Crawlspace

  ***

  Cup of joe in hand, Tom strolled out onto the porch into the frosty morning, ready to hurry up and get the day’s work behind him.

  The brisk sting of winter in his lungs felt almost as satisfying as seeing his wife’s rear-end disappear from view for an entire week, he thought as he took in a lustful breath of the cold morning air.

  He sipped from his coffee, smiling as steam drifted from his lips. The first rays of the morning sun was streaming through a shroud of trees - an omen of better things to come, he hoped.

  Finally life was good, he thought - even if he did have to spend the whole day crawling around on his belly in the muck underneath the house, spreading lime. It was a small price to pay for the week of freedom that lay before him; freedom from accusing looks and random nagging, freedom to allow joy to flood back into his life. Life was good and would get a whole lot better when Miranda showed up.

  Just one more day and she would be in his arms again, the two of them alone in the house together. Tom’s heart quickened at the thought. He figured he’d gladly spread lime in crawlspaces for the rest of his life if Miranda was waiting for him at the end of the day.

  Darkest before the dawn, Tom thought to himself and smiled.

  Miranda was more than the dawn to him. She was as hot as the sun itself, the light of his miserable life. She made him feel totally and completely alive, born again. With her, he had a second chance at happiness, a fresh chance to do things right.

  His reflection on the front window drew his attention. Tom sat his coffee down to better check himself out, running his fingers through his dark, still thick hair.

  “Not bad,” he said out loud, “you’ve still got it, Tommy-boy.” He shot a smile at himself, zipped up his wool-lined work jacket and shoved a pair of utility gloves into his pocket.

  As he surveyed the frost-covered yard, he still felt satisfied with his decision to purchase this old farmhouse in the country. True, it was more than a bit of a journey to get anywhere. The nearest person that could reasonably be called a neighbor was the better part of a mile away.

  Regardless, it felt good to know this land belonged to him - especially since his career had gone down the shitter. Even if he would never be able to fix the place up the way he had once dreamed, he was sure he could find a way to live without riding stables and a swimming pool.

  Tom thought of his recent downfall less frequently now than he used to. But every now and then, his thoughts would drift back to the event, like an accident replayed in slow motion, over and over again, his mind trying to figure out what he could have done differently.

  His career in the finance industry had been a lot like the final Space Shuttle Challenger mission: a straight-up trajectory that was all smiles and hope and promise, right up until the point where everything exploded into a million pieces. His wife was the survivor left behind, barely able to comprehend what had happened, still trying so hard to pretend everything was normal.

  What was that old joke? I’ll feed the kids, you feed the fishes?

  His career was sleeping with the fishes, anyway. This thought amused him and he chuckled aloud.

  His new job had been a high-profile, high-paying position, one he had assumed he wouldn’t have a shot at for at least another fifteen years; but fortune had smiled upon him and handed him his dream job on a silver platter when he least expected it. They had told him this was the gravy train to ride into retirement with style; the fantastic salary, stocks and bonuses were a certainty for at least the next decade, no sweat.

  It had seemed too good to be true, but he still took the bait, hook, line and sinker; and for a while life was grand. He and Kelly and Emily were happy together, maybe the happiest they had ever been as a family. The fat checks started rolling in as promised. His wife had been able to quit her job to raise their daughter full-time, and the future, as they say, was wide open. If only it had lasted a little longer.

  Tom snapped out of his daydream, back to the reality of the present, to the dozens of bags of lime that waited patiently for him at the end of the driveway. Not that long ago, there wouldn’t have been a pile of cash big enough to convince him to climb inside a filthy crawlspace, even for a brief visit.

  He realized now that his dream was long gone. Now he was simply one of a million other unemployed, middle-aged men, struggling to keep up with a deteriorating house that he could no longer afford. He had been forced to exchange his fine tailored suits and unending possibilities for manual labor that he would rather not touch with a twenty-nine foot pole.

  As he squinted against the bright winter sun, delaying the inevitable labor as long as possible, his mind continued to wander back to that fateful day a few months after he had taken the promotion - the day when his phone had chirped with the tinny voice of a stranger telling him that his big shot job had come to a sudden and untimely demise.

  Financial mismanagement had been revealed by an internal audit, he was told. It had all occurred under his area of responsibility, and the board of directors had decided to let him go.

  In that instant it had dawned on him for the first time that he wasn’t the golden child; he was the fall guy.

  He would not be prosecuted, he had been informed - but he wouldn’t be receiving severance, no golden parachute or retirement package - simply game over, the end.

  Those had been the worst of times, the bad days, the big depression. Kelly had begged to get her job back, and did – but at only half the former pay. During that dark period, Tom only got out of bed for the briefest moments, just long enough to get his daughter off to school and help Kelly out of the door to work; then he would retreat back into the safe womb of his bedcovers, lured by the promise of dreamless sleep. There he would lie, motionless in the darkness, for hours upon hours, day after day.

  He had gained weight, avoided his wife and child, and generally behaved as though his life was over.

  His inconsolable sulking finally led to two serious incidents.

  Twice his daughter had gotten off the school bus to find the front door to the house locked, and twice was stranded on the porch, frightened and alone, for several hours. Kelly had arrived home from work on both occasions to find her young daughter outside, panicked and in tears. She had been distressed and enraged, as both times Tom was fast asleep inside the house - fat, unshaven, unshowered – and deaf to the cries of his little girl banging on the front door, pleading for him to let her in.

  That was what had led to Kelly giving him a final ultimatum: either he could get his life together, or he could get out.

  She had suggested that he go back to school, learn a new profession. It would be good for him, she had argued; it would open his eyes to new opportunities, get his mind off the past and help him focus on the future – or some such blather. He had thought that even she, herself, hadn’t believed what she was telling him.

  She had lectured him for what seemed like hours, rivaling a brainwash session in a gulag. Eventually, her relentless barrage of rhetoric had broken his will and Tom had agreed to go back to school, to community college in a nearby town.

  After his high-flying business experience, it felt like the ultimate humiliation. He was only in his early forties, but the disintegration of his career had dealt such a blow to his ego and self-image that he felt like a man twice his age. He had showed up to his first college class feeling like an elderly man being forced from his room at a retirement home to attend an arts-and-crafts social.

