Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

“No, you can’t. I’ll be there.”

He walked up to the house on Bright Street he thought might have been their cottage, again shocked by time’s changes. The block he remembered bicycling up and down now held new apartments where once old houses had led fading lives.

Dogs barked.

Still a few doors down from the house he thought had been his, he approached warily. He recalled the sidewalk, buckled from the eternally shifting California earth, because he remembered leapfrogging the bad spots on his skates. He walked toward the ramshackle cottage, glad to see it, remembering the monster movies, his fears, and the neighbor next door, who yelled when he or any kid happened to stumble into his dichondra.

He hoped the people who lived in the house worked. This, after all, was a working-class street. But a woman came out onto the porch with a tablecloth, shook it vigorously, and reentered the house. He would have to wait. The woman stood in his mother’s kitchen. He went back to his car and rolled down the windows, let his head drop back, closed his eyes, and entered his memories.

He recalled this house vividly. A twenties bungalow, it hid a fruit cellar beneath the kitchen, the only one he could remember from all his years of moving. Shelves below had harbored ancient jelly jars, jars of unidentifiable vegetables and fruits. They hadn’t lived there long enough for his mother to get around to cleaning them out. Dank dirt surrounded the shelves and webs curled around the old jars.

After one initial exploration of the cellar, Esmé had never again opened the trapdoor, to his knowledge. But she had said, and he had remembered, “These were places where people could hide. Maybe they built it to hide from burglars.”

Ray, then only eleven years old, knew the cellar mainly kept food cool in the days before people had refrigerators, and even then marveled at his mother’s paranoia. The fruit cellar, so unusual in his world, so hidden and inaccessible, lured him, and he spent hours down there on hot days in the darkness lying on the damp earth, digging, looking at the jars and the rusted tools. He thought of the place as a refuge. A refuge from what?

He had enjoyed those months in uptown Whittier, with its big city library and a fountain in front where kids like him could cool off on hot days. He admired the old-fashioned downtown. On Saturday afternoons, while his mother did the grocery shopping, Ray paid a pathetically small amount of money to attend horror movies at the Whittier Village theaters on Greenleaf Avenue. His dreams were full of flesh-eaters, bats with human faces who flew at him, toxic liquid beings that seeped under doors. At this house, his bedroom had been a closed-in porch with windows on three sides that offered perfect entrances for monsters. He never told his mother how much the movies scared him and how they sabotaged his sleep at night.

His mother had talked about settling down and found a good job at a hardware store. They lived quietly, occasionally visiting his ailing grandmother in Montebello for hurried, always brief visits. Esmé stayed close to her kitchen and collected cookbooks. She experimented on Ray, making muffins with pecans and oranges, pancakes with maple chips, omelets with zucchini. In self-defense, he stopped eating anything except cereal until she relented and got back to serving him plainer fare.

Looking back, it was as though they really were starting a new life. Then one night in August, yes, another August night, she had presumably moved them. He woke up one morning in a new place, with no memory of leaving.

That made this house promising.

The summer sun played over the sidewalk, heating the stone wall he sat upon. The front door to the cottage opened, and the woman stepped out. She held an expandable leash. The big yellow Labrador walked politely to heel as they disappeared up the street.

She might not be gone long, although a dog that size really needed a good long walk. He got out of his car, sauntered up the porch steps, and knocked. No answer. He pulled out his family of keys. Before trying a single one, he played a game with himself. Which one might fit? He picked through them lovingly, but in truth had no idea, so after a few moments, he simply tried them methodically. Not this one, not that one. This one was too old-fashioned, and the next one, too shiny for one from so many years ago.

Twist. Turn.

Finally, one worked. He had to push hard against the door.

The living room, once home to geometric-patterned curtains, now flowery and strange, held a level of clutter he could hardly believe. Newspapers and magazines piled up in corners, along ledges, even on the couch. He had heard of such people. They hoarded, fearful of what?

He picked his way disdainfully past the moldering stacks, thinking, was it worse to hang on to every single thing, or better to let it all go without regard for its meaning or import?

He checked out the master bedroom and found nothing, then moved into his old room, the one with the three high windows. He hardly recognized it. This room had turned into a repository of neurosis, a place where damp publications mildewed and died. All three walls held moldering papers stacked up to the ceiling. He could barely walk inside.

It hurt, what they had done to his home. He was stifling. Throwing open the back door, he took a deep breath of fresh air to clear his lungs, wondering how much time he had. All the time in the world, really, because the world had come down to this mad search of his.

He moved swiftly back into the kitchen. Scanning the scene, the dirty countertops, the sink full of filthy dishes, he couldn’t immediately spot where the trapdoor lay. A sisal area rug covered most of the floor, and he pulled it aside, examining the stained hardwood flooring below.

Ah, yes, grimy lines that showed where the trapdoor existed. No handle stuck up anymore, however. He had to find a steak knife in a drawer and pry at the sides of it. After cleaning and picking at three sides, the door lifted open like an ancient tomb.

He peered inside. Black. Dank. Nothing. Cold air coming at him.

He didn’t have a flashlight. Frustrated, he left the trap open and wandered farther through the house, trying to find one. In one cupboard he found a hair cutter, shaver, curling iron, and hair dryer. In one, he discovered appliances: a bread maker, coffee grinder, blender, and sandwich grill. All these things reposed willy-nilly between oven racks, coffee mugs, and canned goods so old their labels looked quaint. In the third drawer down in the master bedroom, right next to an oddly shaped personal vibrator, he found a flashlight. Another ten minutes later he discovered the battery that would make it work.

Phew.

After placing the battery correctly in the flashlight, he poked it into the dark hole of the forgotten fruit cellar.

Webs, the overwhelming truth of the matter. Many spiders, many critters, owned this place. He saw jars he thought he remembered from his childhood, ugh, so old even he didn’t want to deal with them. However, he had no choice.

The rotting wooden ladder held his weight all the way to the dank floor. Waving the flashlight around, repulsed, intrigued, he dug through the dusty dank jars, watching for black widow spiders and another revelation.

After all, Esmé had thought of the cellar as a refuge from intruders.

Parked on the street outside, Kat watched Ray leave his car, debating whether to hop out and have a look through a window or two to see what Ray was up to.

“ A1A Beachfront Avenue!” the boyz on her cell phone shouted.

“Hiya. It’s me.”

“Well, hello, Zak.”