It almost sounded like the car peeled out, spitting gravel from its rear fender as it swung around the cul-de-sac and off into the lowering dusk. Stepping through the large doorway, Jack turned and was, as always, awestruck by the entryway’s lofty ceilings. They rose in multiple vaults like a Gothic cathedral, but the marble columns supporting them and the paintings lining the walls revealed that it was a church dedicated to the gospel of wealth, a gospel of which Martin Houghteling was a zealot. Jack followed Mrs. Houghteling and, if he leaned to either the right or left of her ample rear end, he could see the nave of the house stretching into the distance.

“Come on, Jack, the boys are all downstairs. We got some pizza!”

Reaching her hand out for the silver doorknob, she pivoted rather gracefully on her left foot and held the door to the basement open for Jack.

“Thank you, Mrs. Houghteling,” he mumbled. She gave him a smile as he descended the darkened stairwell. Jack kept his eyes fixed on the faint light visible at the bottom while he did his best to ignore the oppressive darkness around him. There was carpet all the way across, but the stairs still creaked if you stepped in the middle. He ran his hand along the wall and took each step gingerly until he reached a small landing, rounded a corner, and ran down the final six stairs with small quick steps as he caught sight of his friends.

“Hey, Jack!” That was Brandon, wearing his shirt with the Batman logo on the chest.

“Come on over; there’s cheese and pepperoni.” His best friends were there — Brandon, Sam and Jared, plus two kids he didn’t know as well, George and…Lyle, maybe.

“You know Lyle and George, right?” Brandon gestured at the two boys and then the two half empty pizza boxes, their open lids releasing cheesy heat by the kilocalorie. Jack reached for the pepperoni, “yeah, of course,” then to the boys in question, “what’s up?”

“Nothing much.”

“Nothing, we were just gonna play some basketball.”

“Cool.” Jack smiled as he took a quick bite of the pizza and sat down to remove his sneakers; if these guys liked basement basketball, then they couldn’t be that bad.

“OK, how about George and Jack and Jared against me and Sam and Lyle,” Brandon said, picking up a softball-sized orange rubber ball from the corner and tossing it absentmindedly at a small plastic basketball hoop pushed up against the wall. It bounced off the back rim and rolled to his feet, where he retrieved it. The other boys shrugged assent.

“All right, let’s go. You guys can take ball first.”

Jack held the ball in both hands, bounced it once, hard, off the carpet and surveyed the room—George was calling for a pass by the wall to his right, Jared was running towards the hoop. Jack faked a pass to the left and ran towards the basket with his head down, the ball clenched in his right hand. He felt Brandon’s forearms pushing against his left shoulder and back. Looking up, Jack saw the wall rushing toward him at an alarming rate. He jumped and tossed the ball at the rim just as he slammed into the wall, jarring the entire room. Jack felt his right shoulder grind in its socket against the solid wall. The ball spun once around the rim and dropped through the net, barely disturbing it. Pulling himself up off the floor, Jack retrieved the ball and tossed it over to George, grinning, “one to nothing us. Winner’s?”

George ran a few steps to his left and passed the ball to Jared, who threw up a mid-range shot that completely missed the rim. Lyle snatched it up and dunked it. With authority.

“1-1.”

“It’s to eleven, right?”

“Yeah.”

The game intensified as the score increased—the basement air grew heavy with sweat and the only sounds echoing off the bare white walls were the boys’ ragged breathing, the pop of rubber ball on plastic backboard, and the thump of boys on plaster.

“10-9, we’re up,” Brandon said between gulps of air, “our ball.”