  He had hated the classes at first, had only agreed to go because it had required less effort than packing his stuff and moving out of the house.

  It was the lowest point in his entire life, he was sure. He had been about ready to pull the plug once and for all on his cryogenically frozen dreams; but then, one day, he had met the most amazing creature.

  “Miranda.” she had stated simply. She had offered him her hand and flashed a smile, confident and beautiful. Her coal-black hair was trimmed neatly at the shoulders
, framing blue eyes that shimmered with intensity.

  The instant her hand touched his, it set his cold, sorrowful heart on fire.

  It had been his first day in a new art class, an elective he had chosen to take, and the instructor had given them an assignment to complete together.

  “We’re going to be perfect partners for this project,” she had said, “you work on it, and I’ll work on you. I want to find the artist in you for everyone to admire.”

  Tom remembered that he had stared blankly at her for a moment, speechless, stunned by the power of her passion, her sheer presence – her eyes.

  He was amazed to have found himself interested in something, or more accurately – someone - for the first time in longer than he could remember, and a whispered “okay,” had been the best response he could muster.

  She had hugged him, probably out of pity for his devastated sense of self-esteem. But that one simple hug had left him a changed man. The moment he felt her arms around him and took in her scent in one deep breath, he knew he was in love, had a reason to live again.

  Not too long after that, they had made love for the first time in the back of her Chevy Malibu, parked behind the campus canteen. He remembered calling Kelly afterwards that day to tell her she didn’t have to pick him up from school - he already had a ride.

  Kelly had never asked him about his new friend at school, but seemed pleased to find his attitude on the mend. He had started speaking up more at dinner, helping around the house.

  But mostly, he eagerly anticipated going to class each morning.

  He and Miranda had made love every chance they could since then, sometimes in her car, sometimes in an empty classroom, or a private study room at the college library. Whenever they had a minute alone they were all over each other - inseparable, insatiable.

  Tom finished off his coffee in a final gulp, set the cup down on the porch rail and started collecting the things he would need for the job that lay ahead.

  He would tell Kelly about Miranda; he would. He knew it was the right thing to do and he would do it. Not yet, but soon; it would be better for him to reveal the truth about Miranda himself, rather than let Kelly find out accidently. He would need to stay in control of the situation, if he was to have any chance of keeping things from getting ugly.

  He grabbed his thick woolen hat from the rocking chair and zipped his coat up to his chin. He slipped his cell phone and keys into his coat pocket and tucked a small mag-light into his jeans.

  He locked the front door, descended the stairs and headed for the corner of the house. His boots crunched on the frozen ground as he approached the thousand pounds of powdered lime, stacked in fifty-pound bags, that waited for him there along with several large rolls of plastic sheeting.

  Tom was no handyman, nor had he ever been. Hanging up a picture was the closest Kelly had ever gotten him to engaging in actual physical labor, and then only after incessant nagging.

  But paying someone to do the work for him was no longer an option, and the moisture under his house had to be controlled soon, or else he would have a much more expensive problem on his hands - one he wouldn’t be able to afford, either.

  He started to work, heaving the sacks of lime onto his shoulder, one at a time, and then dropping them off in a heap next to the small hole that led underneath the house.

  The crawlspace entrance was little more than a gash in the stone foundation of the old house. The rusty door that kept the crawlspace sealed from the outside world swung open inwardly - a rather awkward arrangement - and was propped open with an old crowbar, wedged into the mud under the house.

  He squatted beside the crawlspace entrance to catch his breath, the moisture of his lungs huffing little white puffs into the frigid air. He shielded his eyes from the bright sunlight as he tried in vain to see what awaited him underneath the house.

  Darker than the devil’s asshole under there, he thought. The doorway gaped open before him – its maw black, cold and soulless. It reminded Tom of a cold-blooded carnivore, a dead-eyed crocodile, motionless on a river bank, waiting to clamp onto the flesh of an unsuspecting victim and drag its startled prey deep into the inky black below. He remembered reading somewhere that they would sometimes hold the unfortunate catch underneath the water until it lost hope, stopped struggling, and finally surrendered to the unyielding darkness of the croc’s bowels.

  The thought made Tom cold, and he shivered. He had never experienced claustrophobia, but he thought he might understand that irrational fear soon.

  “Fuck,” he said. “This sucks!”

  Got to get it done, he reminded himself. Even though he had insisted to Kelly this would be an all-week project, he felt sure he could knock it out in a single day, easy. Miranda would be here in the morning; there was no way he was going to waste precious time that could be spent with her back under the house tomorrow.

  After a solid hour of work, Tom dropped the final bag of lime on top of the others. The exertion of carrying a thousand pounds of lime had made his clothes too warm, and he unzipped his coat to let it air out.

  He realized he was no longer afraid to break a sweat, to get his hands dirty; Miranda had seen to that. He had started doing push-ups and sit-ups each morning, and the effort was paying off. He had lost twenty pounds during the two months that had passed since he met her.

  He recalled the look of surprise that had flashed briefly in his wife’s eyes earlier that morning, when she had seen him naked in the bathroom. Even though she had tried to hide it, he knew his newly-fit physique had surprised her.

  He wiped the sweat from under the edge of his hat as he knelt and peered into the dark muddy hole he was about to have to crawl into. His coat had to go, he decided. He didn’t want to be a sweaty mess before he even got started under the house.

  He slipped off his outer layer and draped it neatly over a stack of bagged lime. Hot trails of steam rose from it into the frigid winter air like phantom snakes.

  He took a deep breath for courage, pulled the flashlight from his pocket and slipped on his work gloves. He got down on his knees and stuck his head into the hole to have a look around.

  A foul stench greeted him as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The smell was a dank mixture of several equally unpleasant scents – mold, rust, rotting wood, stale dust and an earthy shit smell that he figured was a fairly accurate recreation of what it must be like to stick your head up a cow’s ass and inhale deeply.

  He could barely see a few feet ahead of him in the limited area the sunlight was able to penetrate. He could see that the crawlspace floor was still very muddy from the faint sheen of reflection on its surface, but it was nowhere near the lake it had been a couple of weeks ago.

  Leaving the crawlspace door open had helped dry things out a bit, but Tom was disappointed to see that he was still going to have to contend with a fair amount of moisture.

