There's Something in the Basement

Vol. 123: Really, does anything good ever come from the basement?

No. 3 in The Scary Songbook Collection- Inspired by “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement” by Ramones

We all heard it again and looked at each other. Being the oldest, I tried not to look as scared as I was, but I was really scared. I wanted to slam the basement door and lock it, but the lock was broken, like everything else in the house. Then I thought about nailing the door shut. We had a hammer, but no nails. The best idea would have been to grab Jay and Carly and run for it, but it was snowing and we had nowhere to run to. The neighbors hated us, and it was night, so school and the library were closed. Mom wouldn’t be home from work until 3:30 am and it wasn’t even nine now. I still had almost seven hours to be in charge.

We’d been hearing noises on and off since we moved in. Things would fall, like a stack of boxes in the basement, or cans in the kitchen cupboards. I’d wake up at midnight to the sound of soft scraping, like something dragging along the kitchen floor, and I’d lay there, wanting to know. Not enough to go look, though.

“Every place in the Bronx has rats,” Mom told me when Carly wasn’t in the room. “You live with it.”

We told Mom again on Wednesday as she got ready for work, with Jay saying that he’d heard the sound of a man coughing during the night. Our dad left a long time ago and I’m eleven. There isn’t supposed to be the sound of a man doing anything in our house.

Mom said it was the guy next door. “You’ve heard how loud he talks, do ya think he’s gonna cough quiet?”

Jay said, “It’s closer than that.” His eyes were big. He’d already told me about the coughing and I believed him. “It sounded like you were in the kitchen,” he told her now. Mom was about to light a cigarette but stopped and put it back in the pack.

“Well, I wasn’t. I was at work, like I am sixteen friggin’ hours a day. In fact, I’m going there now.”

This was what she called ‘sarcasm’. We knew she was going to work, she did nothing else. All three of us looked at each other, knowing that she was barely listening, but having her around for just a little while was better than nothing. We all felt safer with her there.

“And by the way,” she said, shrugging on her coat, “I’m sayin’ it again; could you guys not clean out all the food as soon as I bring it home? I don’t have time to go shopping twice a week, so if it doesn’t last, tough luck.”

Again, we looked at each other. I made our meals every day and we weren’t eating more than usual, but Mom had been getting angry about this for a few weeks now. She huffed at our blank faces and stalked back to the kitchen trash can, pulling out an empty chips bag and a cookie box. They had both been torn open at the seams, like a starving animal had licked the insides. I knew she had brought them home the day before, but I hadn’t seen Jay or Carly open them, and I hadn’t touched them. The cookies were Mom’s favorites, the plain vanilla kind, so we had snacked on dry Cocoa Puffs last night. She shoved the bags back in the trash and gave me The Look. I didn’t say anything.

“Lock up behind me,” she called, and was gone for the night.

I turned to Jay and Carly and asked them when they’d eaten all that stuff.

“We didn’t,” Carly whispered.

Jay also whispered, saying, “Come on, Petey, you know who ate it.”

I knew what he meant, but as the closest thing to a grown-up here, part of my job was to keep things from getting too scary. I often had to stop him from scaring Carly so bad that she wouldn’t go to sleep. There are days I can barely stay awake at school because Carly keeps me talking to her all night. She’s only six, so it’s easy for Jay to scare her.

“Knock it off,” I told him. “It’s like Mom said, the guy next door is a loudmouth, that’s what you heard.”

“Was not,” Jay shot back. “Someone’s here.”

Carly clapped her hand over her mouth. I didn’t like hearing Jay say that either.

I went to the fridge and pulled it open, trying to act like I wasn’t bothered. I asked if they wanted hot dogs for dinner. And that’s when we heard the cough.

We stood there in the kitchen, frozen as we listened, because the sound had come from the bottom cabinet that Jay was standing next to. It was the cabinet we kept our canned food in, and the cookies and chips.

