arnold Schwarzenegger said he helped Lou Ferrigno with body building advice, but Arnold later admitted, sometimes he gave Lou good advice, sometimes he gave him not-so-good advice.” He laughed. “He messed with Lou’s head! Other authors will do that, too. They’re only human, most of them. Take advice, but be wary. Because they want to help you, but they want to kill you.”
He smiled, standing in front of the gathered crowd. “Do the other things that most authors don’t do, like get on radio shows to be interviewed. Then have another party just afterward, so you can nonchalantly brag about it. Then, as they reach for the knives in their pockets, you innocently laugh because they never suspected the hors d’oeuvres were poisoned.”
His impromptu lecture completed, Grubenstein bowed. His newest fan clapped, as did we all, and together they headed to the bartender on the patio for another drink. The rest of us went back to enjoying the party and thought nothing of his performance.
Until he went to jail the next day.
Twenty-two fellow authors and six critics killed that night, murdered by a slow-release toxin inserted into a goose liver pate of the host’s own making. By then, Grubenstein had snuck away for what many thought was a late night dalliance with his newest fan. Little did we know.
The picture in the next day’s paper was of a man in a tuxedo—and handcuffs. He got a life sentence plus twenty years, but for quite a while the headlines perversely made him the overall, number one best selling author on any chart.
I can only assume I was spared because I detest goose liver pate, and because as his contemporary and occasional party guest, Grubenstein knew that.
He did, after all, respect my work.
The Seer
I can’t tell you why I was afraid of my grandma’s basement when I was a child, but… day or night, I was. I dreaded going down there.
Grandma had an old, creaky wooden staircase that went into the basement from the upstairs hallway, but there were two sides to the big space down there. One side had lots of lights and some furniture. A couch, a folding card table, and an old printing press my uncle bought, that sat next to his tiny office. He had a TV in there, too, and a lot of empty Pepsi bottles.
Then there were some steel shelves, filled with the games we were allowed to play—Monopoly, Risk, Parcheesi—and some basketballs and yard toys like horseshoes and Jarts. Hula Hoops, Frisbees—all the toys kids in the seventies played growing up. There were a few snow tires in there, too, and hard leather suitcases.
Then there was the other side.
I can’t even tell you what was over there. Maybe more shelves; maybe old furniture. My grandma made dresses and did some seamstress work, so maybe that’s what was there, bolts of cloth and stacks of dress patterns; I don’t know.
All I ever saw there—day or night—was darkness.
That, and the little coal door that had been welded shut decades earlier when the coal bin had been filled in. That door, I could see from anywhere in the old basement—whether I was looking at it or not.
My mother’s mother lived in Cincinnati her whole life, in a neighborhood that could be its own small city today. Rows of brick houses that had survived decades of icy Ohio winters with furnaces fueled by coal—which her husband proudly supplied. Grandpa provided massive blocks of ice in the summer and piles of coal in the winter, pulled by a horse drawn wagon, no less. In those days, the population of Cincinnati was mostly of German descent, and the front corner of every basement contained a small trap door—a coal door—behind which the dusty, black deliveries were made using a wooden ramp or metal chute, like a cement truck uses today. The coal was measured on a scale first and then delivered down the chute, a black cloud rising as it fell. He prospered until the residents could afford electrical appliances after the war. Within a decade, the coal bins were filled in or their tiny doors were sealed shut in houses across the north part of the nation.
But a dark basement can facilitate many things behind the folding ping pong table and the boxes of old Christmas lights. A big secret can be buried in a little vault.
My uncle was working on something down in his office, smoking Camel cigarettes and watching WXIX’s The Cool Ghoul monster movie on his little black and white TV—rabbit ear antennas sticking out at odd angles to keep Frankenstein from getting too fuzzy. I was tasked with getting another big glass bottle of soda for the grownups. Their card game would stretch into the night, but they’d stop long enough to cheer Happy New Year and raise their glasses. They weren’t teetotalers, but I’m not sure I ever saw my grandparents or my uncle drink. New Year’s was about seeing the family, not getting soused before the hour-long drive back to our house.
“Tradition and remembrance.” That was Grandma’s toast at midnight each New Year’s Eve—holding a Pepsi and shedding a tear for those no longer with us. They were saluted at the mantle, framed photos of loved ones now gone, and Grandma would say a few words about each one before wiping her eyes and returning to her card game.