  He flipped the flashlight on and panned the beam of light back and forth across the tight crawlspace. It shone on only the first few rows of rough-hewn crossbeams that supported the floor of the house, barely a foot or two above the muck.

  He leaned further into the hole to try and find the permanent light fixture that would illuminate the space while he worked. Tom loved his mag-light; the flashlight’s beam chased the darkness from its path nicely and in a few seconds he spotted the lonely and ancient light bulb, nailed to a beam in the dead center of the crawlspace. A thin pull string dangled from it.

  Tom sighed. Why couldn’t the light have a power switch next to the door? How much more would that have cost? Whatever the amount, he was positive it would have been money well spent.

  He pulled himself back out of the crawlspace and sat for a minute, plotting his plan of attack. The door was small, barely wide enough for a man of normal size to fit through. He thought for a moment how fortunate it was that he had slimmed down recently. On the other hand, maybe it was unlucky; if he was still overweight he wouldn’t have been able to
do the job even if he wanted to.

  He grabbed a roll of plastic sheeting and slid it through the narrow opening, careful to keep the end of the roll out of the soft mud.

  Once the first roll of plastic was tucked safely underneath the house, Tom turned to soak up a few last rays of sunlight before he crawled into the waiting gloom. Fragile beams of midmorning sun shot here and there through the sparse foliage of several enormous elms, making the trees look like giant glowing sea urchins hovering in the air.

  A deep breath of the fresh winter air brought him a rush of pleasure with its mingled scents of pine, snow, and fallen leaves. Miranda had brought him back from the edge of extinction, had made him able to once again appreciate the little things, the simple wonders that life could bring.

  The thought of her renewed his vigor and he turned to face the crawlspace; it still lay in wait for him, mouth agape.

  Without further hesitation, he dropped to his knees, took a deep breath and squirmed through the narrow opening.

  The aging farmhouse sat atop a much tighter space than Tom had realized. The darkness, combined with an oppressive odor, created its own unique brand of claustrophobia. If the temperature hadn’t been like a meat locker, he wasn’t sure he could have handled it.

  He now realized exactly why the plumbers he had hired previously had insisted on raising their rates halfway through the job. He had always held the grudging thought that it was because the Lexus in his driveway had made him an easy mark for blue-collared types. He knew better now, though, as he stared into the horrid space underneath his house. He had no doubt that those plumbers had earned every penny, regardless of how much they had charged him.

  There was little room to maneuver between the cold muddy ground below and the rough wooden beams above. He rolled onto his side and turned on the flashlight, panning the light back and forth to scope out the area in which he would be working.

  The ground underneath the house was fairly level, from end to end and side to side. No spot he could see offered more comfort than any other – it was all one big soggy, subterranean field of mud, punctuated with supports at regular intervals.

  The beams above him were so low that he had no hope of achieving an upright sitting position anywhere beneath the house. He realized, to his dismay, that he would be spending the entire day in a slightly elevated low-crawl, at best. He could move across the ground without completely dragging his body through the mud, but not by much.

  He attempted to raise himself onto his hands and knees, and hit his head on a crossbeam in the process; not hard, but painful enough to get the job off to a bad start and fully illustrate the physical limitations the task would impose.

  Knees and elbows were going to be the best he could manage to keep himself off the ground. It was such a tight fit he couldn’t even lift his head up enough to look ahead. To look in any particular direction, he had to turn his entire upper body, head cocked to the side. Contorting himself into awkward positions all day was going to be a serious pain in the neck, he thought - pun intended.

  The small flashlight didn’t help much. Tom hoped more light would make his cramped situation more bearable, so he turned his attention to finding the light bulb.

  He located it quickly. The glass bulb reflected the beam of his flashlight like a buoy bobbing in the middle of the ocean during a starless night.

  Tom grabbed a roll of plastic and positioned it in front of him. He ran his fingers around the roll, found the loose edge of the sheeting and clamped it to the ground with his palm, rolling the plastic out ahead of him with his other hand. A dry pathway unfurled before him, as he crawled towards the dormant light bulb. The low crawl towards his target was slow going, and required more effort than he had imagined.

  He was halfway to his destination in the center of the house when his back snagged hard on something. He was hooked, stuck on a low crossbeam, unable to move in any direction. Panic pushed the air from his lungs and he couldn’t breathe.

  He was held immobile between the house and the ground, his body wedged like a hatchet in a piece of dried kindling. Every attempt he made to free himself only seemed to ensnare him further. He visualized in fast forward what would happen next – his futile struggle, reaching the point of exhaustion while his energy and hope faded.

  Fear sent his imagination into overdrive. In his mind’s eye, Tom pictured rats creeping from their dens in the darkness beneath his house, one at first, timidly – then others, emboldened by his helplessness. He imagined the vermin gathering by the dozens around his face, curious darting black eyes observing him calmly, before they charged him and devoured the skin from his face.

  Tom closed his eyes and became still, his body locked in a half-crawling, half-lying position on his knees and elbows.

  There are no rats, he reassured himself. An exterminator had thoroughly inspected the property before he purchased it, and it had been given a clean bill of health, as far as pests were concerned. He tried to remind himself of this fact, although in his current state it brought him little comfort.

  After a few minutes, the paralyzing panic that had gripped him passed. His breath began to come more easily, and soon he was once again drawing in the sour air freely.

  “Fuck.” Tom muttered, once he realized that the absence of pain meant that it was only his shirt that was stuck, not his actual body.

  He unbuttoned his shirt and wriggled out of it, left arm first, then the other.

  Once out of it, he was free. He was now naked from the waist up, and the cold air bit at his exposed flesh as viciously as the pack of rats he had imagined seconds before.

  Tom saw that his shirt had snagged on a rusty nail sticking out from a crossbeam. He realized how lucky it was that the nail had only snagged his shirt, and not dug deep into the meat of his back. He pushed the offending nail out of the way with his thumb and made a mental note to keep a closer look out for hazards.

  He squirmed his way back into his shirt and got down to business, rolling his way towards the light bulb like a man possessed, as though at any moment the ground beneath him might give way and swallow him whole if he dared linger too long in any one spot.