Surprisingly, Carly didn’t scream but that was only because she was still holding a hand over her mouth in terror. I motioned to them to remain still while I crept over to the junk drawer and pulled it open. I knew we had lots of rubber bands and paperclips and bread tabs in there, because I’m the one who puts them in there. I took a handful of rubber bands, and working as quietly as I could, I wrapped several around the two handles that opened the doubled sided cabinet doors. I twisted them tightly to make sure that whoever was on the other side wouldn’t be able to push them open. Then I motioned for them to follow me into the living room.

“What are we going to do?” Jay asked as soon as the three of us were together. I suddenly wondered why I had thought we’d be any safer here. It was clear to me now that not only was there a man in our house, but he was able to move freely around us. The boxes and cans falling over, the missing food...this guy was living off us. Some bum was living rent free in the house we paid for and was eating our food. Mom worked so much that we only saw her for a few minutes a day, and it turned out some creep was taking what little we had? Jay and Carly watched in silence while I tried to think.

I knew that some kids would call their mom and she’d come deal with it, but we couldn’t. It’s not that she was a bad mom, it’s just that we weren’t allowed to call her at the bar. She needed to be there “to keep a roof over your heads,” as she kept reminding us, so calling her at work or talking to her when she needed to sleep was not tolerated. Anyway, nothing we said would have gotten her to come home.

Our dad was in parts unknown. We heard from him once, twice a year, tops. Not at Christmas or birthdays. He just called when he thought of us, which wasn’t that often. So that was a dead end.

Mom had a few ex-boyfriends, the latest being Nicky, but they had broken up months ago and he moved to Newark. He was a good guy but it would take him hours to get here, if I could get hold of him.

As I said, the neighbors hated us. All of them. Jay had bitten just about every kid on the block already. He may be eight years old but he’s real mean. His two front teeth have both fallen out and left him defenseless for now, but I knew that none of the neighbors would let us stay with them through the night. Even if they did, we couldn’t let it get around that the Cicello kids were too chicken to stay at home by themselves. That would get us killed at school. And it would get Mom in trouble.

Calling the police? Don’t make me laugh. That would be even worse than telling the blabbermouth neighbors. We had to take care of this guy ourselves, and that’s what I told Jay and Carly.

“How?” Carly said in horror.

I had nothing, but the silence was filled by the sound of something crashing in the basement. It wasn’t the soft sound of cardboard boxes falling, it was metallic and heavy. Maybe Mom’s old sewing machine. He knew we were onto him. That crash was him challenging us to do something about it. I know you know, and I dare you.

I thought hard while trying to keep my trembling under control. How do I protect my family?

I put my arms around their shoulders, leaning us into a huddle like when we played soccer at school.

“Okay. Carly, you’re going to hold the phone. If I tell you, you call 9-1-1. Okay? But only if I say so. That’s only if we have no other way out. I’ll have the hammer. Jay, you’ll have the torch. Go get it, quietly.” He was thrilled to hear this. Mom had been given a little butane torch in a dessert set at her work’s Christmas party. She kept it on her nightstand and used it to light her first cigarette of the day. Jay has always begged her to let him set his schoolbooks on fire with it. He came back with the torch and a big smile while I fished around in my backpack.

We went back to the kitchen and I pulled the portable phone from its cradle and handed it to Carly, then I pulled the plastic flashlight out from the rubber band drawer. Another idea had me grabbing three of our dull steak knives and handing one to Jay, who put it in his back pocket. Carly’s pink pants didn’t have pockets, so I tucked it in the side where the elastic band would hold it in place. Mine went right into the front of my jeans, the handle sitting just above the button closure where I could grab it. I crept to the basement door. It was in the kitchen, right at the threshold that divided the kitchen and the tiny dining room. I put my ear to the door and listened. I heard gentle shuffling down at the bottom. I heard him breathing. It was heavy, panting. He was waiting for us to do something.

I nodded at my brother and sister and flicked the flashlight on before turning the doorknob as quietly as I could, then I threw the door back into the kitchen wall, hard. I wanted him to jump. I don’t know if he did, but I did hear him let out a yelp in surprise.

