Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (42 page)

Alan lifted the box onto the stairs. The basement’s light was
just a bare forty watt bulb and his own shadow kept getting in the
way of his search.

He stopped rummaging. Slowly he turned his head back toward the
center of the basement. He’d seen it when he lifted the
toolbox, but the image didn’t sink in for several seconds.

Between two of the house-moving boxes, a black puddle. If they’d
had an oil furnace he might have thought it a leak, but its surface
returned no light, no gleam.

Alan walked across, his head bent so as not to scrape the beams.

A black puddle. Or a stain?

He didn’t want to touch it. No reason, but he didn’t want
to put his fingers into that blackness.

He tore a cardboard strip from the flap of the box closest to him. A
chill of revulsion crawled up his arms as he reached out to brush at
the puddle ... stain?

The cardboard came away clean. Just old gray cardboard. No stain, no
oil, no dirt. He let it fall.

“A trick of the light . . .” Alan didn’t sound
convincing, even to himself.

Jane would be upstairs by now, cleaning her teeth. The kids’
lights would be off. It was late. He felt tired. He yawned. He told
himself he felt tired, that it was late, that he could check it out
in the morning. Deep down though, he just didn’t want to be
alone in the basement a moment longer. Forgetting all about batteries
Alan went back up. He took the stairs three at a time.

“Seeya!” The front door slammed. Alan glimpsed Sarah as
she sprinted out the front gate toward the school bus on the corner.

He folded his paper and reached for his coffee. Across the table Ben
looked up from his bowl of cornflakes, his red hair still in sleep
shapes. “Do I haveta go to school after the dentist, Dad?”

Alan resisted the urge to ruffle Ben’s head. “See what
your mom says, Benny-Boy.” Privately he thought any six year
old should get as many days off school as possible. But then again he
didn’t have to supervise if Ben stayed home.

He laid his paper down and went into the hall. The black pool kept
swimming back into his mind. He was being ridiculous and he knew it.
The lounge window caught the morning sun, bright squares on the
carpet. He could hear birdsong outside.

It might be some kind of leak.

You have to check it out.

You’re being silly.

He opened the basement door and went down on unwilling feet.

In the space between the two boxes the concrete looked a darker gray.
Nothing of last night’s black pool remained, just a shadow. He
nudged at the patch with the toe of his shoe. The top layer of
concrete fragmented, leaving a dusty scrape.

Damp. Rising damp.

Alan shrugged and turned to go. He took the steps one by one. Did
damp do that to concrete? The phrase ‘concrete cancer’
echoed in the back of his mind—he’d heard it some place
and it sounded kind of right.

The phrase returned to Alan as he drove back that night. He edged his
Corolla forward, the beams of his headlights hard on the trunk of the
Lexus in front. Traffic out of Midport was always hell. Once again he
congratulated himself on convincing Jane they really didn’t
need to live on the coast. Ten miles inland and the real-estate got
cheap enough to give you some elbow room. The lights changed in the
distance. Nothing seemed to move. The traffic really was hell
tonight.

His cell phone buzzed.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Jane. Speak up will you, darling, it’s a bad line.”

“Soon. Well soon if I can ever get off route seven! It’s
mad out here.”

“Put it in the oven for me will you, darling.”

“He did? Good. Great.” No cavities for Benny-Boy.

“No, no, just tired. Had a hell of a day. All kinds of weird
shit.”

“Okay, love you too.”

Alan clicked the phone shut. He switched the radio over from the
tunes on 908 to the news on WAFM, both stations seemed to be
suffering from the same static. He’d been hoping for some word
on the traffic but the reports were full of the mining disaster at
the pits out past Stafford, and some story about the ferry to Getchen
Island getting itself sunk in calm waters.

“Concrete cancer.” He should take another look . . .

“Is it still good?”

“Great.” Actually an hour in the oven had left the cod
bake rather dry, but ten years of marriage is an education on when to
employ a truthful answer and when not.

“You alright?” Jane took the chair opposite and sat at
the table. She smiled. She looked tired but very beautiful.

“I’m good,” Alan said. “Just a bit
distracted. Two cop cars shot past me just out on Elm Lane. Must have
been doing ninety, blue and reds flashing. Never seen that round here
before.”