  Then, there it was: the light bulb, only inches in front of his face. He turned his body awkwardly to the left, head to the side to look back towards from where he had come.

  The crawlspace entrance looked a lot smaller from here, and it seemed further away than he knew it really was. It occurred to him that his feelings about that opening had completely changed, now that it had become an exit, now that he was on the inside.

  When he had looked at the entrance from the outside, it had been foreboding, threatening in its dark gloom; but from his new vantage point, deep in the belly of the beast, that same opening had assumed a different meaning entirely. It now shone with radiant light, beckoning him to hurry to it, to thrust himself into the glorious sunlit wonders that lay beyond.

  It’s all a matter of perspective, Tom thought, and smiled.

  His fingers found the light’s drawstring; as he grasped the small ball-bearing-like beads, he suddenly realized he should have brought a spare bulb along, in case this one was burned out.

  He rolled onto his back underneath the bulb, the clearance so low that he could barely roll over. He gave the chain a gentle tug, and the light popped on with a scratchy but reassuring “click”.

  Thank God.

  For the better part of two minutes Tom lay flat on his back underneath the increasingly warm bulb, eyes closed against its hot brilliance. The exertion required to get the plastic rolled out even this far had been a lot more than he had expected.

  Eyes closed, he imagined himself back in his comfy bed, goose down comforter pulled up to his neck, warm sunshine streaming through the window onto his face, the soft warmth of Miranda snuggled up beside him.

  Tomorrow can’t get here soon enough, he thought.

  He took a deep breath. Rest time was over. He had to get this done as fast as possible. He ro
lled back onto his belly, again squeezing his body as he turned in the tight space.

  The shining brightness of the light bulb brought a new warmth and semblance of comfort to this terrible place. This job might not be so bad after all, Tom thought – especially if he didn’t have to crawl around with a flashlight the whole time.

  The sole downside to the improved lighting was that it revealed that the crawlspace was even more filthy and disgusting than the flashlight’s narrow beam had cared to show.

  Decades of abandoned cobwebs drooped overhead, weighted with hundreds of long-hollowed shells, insect corpses that waited for his unwitting face to brush them free from where they dangled, in eternal slumber, as he crawled by. Tom wondered how many of these cobwebs were already stuck to the back of his head and shivered at the thought.

  Further away, towards the far end of the house opposite the crawlspace door, the ground had a glossy green sheen, probably moss – even though he couldn’t imagine how it could grow here, deprived of even the slightest sliver of sunlight. Maybe leaving the crawlspace door open for the last week had been enough to allow it to take hold?

  Tom scrunched his nose in displeasure and realization hit him – how much he had lost with his job, how much he missed his freshly pressed suit and his fine office, where the air was always a pleasant mix of coffee and corporate sanitation. This is what he had been reduced to: crawling around in the dark, alone.

  He rotated around to face the crawlspace exit again, trying his best to stay atop the narrow plastic path he had laid. Every wayward knee or elbow that slid off the plastic meant another part of him that was wet, muddy, and most importantly - freezing cold. The temperature had dropped since he started and he had let the sweat on his body cool too much.

  Tom fought the urge to shiver as he struggled to catch a glimpse of sunlight coming through the open crawlspace door, the same portal that had glowed with such transcendence a few minutes before. The bright incandescent glare of the light bulb behind his head cast sharp shadows that stretched out along the ground in front of him.

  He looked intently from right to left, but could see nothing beyond the bright ring of light in which he was immersed.

  A sudden urge to stand, to stretch, to breathe fresh air possessed him, and Tom scooted along the plastic path toward the crawlspace exit as quickly as he could.

  The light bulb revealed the limitations of its reach, as Tom quickly found himself submerged again in an inky darkness as he approached the periphery of the house. Where the hell was the opening? It should have been in full view by now.

  He fumbled in his pocket for the flashlight he had stowed only a few minutes earlier, thinking he would not need it any longer.

  He propped himself up on both elbows and clicked the light on, illuminating the area in front of him.

  He was startled to see the inside of the crawlspace door a couple of feet in front of his face, concentric circles of light reflecting off its rusty steel surface. Happy to be so close to the exit, Tom let out a sigh of relief.

  Then it hit him. The door was closed.

  He had difficulty processing it. His mind began to spit out possible explanations, like coins from a slot machine. He sorted through the numerous options and settled on the most likely explanation as to why the crawlspace door he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt had been firmly propped open with a crowbar was closed: the wind must’ve blown it shut.

  He crawled forward and gently pulled at it with one hand, hoping it would swing open, but it didn’t budge.

  He pulled again, harder, but still the door refused to give.

  Maybe a neighbor had passed by and seen the door ajar and decided to close it? He had been in this house almost a year and had yet to see a single neighbor set foot on his property, but he supposed it was possible.

  “Hey!” Tom yelled. “Anybody there?”

  He waited. Silence.

  “Hello?” Hey called again, more urgent this time, louder. “There’s someone working under the house. Please open the door!”

  Again he listened, half expecting to hear snickers of laughter; maybe teenage boys had cut through the yard, seen the door open with his materials beside it and thought this would be one hell of a prank.

  He held his breath and listened for any sound from the world on the other side of the door.

  Nothing.

  “Fuck this,” he said and twisted himself around, ignoring the plastic sheeting he had so carefully spread on the ground beneath him. It wound around his knees as he turned, rolling onto his back. He stuck his knee into a sludgy puddle; cold water seeped into his jeans and up his bare back chilling him to the bone. He placed the soles of his boots solidly against the steel door; the heavy rubber tread gripped the rusty surface nicely.

  He took a deep breath and kicked with all his might. The shock of the impact traveled like electricity up his legs and into the base of his spine, but the door didn’t budge in the slightest.

  “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” Tom screamed, grasping at his legs but unable to bend his body enough to reach them.

  “God damn it, open the motherfucking door!” He screamed so hard it felt like his throat was turning inside out.

  “Open the door! Open the door! Open the motherfucking door!” his voice started out strong and demanding, but the sound of desperation in his voice was growing more prominent.

  He planted his feet against the door and kicked two, three, four times more, with the strength of his entire being; still to no effect.

  He lay still, panting. His backside was soaked, his jacket slathered in mud, the freezing cold held at bay only slightly by the heat of his exertion.

