Silence

She lies upon a cobbled bed of old comforters and a canvas car cover in a corner of the basement that seems slightly darker to her than the rest. It is here that she sleeps and here that she eats and here that she thinks she will probably die. The silence surrounds her, engulfs her. Her breath is shallow and careful. Her eyes dart around in the gloom hoping to gather together what little light there is in a place built for darkness. Her stillness is a self contained thing. She hides within it’s shell, but outside that shell is a world full of incessant noise. She is silent, but they are not.

Above her head, on the tiles, on the carpet and on the hardwood floors are a thousand footsteps. Each step is like thunder in her ears, like a thousand ghosts walking the stairs of some ancient ancestral home. They travel around in lazy circles, aimless and searching. She hears them all, each and every single footstep on the marble tile and the Brazilian walnut they had purchased for their new kitchen and to redo the living room. Now and then she would hear something break and just by the sound it made and the place it struck the floor above her she could tell what piece of art or Faberge egg or fine china had been destroyed.

She thinks to herself often, almost like a mantra, that Tom will be home soon. He was supposed to be home a few days ago, she had no idea why he was late, only that he should be home soon. Sometimes she sits and rocks back and forth as she waits and listens for his familiar voice.

A man in heavy boots turns the corner in front of the basement door and pauses there. Her heart pounds, the sound is so loud in her chest that she thinks for certain he can hear it too. When she hears him thump against the door she bites her hand hard to keep from screaming, blood wells around her teeth, she tastes coppery red on her tongue but does not pull her hand away. Instead, she bites harder until she hears those heavy boots move away onto the hardwood floor of the living room. Pulling her hand from her mouth, she listens to the sound of a thousand footsteps over her head, but the heavy boots seem a thunder that is greater than the rest. She can hear pebbles of mud shaking free of the leather with each step, they lie in wait to be ground into the floor. She hears the sound of her own blood as it drips from her hand onto the concrete floor of her prison.

There are many footsteps. There is the clip-flop sound of a woman with one broken heel, the dull thump-thump of someone in bare feet. She hears the clack-clack of a person in flip flops and the light uneasy “thimps” of a young child taking his first shaky steps. She hears people in running shoes and in dress shoes, loafers and boat shoes. She even hears a person dragging themselves bodily across the floor but she no longer hears that sound and she can’t remember when it stopped.

Her first few days down here had been nerve wracking to say the least. There is no way to leave the basement. Tom had installed locks on the outside of the storm cellar doors years ago and she had no way of leaving by that route. The only other door was the one she had used to descend into the darkness, the basement door into the house proper. That way is barred and locked from the inside, to keep them from coming down to her.

She has barely moved from the bed for 5 days, listening to the sounds of the trampling feet above her. In her fitful sleep she hears these footsteps above her and dreams that they are fistfuls of dirt being thrown onto her coffin as it is lowered beneath the earth.

When she retreated to the basement, she brought with her only a flashlight, a loaf of bread, some pickles and two gallon jugs of water. She was so sure that she would have been rescued by now but instead she has run out of water and she would gladly trade her flashlight for a single birthday candle. Her husband had left a very nice LED torch down here in the basement that can run for thousands of hours at a time but she can’t find it. She has wasted what little water she has by crying three times thinking of that light. The sound of endless drumming above her is enough without being forced to deal with the completeness of being left to the darkness.

She can hear no sound other than their footsteps which she knows is beginning to drive her mad with lack of sleep and human contact.. People make sounds. They breathe and talk, they curse in pain when they stub a toe. There is no sound from above her but the relentless thunder of foot traffic, never tiring, never stopping. Occasionally there are knocks on the heavy oak door of the basement. The footsteps joined by a slow hammering of a fist on the stout wood. It would last sometimes for a minute, maybe two before the fist’s owner would leave off an begin his or her slow plodding pace around the farmhouse’s interior once again.. She can hear them come and hear them go, which gives her a sullen kind of hope that if she keeps her silence, perhaps they will all go and leave her alone. Then she can rejoin the light and make her escape. She is unable to understand why they won’t leave. Why they won’t just realize that they can’t get to her and go find some other middle aged woman to torment with their relentless walking.

Finally, the flashlight’s batteries die. She watches it dim as though it is the last sunset she will ever see. The torches light refracts across her retinas moistened as they are by the tears welling from her eyes. There is no hope of comfort in the darkness and no hope left that she will find her husband’s flashlight buried among all the boxes and automotive parts he keeps down here. What little light finds its way beneath the wrap around deck and through the basement windows is barely enough to see her skin, which must be growing paler with each day, trapped as she is in this concrete coffin, this Alamo she now calls home.

