Two Homes on Snickleway Street

Two Homes on Snickleway Street

My next-door neighbor is a kindly old spinster. She lives alone, with no family nearby - like me, actually. She’s four feet tall, with well-coiffed gray hair gathered neatly in a bun. Can’t weigh more than eighty pounds.

Unfortunately, she's quite forgetful. And I fear she's losing her mind. Or already has. I thought so anyway, until one of my visits last month – the radio incident. That's when I started to doubt my own sanity.

I visit her most days after work for a welfare check, a bag of groceries in hand, because she never goes to the market. It's understandable. We live far out in the hills. She has no car and walks with a severe stoop.

Given her condition, I'm glad she takes each step with care. One fall at her age could spell her end. In some respects, however, she’s quicker than she looks. Without fail, on my second knuckle rap – I’m talking quick raps, here, less than a second apart – her back door swings open like she’s been standing there all along. Did I mention that her huge house has no windows near that door? That the door is a faceless wood slab – no window – painted in peeling white with green underneath?

She always wears the same old-fashioned print dress. Never a stain on it, though I never see her in anything else. And what curious, milky blue eyes – forever wide open. I rarely see her blink.

“Hello, I’m Helena Isolda Rimroster,” she always says in greeting. “And who might you be?”

“I’m your neighbor, Ed Flister, from next door,” I say with a smile.

I could tell her any name I want and she wouldn’t know the difference. That would be disrespectful, of course, but it shows her vulnerability, her lost-in-the-fog innocence. Dear God, protect her, when I can’t, I pray every day.

Then she invites me in and closes the door.

That’s when the atmosphere…changes. For despite the sameness of our daily greeting, whatever happens next is anyone’s guess.

---

The day of the radio incident, she sits down at her kitchen table, props her chin on her hand. An unusual gesture, given her typically upbeat nature.

"How long have you lived here, Mister Flister?" she says.

"Coming up on two years now. How about you?"

"Oh, a lot longer than that. I forget how long, honestly, but... a long time."

She stares at the far wall, where a clock that's two hours off ticks the time. Helena doesn't seem her usual chipper self.

“Everything okay?” I say.

“This old radio isn’t working. Haven’t been able to pick up my favorite station for a week.”

I glance about the kitchen but see no radio. Must be one in her living room. I envision one of those behemoth wood console jobs, tubes aglow, playing mellow big band music from fifty years ago.

In frustration, she lowers her left hand until it stops abruptly, with a smacking sound, in midair. Like her hand landed on something solid. But there’s nothing there. Her hand just hovers - motionless and horizontal - a foot above the tablecloth. Then, with her right hand, she begins adjusting something between her left hand and the table. A dial, I realize – she’s pretending to turn a dial back and forth.

“Oh wait. The darn thing’s switched off,” she says, and chuckles.

Helena withdraws her hand from the invisible dial and reaches for an imaginary knob. There’s a distinct click. She turns the knob further, and a sound of static rises from the silence. It’s white noise – like snow playing from the speaker of an old TV. I watch her lips carefully – they’re shut, so I know she’s not voicing the sound.

“That station’s right… around… here…”

Her hand is back on the make-believe frequency dial. Clockwise, then counterclockwise, in small increments. The white noise changes character. Occasional popping noises, the faint buzz of static, and a whirring sound that rises and falls in pitch. But no music. No radio station.

“You never told me you’re a ventriloquist,” I say, realizing she’s pranking me.

She reaches down and clicks the radio off. That click – again it sounds so real, so authentic. Helena glances up at me, puzzlement on her face.

“What do you mean, ventriloquist? You’re being silly, Mister Flister,” she says grinning, her face suddenly as full of wonder and mirth as a young schoolgirl.

“I’m… sorry… you can’t find your favorite station anymore.”

“No matter,” she says, then removes both hands from their fixed, midair positions. “Here, I’ll make us some tea.”

She rises slowly to her feet. When she turns away and hobbles toward the stove, I surprise myself, by reaching into the space her radio would have occupied. If it existed, I mean. Nothing’s there, of course. Then I catch a familiar scent, from decades past, that brings back a flood of childhood memories. The smell of old vacuum tube electronics warming up.

---

It’s pouring rain this evening. Helena’s huge, backyard azalea almost glows with brilliance. Every May, it morphs into a dramatic explosion of red blossoms. Thunder rolls in the distance, but I stop to admire them. Above the bush, a soft orange light glows in her parlor window. By its shifting brightness, I know she’s lit the fireplace.

Early on in our acquaintance, that fireplace really made me nervous. Such a frail woman, and with limited mobility. What if she fell asleep and didn’t mind the fire? One hot coal could spell her doom and burn her huge old house to the ground.

