Chapter 9: The Stench of the Basement

9. The Stench of the Basement

The dream began as thunder, rolling against the river banks and the river rippling against its current with the wind’s promise of a storm. They were chasing me, men and dogs. I was running, sweating in the heat of a summer night, with so very little moon. But then I fell and they grabbed me, and then suddenly it was dark, the light of torches casting my flickering shadow on a stone wall. It was the basement where I had seen Erika and her lover the day before. A sting across my back made me try to scream in pain, but no sound would come out. Surely someone would help if I could just make sound. I tried to turn to see who it was that had hit with whatever it was that stung so, but I couldn’t. My wrists were bound to iron rings mounted in the wall.

I tried once again to scream, but then, when no sound would come out and the swish of the whip was again descending on my back, I awoke. There was no sound and only the faint light from the hallway coming under my bedroom door. From somewhere far below the whisper of the air conditioning, which chilled the sweat of my body, our body.

I tried to reach out with my mind for Allison, asking her to please come, to please be there, to assure me with the words, “It was just a dream. It meant nothing. No one is after you.” But none of those words came. Allison was still locked in her own trauma, images of her youth spinning circles in her thoughts, including the night of the crash.

“Please be here with me.” I pleaded in my mind, but I wasn’t sure she could hear me anymore. The responsibility of keeping us, the body we shared, alive, seemed to fall completely on me.

It was strange that someone who had spent so much time as a spider should now want company so desperately. A spider life is very solitary, waiting for prey, listening to the sounds of the family moving around out in the light of the morning kitchen. But this leap into Allison had changed me, and somehow I knew that there had been a time when I had inhabited a body more like this.

Once I had calmed myself enough my thoughts returned to the dream. Regardless of whether or not it had deeper meaning, it did tie into what I had experienced in the basement, and the ghosts that I had felt when I was down there. They wanted to tell me something.

I swung my legs to the floor so that I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my bare feet pressed to the cool of the floor. I took a big swallow of water from the bottle I had been keeping beside the bed. Allison was locked in memories of her childhood, memories that either kept taking her back to that summer afternoon when she was naked playing in the water with James, or to a deep sense of bereavement for the comfortable suburban life we had left behind on Mollybee Court. She had become useless for keeping us alive.

I was frightened about going back to sleep, frightened about what I had dreamed, and yet I was also felt quite sure that this particular dream had been about the ghosts and their needs. I made a silent promise to them that I would visit them again tomorrow, in the basement, alone. And with that I was able to go back to sleep.

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The morning dawned gray and rainy. Perhaps the thunder of my dream had been real, but still the sense that the ghosts had been trying to talk to me lingered. My mouth felt dry, and the morning oatmeal tasted almost like sawdust even after I swamped it with milk. I stumbled through classes, too sleepy to pay much attention to Miss Dickinson talking about nineteenth century American politics, and in English I still had little idea of what was going on since no one had given me a copy of Jayne Eyre.

Since it seemed unlikely that Erika had anyway to communicate electronically with her mysterious lover, I figured that they would probably meet in the basement at the same time every day. Watching her in my peripheral vision I saw that she slipped into the stairwell, just as the rest of us were making our way lunch. I got near the front of the line and was served orange Johnny Marzetti and mushy green beans that had probably come from an industrial-sized can and then allow to stew for an hour. Allison surfaced enough to say that she missed the way her mother would always season the green beans with bacon, and I had to admit that these were pretty much tasteless.

I ate quickly while sitting back in a corner and sure enough, about halfway through my meal I saw Erika come into the cafeteria, get into the tail end of the line to get her food. By the time I had finished eating she had settled at a table on the other side of the room with her friends, Rebecca and Lindsey.

I had eaten nearly all of my food. After putting the try onto the rollers and sending it back towards the kitchen, I slipped out into the hall, past the door to the restroom and then, trying not to look suspicious, I slipped into the stairwell. Someone might have easily thought that I was headed up to my room to start my naptime early, but  I of course I went on down into the unlit chill of the cellar, the clatter of dishes and the clamor of voices fading as I took the steps one at a time, always listening to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

My hand was shaking as I turned the smooth knob of the steel door, pulled it open and stepped into the cellar where I had seen Erika and her secret boyfriend the day before. Slowly the door swung closed behind me, and I was enveloped in deep darkness, cold darkness. I was enveloped in the soft, comforting smell of damp old stone and mortar. For the spider in me this felt like some place I would have liked to have claimed as a home.

But then there was a shift, a sudden assault of other smells, urine and the metallic taste of blood. The voices that I had heard the day before became more distinct, although they weren’t speaking words, only moans and sobs, sounds of pain.

