Harley had crossed the room and turned on another lamp. It was beside a convertible bed pulled from another sofa. There was still a blanket, pillows and a sheet on the bed. At the foot of it was a trunk. He lifted the lid and peered down.
"More bedding," he said. "and another pillow."
Over to the right of the bed was an armoire. I limped over to it, opened it and saw the clothes. They were all women's clothes. There were about a halfdozen or so pairs of shoes at the bottom. too.
"Who lived here?" I asked Harley. He shook his head.
"No one said anything to me." He remembered the running water and went back to the kitchenette to get me a glass. "Cold," he said handing it to me. "It comes from a submersible well. Good water." He drank a glass himself.
I couldn't believe how thirsty I was. He returned to get me another glass while I continued to explore the room, looking at the contents. I found a stack of old books and some very faded, sepia photographs of a woman and a man. The man looked very serious, almost angry, but the woman was pleasant looking, pretty with an enigmatic smile, one that could mean happiness or could mean a deep sadness.
"There's no door out of here," Harley reported with disappointment after inspecting every inch of the room. "The entrance and the exit must have been that short stairway. The foundation of the house is deep, which explains why there are no windows."
"It must have always been damp and dark here then. Harley. Why would anyone want to stay here?"
"I don't know," he said."A hideaway of sorts. I guess."
The clock that I had started suddenly struck the hour and the doors opened to release a couple of dancers, a man and a woman, who spun for a few moments and then retreated back into the clock.
Harley laughed. He had his arms folded across his naked chest.
"You're going to get sick with all this dampness and no shirt and shoes on. Harley." I said.
I returned to the armoire and searched through the clothes until I found a light blue cotton pullover sweater. I held it up.
"It'll be tight, but it's something," I said.
"I'm not putting that on. That's a woman's sweater."
"Harley Arnold, I'm not going to let you get sick down here. Put it on."
Reluctantly, he took it from me and shook it and then pulled it over his head. It was so tight. he could barely move his arms. He looked at me and smirked and then he took the scissors out of his back pocket and cut off the sleeves.
"At least I can breathe," he declared. "Now don't ask me to put on a pair of those shoes. I couldn't fit my feet in them anyway."
"At least put on these socks." I said holding up a pair I had found. Reluctantly, he obeyed.
"Let's see what else of value we can find," he suggested. We both returned to exploring the room.
"I wish there was a telephone down here." he called from the side of the bed while I went through the cabinets in the small kitchenette,
"It wouldn't do us any good. Your grandfather probably didn't pay the bill."
"Right. Hey," he called. "there's a carton of stuff shoved under the bed.'
I came out and watched him take out more pictures, books, and then what looked like a little girl's rag doll.
"Strange. I didn't think a kid was down here," he said turning the doll in his hands.
"It's someone's childhood memory. Harley. Women often keep the dolls they had as little
"Yeah," he said thoughtfully. "I guess. So who lived here?" he asked.
I studied the room more carefully until my eyes settled on a smaller box below the table upon which the phonograph and records were. Opening the box. I found what looked like an old composition notebook, the edges of the pages yellow with age. While Harley tapped on the walls, looking for another possible entryway that had been covered. I sat on the sofa, opened the notebook and began reading.
"Harley!" I called.
"What?"
"I know who was down here."
"Who?" he asked starting toward me.
"Your grandmother," I said. "The sad-looking pretty woman in the photographs we found out in the other room. This," I said, holding up the notebook. "is her diary. She must have written it while she was down here."
"How can you be so sure she wrote it down here?" he asked.
"From the very first sentence." I replied. He waited and I looked back at the notebook and read.
After Fletcher died, I told Ed that the only place I didn't hear the voices in our house was down in the basement. In the beginning, I only, heard the voices at night, but after a while, I could hear the whispering even in the daytime, so he fixed up the basement for me so I would have a safe place whenever I needed it. He even put a little kitchen in for me.
I paused and looked at Harley. His lips were turned into his cheek, his eyes full of astonishment. I looked back at the diary.
He said. "Come up whenever you want, Francine."
I smiled at him and shook my head. He knew. He knew very well.
I'll never come up again.
Harley and I looked at each other. Would it be the same for us?
14
Grandmother's Diary
.
"Are you hungry?" Harley asked me
After what my stomach had gone through the
night before. I didn't feel like putting anything more than water in it. but I had found some tea and thought I might make a cup. The small electric stove range worked.
"For the time being. I think I had better give my stomach a little rest. Harley. I'm feeling much better. and I don't want to take any chances, especially under the circumstances." I emphasized.
"I can't help it. I'm hungry. I guess the beef jerky can't be poisoned. It's in a wrapper. I'll go back and get that and see if they've come to their senses and opened the door yet." Harley said and went while I boiled some water.
He returned with the carton they had left. "Rolls aren't bad," he said, chewing on one. "They can't mean to poison us. You really need to put something in your stomach. Summer," he insisted. "You can't go all day on just some tea."