  After a few moments, Tom worked his way around to face the door again, and cupped a single naked ear against the door’s frozen metal, listening intently.

  The silence beyond the door was complete. In a hoarse whisper, he began to plead earnestly to anyone who might be within earshot on the other side of the door.

  “Look, this isn’t funny anymore.” His voice was barely more than a whimper. “Please open the door. I promise I won’t be mad. I promise there won’t be any trouble.”

  He grew still and listened again.

  No reply. Not a sound.

  He glanced up at the floor of the house above. It felt as though the weight of the whole building was pressing down on him, crushing him into the mud. He had to summon every ounce of self-control he possessed to keep from descending into a full-blown freak-out.

  He listened for sounds coming from above – hoping to hear someone walking around inside. He listened for thirty seconds, maybe forty, but his ears detected no movement, nothing but the sound of his own labored breathing, his adrenalized heart pulsing in his chest. He realized then that there would be no muffled footfalls from above unless the person who had trapped him here had broken into the house and was robbing him blind. If that was the case, he doubted they would be keen on letting him out when they were finished.

  It would be at least a week before his wife would return; what if he really was trapped under here? Would he still be alive by then?

  Would she even bother to call to check on him while she was gone, he wondered. It was unlikely. And if she did, would she be concerned if he didn’t answer the phone? He guessed not. If anything, she would probably think he was back to moping in bed and wouldn’t bother trying to call again.

  Thinking about his wife calling to check on him reminded him of his own cell phone – it was in his pocket right now. Reception at the farmhouse was fifty-fifty at best, and that was being charitable; but trying to make a call from under the house was definitely worth a shot, Tom thought.

  If he could get through to Miranda, even for a second, she could come and set him free. She would come running to help him. Then, afterwards, they could have a good laugh in a hot bath about his misadventure.

  Tom eagerly slipped his hand into his pants pocket to retrieve his cell phone; not finding it, he remembered putting it in his coat pock
et – and his coat was outside.

  His momentary hope deflated faster than a balloon in a pin factory; but all was not lost. Miranda would be here tomorrow. No matter what happened, the very thought of her, his new love, always filled him with hope. He was sure he would find a way to get out before then; but if worst came to worst, at least she would be here soon.

  He decided not to let it come to that; he would find his own way out of this predicament.

  Tom took stock of his equipment: A small flashlight, a box cutter, four rolls of plastic sheeting, and the wet muddy clothes on his back. The box cutter might be useful, he thought, and perhaps he could use the plastic sheeting to keep warm.

  He rolled onto his knees next to the crawlspace door; the space was so tight that he couldn’t lift his head without hitting the floor above.

  He pulled his filthy gloves from his fingers, and inspected the door frame of the entrance. The doorway was about two feet high by three feet wide, constructed from solid steel tubing welded at the corners. Whoever had built the door had wanted to make sure it would never need to be replaced.

  He ran his fingers around the edges of the steel frame. The door fit so snugly that he was unable to slip even a fingertip into the hairline crack that remained between it and the jamb.

  The steel door extended over the jamb on the side opposite the hinges and he realized kicking it open would be impossible. He would have to pry it open.

  He tried his best to move the door back and forth, pushing lightly and releasing. But the door had zero give, not even the slightest hint of a jiggle.

  His flashlight was starting to give out. He turned his attention to the crawlspace door, hoping to unscrew the two big hinges with the blade of the box cutter. But the screws had been welded into place; escape was going to be trickier than he had hoped.

  No, he decided, he would have to find something he could use to pry it open. Maybe a forgotten tool, a loose pipe – he might have to pull out his own plumbing to climb out through the floor, he thought. Whether or not he would have to do something that drastic before the day passed - before Miranda got here and could help him out - he wasn’t sure.

  He remembered that the door had been propped open with a crowbar; maybe it had fallen over in the soft mud and was lying somewhere nearby?

  Tom shone the flashlight around, illuminating the ground near the crawlspace door.

  To his left, he could clearly see a hole in the mud, now half-filled with water, the spot where the crowbar had been. He maneuvered his head to the left and the right, careful to avoid striking it on the low-hanging beams only inches above, feeling for the crowbar in the sludge, but it wasn’t there. Whoever had closed the door must have taken it out.

  Tom turned around and rested, with his back pressed against the sealed exit, his neck bent sharply forward due to the low clearance. He wished desperately that he could sit up straight, for even one minute.

  He panned the weak light around the crawlspace again, intently looking for anything useful. The mag-light was only bright enough to see a small radius of the ground around him. The naked incandescent bulb still burned steadily in the center, but he wasn’t ready to try to crawl back to the far side of the house to look around just yet.

  He leaned his head back against the steel door and sighed deeply. His breath emerged into the cold air as a phantom of steam, illuminated in the flashlight’s dim beam.

  He set the flashlight on the ground beside him to put his gloves back on. A reflection in the light’s beam caught his attention, something small and white on the ground a few feet away from where he hunched.

  He dropped his gloves, picked up the flashlight and scooted himself through the mud to see what it was. It seemed odd that anything he might find in the muck under the house could look so shiny and new.

  It was a small piece of glossy paper, sturdy cardstock with handwriting on it. Tom peeled it gently from the mud. The ink was smudged, but the neat manuscript lettering was still very legible.

  “Enjoy your fresh young meat,” it read.

  What the fuck? Tom wondered.

  He flipped the paper over to find the other side completely smeared with mud.

  He wiped it clean with his thumb, positioning the flashlight to get a better look.

  It was a photograph.

  The face of a beautiful young woman beamed a smile at him through the grime, her eyes sparkling and full of joy.

  His curiosity turned into shock as he realized who she was; the realization felt like someone had kicked the wind from his stomach.

  It was a photo of Miranda - the only one he had of her. He kept it hidden deep inside his wallet, and would pull it out whenever he was alone and feeling sad. Seeing her face, even in a photograph, always made him feel so much better.

  But right now, here, her photo was having the opposite effect. Seeing her face smiling at him through the smeared filth felt like an icicle plunged deep into his heart.

  He flipped the photo back over to take a second look at the writing. Everything was coming together now – the handwriting was unmistakable, he was surprised he hadn’t recognized it instantly.

