Bahram Zaimi - BASEMENT COMMANDMENT. Edited by Rowan Silva

“I am amazed; and all legal. Sorry, but I am still not frightened.”

“A tough one, but I assure you the third room will terrify you.”

“Cannot wait.”

The botanist and the woman left for the third room, and as they came out of the room of crows, he closed the door and turned off the light switch of the room. They walked to the third door; he turned the light switch of the third room on and then opened the door. She stepped into the room and he followed. He stood by her, facing her to observe her reaction.

She looked around, “But nothing is here besides emptiness.”

“Are you sure?”

She turned around, this time carefully paying attention to the floor, ceiling, and white walls, in the end unable to figure out the significance of the room. “What is it?” she asked.

“My third project, this time a real horror,” he paused intentionally for a moment to enjoy of her questioning stare, then said, “You,” There was a long silence in the room, well conformed to the emptiness. He waited for her response.

“You have decided to imprison me here.”

“You are glaring; your sparkling eyes become glassy now,” he continued, “I am kidding, we can go upstairs. Well, that’s what you asked for, horror.”

“Yes, so if you please, leave me alone in the room. Close the door, and turn the light off. I am seeing something.”

The man went out the room, astonished at her unexpected response. As he was shutting the door, he saw her take a piece of paper out from between her breasts. He closed the door and flicked down the light switch, staring at the closed door quietly.

Finally, there was a knock at the door minutes later, which seemed much longer for the man. He opened the door and both departed the cellar in silence. As they were approaching the narrow gap between the hidden and bright sides of the hall, he dared to ask,

“You look sad, what did you see in the empty room?”

“Just an empty room; the twelve-year sorrow of an empty life.”

“There is sorrow in every horror,” he said.

“I am living in a chaotic world of secrets.”

“There is an order in all secrets. That quote comes from a story that I liked to read as a child.”

They passed the gap where the reign of dark subconscious ended. He couldn’t held the question in his mind.

“You’ve peaked my curiosity. If you tell me what you have seen in the emptiness, I will tell you about the ghost in the third room,” He said while they were walking back to the store counter. She noticed someone was dumping some goods at the end of the aisle but did not turn back to see the person.

“You first,” she suggested.

“You are putting me in narrative mode again. Nobody knows how the mind works, the third room is always a possibility, which human civilization has been unable to banish from the human mind. The real horror is the possibility. We don’t know how far a curious mind can go if an irregularity in normal life crawls day and night across the grey matter.”

“What irregularity?” she asked while they were reaching the cashier.

“Your scent as an example. Now that I see your eyes have got their beautiful shine back, and you are in the secure part of the store, I may say so.”

“What’s wrong with my smell?”

“Something non-human which urges a man to trespass the boundaries. As a botanist, years of working with flowers has gifted me a keen sense of smell. Do you remember the last time you came to my store? It was three days ago and we had just a brief encounter. Tonight, before you came in, I felt you. I wasn’t ignoring you as you silently entered. I had closed my eyes to detect each of your steps getting closer by your odorous intensity.”

“So the third room was really meant for me.”

“Well not precisely, as the scent is not of a flower type. I should confess this time your odor is a hundred times stronger.”

“What do you feel?”

“Something strange burns the two bulbs of olfactory up to a part of the brain isolated from language, the emotional; therefore, very inexplicable in words. I say there is in it a vague message of remembering something lost, which like glue sticks to the mind, crawling across the brain back and forth in a quest. Now it is your turn.”

“My psychoanalyst has advised me that the fear of whiteness is the bridge between consciousness and subconscious which holds hidden the secrets of my true identity. Stay on it and do not run from it until you get something. My subconscious has to infiltrate through the total blockage of consciousness. I cannot read the message in the whiteness as long as it is interpreted as blankness.”

“There is a message in whiteness for you?”

“I still don’t know. When you terrified me of imprisonment, your momentarily vicious silence and the notion of solitude in an empty room brought my whiteness anxiety back. You and the room blurred to white for a second. I had to remain in the moment more, therefore, I asked you to let me stay alone in the room in a hope to see again.”

“And what have you seen in the darkness?” he asked with curious eyes as they reached the cashier station and stood in front of each other.”

“I saw who stole the white painting off the wall of my psychoanalyst, hammered two nails into my wall, and hung the painting.”

“Who?”

“I.”

“And then?” he asked curiously.

“After hanging it on my wall, I guess, saw something which was too much at the moment for me to bear, therefore, I took it off the wall and hid it behind my big mirror. The painting at the back of the mirror created the woman in the mirror, an alien with blue eyes.”

“Why did you steal it?”

“He had hung it on his wall so that I might remember a terrible mystery behind the whiteness from the back of my mind. The painting should have shown something. According to my subconscious I was not stealing it because I believed it was mine.”

“A mystery? How can you differentiate illusion from the recollection of a fact?”

“If I were able to see myself at the right age in the dream. This is one of a few touchstones I have been equipped with by my psychoanalyst. I guess that is enough for today’s psychiatry session.”

“I also have a secret to show you.”

He went to the cash register to grab something and came back. “Open your hand.” She opened her hand. He placed the gift in her hand.

“A dead bee?” she said while laughing.

“It is you. After you left the last time, for hours I could not fight my mind to forget you. I had an unbearable urge to imprison you in the third room, to fill the room with your exotic scent in order to decipher the evolutionary codes in your odor and discover the unique biology which emits it. I threw a live bee into the third room on that day. Today I found it dead, this is the bee.”

“Tonight, you wanted to see me in the third room.”

“Yes, the whole thing was just a show for that. You are lucky since no hypothesis came to my mind. Now you show me the secret that you are hiding in your hand.”

“You saw it.” She blushed, handing him the piece of paper. As he was opening the crumpled paper, said to himself,

“Watch out for the scent.”

She blushed again. Still a ten-year-old girl in me. He questioned while staring at the paper,

“A man with a shovel?” He gave the paper back to her.

“A good omen to start the night.”

She went to the end of the hall where the silver bags had been placed. There was a new sign, ‘The main ingredient of Miracle Fertilizer has been enhanced. The price of each silver bag is increased to $25. It is not expensive; think of yourself as part of the process.’ What a strange reasoning to justify a price increase. She bent down to pick three bags from the basket while she felt somebody at her back was looking at her. She turned back suddenly; a shadow ran and hid at the end of the aisle. She remembered the pickup truck parked at the entrance door. The shadow person could be the owner of the blue pickup. She took the bags and walked to the end of the aisle. Nothing was there but the ammonium smell of the silver bags. She went to the botanist and put the bags on the counter.