Thirty Rooms To Hide In (20 page)

I landed, lived, and while trying to outrun the speed of light realized Chris had pulled one over on me.

Once back in the presence of the adults’ party and unable to retaliate, I consoled myself by giving Chris an especially radioactive version of the hairy eyeball. It hardly mattered. He’d heard me snap the pencil and it was game – set – match.

Chris probably got the idea for the Horrid Light while watching
The Twilight Zone
with Rod Serling. The television show appealed to our dark little souls and we watched it every week. In fact, watching it with my brothers was a sine qua non; it was too scary to watch alone. (My preferred viewing option would have been in Grand Central Station at high noon surrounded by concentric circles of exorcists and army guys.)

But one night I watched it all by myself.

Mom and Dad were out for the night and my brothers were scattered throughout the Millstone, doing homework, playing records – they were around somewhere but not with me. I was down in the basement fallout shelter with the black-and-white TV.

And Rod Serling.

It was the first airing of the famous episode
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
in which passenger William Shatner sees a horrible gremlin out on the wing of his passenger jet.

I made it most of the way through the episode but in the third act, when the thing appeared directly outside Shatner’s window, I cracked and ran out of the basement room with a low moan.

The scariest part was having to turn my
back
on the TV, to make for the door that lead upstairs. As any fifth grader knows, that’s when it gets you. It was common knowledge that the retreating, unprotected backs of fifth-graders in flight were the Devil’s dartboard. The Devil must’ve missed because I made it upstairs to the kitchen. But before I could even catch my breath I realized I had to go back down. I’d left the TV turned on and would get in trouble with Dad if he discovered it. And so back down into the fallout shelter I crept, armed this time with big brother Kip’s hockey stick. I had a plan.

I came back around the corner into the room where the TV was now broadcasting a commercial for Kent cigarettes and its Micronite filter. The commercial, I knew, was only temporary. At any moment it might end and the horrible image of the thing on the wing would be back and with it, of course, the Devil’s hands reaching out of the screen for a little bonbon, a sweet something before bed.

My plan was to use Kip’s hockey stick to push in the TV’s off-button, giving me a full five-step head start on whatever it was that was going to come shrieking out of the screen. Creeping towards the TV, I held the stick out in front of me, closer,

closer,

    until the tip

        touched the off-button

                and I pushed it in.

                        – click –

When you turned off one of the old black-and-white TVs, the picture slowly collapsed into a white dot. A dot that
lingered
on the screen as the tubes inside ticked and cooled. It was the dot itself I found terrifying. I looked at this horrible white window into Hell and realized I had just angered the thing on the wing and even Rod Serling was probably pissed. I was looking at the white period at the end of my life. That little dot in the middle of the TV screen was the scariest thing I’d seen that night. Snap went the pencil and up the stairs I fled into the arms of my Sweet, Sweet Jesus.

* * *

The Millstone was an old house. And there was no place in it that was not scary. The basement fallout shelter had the evil white dot and Rod Serling. Then there was the attic. It was in the attic brother Jeff earned his merit badge.

Even the word “attic” scared us three youngest boys. We’d sit up in bed at night and experiment with the word’s power, whispering it into the dark just to feel our flesh crawl.

“Aaaaattic.”

I think there’s a law somewhere that says attics must be lit by 15-watt bulbs exclusively. Their wan light was just enough to let you think you could see, while leaving shadows black enough to obscure even the whitest fangs. 15-watt bulbs were like evil lighthouses falsely placed to direct ships onto rocks.

Illuminating the Millstone’s attic was an especially dim bulb we were all certain must have been a rare 14-watter. It dangled on an ancient cloth-covered wire descending from the high dark of the attic’s wigwam ceiling. I stood one night under this light with my brother Jeff. I’d agreed to come only because I was with a big brother, one armed with a flashlight.

But the big draw was what Jeff confided he’d found there. He’d discovered the one artifact fifth-grade archeologists seek above all others; the Holy Grail of pith-helmet-wearin’ kids with buck teeth – a mummified dead animal that still had guts in it.

“It musta crawled in here this summer,” intoned Jeff, his shadow leaping ahead of him into the far corner. “It died and it’s still way down there.”

Only the Millstone could have a “way down there” in the attic.

Behind the chimney in the attic, where it finished its four-story climb through the house, was a deep hole in the floor that dropped 10 or 15 feet down into perfect darkness. Whether it was a contractor’s mismeasurement that had created this column of dead air down the spine of the Millstone or simply a crenellation in the complicated plans of the old house, there it was. And we called it The Hole.

When you looked down The Hole, you were chin to chin with the Abyss. Jeff shined his flashlight beam down its gut and The Hole ate it. The Hole took the dim light of the flashlight and shushed it like you would a baby in church. Shamed it. There was only blackness.

Jeff said, “There it is. I can
just
see it.”

“Just see what?”

“There.”

My eyes were adjusting and now I could see the flashlight fell on the top rung of what seemed to be a ladder leading down into The Hole.

“Mmmm. That ladder won’t hold me,” observed Jeff. “I’m
way
too heavy,” said the 110-pound-soaking-wet eleventh grader. “But you, … you’re perfect.”

Nothing felt better to fifth-graders than being informed you were somehow special. Your hunger for compliments of any kind allowed older brothers to use you in all kinds of ways. They could make you run down four fights of stairs to grab them a Coke and run all the way back up just by saying. “You’re the fastest runner here, no question about it.” Compliments were like the crack of the race-starter’s gun – Pow! – and you were off, doing what only
you
were uniquely qualified to do.

Now that I was being told my lithe, aerodynamic physique was the final key to the discovery of the Holy Grail, my foot was on the ladder. I began my descent into The Hole.

