Snow Day: a Novella (8 page)

I turned toward the street again, and prepared to make a break for it, but the crowd around the accident was growing larger as more people filed out of the bus. Then I heard something else, the distant, droning wail of a police siren. The Grandville’s driver had called in the accident.

The police siren was growing closer. Neighbors were now standing on their front stoops in the cold to see what was going on. Someone was pointing up the street in my general direction. The bus driver was pointing, too. Were they talking about the kid who caused the accident? Were they saying:
he went in that direction
?

I had no place to run.

I rushed over to the side door and placed my hand on the knob, wondering. It turned in my hand. The police siren was blaring now. It sounded like the cruiser had just turned off of Broad onto Woodlawn. They were here.

And so I turned the knob, yanked the door open, and rushed into the abandoned house where I found Tommy, and learned about ol’ George, and saw my first real dead body.

C
LANG, CLANG... CLANG, CLANG...

Tommy looked at me. He heard it too and knew what it meant.

“Your Ma’s calling, Billy.”

“Who, Tommy?”

“I... I... didn’t d-do nothing wr-wrong, Billy,” Tommy whined. “I just w-wanted to play.”

“Tommy...”

“It was ol’ George,” he finally said. “He did it. Stay away from ol’ George.” And then he started to cry again, whimpering. “I just wanted to play,” he mumbled through the tears. “...just wanted to play...”

Clang, clang... Clang, clang... Clang –

The sound of the bell ceased. My mother must have had enough.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

Just above my head, there was a footstep and a floor board creaked.

Tommy stopped his crying, frightened into silence. We both looked up at the exposed beams and boards that made up the cellar ceiling, as if trying to see through the dusty floor boards. I lifted the lantern to look and saw some granules of dust fall. Tommy crept closer and stood beside me, listening.

There it was again, a step and a creak; then again. They were tentative at first, then a little more certain. The footsteps were slowly moving from the back of the house toward the front, in the direction of the cellar stairs. I turned to run out the way I came in, but Tommy grabbed me, his hand pistoning out in a flash to grip my forearm.

“No, not that way. He’ll catch you.”

The footsteps stopped. At the top of the cellar stairs, a door opened slowly, its rusted hinges complaining with a soft, sputtering squeal.

Tommy quietly hurried me to another part of the cellar, partitioned off by a long row of floor to ceiling shelves cluttered with old paint cans, rags, and dusty boxes. He led me around the shelves, past a dormant furnace, an old washer-dryer unit, past a paint-splattered utility sink to a secluded back corner of the cellar. As the lantern’s light touched the wall there, I saw a set of concrete stairs leading up to large metal storm doors. They were double doors, the kind that opened upward as much as they opened out, like in the storm cellar in the
Wizard of Oz
, only these were made of heavy metal, not the wood kind that Auntie Em huddled behind during the twister. I looked at the slide bolt on the storm doors. I’d seen this kind before. On one door, there was a handle attached to a large metal rod that passed between the two doors, holding and locking them in place. The handle was folded down and secured there by brackets on either side so the handle and the bolt couldn’t slide right or left. To open the door you needed to lift the handle away from the brackets, which turned the slide bolt. Then you pulled the handle and the attached bolt to one side, withdrawing it from the second door and unlocking it. This was all familiar to me because Bobby had a door like this leading down into his basement from his backyard. One day, when his dad wasn’t around, he showed me how it worked. His dad would never let us open it, not even touch it. He was always afraid we’d leave it unlocked – a welcome opportunity for burglars, or someone else – maybe someone like ol’ George.

“Who’s down there?”

Tommy and I froze at the sound of a craggy voice from the top of the cellar stairs. We looked at each other, not moving, as the footsteps began their descent.

“Damn it, I said who’s down there?”

This time the voice was labored and rushed as it hurried down the stairs. He was racing to grab us, maybe to throw us in the grave he had dug. In that moment I pictured myself crammed in the bottom of the grave beneath the cellar floor, the dead boy on one side of me, Tommy, his face crushed by a shovel blade, on the other. And above, holding the lantern before him and hovering over us from the lip of the grave, I could see the shadow of a man, his face hidden from my squinting eyes by the hot glow of the lantern’s mantle, a bloody shovel in his other hand.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

I couldn’t tell if those last words were in my head or in my ears, and didn’t care. My fingers grabbed for the slide bolt handle to lift and slide it, but it wouldn’t give. It was rusted by years of disuse and jammed in place by the weight of the doors themselves.

“Hurry,” Tommy said.

“Who’s there?” came the craggy voice again. “Show yourself!”

From the sound of it, the man had reached the bottom of the stairs now; the shelves of paint hid us from his view, but he could still see the light from the lantern seeping around and through the shelves. He knew we were there and he knew what we were trying to do.

“I can do it! Let me do it!” Tommy was shouting and shoving me, frantic to get to the handle.

I shouldered him back. “No, I got it!”

Tommy continued shouting in my ear and reaching for the handle. We were blocking the light from the lantern and the shadows were making it hard to see anything, but I managed to grip the handle with two hands, secured one foot against the concrete step and put the back of my shoulder against the door above me to lift and relieve the pressure from the rod. I pulled up on the handle with everything I had, then put my second foot on the step as well. I threw my back and legs into it, straining, holding my breath, not wanting to give in until it did. It was going to be me or that damned door. And then...

