The past…
Junior hadn’t been kidding about losing his way in the warren of secret passageways. Marcus had to crawl through some, and sometimes he had to slide down or climb up. He thought he was close behind the other boys, but sound carried strangely in the dark skeleton of the house. Within two minutes, he realized he had taken a wrong turn. But even after trying to correct his error, he quickly lost the sound of Eddie’s and Junior’s voices completely.
“Great,” Marcus said to himself. “I’m going to get trapped in here and have to live on rats and cockroaches. I’ll become like the Phantom of the Opera, only inside the walls. The Ghost in the Walls. Sounds like a scary movie.”
By the end of his little speech to himself, his voice had begun to tremble with fear.
Darkness terrified him more than anything else. So much so that he carried a flashlight with him everywhere he went. But even under the protection of the miniature Maglite’s warm glow, the darkness was always creeping up behind him. The shadows seemed to pulsate with unseen dangers. The darkness seemed to reach for him. Something about the unknown. He couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see.
He told himself he was being stupid.
Sometimes he would get angry about being scared and chase the shadows into the basement with his fists in the air, ready for a fight. Of course, he had no idea what really would’ve happened if he found anything down there in the dark. He suspected it would involve a lot of screaming and a little pee in his pants.
He summoned all his courage to keep moving. He turned around, trying to trace his steps, but that had merely gotten him lost in the other direction.
And then his flashlight flickered and went out.
He slapped the Maglite over and over and was rewarded with a few flickers of illumination. But with every flash, his mind’s eye saw something moving toward him through the darkness.
The beam came on just long enough for him to see that there was nothing there. Then the light was gone, and his world became pitch black.
Marcus tried to remain calm as the input from his other senses threatened to overwhelm him. Every small sound seemed amplified. The dark corridors smelled of mold and mouse urine. He could taste the dust in the air. His hands shook. He felt what he hoped were imaginary spiders crawling over his body.
But then he realized that his real fear should have been the rats. The giant subway rats lived just across the water from Jersey. Rats could swim. And New York had some of the biggest damn rats anybody had ever seen.
Spiders couldn’t kill and eat him. It wasn’t as if there were tarantulas in Jersey.
Stories that other kids had told him popped to the forefront of his mind. Stories of rats eating babies and gnawing off children’s legs in the night. He had often imagined the rats crawling up under his covers and slowly devouring him. He often imagined their whiskers touching his feet. Often so vividly that Marcus would pull back the covers to check.
Getting to sleep was an incredible chore for him that sometimes took hours.
Then he heard voices ahead and stumbled his way forward. As he grew closer, he realized the sound wasn’t voices but whimpering.
Or was it squeaking? His mind projected images of a mountain of rats flowing toward him like a tidal wave.
Forcing himself to move, he crawled forward on his hands and knees, feeling his way through the space between the walls. He stopped every few feet to examine the walls for a way out. Repeating the same procedure for what felt like miles, he worked his way through the house, but the only things he found were peepholes and entrances sealed off well enough to require tools to open them again.
And along the whole journey, tiny pinpricks of sensory input made him feel the spiders crawling over him, the rats gnawing at him.
Marcus yanked his hand back as his fingertips brushed against something sharp and cold covering the floor of the passageway. Something metal. He cautiously probed the surface and discovered the inwardly spiked ribs of a vent. It felt like a giant upside down cheese grater. Testing the metal to make sure it would hold his weight without slicing his hands and knees to shreds, he cautiously inched out over the metal barrier, and then he heard the squeaking sound again.
No, not squeaking.
Now that he was closer to the source, he recognized the sound of a woman sobbing.