"Okay," I said. I nibbled on a piece and then sipped some tea.
"The door's still locked," he said. "I listened, but I didn't hear a thing. For all I know, he might have gone back to work and left us with her. I tried banging and calling, but no one responded."
I nodded and looked at the diary again.
"Would you like to hear some of this?" I asked.
"Might as well. There's not much else to do until I figure something else out," he said, and sat beside me on the sofa.
I glanced at him and saw he was relaxed and ready. Then I opened the notebook and began.
Ed is becoming increasingly angry at me, I know. He cannot understand why I want to avoid going out. He is constantly telling me about people asking after me, but I know he's making that up. None of the people he refers to now really ever cared to ask after me before I stopped going out.
I let him go on and on about it. He needs to pretend. He's always needed to pretend more than I have. For years he told people Fletcher was doing so well. He made up so many stories about him, I had trouble keeping tipwith them and sometimes would be dumbfounded by the questions and comments people had.
Once he told people that Fletcher was working on constructing telephone communications in. Saudi Arabia and that's why he was never here anymore. Then he told them he was working for the army and he was in Brazil. I think most of the stories came from Ed's own secret fantasies.
The truth was Fletcher wasn't doing anything as exciting and glamorous as anything Ed described. If Fletcher ever called, it was always from someplace on the road, just out of some Midwestern city or Eastern town where he had held dawn a lob for a few months and either had gotten bored or fired and was on his way to someplace else. His future was always just 'someplace else.'
I know Fletcher was the way he was because Ed had pumped him up so much he made him think he should always be the one in charge, made him think he k
new more than anyone. It was why he got into so much trouble in school and had to leave.
Ed's a good talker. He can spin words and weave them like silk. For years and years, he been doing that to me and to Fletcher. Fletcher left, but I remained behind, living in the cocoon of illusions Ed spun. For a long time, it didn't matter. No one bothered me and Ed seemed content, too.
But the dreams and the make-believe began to wear thin. I could feel it happening, feel the world around me begin to collapse and holes start to form, holes through which. the ugly, dark creatures I call Realies crawled.I'll never forget the first
time I saw one.
We had finished dinner. Ed was tired. He had been working a job fifty miles away and the work and the travel were wearing on him. He began to look tired gaunt, the circles around his eyes darkening. After dinner he -went into the living room to watch television as usual and quickly fell asleep. I cleaned up and came in to sit with him, but he had slumped down on the sofa and had his eyes closed, so I picked up my knitting needles and continued to work on the afghan.
The television droned on. I had gotten so I rarely looked at it or heard anything, but I didn't mind the constant music and talk. It kept me company, kept me from feeling as lonely as I was. Hundreds and hundreds of faces moved through the glow, one merging into another, and the same was true of the voices. They became my electronic family, I suppose. They had no names, just different shades of light and color and different sounding voices.
Sometimes, Ed would complain about the soft, silly smile on my face as I worked
"What's so funny?" he -ould ask. "It's the News you're watching and it's horrible.
"What? Oh. I wasn't watching or listening to that, "I told him.
"Then why are you smiling Francine?"
I put down my work and thought. Was I smiling?
'I don't know, Ed. I didn't realize I was smiling."
"Damn," he would say with disgust.
I know I was beginning to annoy him more and more. He -was very angry -when I made him go out for our groceries, but I couldn't do it anymore. The last time I went to the supermarket I froze in an aisle and forgot my whole list. I left with nothing.
"I work all day and then I have to go and do our shopping because you won't leave the damn house!" he yelled.
I didn't cry or argue. I just stared and he would give up and it do the shopping, furious the whole time. I didn't even feel guilty about it, although I knew it was unfair for him to have the added burden.
"I'm sorry, Ed" was all I could say.
"Sorry does me no good," he would reply, but he swallowed it like bad-tasting medicine and after a while, he stopped complaining and just picked up my list and either got what we needed in a separate trip or on the way home from work.
In the beginning I did get a phone call or two from other women I knew, but after a while, they stopped calling altogether. I suppose that was because I stopped answering the phone or if I did answer, I just listened and said, 'Yes' or "No," but nothing more. I didn't even say goodbye sometimes. They did and then I hung up.
So I knew he was doing another one of those pretendswhen he would come home and tell me about the people he had met who all asked after me. No one asked after me.
Anyway, I remember going into the living room and sitting and starting my knitting and looking at Ed from time to time as he snored or muttered in his sleep, and then, suddenly, there it was: a Realie, sitting at his feet, all crumpled like a decrepit old man, its shoulders caved inward, its arms and legs as thin as spider legs, its head very big, but very, very wrinkled with large black, accusing eyes and lips made of two thick, blood filled veins, smirking at me.
He or I should say it didn't speak. It didn't have to. Its eyes said it all. It said you know all he says is a lie and you know your son is no hero, no young man blazing trails in foreign lands. You know its cold and dark outside and people don't really care about you, don't have the slightest interest in whether or not you
-e even alive, Then it laughed.
