Alice and I step out into a world of heat and soft color, a sky washed pink and gold and purple. Insects skate and dart in flickering nimbuses. Midges and biting gnats, crickets chirruping in the grass. At Bert’s front door Alice stands on her tiptoes and gropes along the lintel until she finds the spare key. As she unlocks the door my tongue turns to clay in my mouth, soft and wet and heavy. I reach out for her, suddenly afraid.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. Her eyes are flecked with gold, open very wide. “Are you all right, Mina? Are you sick?”
“No, I—” I don’t know what to say. It’s a feeling of dread, of something impending, like dark clouds gathering, heralding something ominous, something wicked with a forked tongue.
“Mina?”
“It’s fine.” I smile, but she doesn’t look reassured. “Honestly. Go inside.”
Inside, again; the soft ticking of the clock, the sofa, the beeswax polish. I try to shake off the feeling of dread, the slow creep of ice. Alice switches on the television and helps herself to a yogurt from the fridge.
“Do you want anything, Mina? They’ve got jelly, choc ices—whatever you want.”
I stand beside her. The fridge is full of soft foods: bananas quickly ripening to black, Angel Delight, cream cheese. Rice pudding and applesauce. I think of Bert and his dentures, sitting alone in front of the television spooning runny yogurt into his mouth. It’s a thought that is both sad and unsettling. I wonder if he gets lonely.
“Mina? You coming?Cagney and Lacey’s on in a minute.”
“Give me five minutes and I’ll be with you. You going to check on Mary?”
“Yeah. I’ll do it when the commercials come on.”
I thought I’d have to invent an excuse but Alice doesn’t seem to give a shit if I’m present or not. She just wants to eat her yogurt and watch cop shows. Thank God for self-absorbed teens, I think as I head back into the kitchen. I know Sam told me there was nothing down there but I want to see the basement for myself. I’ve already seen the door, set as it is in an alcove beneath the sloping roof of the stairs. I try the handle but of course it is locked, of course it is. I poke my tongue into my cheek, thinking. Would Bert have the keys on his key ring? Probably, but—I reach up to the top of the doorframe the way Alice had outside, feeling my way along it until my fingers chance upon a small silver key. Stunned, I let it drop into my open palm. I hesitate,but only for a moment, before sliding it into the lock and gently, calmly, pushing the door open into the darkness.
The only cellar I’vebeen in previously belonged to my paternal grandparents. It flooded a lot and as a result smelled like dank water, an odor that was somehow deep green and vegetative, like soft black mud. It was always cold down there and my grandmother had lined up jars and jars of pickled vegetables on the shelves, the sour tang of brine making our eyes sting as Eddie and I peered into the cloudy liquid and the strangely mesmerizing shapes within; warty cucumbers and the soft, cranial folds of cauliflower. Eddie would call Grandma a mad scientist and said one day we’d find body parts down there.
Bert’s cellar is nothing like my grandparents’ cellar. Just like Sam told me, it is clean and well-lit and, although it smells a little musty, I don’t feel the same sense of trepidation going down the stairs as I had into the cellar at my grandparents’ house. There’s no dirt floor and no tube web spiders hiding in the corners—just boxes neatly stored on metal shelving and a long workbench running down the center of the room. I approach the boxes, reading the neatly typed labels fixed to them.PHOTOGRAPHS,PRESS CLIPPINGS,BOOKS. I lift the lids of a few of them and find exactly what I’m expecting to find—the scraps of a long life lived; memories and journals and scrapbooks. Old Ordnance Survey maps of Cornwall tinged yellow with age. I feel a sour sort of disappointment bloom in me. Tamsin said she was frightened of the basement but she’s just a kid, isn’t she? Seven years old and trying to emulate her big sister, maybe in more ways than I’d realized. Perhaps she wanted a secret of her own to divulge, perhaps she wanted some of that attention from herparents aimed at her. I pull my fingers through my hair and my eye catches on something on the shelf toward the back of the cellar in the place where the recessed spotlights don’t quite reach.
“Urgh,” I groan as I approach the object, wrinkling my nose with distaste. “Gross.”
It’s a stuffed red squirrel, balancing on its hind legs on a base of polished teak. The black glass eyes glitter, the fur moth-eaten and patchy, almost bald in places. Little yellow teeth jut out like tusks. I lift my hand and touch the tufted tips of its ears.
“Someone mangled the job on you, didn’t they?” I stroke it gently, smiling. “You poor old thing.”