Allison was confused, as if she hadn’t been present for this trip to the darkness or the one of the day before, as if she knew nothing about the ghosts that I had felt the day before. “Where are we?” she asked fearfully.

“No,” I answered reaching for the cold stone of the wall. “Who are they?”

My eyes adjusted to the darkness. Light seeped in from some window at the far side of the cellar, enough to see the rusted iron rings that were still mounted into the wall about three feet above the floor. And there he was. A black man, his one wrist still bound in the ring on the wall, the other broken and twisted with the remnants of rope still draped from it. His back was red with blood the stream from the slashes inflicted from a whip, and below him, at his knees was liquid. Urine, blood, feces – all swamped around his knees. Behind cowered a girl, probably about ten years old, naked, on the floor, curled into a tight ball, with the slash marks of the whip streaked across her back as well. Gradually a third figure materialized into view, the way that ghosts do. It was a woman, naked from the waist up with cuts across her glistening breasts.

With a moan the man, who was not far from where my feet stood in the horrid liquid, rolled over. He had been cut open across the abdomen, his intestines spilling down between his legs. I was afraid to look at his genitals, and whatever torture they might have endured. Instead a fixed my gaze on the man’s face, the agony twisting his features, his mouth contorted in a silent scream, his eyes pleading with me to do something.

But of course there was nothing that I could do. I was shaking uncontrollably and frozen in place, overwhelmed by the stench, the horror, of what I saw before me. I wanted to help, to reach out, but there was nothing I could do. I felt the vomit rising in my gut. All that I was seeing would vanish again – they were just ghosts, but my vomit would make a mess on the floor. I had to, had to run.

I slammed through the steel door and back out into the stairwell, not caring how much noise it made. Still shaking but now holding a hand over my mouth, I pounded up the stairs and into the bathroom that was there, right off the common room. Collapsing at the toilet, not even bothering to close the stall door, I vomited, we vomited, for this was a function of the body I shared with Allison, emptying our stomach, retching. In the toilet and splattered onto the floor was the orange of the Marzetti, the green of the beans and even some of the morning’s gray oatmeal. The sight of it made me retch more, spitting up until I could taste only the bile of my stomach. Waves of heat radiated up through our body, followed by chills. In the quiet that followed I heard the buzz of the florescent lights and chatter of voices of those still at lunch in the cafeteria.

“Are you okay?” someone with a soft, gentle voice asked, someone who was kneeling beside me, the thighs of her jeans splattered the wet of my vomit. She was holding my hair up and away from the toilet.

I turned and looked up. It was her, the beautiful girl with the soft brown skin and the long hands, the one from therapy. I wanted to just throw myself into her arms and cry, to let her be the one to comfort me and to tell me that everything would be alright. I wanted her to be my person for all of that. But I didn’t even know her, so I had no idea why I should feel that way about her, and I certainly didn’t want her to see me like this, sweating, chilled and drenched with my own vomit.

Without looking in her eyes I pushed myself to my feet on the edge of the toilet and charged out of the stall, shoving my way past her and on out the door into the common area.

Behind me I heard her say, “Gesama, wait. We need to …” but I was gone out the door.

As I sailed past the door of the common room, it felt like everyone was staring at me. I looked down at myself and saw that the thighs of my jeans were wet from either the vomit or the edge of the toilet bowl. When I felt my butt I realized that it was wet as well, from sitting on the piss-laden floor of the bathroom.

I launched myself back into the stairwell, this time rushing up to my room. As soon as I was in the door I peeled off the jeans and the shirt and threw myself down on the bed in my underwear, still shaking.

A few minutes later the door behind me. Ms. Slanick had come into my room – without knocking. There was no true privacy at Holshue House. “Are you okay?”

I groaned. “No. I’m … I’m sick.”

“Are you possibly … pregnant?”

I shook my head, “No. Not a chance. I’m still a virgin. As if it’s any of your business.”

“But you know, if a boy gets his … his … near enough to your … and produces sperm …” For such an invasive conversation she was certainly having a lot of trouble with the basic terms for human anatomy.

“No.” I shouted. “That has never happened. I don’t even like boys. They’re pigs! Just leave me alone.”

And then she was gone. I lay on my bed, trying to process all that I had seen, the beating and torture of a black man from long ago. Perhaps the girl had been his daughter, perhaps the woman his wife. Were slaves allowed to have wives? Families?

As I shoved that away from my mind, still unable to find Allison, I remembered the vomit and the beautiful girl who had been right there with me at my very worst, the yuckiest I had ever been in my life. And she had called me by a name. “Gesama,” she had said. It was a name that I didn’t know, and yet it seemed to very right, almost as if she already knew me. And that, in itself was kind of frightening.