But that’s before I sat in her parlor - many times - and watched her tend the fire. She never missed a thing. And how I’ve enjoyed browsing through the old volumes in her three hulking bookcases. What a crazy assortment. Religious books in Latin, beside children’s story books, above a shelf of old tomes with strange runes engraved on their covers, all filled with surreal, nighmarish images. And her cook books, written in French, many of their pages dog-eared from use.

“You have quite the library. Did you collect all these books, yourself, Ms. Rimroster?” I've asked.

I always address her as “Ms.”, not Miss or Missus, because she’s never told me one jot about her past. Perhaps it’s her fading memory. She wears no rings, and I’ve never seen family photos hanging on the walls or sitting on a shelf.

“Oh yes, all of them. I used to travel quite a bit. All around the world.”

During one visit, as she worked in knitting a sweater and I paged through a physics text on the shelf, I decided to test her on something.

“God doesn’t play dice with the universe, you know,” I said. She looked up suddenly, her face going blank, her eyes searching mine, as though wondering why I’d said such a thing.

“Well, you know how Doctor Einstein always rejected physical indeterminacy. No one could ever convince him otherwise.”

Then she resumed her knitting, apparently without realizing how completely she’d blown my mind. I’m a scientist, you see, and I never thought her so versed in physics.

Just last Wednesday, I found her back door ajar, so I rushed in, expecting the worst. As I entered the kitchen, I heard a female operatic voice, soaring dramatically through a passionate Italian aria. I continued through to the parlor and found her standing mid-floor. The moment I caught sight of her, the singing ended.

“Ms. Rimroster, you okay? You left your back door open!”

She looked at me with wet, winsome eyes, her breathing heavy. Like she’d just been singing that amazing aria. I looked about the room for a phonograph, radio, or hi-fi set, but it was just her, alone in the room, candles burning about her in several different candelabra.

“I knew I wouldn’t hear you when you knocked, so I just left it open,” she said.

I felt several competing emotions. First, I was relieved she was okay. Second, the only explanation that made sense was – this ninety-plus-year-old woman could sing opera like a young prima donna! And third, she obviously expected me to visit her, which means she was remembering something of my previous visits. I’d never before seen direct evidence of such memory. Otherwise, why tell me her full name every time she opened the door?

This evening, as I approach the back door, I see that it’s shut per usual. I knock, but, for the first time ever, the door doesn’t fly open on the second rap. I wait a bit and knock a second time. Still no answer. Worried, I try the knob, but it’s locked. Now what? I don’t have a spare key, and I’ve never seen a phone in her house. Still, I should try calling her.

Back at my house, I dial her phone number. She once told me she didn’t have a phone, but I found a number for Rimroster on Snickleway Street in the phone book, so I knew it was hers. After all, we’re the only two houses on this street. The phone rings several times, then a click.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice says. It sounds reverberant – like Helena stands inside a large, empty room, or, no – more like she’s in a tunnel.

“Ms. Rimroster, this is your next door neighbor, Mister Flister. I stopped by your back door to visit, but there was no answer. You okay?”

“Oh yes, Mister Flister, fine, fine. Quite a busy day for me today. I meant to leave the door unlocked but forgot. Tell you what, when you head back over, it’ll be open. I’ll just wait down here, in the basement. I’ve something to show you.”

“If you’re down in the basement, how will you go upstairs to open –”

“There,” she says. “The door is open now. It's high time you get to know me better. See you soon! Bye now…”

There’s a click at the end of the line, so I hang up and walk next door. As she claimed, the door opens with a simple turn of the knob, and, standing in her kitchen, I marvel at the heavy, black wooden door, that hangs halfway open between the kitchen and parlor. I don’t recall seeing it before.

At the door’s threshold, I stare down a set of stairs that seem, well… impossible. I swear there must fifty steps that vanish into the blackness below. Heavens knows how much deeper they go. From what she said on the phone, she’s expecting me down there.

How could she make it down all those stairs, when she hobbles around with a cane in her kitchen? I wonder if someone else has been living here all along – someone who helps her, someone I’ve never met. Seems improbable, but I can’t imagine how she got down there on her own.

A damp, cold draft wells up from below. Goosebumps rise on my skin, while I slide a hand around the thick, textured plaster near the top of the stairs, searching for a light switch. Nothing. In the parlor, I find a candle in a holder, as well as a box of wood matches. I stuff some spares into my breast pocket and light the wick.

Back at the top of the stairs, I listen for sound from below. Silence… For the first time ever, here in Helena’s house, I feel ill at ease. Something isn’t right. Still, could she be in danger down there? I feel we’ve become friends over the past couple years, so why be afraid?