  It was Kelly’s.

  He began to shiver uncontrollably, hugging himself for warmth, but to no avail.

  Kelly had found out. That was what had happened. She had found out about his affair with Miranda and now she was punishing him. He almost felt relieved at the thought.

  He had been planning to tell her, he knew it was the right thing to do; but the right moment had not yet presented itself. That was the only way he could explain his procrastination.

  So much for that now; things had never felt as out of order as they did at that precise moment.

  A new realization struck him - he now had hope of getting out of the crawlspace today. He imagined how events had played out: Kelly had found the picture and decided to get revenge on him, to shake him up. She had dropped their daughter at her nanny’s house this morning instead of going to visit her family, and had then come back here to confront him. If that was what had happened, that would mean she was here. No wonder she had been so adamant about him promising to finish this job. She must have been planning to lock him under here as punishment for his indiscretion all along.

  He took some comfort in the realization that no matter how mad she might be, at least it meant he was not alone. The thought of being trapped in this crawlspace - even for one day – scared him more than almost anything else he could imagine. A pissed-off, cheated-on wife was a frightening thought – but Kelly was no killer. She would relent, she would let him out. She would probably be crying in his arms looking to him for comfort by the evening’s end.

  She was probably standing outside of the door right now, he thought, trying to decide what to do next. God, he hoped that was true. He realized he hadn’t looked forward to seeing his wife’s face so badly in a long time.

  He slid the picture back into his pocket.

  “Kelly?” he called in a gentle voice through the steel door.

  “Baby? Are you there? Talk to me.”

  He heard nothing but icy silence, but in his mind he saw her standing there, fists clenched, mulling over her next move.

  “Kelly, I know you’re there and I know you’re very upset with me…” He paused for dramatic effect. “…and I know I deserve it.”

  He smiled to himself. This was a game he knew, a game he would win. That bitch wouldn’t know what hit her, after he manipulated her into letting him out of here.

  Shit, I might lock her ass under here and be done with it, he thought to himself. I like the sound of that.

  He pressed his ear against the stinging coldness of the door and listened with all his might for her response, for a muffled sob, for the sound of the padlock being lifted out of the collar, anything.

  Silence.

  She was being exceptionally stubborn, he thought. It wasn’t like her for more than thirty seconds to go by without some sort of bitching spewing from her mouth
.

  “Sweetheart?” he tried again, using the most humble voice he could manage. “I never meant to hurt you. I love you. I am so, so sorry. Let me out so we can talk about it, okay - about where we go from here.”

  There was still no response, only maddening silence. Minutes ticked by. Without his watch or his cell phone, he had no way of knowing how much time had passed.

  OK, think, Tom, think. How long can she keep me under here before she gives in? When did she find the picture – this morning? Last week? What else could she know about it, other than the fact that he had a picture of someone she didn’t know in his wallet?

  He didn’t know how long Kelly might have had the picture. He hadn’t looked at it lately himself. It had only been two days since he had last seen Miranda in person, so it was possible that Kelly had taken it several days ago, if not more.

  She would cool down, Tom knew. She couldn’t leave him under the house forever; she wouldn’t kill him, it wouldn’t be worth it. He had not been the best father lately -that was true. But Kelly would not take her daughter’s daddy away.

  It wasn’t like she had had much use for him since he had been laid off anyway, he figured. They hadn’t had anything resembling a true conversation for months. Now that she knew about the other woman, she would probably be glad to see him leave, to be able to get on with her life.

  Regardless of how she had found out or how she felt about things, here he was: trapped under his own house, freezing cold, soaking wet, and powerless to do anything about it.

  Fuck that, he thought, and fuck her. I’m getting out of here, and she can go fuck herself. There’s got to be a way out. I’m not going to lay here and freeze my ass off while she sits upstairs fingering herself while I suffer.

  Tom scanned the crawlspace in earnest for any other way to escape. He knew there was only one door, but he scanned the perimeter of the foundation.

  The usual small vents usually built into the foundation walls were missing, since the house had been built long before building codes had required them. He wouldn’t have been able to fit through a little vent anyway, he knew. It would have been nice to be able to see sunlight, though - for his sanity’s sake if nothing else.

  Previous owners had upgraded the house’s heating and cooling to a central system decades ago, but the air ducts ran inside the attic, not the crawlspace. Unfortunate, because that eliminated the possibility of pulling an air duct loose from the floor and breaking his way up into the house through the hole.

  Too bad, he thought. He could’ve knocked loose one of the air ducts to blow warm air down here while he plotted his escape.

  His flashlight was losing its brilliance, and cut weakly through the darkness. He thumped the head of the flashlight against his palm, and it brightened back up. Near the front corner of the house he could make out what looked like a neat stack of objects, but details were lost in the gloom. Cinderblocks, he guessed. Maybe an abandoned tool might be nearby?

  He crawled forward to inspect, full of renewed hope. His elbows and knees made a wet sucking sound as he pulled them from the mud.

  After sloshing his way through twenty feet or so of mud and muck, he was surprised to find himself looking at several very new-looking, shrink-wrapped packages of bottled drinking water.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of this discovery. Did the plumbers leave this when they were working down here a few months ago? If they were that forgetful, maybe they had left some tools behind too - maybe a wrench, hopefully a crowbar?

  No, a crowbar was too unlikely, a fantasy - but a wrench? That was possible. Didn’t all plumbers carry giant monkey wrenches around with them? If he could get his hands on one of those, maybe he could bust his way through the foundation and make a hole big enough to escape through.

  He surveyed the immediate vicinity around the bottled water for stray tools. Then he saw something, something odd-looking in the corner. He shoved the cases of bottled water excitedly out of his way and crawled towards it as fast as he could manage. It looked like a duffel bag – what if it was full of tools?

  Something thin and shiny stuck out from one end of the sack. It reflected the beam of the flashlight back towards him from the sea of near-total darkness; some sort of tool, perhaps? Maybe a screwdriver?

  He covered the ground that lay between him and the object in a few seconds, and grabbed for it as soon as it was within his grasp.

  It felt different in his hand than his mind had expected it to, and he knew instantly that it wasn’t something the plumbers had left behind. He trained the flashlight on it.