He hadn’t turned the light on, so I did, clicking on the single lightbulb from the top of the stairs. It hung from the basement ceiling on a black wire, hovering maybe seven feet above the room. That light looked like it was older than the house. It wasn’t bright enough, giving just a yellow glow to the basement floor in a circle no bigger than our dining room table, leaving almost the whole basement in darkness, including under the open wooden stairs. I began stepping down, one at a time.

I strobed my light under the planks before each step, certain that this man would reach between the stairs at some point and pull me through. But he wasn’t under the stairs, so halfway down I moved my light slowly about, first to the floor and wall straight ahead. He wasn’t there, so he wasn’t going to lunge straight at me. Jay had come down the top three steps while Carly remained in the doorway. I moved the light over the right side of the stair railing. There was a cramped little space there, what Mom called an alcove and I called a perfect place for this guy to squeeze himself into a ball and spring up when we were close enough to grab. I dreaded what I’d find, but I moved the light over the area. It was only our Halloween decorations there, a stack of plastic jack o’ lanterns from a yard sale and the three foot scarecrow I’d made in class last year.

Jay was breathing on my neck as I began to scan across the wall, going further away, looking along the right side of the room and feeling like I might throw up. But the intruder didn’t wait until I found him. As my light scanned the back wall, Grandma’s side table and glass lamp came crashing over from the middle of the room, just beyond the pool of light from the overhead bulb. The panting breath came from closer than I’d expected and both Jay and I jumped up a step.

“Who are you?” I yelled in the deepest voice I could. I moved the flashlight over the area at the same time he stepped into the dull light, though ‘step’ isn’t really the right word. He moved in a hunched spider crawl, and ‘he’ may not be the right word either, as I didn’t know what I was looking at, let alone if it was a ‘he’. I can only tell you what we saw, and why Carly was nearly hyperventilating.

It seemed fleshless, like a wrinkled old bedsheet covering sticks. It stood almost upright, but its long neck deeply curved inward. It was wearing Mom’s Halloween costume from the year she went as a witch, a long black and purple layered dress that was ankle-length on Mom but went to this thing’s shins and ballooned around its skinny body. It had two arms and two legs, but I saw that each hand had just three fingers. Long dirty fingers. It was bald, no hair or lashes. There was a drooling slit of a mouth that was filled with short and twisted brown teeth. I couldn’t find a nose, just two wet air holes that quivered as it inhaled deeply in our direction. Where the ears would be were also marked just with holes, and the bare skull was a road map of blue veins. But the worst part was its eyes. Or the place the eyes should have been. It had the sealed over, transparent-skinned eyes of a newborn bird. That’s what it looked like, an unfinished, raw baby bird. It turned itself towards us, sniffing at the air.

“I am meeee,” the thing hissed in answer to my question. I’d forgotten that I’d even asked. Hearing that this thing could not only understand me, but could speak, was almost more than I could take and I nearly peed myself. I heard Jay start chanting nononono behind me.

“Get back up there,” I whispered to him and he took two steps back up the stairs to stand next to Carly. She had started crying.

“What are you?” I yelled down. This was the only thing I could think to say.

It coughed, a rasping cough, then said again, “Meeee.”

It hunched down further as if it was going down to all fours, and that could only mean that it would come closer. I couldn’t let that happen.

“Stop right there!” I yelled in my deep voice. I waved my hammer at it. Jay came back down a step and turned the torch on so that it leapt into a small blue flame.

“What are you doin’ in our house?” I yelled.

“Mmmy house,” the thing hissed. “Always mmmy house.”

We’d had bags of food missing the whole time we’d lived in this crummy house. And now I remembered the missing ice cream bars from the freezer and bottles of juice from the fridge. Carly couldn’t reach the freezer, so in my own head I’d blamed her for the juice and Jay for the ice cream, while Mom had blamed me for everything.

“We don’t want you here! Get out!”

This made it smile, a horrible stretching of that wide, thin mouth that showed battered teeth clenched together. A long, thick string of drool slid out the side of its mouth and ran down the front of the witch costume. It made a wheezing sound that was probably a laugh.

