Basement

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Lexi looked up at the house looming before her, its peeling paint a golden orange in the late afternoon sun. She’d spent hours on her hair and makeup, getting them just right but Toby hadn’t seemed to notice. She’d gone through four changes of clothes before he had shown up for their date, and still she was dressed wrong for this. When Toby showed up with a change of plans and too broke to go to a movie, and he suggested they go to a haunted house, she had been so excited just to be with him that she’d said yes. What is the dress code for breaking and entering into haunted houses she wondered.

“Are you sure no one lives here?”

“Yeah, those papers on the front door say that the place is condemned. No one’s lived here for a long time.” Toby stalked over to a low sitting basement window and crouched to peek in.

“What about hobos?”

“I think we’ll be okay. Come over here, I think we can get this window open.”

Lexi stepped carefully through the overgrown grass. On the other side of the house, the grass had hidden a pile of boards stuck through with nails, and Toby had scraped his leg on one through his jeans while searching for a window or door which had not been boarded over.

“It’s rusty. You should go to the hospital. You could get Tetanus,” she had told him, but Toby was okay, he promised.

Bracing his leg against the cement foundation of the house, Toby worked at his tiny finger hold on the window, pulling until the paint gave way with a bang. The dirty glass cracked, but did not shatter. Lexi ducked down next to the fence. Had the neighbors heard? Were they calling the cops? Toby was cute, but Lexi wasn’t ready to go to Juvie for him.

Toby waved her over to the window.

“No, what about the cops?”

“Think about it. It’s all boarded up. They’ll catch you easier outside than in there,” he said.

Lexi gave him a shrug. He did a have a point.

“You coming?” he asked. His face softened, pleading with her to trespass into the “haunted” house with him.

Lexi peeked her head over the fence, looking for any faces in the windows of the house there. The shades were all drawn shut. No seeing in, but more importantly, no seeing out.

“Yeah, I guess. What’s in there?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, can you look?”

He did her one better. Swinging his legs around and flipping onto his stomach, he slipped into the window and was gone. As she watched his face vanish down into the shadow, Lexi felt gooseflesh pull all her skin tight, as adrenalin shot through her body, shocking her senses awake. She could swear she’d seen this in a horror movie somewhere. She crept over to the window, trying to peek in after him, but swirling motes of dust in the orange afternoon light hid the room beyond the frame.

Lexi jumped when Toby spoke again.

“Oh, wow. You’ve got to see this,” he said from the dusty beyond.

“What?”

“Just come down.”

He was not giving Lexi any assurance that she would be safe, but he also had not mentioned anything that made it sound dangerous either. She wished he’d taken her somewhere normal, somewhere she didn’t need to trust his judgement. Bowling was boring, but it wasn’t illegal. Laser tag got your heart beating too, and you didn’t have to worry about the building falling down on you.

“You sure? I don’t want to fall,” Lexi said.

“I’ll help you.”

In a clumsy imitation of Toby, Lexi rolled onto her stomach and tried easing her feet in through the window. She wiggled herself inside the house, getting grass in her face and dirt up her shirt. She felt his hands on her ankles as she eased herself down, but even as she hung from the window frame, he only seemed able to secure her knees. Lexi panicked for a second, and tried pulling herself up, but lost hold of the sill. While she tried getting the weeds and stickers out of her shirt in the single bar of dusty light, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She began to protest about the grass stains on her new pants until she noticed that in the corner a shape, a human shape became distinct from the shadows around it.

Lexi shrieked.

Toby hushed her and walked over and poked the clown. It slowly dawned on her that the thing was stuffed, someone’s old storage. Spiderwebs melted the clown’s silhouette into the wall so that she could only tell it was a clown because of the faded colors that the light had caught. The rainbow hair was matted and the ceramic face had cracks through the mouth and eyes, chips of the painted smile had fallen away and yellowed.

“I want to go now.”

“I don’t think we can go back out that window,” Toby said. “It’s too hard to get a good handle up there.”

“I don’t care. Boost me up. I want to go, Now!”

“Okay,” Toby said. He walked over to her, and cupped his hands for her to step into. Lexi placed her foot in his hands and lifted herself closer to the window, but Toby had been right. She could barely reach the window, but couldn’t get a good enough hold to try to pull herself back out.

She stepped down and turned to Toby. “Fine,” she said. “How do we get out then?”

Toby spun around, searching through the gloom for any other exits, finally spotting a door hidden behind a curtain of spider silk. “Over there,” he said, pointing away from the clown. The sunlight had been growing more red-orange and now barely lit the room with enough light for Lexi to see that Toby wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Okay, she said. “Let’s go then.”

“After you,” Toby said, giving her a mock bow.

“No way, this was your idea. You go first.”

Toby hesitated.

“You aren’t scared, are you?” Lexi asked.

“No, of course not,” Toby answered, but his eyes never left the door and its spiderweb portcullis.