  It was the pointed stiletto heel of a woman’s shoe; black and dressy, with a tasteful silk bow on top, a sharp four-inch heel underneath.

  The heaviness of the shoe startled him as he lifted it. It took several seconds for his mind to process the fact that the shoe was heavy because someone was wearing it.

  “Fuck!” Tom shouted. He recoiled reflexively, dropping the shoe along with the foot it contained, and again struck his head against a sharp corner of an overhead beam. A streak of pain burned through him, creating a lightning-like flash in his eyes.

  Temporary blindness and harsh pain halted his retreat. Every instinct in his entire being commanded him to flee, to get out, to get away from this situation, but there was nowhere he could go.

  Tom cradled his throbbing head in his hands; his panicked eyes darted here and there in the dim light, like the beady eyes of the rats he had envisioned not long since, desperately searching for an escape route and finding none, stuck to die in this sinking ship of a crawlspace.

  He looked back at the human being that lay like a crumpled sack in the corner, only a few feet away.

  I’m not alone after all, he thought; but the idea brought him no comfort.

  “Hello?” he called optimistically to where the person lay silent and motionless in the corner, shrouded in shadows. His voice was not much more than a crackling whisper, so hollow and soft it sounded like an answering machine recording from long ago.

  “Are you OK?” he asked, but as soon as the words left his lips he realized that an answer would probably frighten him more than anything else ever could.

  He took a deep breath and cautiously crept to where the person lay. The flashlight’s ever-weakening beam caressed a distinctively female shape; it traversed along a feminine slender calf with porcelain skin, over a muddy knee on its journey towards a bright blue dress hiked up over a shapely thigh. The person was lying motionless, in what would have undoubtedly been a very sexy pose, under almost any other circumstances.

  The woman was on her side, facing away from him towards the stone foundation, her bottom leg sticking straight out, the other leg pulled up slightly; ankle resting daintily on calf.

  He placed his hand on her shoulder and pulled her gently towards him. Her head flopped back and her empty gaze met his.

  “No, no, no, no!” Tom whimpered in a low sobbing tone as he recognized who it was.

  It was Miranda. The new light of his life – no, fuck that – the only light his life had ever known. The light had been extinguished.

  He had been anticipating her arrival all morning, all week – in a manner of speaking, his entire life. Now, he realized she had been here all along.

  He didn’t want to believe it – the body couldn’t be Miranda, it couldn’t; but deep inside he knew the awful truth, no matter how much his mind tried to persuade him that it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, how could it be? - Tom knew with horrible certainty that it was her.

  As he stared through tears into her lifeless eyes, he realized she didn’t quite look like his Miranda anymore. The sparkle in her eye that made her different from every other woman he had ever met was gone, replaced by a glassy coldness that was nothing like her, the real her - not this wax-museum quality replica of her lying in the mud underneath his house.

  As he began to weep - something he hadn’t done since he was a small child, the flashlight shook violently in his hand.
r />   Maybe she was still alive and he could save her; he hoped it wasn’t too late. He slid his arm under her head and pulled her close into his chest, cradling her like a child.

  “Miranda,” he pleaded. “Talk to me. Say something. Come back, baby, come back – I love you so much.”

  His warm tears rolled down her cold cheek as he laid his sobbing face against hers. He pressed his fingertips against her slender neck, checking for a pulse. Her skin felt like fossilized wood: cold, smooth and rigid.

  Her eyes were wide open, bulging half out of their sockets, mapped with dark red bloodshot veins, her eyelids dried and curled back much farther than they should have been. She stared past him, at some point off in the distance, over his right shoulder.

  Her mouth was frozen in a snarl, teeth slightly bared. It reminded him of a dog growling a warning: “Stay away, or else.”

  He wanted so badly to close her staring eyes, to bring together those soft lips that had kissed him with such tenderness only a couple of days before. He wanted to give her back the dignity that had been stolen from her in death. She had been murdered and discarded like garbage, a total calamity in which he had played an unwitting role.

  She was wearing a blue dress, a gift from him. It had perfectly matched her stunning periwinkle eyes, those eyes that had sparkled with delight when he had surprised her with it.

  She loved it, she had said, and had wanted to try it on immediately. He had said no, to wait. He had asked her to wear it when she came to see him at the farmhouse this week. He couldn’t wait to see how beautiful she would look wearing it while lying across his bed.

  Well, here she was; and he was finally seeing how beautiful she looked in the dress. Except she wasn’t reclining gracefully on his bed, she was lying in the mud underneath his house, about six feet below where his bed would be. The blue of the dress now more closely matched the color of her pallid skin than her eyes. Those eyes that once contained a bottomless sea of blue were now wide and black in the center, pupils dilated like big black pennies.

  This is not real, he thought; but it was. The cold heaviness of her body in his arms was proof enough of that.

  An odd thought occurred to him, the thought that at any moment she might spring back to life, full of hatred for bringing her to this tragic end. He pictured her setting upon his flesh, intent to devour him with canine fangs gleaming, glistening in the dim glow of the solitary light bulb here in the squalid mud beneath his house.

  He resisted an urge to drop her into the mud; instead he laid his hand upon her clammy leg, stroking the smoothness of her right calf, so cleanly shaven and porcelain white, as if to say “I’m sorry. Oh, my dear sweet Miranda, I am so sorry.”

  But she didn’t jump to life with eyes blazing and teeth bared to devour his flesh and his forever damned soul as he had feared. Instead, she did what the dead do: nothing. She ignored his touch as though he was the phantom, and something much more important than him occupied her entire attention, somewhere over his right shoulder.

  The texture of her skin reminded him of silly putty he had played with as a child. For a moment he had the perverse thought of pushing a color Sunday comic up against her skin to see if a reverse image would remain imprinted on her leg.

  He pictured a comic strip with Charlie Brown sitting in front of Lucy’s psychiatric advice stand, 5 cents please; except instead of Charlie Brown sitting on the stool it was him and instead of Lucy seated at the stand it was Miranda, dead and stiff and staring off into the distance with those glassy bloodshot eyes.

  His sorrow at finding Miranda lying dead in the mud under his house had come to him fast and hit him hard, a sucker punch to the heart. But now he felt another emotion pushing his sorrow away: a sense of anger stronger than any he had ever known before flushed his cold body with a raging heat that boiled in his marrow.