“It’ll be in the Chronicle for the next month!”
Jane grinned. “They can milk a parking offense for a front page
story.”

“And I saw Jim out front,” Alan said. “I said ‘hi’.
Gave me an odd look.”

“Odd?”

“I dunno, it was just odd.” He chewed another dry
mouthful. “I’ll go over and see him later. See how he’s
getting on with his latest project.”

“Daddy?” Sarah was standing at the doorway. She looked
pale.

“Honey?” Alan got up. She calls me ‘Dad’, not
‘Daddy’. Ever since she turned nine.

“Daddy.” Sarah hugged herself. Dark hair across her face.
Dark eyes. “I don’t like the noise.”

Alan crossed over to her. She was trembling. She pointed to the
basement door. A coldness crept over him. The skin on his cheeks
tingled. But he went, because his daughter needed him to.

The stink of wet earth hit him before he reached the door. Wet earth
and rot, and worse. He pulled the catch and reached in for the light
switch before his courage failed him.

The light showed the first three steps down. After that the blackness
swallowed them, utterly. It was a sea of liquid soot, or a black fog,
and it rippled with a slow undulation as though it breathed.

“Oh crap!”

Alan stepped back and closed the door. “Get the kids outside,
Jane.”

She put her head around the corner. “Why? What’s wrong?”

What could he say? “Just get them out, now!”

“What is it? Alan, you’re scaring me.” She stepped
into the corridor.

“Now!” He screamed it at her. “Get them out.”

Jane pulled Sarah from the kitchen and pushed her to the front door.

“Ben!” Alan shouted up the stairs.

Nothing.

“Ben!” He shouted it hard enough to hurt his throat.

A clunk from behind the basement door, deep and hollow, like a boat
jostling against its moorings.

On the porch Jane turned, her face strained. “He was looking
for some batteries . . “

“God no.” Alan felt the strength run from him. The beat
of his pounding heart seemed to fall like slow footsteps. The
basement door drew his gaze but his feet would not take him to it.

“Hi Daddy!” Ben ambled down the last few stairs. “Look!
I got my Gameboy working!”

The cold wave of relief made Alan tremble, made him want to cry.
Relief for his baby boy, but more than that, relief for not being
asked the hard question. A small voice deep inside told him that he
would not have walked into the black sea, no matter what the need, no
matter what the cost.

“Get in the car.” He dragged Ben into the street. “Get
in the car, all of you.”

“What the hell is going on?” Tears sparkled in Jane’s
eyes, and she was furious.

“I don’t know.” Alan shook his head. “I don’t
know.”

“What’s in the basement?” Scared, angry, hugging
two kids to her waist, but God she looked good.

“I don’t know.” He could feel himself getting angry
too, as the fear ebbed. “Something. Oil maybe.” He knew
it wasn’t. “It could explode.”

“Oil?” Jane pushed Sarah into the back of their old Volvo
Estate. “Oil?”

Out in the street with the lights of the houses all around it all
seemed silly. If he went back in the basement would be empty. Madness
started like this.

On next door’s lawn a ghost flashed on and off, a spook made of
Christmas lights on a wooden frame. The Jensen’s always got
ready for Halloween a week too early.

“Oil?” Jane stared at him, her hand on the car door, the
kids peering through the window. Sarah still with her haunted look.
Ben clutching his Gameboy and frowning.

“I … I don’t know.” He turned in a slow
circle. The houses, the lights, the trees, some bare, with black
fingers rubbing over each other in the breeze. “Look, wait in
the car. I need to ask Jim about this.”

Alan started across the street before Jane could object. He looked
back. “Don’t go back in. Not yet. It isn’t safe.”

He hurried up the path to Jim’s front door and knocked hard,
then rang the bell. Jim Sanders. Jim would know about the oil. Jim
knew about plumbing, about warped shingles on the roof, how to seal a
deck, how to wire up a Scalelectix so the cars would spark all the
way around and speed like they were on nitro. Jim would know.

“Alan. You look all flustered up.” Marge opened the door
to him, frumpy in her apron and iron gray curls, slight disapproval
behind those half moon glasses.

“Marge, sorry, is Jim in, I’ve got a problem. Is he in?”