So she listens to the sounds from above. The endless tromping of feet, the shuffling, the occasional bang as some piece of furniture is pushed or some piece of art she’d insisted on buying falls from its meticulously arranged space on the wall. Her husband had thought her crazy to want these city things on their walls. He had been raised in the country, so he didn’t know what it was to have such nice things, to be able to show your friends how well off you were. Such things meant nothing to him, all that meant anything to him, he often said, was her. Such wonderful words; she longed to hear them again, to know he was up there, waiting for her or coming to rescue her. Tom had such strong hands. He never understood about her needs, but he knew how to touch her. Now all of her fine things are being destroyed in fits and starts above her, and she is strangely detached from it. At first she was angry. When she had heard the Jay Strongwater frames falling from their places and the Waterford crystal shatter in the living room she had nearly screamed at them to stop. She had nearly screamed at them to watch where they were going. She had stood staring at the floor above her where the sounds were coming from. She could picture her expensive decorations in pieces but her fear had swallowed the harsh words before she’d had a chance to voice her outrage and she had slunk back to her makeshift bed in the corner.

She had lost track of the days now due mostly to the erratic nature of her sleep. Sometimes she awoke not knowing whether she had slept through day or night or perhaps both. Her food had run out completely but she was not sure how long she had been hungry anymore. They had stored no food in the basement, only things they didn’t want to look at or think about just then. Even the crumbs had been eaten and there was nothing left. She knew now that she had used the food up too quickly, she had not rationed it as she should have. She had eaten two pieces of the bread for every meal, and taken long swallows of water to go with it. The clothes that had been modestly snug and comfortable on her body when she had retreated to the basement have loosened noticeably. She was dirty and her hair was matted. She had not washed in God alone knew how long and now she was hungry enough to eat her own fingers, if she could even find them in the dark.

In her dreams she sees the people she loves, her parents, her society friends, her husband. She sees Samuel, her beautiful boy whom she had loved and tragically lost, it seemed so long ago. When she wakes she can feel wet tears on her cheeks. She has been crying, and knows that in her sleep she has cried. She has little doubt that she made noise because she can hear the basement door being struck repeatedly by several different fists. She tries to sit up and realizes how weak she has become. She feels cold, and her skin is hot and dry. Can she really run away if she has the chance? She doesn’t know and decides not to dwell on it.

She thinks of Tracy, remembering her from the dream. Tracy had been her best friend in college. They had been the most popular girls in their class, pledging the same sorority, ruling the same social circles. Neither had ever wanted for a date or a boyfriend and their social calendars had always been full. Tracy had been the free spirited fashionable one. All their friends had looked to Tracy for advice on what to wear and what was the new best look. Many of them had invited Tracy shopping just to get her advice on what to buy.

She had been the conservative socialite, counterpoint to Tracy and the one that their friends had always looked to for advice on dating and social etiquette. She had fielded the questions about “What do you know about so and so” or “is it too soon to go down on him? We’ve only been out once…” When they both graduated, Tracy had taken a job in her corner of the world at a very upscale fashion warehouse as a purchasing agent. They had been like sisters and did everything together. When she had announced her engagement, Tracy had been the first person she’d called, even before her parents. When she and her husband had moved away from the city, she had known it would be Tracy she missed most of all. It was Tracy who bought the biggest and most lavish gift for Samuel for the baby shower and Tracy had nearly screamed with glee as she had opened the expensive paper and gasped.

It was not until the power went out, two days before she had been forced out of the sunlight and into the basement that she had begun to fear the worst. While her husband was always good about calling while he was away on business, it was after the loss of contact with Tracy that she had allowed herself to admit that things had gone terribly wrong. Somehow, somewhere, things had stopped. Her inability to call even her best friend had hit her like a loss and the loss of Tracy had sharpened the sting of fear and uncertainty into a spear that both pierced her heart and pressed down on her like stone.

Above her, the clip-flop sound of the woman in the broken high heel shoe cut through the rest of the noise. It was so like the sound that Tracy’s shoes had made as she crossed the stage to receive her degree when they had graduated together. The shoe had broken on the stairs as she had climbed up, and with a strange grace, she had managed to walk across and receive the degree she had spent four years being fabulous to get. Tracy had refused to remove the shoes even at the reception, stating to everyone who asked

“These are Malono Blahniks, even with one heal missing they are still my best shoes.”

Above her, Tracy entered the living room, her one high heel and one broken heel crunching over shards of Waterford Crystal.

“Please,” she whispered to her best friend, so softly it was barely more than a whisper, “I’m so glad you came Tracy, I’ve missed you so much, have a seat, Can I get you something to drink? They have a wonderful local wine here,” and sleep claimed her as she shivered beneath a dusty canvas car cover.