I screamed, of course. it was the first time, so I was very frightened.
Ed woke, blinked and sat up.
'What the hell you screaming for? he asked.
The Realie looked at him and then popped like a bubble and was gone. Later, it appeared in the hallway outside our bedroom, still smirking at me.
I told Ed and he stared at me and then shook his head and lowered himself to the sofa. He was asleep again in minutes.
Sometimes, there were two or three Realies at a time. They usually came in when the door was opened, so I stopped opening it and I kept the windows shut tight. I couldn't help it when Ed came home. If he left the door open while he carried in packages, I would scream and run to shut it, but it was always too late.
More and more of them streamed in, each with another ugly truth to tell or remind me about, like the one about my father hitting my mother or the one about Aunt Elsie dying from burst appendix when it should have been easily treated. Her mother distrusted doctors and nurses andwouldn't call for help. She put a hot water bottle on her stomach. She was only twenty-nine years old, and I couldn't believe she was in that coffin and being put in the ground. I was just nine at the time.
Who needed to be reminded, especially reminded by something as ugly as a Realie?
It got so my living room was filled with Realies and when I walked by, I could hear them all chatting away... They often laughed, but it was more like a cackle than a laugh. Some of my earliest childhood nightmares were in there with them, ready to be run on the television screen like a rerun of an oid movie if I glanced through the door.
I walked through the house with my head down. Whenever I went up to my bedroom, they followed. They even followed me into the bathroom. It got worse after Fletcher's death. More of them entered the house, each with a story to tell about him, about some of the other bad things he had done. They loved to describe his death, all the gory details, such as how the truck burst into flames before it hit the water and how he was screaming for me.
Finally, I -went down into the basement one day to get away and discovered they couldn't follow. They couldn't go down. They couldn't go below. I was safe here.
In those days, all we had was a storage area. I put a chair down here and spent my -whole day here in the dank, dark place. Ed discovered that and when I told him why, he sighed, shook his head and then, one day, he started to build all this for me. He moved things down for me and sometimes, he stayed with me.
Eventually, he did that less and less. There were times he left so early, I would only find some food at the door in a carton. There were times he was away .for days. I could tell the passage of time with my cuckoo clock, but I really didn't care what day it was. The only thing that vaguely interested me was how long Ed was gone.
One day he admitted something.
"No one asking about you anymore," he said, and I knew the Realies were still upstairs and now making him stop pretending, too.
'I should take you to see a doctor," he told me on more than one occasion, but he didn't. The Realies made him say it, but that was as far as it went. I wouldn't have gone anyway and he knew that.
Many things happened to me down here and I should have gone up and out to see a doctor and a dentist. I had a terrible toothache one day. It didn't stop no matter what I did, so I asked Ed to pull the tooth out of my mouth. He refused and went upstairs, but not more than ten minutes or so later, one of the Realies sent him back down with a pliers and he did it.
I passed out, but when I woke up, I began to feel better.
"Let that be a lesson to you," I told Ed. 'Never pretend something you know has to be done doesn't have to be done."
He shook his head at me just like he always did and left me. He was gone almost a week this time, and I ran out of many things. It was then that I realized as long as he stayed away from the house, he could stay away from the truth. Out there, on his jobs, away from this village and these people, he could be whoe
ver he wanted again and he could continue to make up stories about Fletcher, even though Fletcher was dead and buried.
Then, one day, I heard more than one pair of footsteps above and Ed came down with a darkskinned woman he called Suze. He said she was going to be our housekeeper and she would look after me and maybe, she would be able to help me come back upstairs.
"Wait a minute," Harley said. He had been sitting so still and had been so attentive that I almost forgot he was there, "That's not the story he told me. He told me he met her in New York City,"
"That was all probably part of the deception. Harley. Maybe it was something he imagined happened to your father or something. I'm sure you noticed that reference she made to food left in a carton?"
He nodded,
"Go on." he urged.
"You sure?"
"Yes."
"Okay," I said. but I knew I wouldn't be so eager to hear such bizarre things about my
grandparents. It would frighten me. I thought.
I didn't like Suze from the beginning. She had something evil in her eyes. It took me a while to realize -what it was. One of the Realies had entered her and was using her to get down to me. I told Ed and he told me I was wrong. Suze would help me. Where she came from, she was considered the same as we consider- doctors, doctors of the body, but more important, doctors of the soul. He claimed she had already helped him to feel much better about Fletcher, much better about everything even me.
She made all sorts of different things for me to eat and she cooked and cleaned upstairs. Before long, Ed stopped coming down very much.
I continued to read and knit and listen to my music, but one day I noticed I -was getting thinner and thinner. Even though I was eating more, I was losing weight. Suze always had something else for me to eat and some of it did taste good, so I was confused.
I'm disappearing, I realized one day. Suze is making me disappear. That's how she's getting- me back upstairs. If the Realies can't see me, they can't bother me. I don't have to hear any more ugly truths.