“You are. You are scared.”

“No, I’m not. What do you think I am, some kind of—“

Lexi gave Toby a shove toward the door. His eyes shot wide and his mouth drew thin, just for a second, but it was long enough for Lexi to confirm his fear. After steadying himself, he franticly searched the room until his eyes settled on the clown. It sat on an old, delicate looking rocking chair made from spindly pieces of painted wood. He walked up to the clown and stomped down on the cross beam between its legs, breaking the post free from the chair, along with the clown from the webs which had connected it with the wall. It lunged at Toby, tackling him. Toby shrieked. Lexi shrieked too.

Adrenalin clouded Lexi’s mind. She couldn’t move her feet and even had she been able to remember the door, she’d have been trapped here. She watched as the clown attacked Toby, expecting that it would come after her once it was finished with him. Only gradually did she notice that Toby had been screaming for help as she watched on.

“Get it off me, get it off,” he shouted as he wrestled with the clown, unable to disentangle himself from the limp arms grasping at him. Lexi, coming back into mastery of her limbs, rushed toward him and kicked at the clown’s head. The porcelain head broke free, releasing a family of cockroaches onto Toby’s face.

Fear animated Toby and he jumped up, still holding the clown, webs hang from his arms, little white spiders clambering all over him, cockroaches ducking inside the neck of his shirt, crawling every which way. He rushed the silken shroud, using the clown’s headless body to batter it aside, gathering new spiders, black widows and brown wolves. He tossed the clown down once he got to the door. He turned the knob and gave a push.

The door didn’t budge.

He pushed again. Again it didn’t move. He turned harder, the knob turned with him, but the door did not release. He threw his body at the door. He knocked a couple of spiders from his shirt, a couple of cockroaches fell too, but the door still did not budge.

The sun had dropped below the house next door, and the room had lost many of its distinct edges. Only a pale ambient light lit the room to break up the shadows.

“Pull!” Lexi said, with the vibrato and pitch of panic in her voice. She desperately wished to be out of the house now. “Open. The. Door!” Toby was not cute enough for this. She quit caring about him. In fact, she hated him, and had for the past couple of minutes. In the midst of clowns springing from chairs and doors that won’t open in the fading light of a spider infested nightmare, Lexi realized she was too young to be dating. No, it was Toby who was too young to be dating.

Finally Toby reversed his efforts and the door flew open. He was out the door in a flash, leaving Lexi to the spiders and cockroaches and decapitated clowns.

Lexi heard the clanging of chains in the room beyond. Toby cried out, whether in pain or in fear she couldn’t tell. She stepped into the next room. The floor here was smooth like shower tile and slanted to a far off corner. Hooks on chains hung in rows from the ceiling. Lexi found one with a piece of cloth, still warm and smelling of Toby’s cologne, hanging in the middle of the room. The light did not come into this room and she she feared what else she might run into. She heard, below the stomping and her own breath, the creaking of the house and something scratching in the corner. She told herself it was only a mouse. A tiny one, white like the ones at the pet store. The room smelled of rot and mold. When the house creaked she could feel dirt and sawdust fall down from the ceiling above her. Lexi’s hands shook and perspired, but she held herself back from running the way Toby had.

Toby had found the stairs and he clomped up them at a racing pace. Lexi heard the floor above groan under his weight as she weaved her way through the dangling hooks, her hands waving out before her, feeling for danger, or more hopefully the door to the stairs. She found the bottom step with her foot instead.

Toby had found a way out by the time she had made it to the top of the stairs, his heavy footsteps no longer echoed throughout the house. She made her way into a living room with a gaping hole in the ceiling. A whole room on the second floor had crashed down into the living room, and was ready to make its way into the basement. The whole room sagged toward the center. As she walked, more dust fell from above.

The front door had been opened inward, and the boards nailed overtop which had barred entry, and escape, were kicked away near the bottom, leaving enough space to crawl out. She began to cross the room and the floor groaned, reminding Lexi of the imminence of its collapse. She stayed to the edges of the room, brushing against the yellowed, peeling wallpaper that bowed off the walls and curled in on itself.

Climbing between the boards, Lexi found Toby on the sidewalk, brushing creepy crawlies off his shirt, out of his hair, off the back of his neck. Her skin began to crawl too. She stopped for a moment on the walkway to brush herself off, then continued at a brisk pace, right past Toby.

“Wait,” he said. Lexi ignored him, and walked to the bus stop.

“Wait. Sorry about that,” he said again after catching up to her.

“Leave me alone.”

“Can we do something sometime?”

“That was something,” she said, pointing up the street to the house. She coldly looked past him, down the street, hoping to see the bus.

“Do you want to go out again with me?” he asked.

“No.” The bus was coming. Lexi fished in her pocket for her bus pass.

“You have to,” he said.

“No,” she said. The bus pulled up.

“I’ll call you.”

“Don’t.” Lexi stepped onto the bus.