Cellar Door
Mark Petersen
Copyright 2010 Mark Petersen
Cover designed by Kyle Stevens with contribution from Ben Thompson
**
I was not scared at all. I believe everything has a logical explanation, and if there is no tangible evidence of something it must not exist. To believe in ghosts was to make a careless assumption. It was clear to me that Carl was overreacting and that by the end of the day he would realize how much of a fool he was being and he would calm down.
Carl and I have been friends since seventh grade and college roommates for two years. I am used to him getting riled up and emotional about things he didn’t understand. I am also used to him begging me to take a look at things for him, though it had been some time since he had asked me to. When we were younger and used to sleep over at each other’s houses he would ask me to check the closet for vampires or under our beds for monsters and I had honestly figured he had grown out of it by now. Apparently he hadn’t.
Carl believed he saw something terrifying last night and I don’t doubt him. He told me earlier that he had been exploring a large house and found a body of what was evidently a suicide victim. He also explained that even though he didn’t really believe in ghosts he felt like something had followed him out of that house, something dark and evil. So there we were riding out to the same house the day after he had been startled so I can assure him it is just a body, and that there are no evil spirits.
“Let’s go over this again,” I began “You saw a body with a headshot wound holding a pistol?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t notify the police?”
“I told you, it’s probably been there for years, the body is a skeleton mostly, and the pistol is old and rusty, it was an antique German pistol. Not only that but I was trespassing when I found it.”
“I still think we should call the authorities when we get back, keeping a body a secret is way bigger trouble than trespassing.”
A few minutes passed and Carl said nothing; his mind seemed to be elsewhere. He stared blankly at the road. Suddenly he shook slightly as if waking up and mumbled something.
“What?”
“Sorry,” he cleared his throat “turn here, take a right on this dirt road.”
I had never been there before but Carl made this drive quite often. Carl was pretty outdoorsy and liked being alone in the woods. He said the woods brought the creative side out of him and when he had a free afternoon he came out here and took pictures and wrote poems. He told me before that he liked this part of the woods especially because there were no trails or tourist attractions so he didn’t have to share it with joggers or sightseers.
The house was fairly impressive from the outside. It was in a very remote area, we had only passed six or seven houses since we had turned down the dirt road and driven several miles. Carl had spoken of it before, he even told me once he would buy it after we got out of school and fix it up. Fixing it up would certainly be a project I thought to myself as I looked it up and down. It was three stories at least, possibly four, one couldn’t really see the top of the house through the thick trees that had grown around it. It definitely would have been impressive in its day. It was a large Victorian style house, most of the paint had faded off and all of the windows were boarded up with rotting sheets of plywood. There sure didn’t seem to be anything scary or evil about it, the sunlight fell on it in little golden spots after being filtered through the trees and the only sound was a faint rustling of the wind in the leaves. Carl stood beside me looking at the house wide eyed. He was really freaking out. I guess it would be pretty scary to see a body, even it had been weathered down to a skeleton. I suppose it would be especially scary for a quiet and gentle guy like Carl.
I broke the silence and turned to face Carl. “How did you get in? The front door looks pretty securely boarded up to me.”
“There is a cellar door around back. All the doors used to be boarded up, but when I came out here on Halloween last week I noticed it had been opened. I hadn’t gone inside until last night though because when I had first seen it was Halloween and it was night and… you know.”
“Yeah, Halloween night…BOO!” I joked. Carl jumped.
“Dude, not funny. I think this might actually be real.” Carl’s sincerity almost made me feel bad for joking. I say almost because it was still kind of funny to me how serious he was about the whole thing.
The grass around the house was thick and tall. There was a small path paved with slate and concrete leading up to the house and around the back but it was overgrown and not worth trying to follow. After rounding the back corner, waist high in the grass, I saw the cellar opening. The door was missing just like Carl said. It was dark, very dark, and I strained my eyes trying to see into the cellar as I waited for Carl to catch up. When he rounded the corner and looked toward the doorway he froze in fear and I could see his face grow just a little pale.
“Hey man, it’s the basement, you’ll be fine. Come on! You said the body was on the top floor? If you freeze up now this is going to take all day…” I meant to encourage him but I was a little annoyed and failed to hide it. With obvious reluctance Carl took a step forward and faked a smile.
I stepped into the basement first. After going down just a few stairs and taking a few steps inside my eyes adjusted and I could see dim outlines of some of the things in the basement. I clicked on the flashlight I brought with me. The beam fell on the opposite wall which was made of cinderblock. There were gardening tools hanging there, though some had rotted off their hooks and lay broken on the floor. The rest of the room was also a mess. There were steel pails and broken glass jars in piles along the walls, a collapsed cabinet with rusty hinges and dusty contents of different sorts had toppled sideways. An old workbench with some moldy tools was in the far corner by the stairs, a lopsided shop light with rippled metal, stained and streaked, hung over it. The cellar smelled slightly dank and moldy but it was bearable and not incredibly offensive. I can’t say it was anything more or less than I had expected.
I turned back towards Carl as if to say “no ghosts here”. He understood and nodded his head faking another smile. He was right behind me, almost uncomfortably close. The poor kid was genuinely scared and I felt bad for him.
The stairway leading up from the cellar to the main level of the house was shaky and brittle, and we went up one at a time so we wouldn’t strain it. The main level was more accommodating than the cellar was. The first thing I noticed was the light. There were enough cracks and holes in the boarded up windows that we didn’t need our flashlights at all. Closer to the walls I could actually hear the wind rustling in the leaves outside. The main level didn’t smell moldy, just old, like an antique store. There was a thick layer of dust over the floor and the random furniture scattered throughout the rooms. Carl’s footprints in the dust from the day before were the only evidence anyone had been there in a long time. I would have liked to riffle through the furniture and see if there was anything worth taking back with me; but Carl wasn’t comfortable and I chose to make this short and quick for him.
We skipped the second floor and went right to the top. It was only a three story building, but the landing at the top of the stairs had a high ceiling which could give someone outside the impression of a fourth floor. I supposed there could be an attic, but there were no more stairs so I assumed this was the floor Carl had meant. He made it as far as the top of the stairs and nodded down the hall. I pointed towards the closed door at the end of the hall and he nodded again, his face was white with fear. I decided to let him stay behind and ventured down the hall myself. It was a pretty long hall with a handful of rooms off of it. All the doors exc
ept for the one at the end were open and I could see from the footprints in the dust that Carl had explored each room. Most were bedrooms with old dusty beds and bare mattresses on them, there was a bathroom too, the shower curtain still half hanging on a crooked rod. This would be a real job to fix up the way Carl had planned but I was beginning to see some potential in it. He must have been thrilled yesterday checking through these rooms, at least until he got to the end of the hallway. I stood before it now, the brass doorknob inches from my hand. I looked back at Carl, his eyes seemed hopeful almost, but his face was still pale and stern. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I felt a slight thump in my gut when I touched the cold brass knob. It squeaked a little when I turned it, and the hinges squeaked even louder when I pushed the door open. There was a large bed inside and a dusty