The Basement Part 1

The four-door luxury sedan kicked up dirt as it rolled down the driveway of an old house, with a run down porch attached to the front. Will knew the road and house very well. Sometimes when he was a kid he would spend all morning, and most of the afternoon, playing games and talking with his grandmother there. There had been few renovations or attempts to update the place by her and so it looked remarkably the same as back when he was just a small kid.

Now he was an adult, a lawyer with a job, a wife, and a luxury four-door sedan, of course. He was trying to remember the last time he had been to see her when he put the car in park and killed the engine. Was it her birthday a couple years back? That one Christmas when the whole family came over? He couldn’t tell. He didn’t feel particularly guilty about not being able to remember either. He often had phone conversations with his grandmother, so it wasn’t like he totally neglected her (even if he hadn’t been able to find the time to call her lately) and besides, he was a busy man. Nobody said being a lawyer was easy. He had other responsibilities.

A kind of warmth overtook him as he walked up the porch steps, as they reminded him of a simpler and more joyful time in his life - his childhood. When he didn’t have any bills to pay or any court appearances to make. He knocked on the rickety screen door three times and called, “Grandma? Hello?”

When he got no response he tried the handle, and finding it to be unlocked, opened the door. The inside of the house, too, had undergone few changes since when he was a kid. The chairs in the living room were the same ugly, mustard yellow color. There was a bowl of peppermints sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch, somehow she always kept that bowl full, he remembered, and it was then too. A Television set (one exception to the no changes rule) that was added sometime in the nineties he guessed, sat against one wall and didn’t work anymore (since all the TV companies switched to that new-fangled digital crap, he thought his grandmother would say.)

“Grandma?” He called and looked in each room of the house. She was nowhere to be found. There was a stench that permeated throughout the house, one that was prevalent on every old person he’d ever been around. He didn’t know what to call it other than “Old people smell” and as he walked throughout the house he avoided breathing out of his nostrils as much as possible.

He knew there was one place he still hadn’t looked, the basement. As a youngster he had always been afraid of his grandmother’s basement. It was dark, spider webs hung from the corners and under the steps. Each time he went down there he felt it would be his last, as if some fiend lurked in the shadows down there waiting to take his life the first chance he got, or maybe he would unwittingly step into a black widow spider’s web and die from a poisonous bite to his ankle. As a kid he never would go in the basement alone if he could help it, instead insisting that either his grandma or his mother go with him.

The basement made his heart beat fast just thinking about it, he preferred to stay in the main part of the house where there were doyleys laying about and pictures of Jesus to watch over him, but he knew he had go down into its midst. Maybe his grandmother had fallen down there and was in trouble. He couldn’t bear it if he left and she died because of him.

The door leading to the basement was old and wooden, painted white long ago. He had to push considerably hard just to get it to move. It squealed open on its rusted hinges and Will, hoping to save a trip, called down, “Anybody here?” Unfortunately, there was no reply.

He gingerly started down the steps that even twenty years ago seemed about to give way at any moment. Each step he took down the stairs into the dark basement creaked. As if the steps themselves were pleading with him to turn back, to not go in. He almost listened to them too, only he knew he couldn’t. Not without making sure.

The basement was cooler than the rest of the house had been and chill bumps tingled up his arms and legs. His foot reached the bottom of the stairs as he ducked to one side and avoided a spider web. A folded up lawn chair sat leaning against one wall just where he remembered it always had, and an old dryer (his grandmother never bothered to buy one of those new fangled washing machines) sat in one corner just where it had when he was a child.

Yes, everything seemed to be exactly in order and the same, except for one thing. A cushioned burgundy-colored chair sat deep in the back of the room. It was in an area of the basement that was especially dark but Will could see a frazzled, unkempt head of white hair peeking up over the back of the chair.