Bugs and spiders scatter as he tugs open the creaking, wooden bulkhead doors and peers down into the darkness. “There’s a light at the bottom of the stairs,” she tells him. “Just feel for the string and give it a pull.” He carefully tests the strength of each squeaking step, as he descends into the damp shadows of his neighbor’s cellar. She thinks he’s her grandson and asks for help around the yard from time to time. Today she wants him to trim back the dead patches in the ivy cascading down and over the trellis. Her voice, almost as frail now as her gaunt, shrinking frame, continues from the top of the steps. “The clippers should be right there on the workbench, dear. Your grandfather always kept them on the workbench.”
He rakes his hand through layers of web before finding the string. When he pulls it, a single glass bulb flickers yellow for only a moment before the filament crumbles and his only light is once again the daytime glow shining down from behind him. In the near darkness, he spots the sagging workbench against the far wall, covered with glass jars, coffee cans, and hand tools, the onetime instruments of a home craftsman, now mere dusty relics of better days. He treads carefully toward the bench, his arms swimming before him to cast aside the cobwebs hanging in his path. The clippers are right where she said, but the wooden handles have loosened with wear and time, and the steel blades are seized together in a crusty bulk. He runs his fingers across the rust and calls up to her.
“I don’t think these are going to work, Mrs. Folger. I can just go get my set. Mine will work just fine.”
“Hello?” she calls from atop the stairs. “Is somebody down there?”
“It’s me, Mrs. Folger,” he says, treading carefully back toward the opening. “I was just looking for the clippers.”
“Oh dear,” she says in a faint aside. “Who could have left this open?”
The hinges creak and the square of light begins to shrink.
The door slams shut.
Then, in total darkness, he hears the gentle clicking of a lock.
James M. Maskell has taught high school English in Massachusetts for over twenty years and writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in the early mornings before heading off to class. His work has been featured in Loud Coffee Press, Assignment, Crow and Cross Keys, Vita and the Woolf, the Dance Cry Dance Break podcast, Waccamaw, Windmill, Paper Dragon and elsewhere. You can read his other work at jamesmmaskell.com.
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