The cellar door was
located in the narrow alley between the service counter and the kitchen. Kevin
opened it and peered down into inky blackness. As he aimed his flashlight down
the stairs, his courage waned.
‘Hello.’ His voice,
not much above a whisper, quavered.
There was no reply.
He looked back at the
cafeteria with its modern, pristine, spotless appearance and its panoramic
windows looking out onto the Melmerby lands and misty moors beyond. He twisted
his head further round and took in the stainless steel tops of the servery,
with their racks of clean cups, saucers, cutlery, and glass cases, cases that were empty now but were usually
filled with foodstuffs for the ever-hungry visitors.
My kind of area, he thought. Food, drink, and I can watch life go by.
That was the trouble
with cellars. You couldn’t watch life pass by in a cellar because there was no
life there, and no windows onto life outside. Cellars were where you stored
defunct matter: old mangles, washing machines, rustic workbenches and rusty
tools. Cellars were the graveyard of those things you no longer needed in life.
Cellars were graveyards, full stop.
Summoning his courage,
he began the descent. To his relief, the steps were made of stone, so at least
they wouldn’t creak like the front door had done. Creaking gave him the creeps.
Tramping hard on each step, deliberately clomping his weight down and making a
lot of noise, as if he hoped to scare off any potential ghosts, goblins,
vampires or tramps who might have wandered in for shelter from the inclement
weather, he made his slow way down to the cellar. As he reached each step, he
paused, listening to the darkness ahead. His courage evaporating faster than a
pan of water boiling away, he began to whistle tunelessly, his quaking muscles
producing a staccato trill that many trumpeters spent years of triple-tonguing
practice to achieve.
Outside, the light had
been fading quickly into dusk; a deep, late afternoon gloom had settled over
the cafeteria and kitchen. In the cellars, that gloom became the total
blackness of a night so dark that it was the heart of a black hole, sucking in
everything and everyone in its vicinity, including Kevin Keeley.
Like an angry Pete
Brennan cutting through a gang of football hooligans, Kevin’s torch beam cut
through the impenetrable darkness, picking out strange, angular and elongated
shadows on stark, whitewashed brick walls. He reached the bottom of the steps
and the cold, stone, cellar floor. A low, arched ceiling hung above his head,
and tall wine racks created a labyrinth of narrow aisles ahead of him. His hand
shook; the torchlight wavered and the shadows quivered in time to the
trembling. He flicked the light here and there, seeking anything that looked
like a mains fuse box or electrical isolator switch, but all he could see were
bottles of wine in the tall, wooden racks, and dark, narrow alleyways between
them.
There was no sound
save for the click of his heels as he eased his way along the constricted lines
of floor-to-ceiling racks. At the end of one aisle, he came to another at right
angles and worked his way along. The comforting noise of Scepter and Pete
unloading the car, chattering softly to each other, was gone, lost somewhere
behind and up above him.
He moved further
along, found a gap in the rack, made his way through it and found more racks.
The silence began to prey on his nerves.
‘Can’t even hear the
wind and rain anymore,’ he said to the wine racks.
But then, as he
reminded himself, he wouldn’t, would he?
‘I’m two to three
meters below ground level, the same depth as they bury coffins in a ceme ...’
Kevin cut off the
thought before it could properly mature and flashed his torch back the way he
had come, seeking the bottom of the steps, only to learn that he could not see
them anymore, only racks and racks of wine.
‘Now, did I turn left
and right or right and left? Or was it left-left-right, left-right-left,
right-left-right, right-right-left, right-right-right-right, or
left-left-left-left?’
He cursed softly.
‘In the place less
than ten minutes and I’m lost already.’ He paused, deliberately trying to calm
his mind. ‘Take it easy Kev. There’s no need to panic.’
The moment he uttered
the words into the void, his mind rebelled.
‘No need to panic?
There’s every need to panic!’ His
words sliced into the darkness. ‘I’m on my Jack Jones in a pitch-dark cellar
with nothing for company but an unpublicized liquor store and a couple of
ghosts. And one of them likes chucking knives and bottles of plonk at visitors.’
