“Yeah, what’s left of them anyway,” Sheriff Carmichael replied, panning the flashlight to the right side of the archway. “Stairs are just over there.”
CHAPTER 15
Hollow echoes came a half-beat behind each footstep that fell upon the wooden plank treads of the basement staircase. The dull sounds resonated from the concrete walls below, each lonely thud fading away to make room for the next. The rhythmic noise was an audible indicator of the emptiness contained within the subterranean room.
Armed with a flashlight, Sheriff Carmichael had led the way for a change, with Special Agent Mandalay close behind. A small amount of the dim light from the still open front door was filtering into the stairwell behind her. The muted illumination wasn’t at all obvious while she kept her gaze forward as they descended. In fact, she didn’t even notice it until a gust of wind caught the loose screen door outside and knocked it hard against the side of the house, prompting her to stop midway down the steep staircase and glance back up over her shoulder. The basement doorway above her was filled with dull light, appearing as a dim, rectangular panel of gray floating in a black void. When she exhaled, the frosty cloud of her breath bloomed in its faint glow, briefly hovering before her like a translucent apparition, only to disappear in less than a blink.
With a quick shudder, she turned and continued downward, following the bobbing pool of brightness from the flashlight in Sheriff Carmichael’s hand. Her running shoes thumped a significantly lighter beat against the stairs than his harder-soled clomps. Constance heard him let out a heavy grunt, which was then followed by the sound of his shoes against concrete, as he arrived at the bottom and stepped down to the floor below.
“Watch yourself,” he told her, moving off to the side, but keeping the flashlight aimed at the last stair for her. “That one’s a bit to the high side.”
She heeded his warning and held onto the loose handrail as she stepped down from the last tread. He hadn’t been exaggerating. If anything, he’d been conservative in his assessment. The final step was akin to taking two at once. She felt his hand on her upper arm as she pitched forward, her foot searching for the floor. She appreciated the help.
“Thanks,” she said.
“It can be an unwelcome surprise if you don’t know it’s there,” he replied.
“Spoken from experience?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Once he was certain she was on even footing, Skip swung the flashlight around the large, squarish room to get his bearings.
By now, Constance’s eyes had mostly adjusted to the muted darkness. She could make out the coarse shapes of what little remained in the abandoned basement.
As she glanced around, she could see that there were small, glass block windows at the top edges of the walls, spaced at roughly even intervals. A small amount of the gray daylight was leaking through them, but not as much as one would expect. She had noticed the rusted upper lips of the galvanized window-wells protruding just above the ground when they first approached the house, but she had not looked down into them. Now that they were inside she could see that they must be filled with leaves and other debris. A by-product of Mother Nature combined with the past seven years of cyclical neglect visited upon the property.
From their position at the bottom of the stairs, to the left she spied the squat hulk of an antiquated furnace lurking in the darkness. It appeared as though a maintenance panel was missing, which left a contrasting rectangular hole on its front. In a peculiar sense, it looked much like a huge, gaping mouth at the bottom of an oblong face. Shadowy round metal ductwork branched out from the side of the unit, like fat arms extending upward until they disappeared into the rafters above. Once a source of heat, viewed at this angle it was now a cold, basement-dwelling monster, reaching for the upper floors in order to drag the unsuspecting into its hungry mouth.
Whether it was the exhaustion or something else entirely, Constance wasn’t sure, but for some reason this house had a bizarre way of becoming anthropomorphized visions in her brain. She shook her head and blinked as a gut response to the hallucination being produced by her uncharacteristically rampant imagination. But, was it just her imagination? The shiver along her spine made her wonder. If anything, it was just as bad now as it had been the previous evening, maybe even worse.
Sheriff Carmichael noticed the motion and brought the flashlight up in her direction. “You okay?”
She nodded and lied. “Just a cobweb, I think.”
“Yeah. Plenty of those down here, that’s for sure.”
He swung the flashlight back down and adjusted the beam on as wide as it would go and still be effective, then played it slowly around the basement to reveal those things that were still hiding in shadows. Just beyond the furnace-that now looked like nothing more than what it really was-stood a dilapidated water heater in the middle of a large rust stain that spread outward from it on the floor. Along the walls, seeping cracks flanked by dark mold became immediately evident in the illuminated swath. Those certainly accounted for the damp, musty smell that permeated the cold air.
“Old coal chute,” Skip said, directing the light at a single point for a moment. The highlighted area was covered in the same peeling, off-white paint as the rest of the walls, but a pattern of bricks and mortar seams were evident beneath. “It was bricked up even back in seventy-five, so no way in through there.”
He began panning again and the beam of light eventually fell across a vertical column rising upward from the centerline of the basement to bear the load of the structure above. Several feet to the right, directly in front of them and against the side of the staircase Constance could see the shadow of its twin.
Skip finished the slow arc and then waved the beam back toward the center of the room and mused aloud in a sad tone, “Hasn’t changed…”
“Stands to reason,” Constance offered. “If the house has been vacant for seven years.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. His voice still seemed strained. “But I mean it hasn’t changed since seventy-five.”
She didn’t respond to the explanation. She really didn’t know how.
After a moment he tilted the beam downward and began walking slowly forward on a direct line between the support columns. She followed.
“Right over here,” he finally said, playing the light across the floor in front of them.
The yellow swath of illumination revealed an oblong outline chalked on the concrete. A foot or so away was a much smaller outline, roughly perpendicular to the first. Dark stains colored portions of the floor within the two shapes, spreading outward in haphazard flows, as if randomly spilled with no regard for the lines themselves. Similar dark splotches were heavily splattered on the wall nearby.
“And over there,” the sheriff offered, sliding the light to the corner a few feet away, where a basketball-sized circle was drawn. It too, bore a dark stain beneath.
“And over there,” he continued, again aiming the beam toward a location apart from the others. This one looked like the outline of a giant, disproportionate boomerang.
“Torso and upper right arm,” Carmichael announced, panning the light back to the first location. Moving it rapidly to the second spot he added, “Head.” Aiming at the third he said, “Left calf and most of the thigh.” Waving the light slowly around to reveal other outlines, he hesitated for a moment at each and named them off one by one, “Left arm and hand; right forearm; right calf, thigh, and foot; left foot; right hand. And…well…that’s pretty much it.”
“And the body parts are dumped exactly the same way, every year?” Constance remarked as much as asked.
He played the beam slowly over the blood-stained wall. “They aren’t just dumped. It happens right here.”