The well-established inverse-square law of light states that the brightness of light is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from its source. This maxim would seem also to explain the proportion to which the buttocks of fifth-graders squinch ever tighter as they move farther away from the lights of civilization, be they lonely campfires, distant porch lights, or flashlights held by big brothers as you descended into The Hole.

As I felt my shanks tighten, I would test the umbilical cord between Jeff and myself, throwing falsely conversational questions back up the ladder.

“So …what kind of animal you think? A squirrel?”

Down The Hole came Jeff’s terse “Probably.”

“Oh. A squirrel, you say? …. Makes sense.”

“Yep,” more distant now.

Neil Armstrong had not set foot on the moon yet, but the similarity of my P.F. Flyer touching the gravel surface of The Hole’s bottom is noted here. Simply to have made it down the ladder, grail or no grail, was an event I thought worthy of a cover story on
Jesus Christ, You Did WHAT??
magazine.

“I’m here. I see gravel. Just gravel.”

“Try over there,” said Jeff, directing his light to the area where he’d placed the gizzard, liver, and neck bone of a chicken Mom was preparing for dinner that night.

“WOW! It’s here!” I said. “It’s really here!”

“No kidding?” said Jeff. “Lemme see, lemme see.”

I directed his attention to the small mess in the corner.

“Wait a minute.” said Jeff.
“That’s no squirrel. Those are pieces of a human being! There’s a dead guy down there!”

He snapped off the flashlight, strode back through the attic and before closing the door, extinguished the 14-watt bulb. Leaving me in an interstellar blackness of such velvet even a visit from the Horrid Light would have been welcome.

* * *

Dreadful things lurked on the grounds of the Millstone.

Fathers who raged for entire three-day weekends were certainly dreadful. And though the horrible things he said made you grow up fast, in the end you were still just 11 years old and what you really worried about was whether your friends thought you were cool or not. Or being seen naked, by girls. You worried about things that had sharp teeth, like the Dobermans owned by the Plunkett’s or the water moccasin in Grandpa’s pond down in Florida.

Closer to home was the giant snapping turtle Sam Martin allegedly had in the abandoned fountain-pond behind his house. Some doubted its existence but none doubted the fact that a snapping turtle’s jaws could fold a silver dollar like a warm pancake. This finding, published exclusively in the
Encyclopedia of Big Brothers
, was accepted fact.

The only item of debate was what kind of food snapping turtles most liked to crunch between their fabled jaws. The agreement around the jungle gym was, of course, penises. Snapping turtles almost certainly grew fat on the penises of fifth-graders who disturbed the turtle’s sleep by taking short cuts past Sam Martin’s abandoned fountain pond.

Why my penis should occupy the top triangle of the snapping turtle’s food pyramid was never discussed. Nor was the curious chain of events that would have to take place in order for this obscure part of the food chain to go its natural course. It was just the horrible
possibility
of such an encounter, the snipping sound, the image of the creature and its captured prize disappearing under green water. It was so horrible it had to be true.

And so the footpath past Sam Martin’s pond sported two separate orbits. One was where little boys who walked alone swerved wide to give the Peni-vore its due respect. The other path, closer to the pond, was where boys in groups swaggered by scoffing loudly at the whole idea of snapping turtles.

Up the road, in the opposite direction of the Martins, was the Mayo Clinic’s Animal Research Institute, referred to simply as “The Institute.” The squat buildings swarmed around a huge water tower that fed the complex, and it all had that government-issue sort of architecture one suspects is on the grounds of “Area 51.” Occasionally the head physician there, Dr. Zollman, gave us tours through all the labs, past the wide, clean cages of little animals. It made us sad to think the rats and guinea pigs were being given cancer and we always felt a little guilty after a tour. In fact, it was here at the Institute where I contracted cancer too, or thought so anyway.

I’d gone up to the Institute on a Sunday to poke around in the piles of medical waste just behind the high water tower. I was looking for syringes – the kind with the detachable needles. Earlier in the week my brother Chris had amazed me with a new syringe-weapon he’d purloined from the Institute’s junk pile. He’d poked the needle of a salvaged syringe into a candle, clogging it. Then, with a hard thumb on the plunger, you had a blow-dart straight out of
Man From U.N.C.L.E
. I succeeded in finding a few syringes, pocketed them, and on my way off the grounds thought I’d take a peek into the Institute’s windows; maybe get a look at animals with cancer.

The first windows I tried were paned with fogged glass, so I went farther down to the end of the building to an odd-looking window with slats. I pulled myself up and at the moment I had my face in position, the exhaust fan inside turned on, the slats blew open, and I received what I was certain was a face-full of hot cancer.

This was surely air so rank with infection the doctors inside thought it best to rush it out of the animal cancer ward through the nearest pipe and just pray it dissipated in the Minnesota winds. And now I had placed my face directly in front of a propeller blowing the carcinogens from a laboratory of tumors, served up hot and fresh like malignant food from a charnel house diner. I had looked in the asshole of the famed Mayo Clinic, inhaled its cancerous fart and had at best only a few days left.

Rushing home, I consulted my father’s medical journals to see how I might suffer my final days. Dad’s journals were normally a form of great entertainment – mutation and injury, amputation and necropsy, all the things that delight fifth-grade boys. Now it was less a journal and more a travel brochure of a place I was going.

The most-thumbed page in Dad’s entire medical library featured a photo of man suffering from elephantiasis of the scrotum; the poor soul had privates so public he had to cart them about in a wheelbarrow. “At least he’ll
live
,” I thought, flipping past Wheelbarrow Man, to my section – tumors of the face.