“Slow down, Alan, you’ll do yourself a mischief.”
She pressed a smile between tight lips.

“He’s out?”

“Oh he’s in of course. Where would that old man go? Who’d
have him? He’s working on some project of his.” Marge
pointed the bead curtain down the hall. “Go ahead. And tell him
I want him up here soon. He hasn’t had his supper yet.”

Alan hurried past her. He swept the curtain aside before he
registered the smell. Earth and rot, and something older than both.

The light from the hall revealed the first three steps down before
the undulating darkness swallowed it.

He stood frozen.

“Anything the matter, dear?” Marge came up beside him. “I
expect he—?

She fell silent.

“Jim’s down there?” Alan whispered. Something in
him was afraid of what he might hear.

“My Lord!” Marge found her voice. “Jim! James
Sanders you come up here this minute!”

Nothing.

“Jim! Jim!” The first hint of terror entered her voice.

A silence, and then in the darkness, a scrape, the dry scrape of
sandpaper on stone, and the noise of nails on a chalkboard. Not
close, but down there in the depths of the basement workshop. Down
amongst the blades, the chisels, the soldering irons, the wire.

“Jim?” Alan still didn’t raise his voice. He
couldn’t.

Nothing, and then, so close that it might come from immediately below
that skin of blackness, a chuckle. A nightmare chuckle.

Alan ran. He pushed past Marge, leaving her staggering and bewildered
in her own hall, and he ran.

“Just keep driving. I need to think.”

The roads were neither more crowded than normal for the time of
night, nor less, but the traffic was different. From time to time a
police car or ambulance sped out of the rear view mirror and dwindled
in the distance with indecent haste. But it was the regular cars that
worried Alan. Too many of them packed with a whole family. White
faced kids at the windows. Up too late.

“We’re going to be in Edmont soon!” Jane’s
knuckles showed pale on the wheel.

“I know.”

“Tell me again,” she said.

It sounded stupid. With each mile they put behind them it sounded
more stupid. “I’m trying the cell again.” He
clicked it open.

“Still no signal?”

“Damned satellites.” He peered at the sky. Inky and
featureless. He heard the chuckle again, and cold fingers touched his
spine.

“There. Pull in there,” he said. A roadside eatery,
‘Mable’s steaks and fries,’ bright lights and
stainless steel, a dozen cars in the lot. “We’ll call on
a landline.” And tell them about a chuckle in the dark?

Jane huddled behind him with the kids while Alan tried the payphone.
He started with the numbers for the local police. They were busy.

“I’m going to try 911,” he said.

He glanced across the restaurant, feeling suddenly guilty. He had
never rung 911 and now he was doing it to tell them it was dark in
his basement. He jabbed the numbers.

The engaged tone.

Alan hit redial.

The engaged tone.

“It’s fucking engaged!”

“Alan, Benny’s listening.” Jane said it without
conviction.

He dialed three times more then slammed the phone down. “Crazy!”

The waitress scowled at him from her order.

“C’mon.” He led the way to the car. “I’ll
drive.”

“Where are we going, Alan?” Jane had her ‘adult’
voice on, but he could hear the tremor under the surety.

“My mother’s,” he said.

“That’s ninety miles!”

“Ninety miles sounds good.” He turned the ignition and
pulled out onto the highway.

Alan pushed the Volvo to seventy, foot on the floor. If a cop got him
for speeding, well at least he’d get to speak to the police.

He turned the radio on. Static. 908 FM appeared to have
closed up shop. No hot tunes, no cheaply made commercials, just a
harsh static roar. He hunted for WAFM and the news.

“ … word out of Midport. And additional disturbances in
Highton, Maytown, and Deal. I repeat, police advise against any
unnecessary travel. The coast road is closed from Eastham, as far west
as we have reports. More on the problems for folk wanting to get into
Midport as we get it.

Bob, I’m thinking it sounds like some kind of toxic spill.
What’re your thoughts?”

Bob’s thoughts, if any, were drowned out by an unearthly
howling.

“Turn it off! Turn it off!” Jane screamed.

Alan twisted the volume to zero then rubbed at his ear.

“What the hell was that?” Jane asked.

“Interference.” He hoped it was interference. It did have
an electronic quality to it. He overtook a 4x4. The
speedometer read 85.