I sigh. I was sosurethat Bert was hiding something. I’m almost embarrassed at how nervous I was coming down here. I’ll tell Sam after this and we can laugh about it. I lift my hand away from the squirrel’s tawny fur and feel, just for a moment, the lightest draft kiss against the skin of my palm. I lean, notice the shelving unit isn’t quite flush with the wall behind it. I press my face up to the gap. It’s not a draft, not quite. It’s a coldness, a sense of space, of opening up. Behind these shelves there’s a gap about a foot across, maybe more. My stomach sinks like a stone. I squint along the back of the shelves but it’s too dark to see what—if anything—is back there.
Jesus, Mina, calm down. Basement walls get cold and drafty. There’s probably a damp problem, that’s all.
Yeah, I tell myself. Maybe. But that strange, tickly feeling persists, tugging at the back of my brain, trying to warn me that something is wrong. I pull down one of the storage boxes from the shelf—it is labeledSLIDES-MASSACHUSETTS APRIL ’83—and peer through the gap. I wish I thought to bring a flashlight with me. I don’t see anything.
“This is nuts,” I tell the empty room. “This is just fucking bana—”
Then, there. When I move, the shadows are positioned differently, and it just takes my eyes a moment to adjust. I experience a stomach-dropping moment of horror when I glimpse a shrouded figure almost as tall as I am before my brain catches up a moment later, recognizing it as an object covered in a dust sheet. It’s an illusion. That’s all. Like the dead, darkly transformed.
I edge around to the back of the shelves and ease myself into the space. It’s so narrow I’m forced to do so sideways, pressing my back against the brick wall as I sidle in. There is just room for me to turn slightly so I can face the draped object in front of me. It’s been well concealed, the dust sheet covering it almost the same muted color as the brickwork. I hesitate before tugging the material away, fear pooling in my throat as bright and sharp as cut lemon.
For a moment I am convinced Eddie will be under there, the remains of his teeth crystalized with frost, eyes sunk into his skull. Eddie, reaching up with one trembling hand, lips blue and slack.Tell me about the ice, Mina,he will say, and his voice will sound like rocks grinding together, like the rattle of thrown grave dirt.Tell me about the ice.
But it is not Eddie. It is a tailor’s dummy about five foot tall, dressed in a white linen smock, very plain, with a long, full skirt that touches the floor. Above the headless neck is a cage of blackened metal, padlocked at the collar. It is bulky and crude-looking, with a sharp tab of spiked iron protruding inside of the neckband about the length of my finger. I press the spikes gently and my fingertips come away smudged dark. Something about it makes my insides curdle. The metal is old and well-used, an apparatus that has seen and tasted blood. Draped over the shoulders of the mannequin are rows and rows of necklaces, some short, some long, all strung with chunky beads in dark colors; brown and gray and black. I don’t realize what they are until I try to lift one and find it shockingly heavy, cold to the touch. Stones.Hagstones. Dozens and dozens and dozens. They fall over the shoulders and between the white cotton breasts of the dummy, threaded on cord and leather and twisted old rope. One of the stones is as big as my fist, seamed with quartz. I run my fingers over them, hard little rocks polished by the motion of the tides. I step a little closer and my foot connects with something on the floor, something tucked at the base of the dummy, almost concealed by the long skirts. I have to lift the fabric to see what it is. Another storage box. This one also has a label.
It reads:THE DEVICES.
TWENTY-EIGHT
There is a sudden ringing in my ears, a rush of blood to the head as if I have stood up too fast. Heat blooms close to the surface of my skin like a surge of quick blood. I lift the box and carry it out into the basement, setting it on the workbench beneath the lights. I’m careful, brushing the fine scrim of dust from its surface. My hands are shaking and my heart is in my throat as I open the lid. Inside are two objects wrapped in tissue paper. I lift them out, feeling the dull weight of them, aware that sweat has started to trickle the length of my spine. Half an ear is pricked for the sound of a car outside, the slam of the front door. I have to be quick, I tell myself, but I make sure I unwrap the items carefully, laying them side by side on the table in front of me.
They look agricultural, like medieval farming tools. Crudely shaped but purposeful. One resembles a knife but thinner, likea darning needle with a long wooden handle. The handle is printed with writing in gold leaf, something in Latin.DAEMONIA EICERE, it says. The second is an ugly, industrial-looking tool, like something used by a blacksmith. As I stare at them, I realize what they look like—crucible tongs. I’ve seen them used in Oscar’s laboratory, only what I’m holding aren’t gleaming scientific instruments of stainless steel. They are fire-blackened metal, rough to the touch. The scissorlike handles are fixed to two long pincers that end in flat plates, crudely formed. Some inner revulsion forces a bubble of acid up into my throat. It burns like salt water. I hurriedly put the tongs back on the workbench, face twisted with revulsion. I turn back to the needle.DAEMONIA EICERE. I trace my fingers over the worn gold lettering, pressed into the wood.
Oscar would know what this means, the little voice in my head reminds me.He’s forgotten more Latin than you’ll ever know.