The Lovely Shadow Page 4

  Just standing there waiting for me to open the door so she could begin her horrid screech. I played the whole scenario in my mind. The door would open and there she’d be. She would screech; she would raise her arms out in front of her and lunge at me. Both of her hands would catch me square in the chest and knock me backwards down the stairs. As I tumbled head over heels down the stairs I would catch glimpses of her standing there with her arms now crossed over her breast with a sardonic, triumphant smile on her face.

  I would lay broken at the bottom of the stairs staring up at her and she would close the door, leaving me yet again in the darkness. Then she would silently stand there again, waiting, just waiting for me to climb to the top and open the door so she could push me down again.

  I blinked my eyes closed hard and shook my head violently back and forth, trying to chase away the dark fantasy that was playing through my mind. I only partially succeeded but I knew it was now or never. I took a deep breath and pushed the door hard and began rushing forward, hoping that if she was standing on the other side, the force of the door swinging open would knock her over and give me time to rush into the kitchen before she could push me down.

  Instead of rushing triumphantly into the daylight of the kitchen I bashed my face right into the door which had remained steadfastly shut. The force of the impact knocked me off balance and I very nearly did fall backwards down the stairs but my grip on the doorknob saved me. My sweaty palm slipped a bit, but in the end remained attached to the doorknob allowing me to pull my flailing body back from the abyss.

  After righting myself at the top of the stairs I stood there staring blankly at the door, breathing in big, gasping breaths. It took me a bit to shake off the fear and confusion that had resulted from my near fatal plunge down the stairs. My fear of my Mother hiding on the other side of the door was slowly draining out of me and being replaced with another fear.

  Hoping against all else that my second fear was as unfounded as my first, I tried the door again. I turned the knob very slowly until I heard the click and the knob refused to turn any further. Then I pushed gently against the door. It didn’t budge. I pushed a little harder. It didn’t budge. I pushed as hard as I could. It didn’t budge.

  My heart sank as the realization set in. The door had a deadbolt set high up on the other side, a cautionary device that my Mother had put in years before to ensure that us kids would not accidentally get the door open and fall down the stairs. Now it appeared that instead of using the deadbolt to keep me out of the basement, my Mother was using it to keep me in.

  Fear flowed up inside me like water gushing out of an artesian well, overriding my previous state of shock. I now know that although the television shows tell you to cover a shock victim with blankets and lay them down and elevate their feet and all manner of other inane crap, none of this is necessary. If you simply scare the bejesus out of them it works as an instant shock removal system.

  I was more frightened at the prospect of being locked in the dark than I had been of any of my Mother’s irrational beatings and behavior. I gripped the knob again and shouldered the door. It didn’t budge. I hate to admit it, but I freaked out a little bit at this point.

  I hit my shoulder against the door again and again with no results. I tried to kick it but nearly lost my balance and tumbled down the stairs so I quickly gave up that tactic. I began screaming a primal scream, with no words, no articulation at all, and went back to slamming my shoulder into the door. Sweat began to roll down my forehead and into my eyes. My hand started slipping on the knob as sweat broke out on my palms, making them greasy. I could feel my eyes bulging out of my head as they were sprung open to their maximum limit. And still I screamed bloody murder and slammed my shoulder mercilessly into the door.

  I continued this way until my strength finally left me and I had to give up my molestation of the door and sit down. I was too tired and sweaty to continue. I felt depleted and defeated.

  I don’t know how long I waged that fruitless assault against the door, but I know it was a good long while. I think that during that battle I was as close as I have ever come to becoming insane like my mother. The only thing that differentiated my mindset from hers was that in the back of my mind I held onto a gossamer thread of sanity that told me I was acting irrationally.

  In short, I knew my efforts were useless and I was not deluded into thinking that I would somehow get a different result by continuing to use the same course of action, whereas my mother never knew she was being irrational. That knowledge may have been a small difference between me and my mother, but it is a difference that saved me from being like her and I have often thanked God since that day that I’m not insane like my mother.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sitting at the top of the stairs in the dark, my situation began to come into focus more clearly. My mother had beaten me until I blacked out, then she carried me to the basement and locked me in. She was utterly insane, with no hope of recovery; I was trapped in the dark with no hope of escape—wounded, hurting, and tired.

  I began to cry again. That crying session was not the same as all the previous ones I’d had that day, (I thought it a miracle that I had any tears left in me at that point, but apparently I did). That was not a session of tears that was brought on by pain or fear; it was a session of plain old indulgent self pity.

  I sat there crying as I marveled at how unfair life had been to me thus far. I had no father, I had lost my brother, and my mother had become increasingly abusive as she succumbed to her Sickness. Now I was locked in the dark, alone and broken, with puke on my clothes, and no response from my psychotic mother on the other side of the door.

  When I finally grew tired of bemoaning every little detail of my life I decided it was time to get moving. Since the light switch was on the other side of the door, I was going to be stuck in the dark. And since I couldn’t budge the door, I was stuck in the basement.

  Those were very unpleasant circumstances but I knew I couldn’t just sit there at the top of the stairs for God only knew how long, waiting and hoping that my mother would come to release me. And besides, I was hungry. All the action from the day had made me quite ravenous.