Jack rolled the ball towards Brandon and set his feet. Grabbing the ball from the floor quickly, Brandon ran directly towards the hoop, crashing up against Jack’s chest. Jack staggered back a few steps as Brandon stumbled to his left and tossed an underhand pass to Sam. George dove, trying to intercept the pass, and missed narrowly. Sam’s eyes widened at the sight of a clear lane to the basket and a chance for the game-winning basket. He took a few steps toward the hoop as Jared ran across the room to guard him. Just before Jared reached him, Sam threw the ball at the basket—it bounced off the backboard and rippled the net as it fell through the hoop. Sam, Lyle and Brandon went crazy, jumping up and down, yelling. Mustering all his sportsmanship, Jack high-fived Sam and conceded, “nice shot.”

The boys filed upstairs through the dark stairwell, their six right hands tracing sine curves along the wall as they climbed. They moved as steadily as mountain climbers, the adrenaline wearing off, their legs heavy and plodding. The air cooled as they ascended, sweat evaporating from the backs of their necks.

They took large swallows of a round of Gatorades in miniature plastic bottles between panting breaths in the cool kitchen air. Jack chose blue, like he always did.

There was a large island topped with black marble in the middle of the Houghtelings’ kitchen, and all six boys leaned their elbows on it, looking across at the others, not saying a word. Outside windows that lined one wall, the night was dark. If the lights in the kitchen had been off, the boys might have been able to see a sliver of moonlight glinting off of something shiny thirty or so yards back into the woods, maybe a broken mirror, or a bottle, they might have thought. Incorrectly, as it happens. Nearer, about five yards from the house, there was a raccoon tearing greedily at the bit of corn left on a discarded cob and at the end of a hot dog buried in the grass, the remains of a cookout from God-knows-when. But the lights in the kitchen weren’t off. In fact, every single one was switched on and burning with all the heat and radiance their filaments could muster, so, when Jack tried to gaze out into the black beyond the pane of glass, all he saw was his own reflection and his friends’ backs, their heads tilted up as they chugged the last of their drinks.

Mrs. Houghteling materialized in the doorway and smiled at their breathlessness. She was wearing slippers, pajama pants, and a thin robe.

“Hey boys, how was the game?”

“It was good, Mom,” Brandon said.

“You guys ready for bed?” she asked, glancing at her watch, then at the wall clock, both analog. “It’s almost ten o’clock.”

The boys were all silent. Each of them stared across the counter at the others, none of them wanting to be the first to admit that they were tired or agree that it was bedtime, just in case the others usually got to stay up later.

“Come on, boys, let’s go downstairs,” Mrs. Houghteling continued, cajoling, “you can watch a movie before you go to sleep.”

Before anyone said a word, it was obvious that they had relented and mentally agreed to go back down to the basement, but it was another few seconds before each of them started shuffling towards the doorway and sneaking glances at each other. Finally Brandon turned and tossed his bottle into the garbage, not the recycling bin, from a few feet away. The other five followed him in a line. They stayed in single file ,with Mrs. Houghteling bringing up the rear, as they once again descended the unlit stairwell to the basement. She closed the door behind her, plunging the entire group into darkness but, as Jack noted gratefully, it was the darkness of a tunnel—there was a bright, definite goal he could focus on. Still, he ran his hands lightly against the walls on both sides and placed each foot down tentatively on steps he couldn’t see.

The boys glowed electric blue. Mrs. Houghteling picked her way through the sleeping bags and turned off the TV. She kissed Brandon’s forehead and lightly touched the soft hair of each head within reach. The first stair creaked as she paused briefly, then she was gone upstairs, the basement door closing with a small click behind her.

The muffled sound of cicada wings scraping together in the trees percolated down through the dry soil and the basement walls. An opossum snuffled in the bushes outside and Jack dreamt he lived in a castle at the bottom of the ocean, just he and his mother. His father had gone out fishing days before and hadn’t returned. Ominous shadows glided outside the castle door, but Jack felt safe. The castle began to blur and fade; the thin wisping of portentous fins through the water became the wriggling of clammy earthworms in the dirt around his gloomy burrow and Jack was alone now, fetal and helpless. A snake’s hard, flat head broke through the wall — “Follow me.” The snake pushed out the other side of the den and Jack slithered frantically after it. As his whole body entered the tunnel, he blocked what little light had been in the burrow, and soon it was pitch dark. Frightened, Jack squirmed, tried to let some light in — he could barely move. Little clods of dirt rubbed into his skin and under his hair; he thrashed in fitful bursts of desperation, straining against the implacable earth.

