Encumbrance

By the time David Hinch got around to cleaning out the basement, the house had already been sold. The closing had taken place three days earlier, and the new owners, a young couple expecting their first child, had agreed to give him until Sunday evening to remove whatever remained of his parents’ belongings. When it had been listed, the entire upstairs had already been cleared out and staged by the realtor, but she had told him to leave the basement alone. His father’s space had been tidy enough to show. The walls were adorned with rustic signs and advertisements for companies that either went extinct or became mega-corporations, and his workbench and tools on the back wall gave the room a utility that spoke to what a man cave was before the age of seventy-five-inch flat-screen televisions and gaudy neon beer signs.

His parents had built the three-bedroom ranch in 1978, two years before he was born, and lived there the rest of their lives. His mother had died first, nine months earlier, following a stroke that left her unable to speak during the final days of her life. His father followed six weeks later. The doctors called it congestive heart failure. David’s sister-in-law, who had worked as a hospice nurse for nearly twenty years, called it a broken heart. David suspected both explanations were probably accurate.

He’d expected the inheritance to be straightforward. His parents had been sensible people who paid their bills on time and kept financial records. His father had even purchased a cemetery plot for himself and his wife in 1996, following a particularly unpleasant experience arranging his own mother’s funeral. There were no outstanding debts, no complicated investments, and since David was their only child, there were no competing claims to the estate.

There was, however, the matter of the house.

His parents’ will contained a provision instructing David to retain ownership of the property for the remainder of his natural life. The language was unusually emphatic, according to the attorney handling the estate, and had been added during a revision made shortly after his mother’s death. His father had signed the revised document in the presence of two witnesses, neither of whom could recall him offering any explanation.

David had read the relevant paragraph four times before asking whether it was legally enforceable. The attorney, a man named Harold Price who had represented his father in various matters for more than thirty years, had removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his gargantuan nose.

“Your father was quite insistent.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“No. I suppose it wasn’t.”

Price explained that the provision presented certain legal difficulties, and he strongly encouraged David to respect his father’s wishes. David listened politely, then consulted another attorney.

Mr. Price did not have to pay yearly property taxes on a house that he hadn’t lived in since he’d left for college, and David had no intention of doing so either. He had his own mortgage and two children approaching college age. Maintaining a second house indefinitely because his father couldn’t let it go, even in death, struck him as unreasonable. He’d loved his parents, and he knew they loved him. But that didn’t obligate him to carry this burden to his own grave. It couldn’t.

The new attorney, a younger and less bulbous man by the name of Oliver Temple, reviewed the documents and identified a means of selling the property without violating any enforceable obligation. The process took longer than David would have preferred, but a little over a month ago, the FOR SALE sign had been driven into the front lawn.

There had been several offers within days of the listing going live, including one for eleven thousand above asking price. But he had been present when the young couple had toured, and when they made a fair offer, he’d reached his hand out and accepted. Knowing they would be starting a family in the house helped assuage the guilt he’d been harboring once the process had begun. They would create new memories here, and now he was looking forward to clearing out the basement and putting this whole business behind him.

He arrived a little after nine on Sunday morning with a few cardboard boxes and a roll of contractor-grade trash bags. He’d arranged for a junk removal company to arrive at four, giving him the better part of seven hours to decide which of his father’s possessions deserved to make the trip home. Everything else would go. His wife had offered to accompany him, but he’d declined. This would be the last time he’d ever set foot in this house, and he wanted to do this part alone.

He made it to the basement stairs and flipped on the overhead lights as he made his way down. The fresh paint smell from upstairs faded away, replaced by the commingling aroma of wood shavings and dryer sheets. It smelled like fond memories, and he suddenly realized that after he was through today, that simple olfactory trigger that could transport him to simpler times would be gone forever.

He remembered playing down here on rainy afternoons, staging wars with his action figures. He remembered building a birdhouse with his dad when he was six or seven, one that would occupy the tree in the backyard for years until a storm destroyed it. He remembered taking shelter down here during that very storm and watching his parents dance to a song that played on the radio between news updates, stepping and turning fluidly in the candlelight as the wind howled outside. He had been scared until that moment, but watching them glide through the gloom had given him the sense that everything would be all right. And of course, it had been.

He opened the first cardboard box and began removing the signs from the walls. He had done his research a while ago on which were valuable and which could be discarded. He placed the ones he could sell in the box and leaned the others against the wall for the junk removal company. With that finished, he moved on to the tools.