“Dooon’t care,” it hissed.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I looked back at Jay, who looked at me. The torch was still burning. I told him to turn it off just because he looked so stunned that he might set my hair on fire. Carly had stopped crying but looked like she’d start again any second.

“You can’t stay here.” I didn’t yell it, I just said it.

“I ssstay,” it replied. Again, it smiled, and then it reached up and tapped the light bulb that hung overhead, sending it in a back and forth like the dragon swing at the fair. The yellow glow went with it, causing shadows where they hadn’t been before. It used the distraction to go down on all fours and skitter on the floor towards the stairs me and Jay stood on.

“Turn the torch on!” I yelled at my brother. He did, and I grabbed it from him while shoving my hammer into his hands. I yelled for him to go and Jay stomped up to the top of the stairs while I pulled a pack of firecrackers from my front pocket. I’d bought them from a kid at school just the day before. I lit the fuse with the torch and threw them over the railing at the thing as it crawled closer. I ran up the stairs and slammed the door shut just as the firecrackers began to explode.

If you think they’re loud outside, try having a whole pack go off in an enclosed space. Even with the kitchen it sounded like gunfire down there, and the thing’s terrified shrieks could be heard in the kitchen.

“Pull the picture nails out and bring ‘em!” I yelled to Jay as the firecrackers went off. There were twenty crackers tied together and I knew we were almost out of time.

We ran through the living room and I used the hammer to yank out the nails that held up family photos and a framed poster of the Italian Alps. When Jay came back to me I saw the nails he brought were bloody from him ripping them out with his fingers. He put all his weight against the basement door and I began hammering through the side of the door jamb and into the door’s edge, connecting them. I was able to get two nails through completely before we heard it coming up the basement stairs. The firecrackers had stopped and the monster’s panting was terrifying as it climbed each stair, coming closer with its rasping, rattling breath.

I drove a third nail through the wood as it began to push on the other side of the door. I started hammering a fourth nail and the monster was banging on the door. It was lucky that the stairs didn’t give the thing the space to back up and ram the door, but it was doing its best to break through. Carly was wailing again, clutching the phone and screaming that she wanted to call the police.

I didn’t know what to do, other than keep nailing the thing in.

I told Jay to get more nails and he sprinted off down the hallway to yank down all of the black and white family photos, the stuff Mom calls “the Old World family”.

I went to the cabinet I’d rubber-banded shut and pulled the bands off quickly. I knew it was an opening for the thing and began knocking all the cans of soup out of the way. I pressed against the back of the cabinet gently and felt the thin back panel shift. It wasn’t attached to the wall. I closed the cabinet doors and began rubberbanding them again. The monster realized where I was working and the pounding on the basement door went silent. I knew it would be at the other side of the cabinet soon.

“Hurry!” I screamed. Carly wailed, “It’s going to kill us!”

Jay returned with eight nails and fell to his knees to press against the cabinet door while I frantically hammered into the main frame of the cabinet in an attempt to seal it off in the same way some of our windows were nailed shut. I had gotten two nails in when we heard the monster push its way into the cabinet space where our food had been just minutes ago. It pushed on the other side of the wood, which creaked, and I realized that this door was much thinner than the basement door. It hadn’t been made to keep a monster out, and it was cheap and barely better than cardboard. I hammered three more nails in while the thing tried to push its way out. Its arms were weak but I had no doubt that it would get through.

“Okay...oookay,” it hissed once I’d stopped. “Not the only waysss.”

I had held back three nails because I suspected this.

“I wanna to talk to you,” I called out. Jay looked at me like I was crazy.

“I wanna help you out,” I said. “Just gimme a minute to get something for you. Just wait right here.”

Jay and I tiptoed to the living room. I motioned for Carly to cry, which didn’t take much of a push for her. She started bawling hard, wailing that she wanted to move. I whispered in Jay’s ear, he nodded, and we both took off, searching around the living room. Nothing. We had to go down the hall, to the bedrooms.

We found another opening in Carly’s closet, a small wooden panel that popped right out. Jay held it while I nailed it shut, then we ran to our room and dragged the heaviest piece of furniture up against the panel, our metal hockey trunk. It wasn’t great, but it was the best we could do. We went back to the kitchen cabinet.