I stood at the top of the stairs, holding the painted wood railing, looking at the shadows below. The first step was the hardest, because my cousin might be watching, and any hesitation would be quickly derided with calls of scaredy cat and afraid of the dark.
But my feet didn’t move.
I took a deep breath, staring down the steps.
It won’t be too bad. Uncle Jim is down there.
A shadow moved acros
s the bottom of the old wooden staircase, blocking out the light from the lone overhead bulb. My stomach lurched as I took a half step backwards—until I saw the broad shoulders and balding head of my uncle Jim coming up the stairs.
I politely moved out of his way. “Uncle Jim! Uh, where are you going?”
He shrugged as he went past me, his big frame filling the hallway. “Time for a break.”
I nodded, putting a finger to my chin. “Oh.”
Turning back to the staircase, I peered into the darkness. Uncle Jim had turned off the lights. A cold, damp draft wafted up from the lower level. Goosebumps rippled my arms.
“Uh, Uncle Jim?”
He stopped at the end of the hallway and faced me. “What’s up, Denny boy?”
Denny boy. He only used to call me that on special occasions, when it was Christmas or my birthday, but only when I was little and he was coming into our house with a present. How ya doin’, Denny boy? It was a term of affection, to be sure, but I hadn’t heard him say it in a while—a year, at least. I guess I was getting too old to be Denny boy—and yet, he said it now.
I swallowed hard and addressed my uncle. “Chris said that last New Year’s Eve, you told him you hear and see strange things in Grandma’s basement.”
My uncle folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “He did, did he?”
“Is that true?” I did my best to keep my voice from quivering. “Did you say that?”
“I, uh…” Jim scratched his chin, the light from the kitchen making him appear as a large silhouette. “I don’t remember.”
Another chilling gust came up from the black of the basement. When I turned to ask Uncle Jim another question, he was gone.
The conversation from earlier, when Chris and I lay on the floor playing Battleship, echoed in my head.
“I dare you to go by yourself,” Chris said, smiling.
A moment before, my mom had called out from the card table, asking for one of us to go get another bottle of Pepsi from the shelf downstairs.
“No.” I whispered to Chris, shaking my head. The arrangement of my Battleship pieces was suddenly very important.
Chris nodded. “Chicken.”
“I’m not chicken.” But my cheeks were growing hot.
“Then go down.”
“Why don’t you go?”
“I got the last one.” He snickered, as if he’d had it planned. “It’s your turn.”
I glanced toward the ominous basement door. “You got the last bottle before dinner. It was still light out.”
“See? You’re chicken.”
“There’s nothing down there,” my mom would always say, usually in the car on the way home if I mentioned anything about Grandma’s basement. “Don’t be a baby.”
I never told her about the basement and my dread of it, but somehow she sensed it anyway—possibly by the longer and longer amounts of time it for me to embark on a soda retrieval mission whenever asked.
But there was something down there. I knew it. I felt it.
It was hard enough to do in daylight, because the nearly windowless basement got very little light on the sunniest days, and the sparse overhead bulbs didn’t shine too far past the big shelves in the middle of the room.
At night—late at night—it was an entirely different matter. The basement was a patchwork of shadows, each darker than the next.
But right now, the soda awaited. I reached a trembling finger out and turned on the light.
I stared down the steps, my hand on the rail, holding my breath and not moving. The stairs were worn yellow pine, hard as a rock but creaky in places—just the thing for a trip into a dark basement.
Tradition and remembrance. A bottle was needed for the toast and the honoring of those no longer with us—and time was running out.
I had to move soon or my cousin would notice, too.
Chicken! Bwack, bwack, bwack!
Forcing myself to take a deep breath, I lowered my foot to the first step, keeping my other foot firmly planted on the linoleum of the hallway.
There’s nothing down there.
Swallowing hard, I shifted my weight and eased my anchor from the linoleum. My heart pounded as I inched my foot down to the next step. The floor beams created a triangular gap with the staircase where objects below came into view and where the hand of any monster could reach out and take hold of my ankle. I tipped my head forward to gaze into the darkness, holding tight to the railing to launch myself back upstairs if necessary.
The basement was still and quiet. Nothing moved in the darkness.
I slipped my sweaty hand a few inches forward on the painted rail, letting go only enough to move before getting a better grip.
Keep going. There’s nothing there.
Holding my breath, I debated the wisdom of running down the ten or so remaining steps, to get it over with quickly, like pulling off a Band-Aid.
Fear won. I crept down the dark stairs, hunched over and clinging to the rail, glancing in all directions.