His father had accumulated an impressive collection, with much of it passed down from his grandfather, all of it cared for and looking shockingly new save for the handles, which had worn smooth from the better part of a century of use. David was not as handy as his lineage might have suggested, but to him, these were something akin to heirlooms. They would be coming home. They hung proudly on a massive pegboard above an enormous homemade workbench constructed from heavy lumber and topped with two sheets of thick plywood. He had considered bringing the bench home too, but eventually decided it would be too laborious a project.

The workbench itself was perfectly clean, and David started pulling tools down and arranging them along its surface. Hammers, screwdrivers, and wrenches all made it safely down, but as he reached for the Yankee push drill, he bumped it from its place and it fell, landing briefly on the back edge of the workbench before rolling into the small gap along the wall. He waited, hoping to hear it clatter to the floor, but the sound never came. He leaned over and peered into the gap. It had wedged itself about halfway down, and he had no hope of reaching it.

“Damn.”

He tried pulling the workbench away from the wall and failed to even budge it. Thinking that it was just an exceptionally heavy bastard, he pulled harder and failed again. He then gave it a thorough inspection and discovered that the short legs below the bottom shelf had been bolted to the wall on each side. He laughed and then cursed again as he set about finding a socket that would fit. With roughly five minutes of effort, he had removed the bolts. His fingers found purchase as he prepared to pull hard, and in doing so, he tugged lightly to be sure of his grip. The table, to his surprise, moved several inches away from the wall seemingly on its own. He stepped to the side and, with one hand, swung one end of the bench as easily as opening a door.

Casters? he thought. Clever man, his father.

He walked behind the bench and crouched to retrieve the fallen tool. When he picked it up, he realized it had been resting on a recessed handle lying in a small divot in the floor. Only then did he notice the thin lines running through the concrete, forming a rectangle that terminated at two flat hinges lying flush with the floor. He rapped his knuckles on the surface, and it returned a hollow sound beneath the steel, which had been painted the same gray color as the floor.

“What the hell, Dad?”

He set the push drill on the workbench and ran his fingers along the handle. It was surprisingly clean, and when he lifted it from the shallow depression, he found that it moved freely. He gave it an experimental tug, expecting the hatch to resist. Instead, the steel lifted several inches, revealing a strip of blackness beneath.

“Huh.”

He repositioned himself, took hold of the handle with both hands, and raised it up and open. There wasn’t so much as a squeak as it came to rest, the hatch door fully extended. A steel ladder descended into darkness, its uppermost rungs anchored to the concrete immediately beneath the hatch. He could see perhaps six feet of it before the available light failed to pierce any farther.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

He’d known his father was capable of practically anything when it came to home improvement, but this was something he’d never considered, and apparently his father had managed to keep it a secret, at least from him.

David took out his phone and turned on the flashlight. The shaft extended deeper than he’d expected, and although he still couldn’t make out what was below, he could see the ladder came to rest on what appeared to be another concrete floor.

His father had been seventy-six when he died. He’d complained about his knees for years, but he’d never been frail. Even toward the end, he’d still insisted on mowing his own lawn and changing the oil in his car. Apparently, the old man had also been climbing down a ladder.

“For Christ’s sake, Dad.”

He lowered himself onto the edge of the opening, letting his legs dangle over the first few rungs. The ladder felt solid when he tested it with his weight. He considered calling his wife, if only to tell her what he’d discovered, but decided he’d see what was at the bottom first. He’d never considered that his father might have been a doomsday prepper, but the prospect of finding an excess of canned goods and emergency supplies in a hidden sub-basement had him laughing as he started his climb down.

Once he cleared the hatch, it was easy going. David kept his phone in one hand and descended with the other wrapped around the cold steel, lowering himself carefully until the light from the basement no longer reached much beyond his shoulders. He moved the phone beneath him and watched the beam travel down the ladder until it found the floor. By his best estimation, he was only ten or twelve feet below the basement, but it felt farther. The square of light above him looked much smaller by the time his shoes touched concrete.

He stepped away from the ladder and turned slowly, moving the flashlight around a room that was almost disappointing in its minimalism. There was a small wooden table with a single chair and a bookcase beside it. A pair of his father’s reading glasses sat on a black book beneath a small reading lamp. He pulled the metallic bead chain hanging from its side, and the bulb came to life, revealing the simple title.

HOLY BIBLE.

David moved his father’s glasses to the side and retrieved the volume. The cover was soft leather, and his father’s name had been embossed in gold along the bottom.