“Hey. You still there?”

It panted for a moment before wheezing, “Heard what you dddid. I find another way in.”

“Yeah? Well, I been wonderin’ why you want to live with a family like us when you could live in a house with lots of food.”

“What houssse?” It sounded confused.

“You shoulda gone to a better neighborhood a long time ago. Everyone round here is poor, that’s why we get one bag of chips and one carton of juice a week. You go to the better houses and you’d eat cookies all day long.”

It’s panting became fast, it was excited by what I was saying. It still pressed against the inside of the door though.

“Our mom is so mad about the food you been eatin’ that she says we won’t get any more of the good stuff. No more cookies and chips.”

“Don’t believe you. I stay. I get youuu.”

This, this really scared me. I wanted to wail like Carly. I would have if I’d been alone. But instead, I yelled, “I think I’ll let you starve down there. So long!”

Throughout the night we heard the thing push and bang on the openings we’d nailed shut. I sent Jay and Carly to the living room while I picked up the canned food and stacked it neatly on the counter by the sink, picturing a three-fingered hand bursting through the thin cabinet door and grabbing my leg as I cleaned up.

It was listening, I knew that. I shut all the bedroom doors and balanced juice glasses on the doorknobs so we’d hear if the thing was coming out. It was a small house and I could only cross my fingers that we’d get out the door before it stood in the living room where we were huddled. We left the tv off and spent the night whispering. I tried to make up a story about the Mutant Ninja Turtles but Jay told me to knock it off and eventually Carly fell asleep.

When Mom came home, we were all asleep together on the couch. I jumped up when she shook me, ready to fight. Of course she wanted an explanation for why all the photos were on the floor, and why we were in the living room. She was mad.

Jay woke at the sound of Mom’s voice, but Carly kept sleeping. We three had agreed on what we’d tell Mom. We had to have the same story.

I told her that there’s a man in the basement and we’d nailed him in down there.

“What?!”

Jay backed me up, telling Mom that the man was a psycho, and that he’s the one eating all the food.

“Oh my God! OhmyGodohmyGod!” She ran to the kitchen and saw the cabinet door nailed shut, then the basement door.

I told her about the other opening in Carly’s room. She yanked a drawer open and took the good knife, then ran down the hallway. Jay and I watched her slap the glass off the doorknob and enter. After a second she yelled out, “Where?”

I went to the doorway and pointed to the closet, telling her not to move the trunk.

“It may be all that keeps him in there.”

She came out and shut the door. She thought a second, then put the glass back on top and we went back to the living room.

She looked between Jay and me, then sort of begged to know why we hadn’t called her.

We answered at the same time. I said, “You would have told me to figure it out,” while Jay said, “You wouldn’t have come.”

Her mouth dropped open. She stood there looking at us while her eyes welled up. “I would have come. I swear, I would have.” We knew she was saying that to make herself feel better. It wasn’t true.

She got on the phone and in three hours had a new place for us. We reminded her over and over: no basement. Once Carly woke up, she joined in. Mom called our landlord, waking him up, and told him we were breaking the lease because there was a man in our basement, then she chewed him out for renting a house with a squatter to a single mother and her defenseless children. She threatened to sue the landlord for the therapy we would need after a night of terror. The landlord said he’d pay our moving expenses and the first month in our new place.

We lived in apartments after that. The buildings had basements, but we never set foot in one after that night. All of us have lived in apartments ever since.

I don’t know what happened to the monster. We gathered our things in no time and fled. We left all the stuff in the basement, telling the landlord it was his now. He told Mom during that phone call that he would go to the house that morning and deal with whoever he found. Mom spent weeks trying to get the money he’d promised, but he never answered his phone and didn’t go to his job no more. He just disappeared.

Welcome to all the new ALH subscribers! I look forward to scaring you all year round.

Next week: My Creep Club and I are going to gather round the fire and talk about a decades old mystery that’s finally been solved. We’re also discussing Halloween candy (Mine! All mine!) and messing around with Bloody Mary. We should not do that.

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