It gave!

With a squealing cry of metal against metal, the handle lifted from its resting place between the brackets and the bolt turned with it. Another push from my legs and back and I was able to inch the bolt a little to one side, but not enough to clear the ring that locked the doors.

“You’re not going anywhere,” the man shouted.

Old paint cans, some empty, some not, came flying off the shelves. He was still on the other side of the shelf partition pushing the refuse off the shelves, clearing his view of us, shouting though the open gaps in the shelves.

“I see you! Don’t open that door, kid!”

Of him we saw only a shadowy eye through the gaps on the shelves, then a flash of shouting lips and yellowed teeth. Another empty paint can rocketed off the shelf. In its place an arm jutted out, sleeved in a dark coat, fist waving, opening, fingers reaching, clenching again into a fist.

“Open that fuckin’ door and I’ll kill you, I swear!”

He pulled his arm back, and there was a crash. He’d fallen, probably slipped in the dark on the loose dirt from the grave. There was a scream of pain and rage. He was coming, groping and finding his way in the dark to the edge of the long shelf. In seconds he would turn the corner and have a clear path to our corner of the cellar lit by the burning lantern.

Again I stood on the step, put my shoulder into the door and pulled the handle. Again it gave a little, then a little more. Just as it passed the locking ring, Tommy stood on the step too, pushing his shoulder into the second door to try to throw it open, but it was too heavy. The door opened a foot, then slammed back on his shoulder. I gave another push, and the door gave some more.

Together, we finally heaved the door up and open. It quickly swung high on its hinges, and then slowed, almost to slow motion, as it reached the apex of its arch. It threatened to slam back down on us, but instead swung the other way, crashing into the brick patio with a hollow, metallic
Bong
!

Before the sound even reached our ears, we were scrambling over one another to get out, banging our shins on the top step of the concrete stairs, stepping all over each other. We were a panicked tangle of arms and legs, first pushing each other out of the way, then grabbing at each other’s coats, each pulling the other along to get us both out of there, neither wanting to leave the other behind.

We crawled as much as ran across the patio, finally gaining our feet, then sprinted, as best we could in the high snow, across the backyard to the fence. Thank God this part of the fence was only four feet high. First Tommy, then I, reached the fence at a dead run. Without slowing, we leapt and threw ourselves on it, rolling our bodies over the top and falling into the snow on the other side.

Tommy was already sprinting away into the night by the time I got to my feet. From the safe side of the fence, I stole a glance back at the house. It was a giant dark shadow against a dark sky, but the lantern’s glow rose up from the open cellar door. Standing at the threshold of the cellar steps was the shadow of a hulking man. He wasn’t following us, though, just watching. In one hand, he held a shovel. He gripped it high on its neck near the blade and just watched.

I turned and ran.

I
RAN AS HARD AS I COULD THROUGH THE DARKNESS,
my knees pumping high, my green, yellow-toed boots pistoning into the high snow as I crossed the yard that adjoined the lot with the abandoned house. I didn’t think. I just ran. I needed to get away – away from the empty house, away from ol’ George, away from the accident on Woodlawn Avenue.

Without warning, I felt something scrape my face and jerk hard across my right shoulder. It nearly pulled me off my feet; I stumbled and thrashed. It jangled like metal and I was tangled in it. I realized in an instant it was chains descending from above, attached to a wooden seat. I had just run into a child’s swing set.

As I frantically wrestled with the swing, a dog in the next yard over started barking. I froze and listened, hearing the scrape and rattle of another metal chain unraveling. It let out a faint
ping
sound as it pulled tight against a metal pole. Though I could see almost nothing in the dark, I could hear it. The dog was big. It alternately barked and growled and panted as it paced along the fence that enclosed its yard, all the time straining at the end of its long leash.

The muffled voice of the animal’s master called from inside his house: “Shut up!” But the dog only barked louder and grew more frenzied.

I twisted and turned until free from the swing, but just then a light in the rear of the dog owner’s house flickered to life, seeping out to cast a soft glow that barely reached me in the yard next door. Quickly, I dropped to the ground and lay still in the snow, holding my breath, trying my best to act invisible. With one hand I reached up and grabbed the swing to still its motion.

The back door swung open and the distant sound of
Eclipse
from Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
wafted out into the night air. A shaft of light spilled out and bathed the yard next door, and to a lesser extent my hiding place just beyond. I could see the dog now, through the chain link fence that separated its yard from the one where I now lay hidden in the snow. It was a German Shepherd, as big as I had surmised, and chained to a pole that once held a clothes line.

A man’s shadow appeared in the doorway. He had a long-necked bottle in his hand.

“Friggin’ dog. I said shut the hell up!”

The shadow brought the bottle up behind his right ear and heaved it at the Shepherd. It missed the dog and shattered against the pole.

The door slammed shut, the man was gone, and the dog stopped its barking. A few seconds later, the light winked out and I was cloaked in darkness again. The dog, sufficiently chastised, now only panted and whined as it paced back and forth behind the fence. It knew I was still here, but knew better than to piss off her master again.