Then he woke up, but for a moment wasn’t sure if he had. He still felt trapped underground. The darkness around him was different than the darknesses he was used to. At home, Jack slept with a nightlight on in the bathroom (and had for as long as he could remember), which left his room dim, but still defined the edges of his somnolent environment: the lacquered wood at the foot of the bed glistening dully, the nightstand and near side of the bed clearly visible, the sheets on the far side of the bed a dark gray against the carpet’s near-black and his teddy bear gazing up at him from the crook of his arm. But here, in the Houghtelings’ basement, the absence of light crowded up in front of Jack’s face, pushing into his eyes. When he shut them, he could push it away for a moment. It came rushing back again when he opened them, sticking to his lashes like a heavy wool blanket. It was more complex than that, though. At the same time as the dark hung immediately before his eyes it telescoped out, the room’s finite space gone celestial, pushed out forever by Jack’s bewildered imagination. Without visible borders, the mind assumes infinity, a nothingness indescribable. Throughout his entire mental expanse, the basement’s darkness penetrated. Not yet fully conscious, Jack was terrified beyond words.

His heart pounding, palms starting to sweat, Jack lay encased in his sleeping bag. Like the blind, his other senses sharpened and he became immediately aware of the slippery polyester and unforgiving floor beneath him. After a few seconds of shallow breathing and hurried deliberation, Jack rose unsteadily to his feet, unable to find his equilibrium in the total black. He stood for a moment, rocking gently as if at sea, staring into the middle distance (not that distance means anything without reference points) and seeing the middle distance stare back. A ten-year-old boy, like Nietzsche, knows that the darkness gazes back, not only with the eyes of unseen monsters, but with the toothy smirk of the unformed universe.

Imagined waves swam up toward Jack through the darkness. After a few seconds, he realized that the staircase was off to his right somewhere. Intensely grateful that he was situated on the outer edge of his friends’ sleeping formation, Jack shuffled across the thin, rough carpet with his hands out in front of him, hoping to feel a wall that could guide him to salvation.

The pad of Jack’s right middle finger brushed something. He lunged forward greedily and pressed his palms against the smooth, cool surface. Relief flooded through him. He stubbed his toe on the first stair and scuttled up the steps on all fours, hands feeling the stairs above until they finally met with the door. He groped for the knob and emerged into the gloriously dim foyer. Moonlight poured through two skylights he’d never noticed before. He stumbled over to a massive pillar and threw his arms around it like a sailor grasping the mast as the deck heaved under his feet. Jack thought of Ishmael in the illustrated Moby Dick he’d read three times through, and of his parents embracing on some distant shore; he wondered if they were thinking of him. But they were thinking of mushroom risotto and their thinning hair. His legs trembled under him.

Jack looked back into the gloomy hallway behind him, searching for a clock or some sign of life. All the clocks on the ground floor of the Houghtelings’ house were analog. He stood in the marble hall in his thin t-shirt and Superman underwear, his grip slowly loosening on the icy pillar and his fear retreating until it solidified in the pit of his stomach. He realized how cold he was and, collecting himself, made for the main staircase. A sumptuous carpet ran along the upstairs hallway, with immaculate hardwood flanking its path, ending at a double-door left partially open.