Silence engulfed him;
the complete silence of a funeral director’s chapel of rest, broken only by his
short, sharp breathing and the thrumming of his pounding heart. Upstairs,
outside, in the sane world of drug dealing, murder, famine, the ever-present
threat of annihilation by nuclear weapons or rogue comets, and race, religious
and economic wars, there were three CB handsets nestling comfortably in a box
in Pete’s car, quite content not to go anywhere. If he had used his head and
brought one with him, at least he could have called for help. Now, he dared not
even shout out. There was no guarantee that Pete and Scepter would hear, and
any shouting might disturb the ghost of Henry Melmerby.
He pressed on. He was
sure that at some stage, he would encounter a wall, and when he found it, he
would stick to it, follow it until it brought him back to the steps, the
electricity switch or both.
Disturbed thoughts
jumped into his mind. Didn’t Anthony Perkins keep his mother in the cellar in Psycho? He recalled watching it on
late-night TV one night when his parents were out, and how scared he was when
Vera Miles turned the decaying old woman round and the cameras gazed into the
hollow eyes, fastened on the festering, unrecognizable skin and ...
Once more he closed
his mind to the images. That was fiction. People didn’t do things like that in
real life... did they?
Frantically, he
searched his anxious mind for the good things that happened in cellars. To his
terrified dismay, he could not think of any. Everything that happened in
cellars was bad, dark or dirty, including the delivery of coal in the dim and
distant past. When Buffy got into a fight, it was always in some subterranean
crypt or vault, and Christopher Lee had spent half his working life in these
places before he moved on to cutting people’s arms off with his light saber and
sending orcs to waylay them.
Kevin pressed on,
almost tiptoeing so his footfalls would not disturb the phantoms in that black
hole.
From somewhere in the
distance came a scrabbling. Convinced that it was a figment of his imagination,
Kevin stopped and held his breath, ears pricked, listening, listening. There it
was again. That was no auditory hallucination; he knew enough about the strange
sounds that sometimes emanated from headphones and microphones to know the
difference, and this was for real. A scratching, scraping sound and it was not
far away. His aural sense of direction was poor, thanks, he maintained, to all
those times when the school had compelled him to sit by the speakers during
morning assembly. He couldn’t locate the direction from which the sound came,
but there was no mistaking it. A scratch-scratch, scrabble-scrabble, as if
something was trying to get in,or out,of its coffin.
Then came the tiniest
of squeaks, leaping into the darkness, and that was enough for Kevin. He ran.
Heart thumping painfully, he hared blindly along the narrow aisles between
racks, flashlight waving erratically in front of him. He tripped, rattled
heavily into a rack, heard a crash, wondered vaguely if the wine bottles were
coming to life to pursue him, accelerated his pace just in case.
He turned right, ran
some more, turned right, ran some more, turned right, ran some more and finally
had to stop to catch his breath, the years of smoking and crummy diet catching
up to him, denying him the strength to get out of that dark, forbidding vault.
He gained some control over his heaving chest and listened. There it was again.
Squeak, squeak, scratch, scratch. Something clawing its way towards him. He
looked at the torch.
‘Maybe the light’s
attracting it,’ he whispered to himself.
He flicked off the
lamp... and promptly flicked it back on again. Less than a second of utter
darkness produced terrifying visions far worse than anything he had ever seen
in the movies, much more terrifying than the notion of a vampire trying to give
him a love bite.
He ran again. Where
were those rotten steps? Sod the electricity. Pete could come down and switch
it on. He was bigger than Dracula anyway. Bigger and stronger. And so
thick-skinned, the vampires would need a hammer drill to get through his neck,
never mind fangs.
Ahead, he made out the
whitewashed walls, that he knew lay near the steps where he had first come
down. He was moving so fast he almost crashed into the wall. He flashed the torch
right and left, and still couldn’t see the steps. All he could see was more
whitewashed wall, running off in both directions. The scrabbling was coming
closer. Consumed by panic, he tried to decide which way.Eeni-meeni-myni-mo. He turned left and hurried
along. Ten meters away, another wall sat at right angles to the one along which
he was tearing. He reached it, turned left again and¾
Suddenly the entire
cellar was flooded with light and there, straight ahead of him, was the tall,
gaunt figure of a man.