Tom not been born into money. He had been raised by farmers and had possessed little refinement by her standards. They had met at a party a year after she and Tracy had graduated. It was a social gathering, the parties of college legend having been put behind them. She had found him so interesting then, this pragmatic man with little social sophistication. He had a strange charm and an easy smile and he stared at her with such desire that her arms would break out in goose flesh. She remembers thinking that Tom would be a wonderful project for her. At Twenty-Eight, Tom was a Millionaire several times over and the most sought after Engineer on the eastern seaboard. She had been so enamored of him and the challenge she felt he represented that she had violated every rule in her playbook of dating on the first night he had taken her to dinner. She had always wondered if she had been steering those girls wrong all of her college career.

While she had grown up with all the trappings of wealth, Tom had grown up on a farm and then worked his way through college. He did not spend his money the way other men did. For the first year they dated, he owned a late model Nissan sedan with over 150,000 miles on the odometer. When she had asked him why he didn’t just buy a new car, he had told her “Because this one still works”. When Tom had given her a pair of one carat diamond earrings for their first Christmas, he had been embarrassed about it. She had showed up to his apartment on Christmas Eve in two carat diamond earrings that her father had given her. She had wondered why Tom had acted so strangely in giving them to her, so sheepish, almost shy, when it had finally dawned on her. To her such earrings were almost an everyday part of her wardrobe, to Tom, it was his first foray into jewelry as a gift and he had come up short. He was so hurt when she had laughed at him for his silliness that she never wore the earrings her father had given her again.

Her father had spoken often of wealth as she grew up, confiding that Fortune and Prosperity are things that must be seen, not just maintained. Tom on the other hand saved every penny he could, banking as much as possible. He lived in a modest, sparsely decorated apartment. He did not wear designer clothes or fancy colognes. More often than not he made them both dinner and they watched stolen cable on his older model television.

It had not been long after they had married that Tom had started talking about children. She wanted children too but Tom was unwilling to raise children in the city. They had begun looking for homes immediately and Tom had fallen in love with an old rambling farmhouse 100 miles from the city limits. She had not cared for it, but he had convinced her they could renovate, and that anything she wanted short of tearing down the superstructure he would agree to. Six weeks later they closed on the Farmhouse and began renovations.

Her husband is a hands on person, and took time from work to supervise the renovations so that everything would be just as they wanted it. She remembered the muddy work boots that he wore. He always left them outside when he returned to their temporary apartment in town, and though she harangued him incessantly about tracking mud all over, secretly she adored those boots because she knew that the mud was from building a home for their family. When the renovations were done, Tom had put the boots next to the stairs which led up to the porch in front of the farmhouse. He had filled them with soil and planted a rose in each one. She had loved him for that. It was so simple and elegant that even she, a woman of taste and refined sensibility had been almost breathless with the thought. The night they moved in, they began trying to have a child.

She woke from the memory with dread. She felt, no, she knew, that Tom would not be returning from his business trip out west. Things had gone too far for that to happen. But, wasn’t that him upstairs? Hadn’t she awoken to the sound of his heavy work boots on the floors of their home, the mud having long since been shaken off and trampled. She can hear the light rasping sound of a shoelace that had come undone, and trailed behind him as he walked. Her fever was a fire in her now. She felt so cold and the shivering seemed never to stop but through it all she could hear his steady pace as he moved from room to room looking for her. He was here to save her and she needed to go to him. He would take her to safety. He had finally come home. She rose from the bed, the sudden movement startling a dry seizing cough from her. The noise let him know where she was, and she heard his heavy footfalls change direction to the door of the basement. Slowly and carefully she began to feel her way through the dark to the stairs that led up to Tom and Tracy. Tracy was up there she knew, she had just had a conversation with her a few hours ago. Right before she had come down here to…to what? She couldn’t remember. It was so dark down here. She was thirsty, so thirsty and hungry too. She couldn’t remember ever being this hungry in her whole pampered life. She thought of Tom, how he must be heart sick as he waited on the other side of the barred basement door. She could not understand why she had barred it now, did she feel unsafe? Was something wrong? She could not tell, she could not remember. She knew now how pampered she had been, how easy a life she had led. She remembered some of the hurtful things she had said to Tom in their spats over the years. How simple he was, how he was another educated fool. She remembered the hurt in his eyes when she had blamed Samuel’s death on him, on their inability to produce another child on all the hay chaff cigarettes he had smoked growing up on the farm.

She had turned away after saying that, the hurt look in his eyes had cut her so badly that she thought she might cry. When she had turned to apologize, all she saw of her husband was the front door closing as he left for his business trip. She heard Samuel’s light footsteps approaching the kitchen and pausing in front of the refrigerator as she reached the foot of the stairs.