  Kelly would pay, he decided.

  Kelly had done this. Kelly had killed his true soul mate. His fucking bitch of a wife had stolen the last single joy he had left on this whole entire planet.

  Why hadn’t she killed him, instead? Why did she have to murder a perfectly innocent young woman, so full of life and beauty? What had she ever done to hurt anyone?

  Tom pictured his wife standing outside the crawl space door again, arms still crossed in her typical disapproving manner; but this time he imagined seeing her eyes full of delight as she listened to the cries of his sorrowful discovery seep through the door.

  He wanted to kill her, to drag her worthless life straight out of her body and give it to Miranda. Life for the worthy, for the beautiful – not the worthless cunt his wife had become.

  He would kill her himself, he decided.

  Tom let Miranda’s lifeless corpse fall back into the mud; her head landed with a dull plop, free arm dangling over the backside of her body.

  Tom stabbed his dying flashlight into the darkness ahead of him as he crawled furiously back towards the closed crawlspace door. He splashed through the mud and threw himself towards the sealed exit of what had become in his mind a cursed crypt.

  The only remaining vestige of thought in his mind was of revenge: immediate, unyielding and unmerciful retribution.

  The rusted steel door stood resolute before him. As he faced it, he became possessed with the conviction that no mere obstacle of brick, mortar or steel could prevent him from inflicting carnage on the person responsible for the horrendous death of his beloved.

  Tom squatted on all fours, every muscle of his body tensed like a lion, set to pounce on its prey. He lunged at the door as though it were his mortal enemy, letting out a feral growl as he slammed his shoulder into it with every ounce of his rage-fueled strength.

  “You killed her, you bitch!” he snarled through rusted metal with inhuman ferocity. “You killed her. There’s nowhere you can hide, I’m coming for you.”

  He hurled himself against the door again and again, bruising muscle, tearing tendons, ignorant of the absolute futility of his efforts.

  Despite the fury within his soul, his body was human, and could only withstand so much abuse. Tom launched himself forward one last time before allowing his body to drop into the mud; but he was far from finished.

  He clenched his muddy hands into fists and began pummeling on the door in a sick, steadfast rhythm, like a drummer settling in for a solo at a rock concert. Tom already knew how this performance was going to end: with that fucking cunt’s head ripped clean from her body, that’s how.

  Unceasing curses bellowed from his mouth like an incantation from the depths of hell, a stream of pure hatred manifested in auditory form.

  His effort was wasted; the door absorbed his abuse with stubborn indifference. His fists were not so unaffected; the rough rusty surface efficiently shredded his skin, creating a foamy mush of blood and flesh above his wrists.

  “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you,” he screamed, his threats in time with the pounding of his fists. His voice faded to a rasp, his breathing labored.

  He twisted himself around in the small space and lay flat on his back in the mud, planting the soles of his feet solidly against the crawlspace door. He resumed stomping on the steel again, with the full strength of both legs at once, not missing a single beat of the rhythm he had established with his now battered and bleeding fists.

  “How dare you lay a finger on her? She never did anything to you! You killed her for making me happy? You had no right!” he screamed at the wife he imagined must be standing just outside. His voice started to change, to falter, to tire out. What had started as a lion’s roar had been reduced to a pathetic whimper.

  WHAM-WHAM-WHAM slammed his feet against the steel.

  “I’LL – KILL – YOU!” His threat had become a mantra.

  Yet the door stood firm, unyielding. Some tiny part of Tom’s brain knew that the door would never kick open, that it only opened inwardly – but the rest of his mind didn’t care.

  Time stopped for Tom. He continued pounding for what might have been
hours, but what was more likely only a few minutes longer. His voice grew softer and softer as his exhausted body continued its increasingly hopeless flailing in the cold, wet mud, the gasping spasms of a fish in a drying puddle, taking its final breaths.

  “I’ll… kill… you.” His final statement of malevolent intent amounted to little more than a thought in his head and a small wisp of steam above his lips.

  Tom’s feet dropped to the ground beside the doorway. He lay there, as spent as three-inch ash on an abandoned cigarette.

  Then silence set in, a quiet so dark and deep and real that his heavy labored breathing seemed to belong to it, not him.

  Tom lay motionless as his body slowly sank into the cold mud. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he had come to be here, but it was long enough for him to be certain that he was, in fact, completely and utterly alone. He knew there was no one in the house, no one outside of the house, no one for miles.

  He felt the reality of his solitude with so much certainty it was like a sixth sense had emerged. His wife had never been there listening, smirking as he had imagined. The silence that greeted him from outside the door and from the house above him was complete. It contained not a hint of a presence other than his own, and even that felt as though it was in danger of slipping away.

  The flashlight, tossed away during his rage, lay in the mud somewhere off to his right. Its filament was a dying ember, a soft red halo of light in Tom’s peripheral vision.

  Then, as quickly as he noticed it, the glow extinguished.

  Silence had arrived first; now its companion, darkness, announced itself. Tom barely had time to register these sensations as actual thoughts before the next unwelcome guest arrived, like the third horseman of the apocalypse: the cold.

  A bitter chill gripped Tom’s body with a sudden rushing ferocity. The hot heat of rage that had burned in his veins only minutes before was replaced with a torrent of frigid water, ripping through every capillary in his body like tiny jagged shards of ice.

  Tom tried to roll over onto his front, but found he was unable to move. He lay terrified, half-paralyzed, teeth clenched as his entire body convulsed; shivering as the excruciating pain of the cold drew him into its arctic embrace.

  The unholy trinity of cold, darkness and silence now owned his soul. With enormous effort, Tom dragged himself onto his stomach; his shredded hands dripped blood that clotted in sticky spiral ribbons on his forearms. He wanted to crawl from his muddy puddle back onto the dry plastic sheeting, but the exertion of his rage had completely depleted his energy.

  He looked towards the light bulb in the center of the crawlspace that still burned like a distant sun in the darkness; it seemed as though it was a million miles away. He wanted to go there, to be close to its warmth and light, but he felt like a planet at the farthest end of the solar system, spiraling out of control, about to be flung into the nether regions of the uncharted void of the universe, never to return.