It seems like it took a half hour, but no relief met me at the bottom of the stairs. Stepping off the island of security and into the shadows caused my hearth to pound in my throat. Past the folding table, past the steel shelves, somewhere near the base of the front wall, lay the case of big, glass soda bottles. I’d grab one and run.
It was a clear path to the front wall. The shadows graciously spared three feet of space down the center of the basement. One tiny window allowed a beam from the streetlight at the corner. The rest was black.
But watching me from all that way was the tiny black steel door.
It was there, somewhere, waiting for me. I’d know where in daylight, because it’d be a little lighter, but not now. Not tonight.
The basement was cold; a dry, graveyard chill that permeated a person until their bones ached. I took a step toward the front wall, looking in all directions but never straying too far from where the dreaded little door would be. My heart pumped, churning in my ears with each tepid step. My hands were clenched tight to keep them from shaking.
Each steel shelf moved past me in a slow procession until the room opened wider and the temperature dropped a few more degrees. The draft from the bin and the window sent an icy breeze past me and through me as the whites of the bottle caps appeared. Three or four, I couldn’t say for sure; I couldn’t take my eyes off that front wall and the little metal door I knew lurked in the shadows.
I gritted my teeth and stretched my skinny hand out, not wanting to put any more of me closer to the wall than was absolutely necessary.
My trembling fingertips met the cold top of the metal cap. I closed my hand around it, pulling back, ready to sprint for the staircase—but the bottle was too heavy to come away so easily. It required more than fingertips. I groaned to myself, my stomach forming a knot, leaning forward and exposing more of me to whatever waited there in the blackness. Gripping tight to the glass bottle’s cool neck, I pulled hard and hoped it would lift up and come away with me. My feet pointed at the wall, but my torso was already twisted away to run back to the stairs.
That’s when the leather-cold grip of dead fingers touched my hand.
I jerked upright, gasping and looking down at my hand and the bottle. In the darkness, a blue-white hand laid on mine.
I lurched backwards, fear tearing at my insides, twisting my head away as I fell. I hit the cold concrete floor as I opened my mouth to scream—but nothing came out. Pushing myself away, I stared at the light by the staircase as if it were at the top of a well I’d fallen into.
The dust from the floor invaded my lungs, filling my mouth with dryness. Adrenaline surged inside me.
The cold hand stayed on mine, squeezing hard, clamping my fingers to the bottle neck so I couldn’t drop it and run. The pale skin glowed in the darkness, small and white, a hand and a wrist and a forearm, then the shadows from the wall swallowed the rest of it up.
My heart pounding, I heaved myself backward again and again, but I could n
ot move. The heels of my Keds raked across the concrete floor, the palm of my hand scraping, grabbing, pressing to move me an inch. I couldn’t breathe. Jerking and yanking, I tugged on my hand to get the clammy, white fist to release me, but it would not let go.
I strained backwards to see the light bulb. It seemed a mile away. I squeezed my eyes shut, pushing with all my strength to get free of the hand.
From the shadows, a face emerged. I shook my head, wanting to scream, wanting to cry, but I could not look away. It was the face of a child, withered and white. A boy my age, holding my hand in place and staring at me with dead, white eyes.
I groaned, the air leaving my lungs. Each bite of wind I could swallow was jerked out of me as I struggled to get loose.
The face leaned forward to mine, its breath as dank as a graveyard, one hand holding me, the other raising up and pointing to the front wall. The edges of a small rectangle became clear, in painted black steel, reflected in the light from the street. The letters of its maker stood out like a reverse tomb stone.
The boy pointed at the door. “I . . . am there.”
I strained against his grip, terrified of what he wanted. “No,” I whimpered. “No.” Tears filled my eyes. “Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!”
I twisted my hand upward to break his grip, but he clung to me. I shoved my sneakers into the floor, pushing as hard as I could, but I couldn’t move away.
The old latch on the door dropped downward, the screech of metal on metal filling the air like a scream. My mouth dropped open, my mind racing at the horrors inside the hole. The little door, long ago welded shut, inched open. The blackness of midnight stared out at me from inside. The boy’s face appeared in the space, white and translucent, like a movie projector throwing his image onto a screen that wasn’t there.
His eyes widened and his lips parted in a horrible, black emptiness. A moan escaped from deep inside him, echoing from Hell and bouncing off the cold basement walls.
“I am here!”
I shivered violently, gasping for air as sweat broke out on my forehead.
