Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

Before he left, Fearless called down through the floorboards, “Paris, you still got that trunk with the padlock on it in the back?”

“Yeah,” I said in a deep tone.

“Where’s the key?”

“In my tool drawer. Why?”

“I’m’a put the lock on the front do’ so nobody come in here.”

I heard him walking around for a while after that. He went back and forth a couple of times, and then the house was silent.

The first thing I realized after Fearless was gone was that I didn’t have a book to read. At the best of times that would have been bad news. Reading is how I made it through life. While other children were out getting into trouble, I was in the schoolroom or at the back of the church reading Treasure Island or Huckleberry Finn. Books were my radio and my daily drug. I could live without almost anyone or anything as long as I had a book to read. A long queue became a luxury if Anna Karenina was there to engage me. The doctor’s waiting room became my private den if he kept up with his magazine subscriptions.

Sitting there next to a heap of flesh and bone that once made up a man, with no book and no way out, made me jittery, pressed me to the edge of panic.

I tried to go over how I had come to that place. Should I have left Jessa alone? Probably. But she said her boyfriend had left her. Should I never have believed what people told me?

Within five minutes of Fearless’s departure a peculiar pinging sound began emanating from the corpse. It had a nautical ring to it. His body juices settling, no doubt, I thought.

I turned off the lamp and closed my eyes, determined to sleep until Fearless returned with his helper. No more than a minute later came another greatly extended bodily note. I turned on the light and wondered if I could push the trapdoor open.

Tiny’s head was on the floor and his middle was bent backward so that his feet were next to his head. I decided that it was this uncomfortable position that made him so musical. Maybe if I straightened him out he might calm down.

With great difficulty because of my hurt back, I pulled on the big man’s legs until he was lying flat on his stomach with one hand underneath him and one behind his neck. I would have straightened him out more, but he had soiled himself and was beginning to smell pretty bad. For a moment I worried that the odor might overwhelm me. I panicked and climbed the ladder, but when I made a tentative shove against the trapdoor I realized that I’d never be able to push my way out.

I kept a tarp down there that I used sometimes when I had to do work around the house. I used this to cover the body and to contain the odors it was emitting.

Then I turned out the light again. The next sound that came from Tiny was like that of a giant toad being pressed underneath him.

I turned on the light.

I was caught between my fear of the dark and the terror that light brought.

“You gonna be fine, Paris,” I told myself. “It’s gonna be okay. You didn’t kill this boy. You didn’t ask him to come over here after you, actin’ a fool.”

For a while there I blamed Useless for my problems. Just the fact of him dragging his unlucky hide to my doorstep, I reasoned, had brought this misfortune down on my head.

But I couldn’t blame Useless. He hadn’t even come in my house. Anyway, if my cousin had caused the problem it would have been me stretched out on the floor instead of Tiny.

For some reason that thought made me laugh. The laugh, in turn, made me smile; as long as I had a sense of humor I was on the way to recovery.

That’s when Tiny twitched under his canvas blanket.

It wasn’t a violent motion, more like a twist and a shudder. But when the man you’re sitting with is supposed to be dead, you don’t want to see any movement whatsoever.

I leaped to my feet, uttered five or six unintelligible syllables, and ran smack into the wall. I hit the ground and then looked around for a weapon to protect myself from the man I was entombed with, the man whose only words to me had been that he intended to take my life.

My forehead was bleeding. My fists were up in front of my eyes. I was panting like a spent dog. Sweat was coming down my face, and I shivered from cold. I had never been so frightened in all my life, and then Tiny shifted under his rough pall again.

This next motion could only calm me. I mean, things couldn’t get any worse. I took a step toward the prostrate figure and nudged him with my toe.

He didn’t respond.

“Tiny,” I said. “Hey, man, you okay?”

I thanked heaven that he didn’t answer.

It was then that I remembered reading that corpses in morgues and mortuaries often exhibited some characteristics of life. They shifted and farted and made all kinds of sounds and motions. Some bodies had been known to sit upright hours after their demise.

Tiny was dead. If the bullet in his brain hadn’t killed him, his broken back from that fall would have finished the job. He wasn’t going to rise up and kill me in that cellar. All I had to do was sit there and wait for Fearless to return and everything would be just fine.

That last thought was the wrong one to have because it aroused a question. When would Fearless return?

Milo went to bed before ten every night. He had a switchboard answering service that connected to him or Loretta on alternating nights in case an important call came in. Fearless would drop Milo off, pick up his helper, and return to get me out of that hole. If everything went well, I figured, he’d get there no later than 11:30.

It was the if everything went well clause of this logic that got stuck in my craw. What if something went wrong? A car accident or the police stopping Fearless and finding his illegal gun. What if there was a shoot-out with Albert Rive and he got the drop on my friends? It could happen. Anybody could die. And Fearless was the only person in the world other than me who knew about the crawl space under the floor.

Even if my back was in perfect condition, I wouldn’t be able to push that heavy bookcase off the trapdoor. If Fearless didn’t make it back in time, I would die.

The cold in my chest was like a new ice age creeping down toward my feet. I was a fool and I was going to die because of it. I sat in the corner, turned out the light, and buried my head in my hands.

A moment later I forgot about all my worries.

I heard a footstep above me. I almost called out, but then I thought that it couldn’t be Fearless because not enough time had passed. And it couldn’t be anyone else who was there by accident because Fearless had padlocked the front door for sure.

Someone had broken in. He was walking around, sending shelves and furniture crashing to the floor. I heard glass shattering and table legs crying across the wood floor. And whereas just a moment ago I was afraid that no one would ever find me in the tomb below my home, now I was scared that whoever it was searching my house would kick the blue carpet, discover the trapdoor, and climb down to kill me.

I felt around Tiny’s pants, locating a fairly large pocketknife. This I unfolded and held in both hands. Maybe I could wound the invader before he knew I was armed.

That was the worst night of my entire life. Everything that happened was a potential threat. No matter what I did, Death was dogging my tail.

After quite a while the footsteps and crashing subsided. After ten minutes of silence I turned on the light. The fears then began to pile up like stones in an avalanche. I worried about carnivorous insects burrowing after Tiny and then deciding they’d like to have living flesh too. I wondered how much air there was in the underground room and if I’d have enough to last me until Fearless returned, if he returned.