I begin my descent, one slow step at a time, my candle flame shivering in the draft. As I continue, my unease rises toward a formless dread.

---

Ten minutes later, I reach the bottom. It’s numbingly cold down here, and my breath condenses into puffs of fog. I'm in a natural cave, complete with gray stalactites hanging from the rough rock of the ceiling, about twenty feet above.

“Ms. Rimroster?” I say. My voice bounces off the cave walls, echoes into silence. So I shout out, in case she’s somewhere deeper in this cave. No reply. Soon, I hear the drip of water, so I follow it. Now something smells rotten, along with the acrid stink of mildew.

There, ahead – a large heap of paper bags – hundreds of them. I pick one up and look inside. Rotten fruit, and a brightly colored plastic wrapper, over a loaf of moldy bread.

Then my heart sinks. These bags are all labeled with the same faded red letters. “Lugers,” they say. It’s where I shop for groceries. And by their contents, I know - these are the bags I’ve brought Helena each day, ever since I’ve known her.

My gnawing unease rises into dread, so I turn to climb the stairs – then jump in fright as Helena stands a foot in front of me. Her expression is grave, the flesh beneath her eyes drooping badly.

“What’s this all about? Why throw all that food away?” I say while taking several steps back.

“Does it matter?” she says. Her voice is deep, menacing. All sense of frailty and age is gone. "I've lived here a very long time. Longer than you can imagine."

“Out of my way. I’m getting out of here,” I say. I try to sound angry, but I can't pull it off.

I swallow hard, my voice trembling. She watches me closely, her face expressionless. When she takes a step toward me, I move to the old shopping bags and step among them, their thick paper crinkling. I lower the candle flame to one of the bags, and it readily catches fire. I light other bags, too, and soon the fire is spreading from bag to bag. I cough in the smoke, as heat and light fill the cave.

In this new light, my blood runs cold as I glance deeper into the cave, where human bodies lie against the cave wall – some of them still half-clothed. Several bare skulls glint in the growing firelight, their sockets black and hollow. Some corpses show dark, desiccated skin, as if their bodies were sucked dry of fluids.

“Been many years," she says in a guttural tone. "But now it's time I eat." Her skin is suddenly glistening wet, shriveling before my eyes, as if her human form were just a facade. Then she rushes at me, swings her right arm at my face, but I duck. She misses, her arm whistling just above my head. I lunge forward, slamming into her chest. I viciously head butt her forehead, and the force of it knocks her backward.

She stumbles, falls to the cave floor, so I rush for the stairs. Soon, I’m bounding up, two steps at a time. Below me, she laughs in a deep, raspy voice, her throat gurgling fluidly with each syllable. Soon, I can hear her just behind me. Up and up I climb, until my right calf suddenly explodes with pain. I stop then, spin round, and, holding onto the handrails, raise up both feet and kick hard with both into her chest.

Helena, or whoever, whatever she is, tumbles back down, into darkness. I continue up, now guided by faint light from the open door at the top. At last I emerge into her kitchen and bend over, gasping for air. I shut the black door and drag a heavy set of shelves in front of it, while old plates and glasses tumble from shelves and shatter about me on the floor. As I work, my muscles burn with fatigue. Then I’m out the back door, running across the lawn as rain pours down and lighting forks the sky.

When I run to my car to flee the area, I see that two large trees have fallen across Snickleway, so my only path out of here is blocked. For now, I'm trapped here, with an apparently ancient monster seeking to devour me.

I feel overwhelmed - all of this is contrary to everything I know and believe. My reality makes no sense, and I'll have to fight to survive.

---

Night has fallen. I’ve finally staunched the bleeding from an eight inch gash in my calf. I doused it with whiskey, wrapped it in layers of white cotton cloth. Presently, it feels warm and throbs with pain, but I’ll live.

Meanwhile, the storm rages on. The power failed minutes ago, just as I reached for the phone to call the police. As I brought the receiver to my ear, I heard the dial tone suddenly cut out. That’s what I get for living out this far, with such antiquated wiring.

Or was it her? Had Helena somehow cut the line? Outside, everything is pitch black, as rain hammers the windows and thunder roars. I grab a torch and rush to my gun cabinet. I load several shells into the shotgun, head to my upstairs bedroom, a large box of spare shells in hand. I barricade the door and slide my behemoth of a wardrobe - an antique built of solid oak - across the only window in the room. Then I sit on the bed, shotgun across my lap, and pray I'll live through the night.

A half hour later, I hear a thud on the roof, then strange scratching noises, as if some creature is scrabbling across the flint shingles just above my head. I cock the lever. A shell is in the chamber…