  I stood up and felt every muscle in my body creak and groan in protest of the movement. I turned carefully away from the door and gripped the handrail on my left in a death grip, and slowly plodded my way back down the stairs being every bit as meticulous as I had been on the way up.

  Breathing a sigh of relief as I reached the bottom, I decided the first order of business should be locating that infernal stool that had caused me so much recent discomfort. I stared straight ahead and moved forward slowly, shuffling my feet across the ground rather than lifting them up until I bumped into the stool. I picked the stool up (no easy task with bent, sausage sized fingers on one hand) and carried it over to the drier and placed it on top, out of my way.

  That task done, my next task was to try and find food. I turned toward the rack with all the dry and canned goods and was surprised to see that I could almost make out its shape in the darkness. Just enough light was shining down from the bottom of the door to cast the rack in a very faint grey wash.

  I looked around me and found that I could see very faintly all around. The light from the door spilled all the way down to the floor to a distance of about six feet out from the bottom stair. The back end of the basement was still in complete darkness, but the area around the stairs had some light. I smiled wide; that was the best thing that had happened to me since finding, and falling in love with, Kim Basinger. That discovery of gloomy light might have actually been even better than the discovery of Kim.

  Still smiling, I shuffled over to the food rack and began to root around for something I felt like eating. That was a rather difficult task because although there was enough light to make out the general shape of the objects on the shelves, there was not enough light to actually read the labels to see what food was contained within the packages.

  I picked up
a box I guessed was graham crackers and gave it a shake. I’m not sure what was actually in that box but it didn’t feel or sound like graham crackers so I set it aside and found another box. Shaking that box, I decided that it likely was graham crackers, and tore it open with gusto. It turned out that it was indeed graham crackers.

  I had pulled a pouch of cracker from the box and was just getting ready to tear it open when I decided that there was no reason I should be uncomfortable while I ate. I set the crackers down and made my way carefully to the back of the basement where I knew there were a couple chairs, including a folding lawn chair that reclined back into several positions.

  Finding the wall of junk in the dark was easy enough, but finding the chair I wanted amid the bramble of junk was less so. As I searched I began to get creeped out, feeling like I might not be alone in the dark end of the basement, so I sped up my search as much as I could.

  After I located the chair I had to dig it out of its ensnarement within the tangle of accumulated but seemingly unneeded possessions. With my right hand hurting so bad that it was virtually useless, I had to do most of my pulling, moving, and digging with my left hand only. It was quite a chore and when I finally freed the chair I wasn’t certain it had been worth the effort.

  I dragged the chair back over by the stairs, where I could just fit it into the circle of grey light that was filtering down and got it all set up the way I wanted. I had the back slanted backwards and upwards, and the feet slanted up. I lay down in the chair with my head tilted slightly back, my box of crackers in my lap, and my feet propped up and I felt amazingly good.

  I imagined I was a king laid out on his throne with a multitude of servants about me to serve me my daily allotment grapes. It is surprising what a small modicum of comfort, a tiny little bit of light, and a lap full of your favorite snack can do for your disposition.

  I munched contentedly on the crackers until I had eaten the whole box. I patted my belly and smiled in the dark and thought about just how wonderful my little prison might be. Then I noticed how thirsty I was.

  ‘Well of course you’re thirsty ya big dummy,’ I thought to myself. ‘Ya done cried out all the water in your body today.’

  I started to get up so I could go get some water but stopped halfway through. It had just dawned on me that I did not have a sink or any glasses down here. I could not get water.

  I slumped back into my chair with a groan. I had just a moment where I started to panic but managed to swallow the panic back down my dry throat. I figured I’d done enough panicking for one day.

  ‘No, Johnny,’ I thought, ‘you’re not going to panic this time. You’re going to sit here and think about this situation logically until you come up with a solution.’

  So I sat there. I no longer felt so great and certainly did not entertain any more delusions of grandeur as I sat.

  I sat in my chair for about 10 minutes, staring blankly at the grey outline of the washing machine in front of me and trying to ignore the fact that I was thirsty. Unfortunately, it seemed like the more I tried to forget my thirst, the stronger my thirst grew. Soon I felt like I couldn’t swallow. My mouth dried up like I’d filled it with cotton and absorbed every drop of moisture that was in it.

  My tongue felt like sandpaper against the roof of my mouth. But I didn’t panic. Instead I sat and tried to think. I was growing increasingly frustrated the longer I sat there, convinced that I was going to die of thirst, with no ideas for solving my dilemma coming to me. Finally I gave up being frustrated and went to being pissed off instead.

  I was pissed off at the washing machine, of all things.

  “You piece of crap old tub!” I hollered at it as I jumped up from my seat and prepared to give it a swift kick. “You think you’re awful smart don’t you? Just sitting there waiting to dump your precious water all over some dirty laundry while I’m sitting here dying of thirst!”

  I finished the last of my pointless tirade against an inanimate object just as I was drawing my foot back to kick the machine, and as I finished my tirade and pulled my foot back it dawned on me that I was an idiot. Not because I was chastising and preparing to beat up a machine, but because if that machine could deliver water to clothes, then it could certainly deliver it to me!