Samuel was such a bright and happy boy, so fun loving and adventurous. As a child he would follow his father around the barn asking questions in a whimsical but overtly intelligent manner. Tom would tell him anything he asked, no matter how simple. Tom loved the boy, his death beneath the wheels of that truck had torn him to pieces. Sammy had only been following his father to the mailbox.

Daylight filtered through the crack beneath the door from upstairs. She could hear Tom and Tracy and Samuel knocking on the basement door, asking to be let in so they could help her. Samuel is exploring cupboards and raiding the refrigerator for snacks even now. She scolds him smiling, “Now, now Sammy, if you have any snacks now you’ll spoil your dinner, go play until suppertime.” Her tone is matronly; kind but firm. As if in response the child’s footsteps wander off towards the family room and she adds “That’s a good boy, doing what your momma tells you is so good.” She is seized by another wracking cough and she doubles over.

She is halfway up the stairs now and there is enough light filtering from under the door to see that there is a dark almost black liquid down the front of her dusty shirt. There is more on the steps beneath her feet and she can taste copper in her mouth. She is almost to the top now so she keeps climbing. Tom is up there, such a strong man, she will treat him better, she swears to God she will. And Sammy is up there too, her baby boy. He will grow up strong like his father. Another step she thinks, keep going. She is so tired that it takes all her strength to raise first one knee and then the other but she is almost to the landing in front of the door. It will be okay, they are waiting for you, it will be okay. She tells herself this with each painful step, each nerve wracking cough. She can hear Tom’s fist on the door. He is worried about me, he still loves me even though I was mean to him, she thinks and begins to cry but she has no more tears to give. As she reaches the landing, she leans back against the wall opposite the door to gather her strength. The bar across the door is heavy and she will need all she has to lift it away.

On the other side Tom and Tracy and Samuel and some of their friends are trying to get to her, to help her. She can’t wait any more. She is coughing and hacking as she lifts the heavy wooden bar that secures the basement door in its place. Her sputum is full of blood that dribbles down her chin and onto her shirt. She steps back, she doesn’t have the strength to open the door now and she crumples onto the landing in front of the door and waits for Tom to rescue her, to lift her back up into the light, but the door does not open. Why is he waiting? Why are they waiting? She’s right here, she needs their help. She is far too weak to do it herself, to open the door. Perhaps the door is locked maybe I locked it she thinks. She makes to stand again, coughing. More blood and she can see dark blotches against the light from under the door. She reaches for the door handle and it twists easily in her grasp. There is no lock on this door she realizes and then it all comes back to her.

As the door opens she sees a hulking figure wearing mud stained leather biker boots. He is wearing a black leather vest with patches on it and half of his face is missing from some kind of accident. There is no blood, just ragged rotting pieces of stringy flesh that hang from the ragged hole where most of his left cheek used to be. His eyes are dead and white. Behind the man who is not Tom is a woman who is not Tracy. She is dressed in a black miniskirt a pink halter top and fishnet stockings. On her feet are a cheap pair of poorly made pumps, one of which is missing a heel and are clearly not Malono Blahniks. Her left thigh has a large hole in it that looks to have been chewed to the bone and the flesh around it is green and rotting. Where the halter top stops suggestively above her belly button, her entrails hang out almost to her knees.

In the background is a small girl. She is wearing bib overalls with the “Osh Kosh B’gosh” logo on them and her head lolls to the side since there is no muscle left around her neck to support its weight. She looks to be four or maybe five and in her hand is a small green plastic shovel like those that come with beach toys. The flesh around her eye socket has been chewed away.

She steps back then, her hand reaching for the door in a vain attempt to close it. She can hear the footsteps again, but this time they are around her, not above her and the walking corpses who are not Tom’s friends begin to come for her as she falls headlong down the stairs.

An hour later a woman climbs up from the basement on a set of stairs that still have a blood stain on them. As she reaches the landing she turns and enters the living room where the sun shines and shines. She steps over bits and pieces of broken things that might have been nice once, in another lifetime, but not anymore. She turns towards the kitchen door and out onto the wrap around porch that a man named Tom once built for his wife. The woman’s neck is at an odd angle, as though she is shrugging and trying to tap her head on her left shoulder. Her right arm is bent backward where it should be bent forward and her fingers seem to clutch ceaselessly for a handrail that she never did manage to grasp as she fell. There is a ragged bite in her leg that has stopped bleeding and behind her a large man in a leather vest, a girl with bad makeup in a miniskirt and a young girl in bib overalls keep pace with her as she walks down the steps off of the porch and up the driveway into the silence of the gathering dark.