WILLIAM HINCH.

He opened it and found his father’s handwriting filling the margins. The same stilted swirls of cursive David had seen on birthday cards and Christmas presents his entire life. He flipped through the text, seeing underlined passages and dates accompanying the notes written throughout. One note written in red pen caught his eye.

God in Heaven, have I sinned so dearly that I am beyond your Grace?

He returned the Bible to its place and shook his head. He reached over the table and tilted the reading lamp to take a look at the bookshelf. There were perhaps thirty titles altogether, and most of them looked older than his father’s Bible. Some were in languages he didn’t recognize. Malleus Maleficarum meant nothing to him beyond the vague familiarity of something he might have encountered in a documentary or horror movie. The Lesser Key of Solomon was equally foreign, though the pentagram stamped on the spine left little doubt as to the subject matter, and an uneasy feeling crept into him.

“What the hell were you doing down here, Dad?”

With the added light from the lamp, he turned to take in more of the room and noticed a door across from him. It was steel, set deeply into the concrete wall and large enough that David couldn’t imagine it had been brought down here through the hatch. The frame surrounding it was equally substantial. Heavy rivets held it in place at regular intervals, and three thick hinges ran along one side. A lever was set into the steel and, above it, two words were painted across the door in red.

IT LIES

David stared at it, and for the first time since climbing through the hatch, he considered going back upstairs.

The thought embarrassed him.

He was standing beneath the house where he had grown up. His father had helped him repair his toys twenty feet from where he now stood. His mother had washed his clothes a few feet farther. There was nothing behind that door that required him to stand in an underground room frightening himself with a collection of books from an eccentric old man and a couple of words painted on a door.

David crossed the room.

The lever was cold beneath his hand. He pulled downward and heard something substantial withdraw inside the door. Whatever mechanism his father had devised was remarkably smooth. The door swung toward him without a sound.

Darkness waited on the other side.

David raised his phone.

The beam penetrated perhaps twenty feet before being swallowed. The concrete ended at the threshold. Beyond it, the chamber was stone.

Natural stone.

He moved the light slowly from one side to the other. The floor sloped gently downward before leveling out, and the flashlight caught flashes of pyrite in the exposed rock.

Then the smell reached him.

It wasn’t unpleasant. It reminded him of the fire pit behind his own house after he used it, but this was older somehow. Drier. A calcined ruin that had burned long past the point where there was anything left to burn.

He directed the flashlight along the wall beside the door and found a switch mounted in the stone.

David pressed it.

The floodlights came alive all at once in a violent electrical snap, followed by an eruption of white light from fixtures mounted high along the walls. The lights were brutally bright, and for a brief instant, the darkness was banished completely.

Then the shadows came back.

David watched tendrils of darkness slide into the chamber from behind him. They writhed across the floor and along the walls in a rush. He snapped his head around and took a step back as the shadows washed over him as well, the room he’d just left suddenly more luminous by several magnitudes than it had any right to be. He turned back and watched the shadows coalesce along the rear wall of the chamber, wrapping themselves around a tall metal chair and the figure that sat in it.

David’s heart raced in his chest as he squinted at the scene before him. The first thing he noticed was a pair of bare feet against the stone floor, then hands resting loosely upon the arms of the chair. Its wrists and ankles were wrapped in chains that had been securely bolted to the floor.

“Holy shit.”

The figure raised its head.

Its skin was papery and sallow, drawn tightly over a structure that approximated humanity without quite achieving it. The cheekbones rose too high. The mouth was too wide. Its chin narrowed more sharply than it should have, and its too-tall ears lay flat against an elongated skull. Its irises were silver rings. There were no whites that David could see. Just thin circles of metallic brilliance suspended in the borrowed dark.

David didn’t move. His phone remained clenched in his hand. He became aware that he was holding his breath and released it slowly through his nose.

The thing’s nostrils flared.

Its head tilted slightly.

Then it smiled.

David’s stomach tightened, and for one terrible moment he thought he might shit himself.

The smile broadened. A sound escaped past its lips.

At first David thought it had coughed. The noise was dry and small and seemed to catch somewhere in its throat. Then it came again, and its mouth opened wider.

It was laughing.

It wasn’t a mad laugh. It laughed the way a man might laugh after finally understanding the punchline to a joke he had been told years before.

David took one step backward.

The laughter stopped.

The thing looked directly at him and spoke.

“Hello, David.”