  I felt an absurd impulse to apologize to the washing machine for my unfounded behavior, but quickly suppressed it.

  ‘I’m not going to be crazy like my mother!’ I thought to myself as I approached my new savior, (a savior that looked remarkably like a washing machine).

  I pulled the lid open and recoiled at the smell that came from it. Apparently I had put a load in the wash quite some time ago and had forgotten to take them out again to be dried. They had soured and the smell blasted up out of the washer and smacked me across the face.

  I recoiled at the smell and took a step back.

  ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I’m just going to have to be thirsty a little bit longer, ‘cause I ain’t drinking anything that comes out of something that smells like that!’

  I reached over to the drier and found my step stool which I grabbed and placed in its proper place in front of the washing machine. I climbed the stool and grabbed the soap off the counter above the washer and got everything ready to wash the stink out of the clothes. I marveled at how much my thirst had abated just from knowing that there would be water soon enough.

  I was still marveling this psychological phenomenon as I reached over to grab the knob on the washer and turn it on, but being as distracted as I was I grabbed at it with my right hand and jammed my broken fingers into the control panel of the washer.

  It hurt so bad I couldn’t even scream. My chest tightened and a small groan of air squeaked out of me that sounded similar to air leaking out of a balloon. Tears immediately sprang up in my eyes. I jerked my arm back and banged my elbow on the top of the washer, making a resounding ‘bong’ sound.

  That time I found a bit more voice and emitted a growl of pain. I pulled my arm back a bit more carefully and tucked my elbow into my side just below my ribs. Every muscle in that arm was rigidly flexed and my face was contorted in a severe grimace.

  I stayed that way for several minutes, waiting for the pain to recede and wondering if it ever would. Eventually it did, slowly. I could feel the pain leaking slowly out of my arm and hand and as it did, I relaxed my taught muscles in direct proportion. When the pain finally reached a level I could bare, I used my left hand to turn on the washer and I made my way back to my lawn chair and sat on it.

  As I was wiping the tears out of my eyes and off my cheeks I knew what I had to do and dreaded it. I had to try and set my finger bones back into their proper places. I had seen it done on a survival show once, where the host had fallen down and dislocated one of his fingers, so I had a vague idea on how to proceed, but I was terrified to do so.

  It looked pretty damn painful when that guy on T.V. did it, and I really didn’t think I needed any more pain. I sat for a bit pondering whether to actually do it or not and finally decided that if I didn’t do it I was just going to keep banging my useless fingers around in the dark, and that pain would outweigh the pain of trying to fix my dislocated digits.

  I steeled myself for the coming pain by squeezing my eyes closed and gritting my teeth. I took a deep breath and held it as I reached out gingerly with my left hand and wrapped it tightly around my ring finger on my right hand. It hurt like Hell to grab it, but not nearly as bad as I’d been expecting.

  I exhaled slowly and tried not to move the finger I was grasping. I sat there feeling indecisive for several seconds before deciding it was a now or never situation. I took another deep breath and yanked the finger straight out, away from the hand in one quick jerk. I felt the bone sliding across the knuckle socket that it was supposed to be connected to as I pulled it. Then I felt the bone slip into alignment with the socket.

  It’s hard to describe exactly how that felt. There was just a slight pressure all the way around the socket of the knuckle and
I knew that the finger bone was sitting on the rim of the socket, waiting to be popped in.

  As soon as I felt that pressure I rammed the finger towards it, holding it as straight and rigid as I could and felt it pop in. I let out a holler that was somewhere between a scream and a growl as I thrust it in, but found that that the scream was not actually necessary as it hurt a whole lot less than I thought it was going to. The pain relief that came after setting the finger in place was instant and tremendous.

  I was much less apprehensive about setting my second finger and it went back in place in much the same way, and again, the relief was tremendous.

  Now that my fingers were happily back in place I knew I needed to find a way to tape them up or I’d just pop them out again, and God knew, I didn’t ever want to go through that again. So I started shuffling towards the back of the basement where I’d found the chair.

  I didn’t like going to that end of the basement much because it was pitch dark and with my penchant for scary movies and books over the last few months my imagination had a field day with the dark.

  In my mind I could clearly see three long, black, slime covered, tentacles that were coiled beneath the piles of clutter. The pointed tips were just poking out from the clutter, watching me. Tasting my scent as I drew nearer, twitching like a cat’s tail does when it’s hunting. I could sense the excitement growing within the tentacular beast as it waited patiently for me to get within striking distance. I knew it could probably reach me from anywhere in the basement, since I couldn’t get out, but I didn’t think this beast was intelligent enough to know that, so it would wait.

  It would wait for me to get within a few feet and then it would lunge out of the clutter, spraying debris in the air as it flew towards me faster than a striking snake. I knew it would hit me square in the face, and it would have suction cup grips on the bottom side of its tentacles that would grip my flesh and start secreting acid. Once it had attached itself to me with all three tentacles it would pull the remainder of its gelatinous body out of hiding.