The door creaked softly. The master bedroom was enormous, and the moon lanced into it from a long row of windows with the Venetian blinds drawn. Jack saw the king-size bed against the opposite wall, upon which there rested a lumpy form, partially illuminated. It was Mrs. Houghteling, completely naked. Together with the moonlight, Jack’s gaze crept over her body, filtering into every crevice, sliding over sheer, pale flesh. There was her face in repose, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow. There were her breasts, flattened by their own weight and spilling onto her belly. There was her navel, dark and deep, and there was her groin, covered by a heap of slick black hair. There sprouted her thighs, large and soft, tapering down to a pair of heavy, calloused feet. Her big toe twitched faintly. Jack took a tentative step forward, then stopped. Beached whale is an insensitive and inexact way to put it, but that’s how Jack would have described Lily Houghteling as she lay there in the moonlight.

Slack-jawed, he moved further into the room — seven feet from the bed now. Her belly moved slowly: growing three seconds, shrinking two seconds; rising four seconds, falling two seconds; swelling three seconds, collapsing one second. Otherwise Mrs. Houghteling was completely still; hands at her sides, the fingers deathly quiet. Her big toe twitched again. Jack cocked his head slightly at a faint sound like water trickling over pebbles. The pebbles became a car rolling up the gravel driveway below the bedroom windows and Jack’s eyes widened; the realization rushed upon him: I’m not supposed to be here. He whirled and took a small step toward the door, stopping suddenly as the Houghtelings’ massive front door opened downstairs. Frantic now, Jack cast around for someone to help him, somewhere to go. There was a small closet to the left of the bedroom door and Jack bolted towards it, feeling the carpet’s plush reach between his toes and push his heels upwards. The closet door, slightly ajar, beckoned him to its darkness and he fell into it gratefully, his head swirling.

Twenty seconds passed and Martin Houghteling filled the bedroom’s entrance, the door to Jack’s closet still slotted open. Martin wore a dark suit with a solid red tie and a white shirt that stretched across his bulk. A solid third of his face was covered by a trimmed black beard and heavy pouches sagged under his dark eyes. His size 11 3E shiny black Florsheims moved quietly across the carpet toward the bed as he fiddled with his cufflinks. Pausing at the foot of the bed, Martin began to take off his jacket and took a step toward the bathroom, then stopped again. He turned back and went to the bedside away from the windows, the jacket still halfway off his shoulders. Jack held his breath and Martin stood motionless, leaning over slightly, searching his wife’s body for something. Martin leaned closer over Lily’s tranquil face, staring at her closed eyelids. The closet smelled like a tomb, stagnant, like a small space never cleaned, rarely seen and slowly filling up with things best forgotten and left untouched deep in a bunker somewhere: the smell of defeat.

A minute went by. Then two more and Martin Houghteling still stood motionless over his wife’s peaceful form.

He whispered her name, gently, beseechingly, “Lily.”

Again, almost inaudibly, “Lily?”

She didn’t move.

“I…”

They’d been married for fourteen years and nine months. Martin straightened abruptly and wriggled into his suit jacket, wriggled back into himself and seemed to shrink. He turned, his back straight, the corners of his mouth drooping, and strode purposefully out the bedroom door, closing it quietly behind him. The floor in the hallway creaked in softening tones until the marble floors of the foyer clicked faintly a few times and then Martin Houghteling was out the front door. His car door opened and closed and the engine rumbled smoothly as it slipped back out into the night, a horse roused for a midnight ride and happy to be needed.

Silence once more made itself comfortable in the Houghteling house. Even, especially in that house, there was nowhere to go, and Jack stood frozen — it was all the same, all the same aloneness, all the same dark dank dead closet wherever he could go. So he went back downstairs. He plodded down the main stairway, a man condemned, and took a deep breath as he cracked open the heavy basement door. It swallowed him.

Later, as he lay awake in his sleeping bag, Jack hugged himself and squeezed his eyes tight shut and let the cold darkness roll over him.

 

Max Bloom is a writer and a high school English teacher living in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA from the Writer’s Foundry program at St. Joseph’s University, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as “The Michigan Daily,” “Xylem,” and “Fortnight Literary Press.”