To Penumbra

I have always loved secret things.

Forgotten basements and attics full of dusty boxes, tucked away and neglected; old uncared for relics sent to the thrift shop or the dump and regarded as mere clutter; things hidden in the walls or under the floorboard, things left and forgotten, never meant to be rediscovered. These sorts of things all have a story of their own, a story that can't be told, but only unraveled.

I blame this part of my character for the early development of a knack for finding these old secrets. I learned early on that, in order to discover them, I mustn't let the fear of spiders or of the dark or of getting scolded stop me. There's a certain unbridled curiosity somewhere inside me, and to this day I find myself unconsciously looking out for such secret things, vigilantly, if not somewhat unintentionally, waiting for the chance to drop what I'm doing and dive in and pick it apart.

So when, in 1994, my mother and I moved to an old fourplex after the rent at our old apartment was raised, I naturally slipped away as she and a couple of our new neighbors began taking our few possessions upstairs.

This fourplex, as I remember it, was not far removed from town, but nonetheless sat on the outskirts of the suburbs, with train tracks out back and a long flat plain of sagebrush that seemed to stretch all the way out to the bare mountains on the horizon just beyond it.

I had overheard our new landlord mention the building's age—it was built sometime in the 30s—not long before my mother signed the lease agreement, and I considered this old enough to be interesting.

I remember the blue cloudless sky watching over everything and the sun glaring down on me, I remember the warm but lush grass pressing into my bare soles, I remember the yellowish vignette of age lining all the windows...

And I remember the door.

Out back in the relative cool of the building's shadow, where I could take a break from the sun's heat, I saw a door, propped open and shaking slightly in the soft wind.

Approaching it, I saw a short staircase which I mounted without a thought, and I found myself in a basement where there was a washing machine and a dryer.

A sickly yellow light illuminated much, but not all, and it flickered, every now and again.

I began to examine the laundry machines, only half interested. They were indeed laundry machines. Laundry machines and nothing else.

Wondering if the gnarled Russian olives back on the surface would be good for climbing, I turned and was faced with something that made me pause.

There, on the right side of the staircase that brought me down to this dingy basement, was a hole.

It was lined with cobwebs and dust, and chunks of crumbled drywall coated the floor beneath it. But it was its darkness that intrigued me.

I crouched down low and peered inside. Then, I lay flat on my stomach, and squinted.

There was wood, more cobwebs, more crumbled drywall, two or three rusted bolts, a scrap of newspaper, and...

And a staircase. Another one, I mean.

At the back of the cavity I was presently examining, I could see a space opening up, and, draped in rubble and dirt, a staircase rested, slumbering in decay.

It almost wasn't visible, in the dark, but I could make out the bare details, and though it sat, unmoving in the shadows, it beckoned.

The more conscious front of my mind knew that it would only lead to a blank wall, and that it likely wouldn't take me anywhere, but that didn't matter.

Ignoring the thought of the spiders and centipedes that undoubtedly hung just above me, I dragged myself through the small opening, keeping my head low as to avoid any protruding nails.

It was a struggle, but a brief one, and I soon found myself standing straight again, and began to make my way up the stairs, avoiding the moist mounds of dirt that sat intermittently upon the old wood of the steps.

It was dark, and though I could see, barely, the first few steps, the top of the stairs was completely shrouded in blackness.

I reached out and began to gently feel for the top, wholly expecting dusty drywall, and possibly a few—hopefully abandoned—spiderwebs.

Instead I found a doorknob.

It felt cool and smooth, somehow unaffected by the dust and dirt around it. Almost without thinking, I tried to turn it, and found it unlocked. There was some resistance, but with some force it opened enough for me to look.

What I saw both shocked me and fascinated me.

It was the same property I should expect, the same grass and trees, the same railroad, the same long stretch of dry brittle sagebrush, the same mountains, but there was something off about it all.

It seemed strangely saturated with an old and twisted darkness, the same sort of darkness that lined the windows I was looking at not ten minutes before, and though there had been a soft wind brushing the grass and the leaves, all was perfectly, perpetually still.

I remained intrigued, but a strange element of creeping fear had mixed itself in with my fascination, and I suddenly felt that I needed to be much more cautious.

As I stepped down from that crumbling doorway, the grass felt cold, almost artificial. The air was simultaneously bitingly cold and dry, devoid of all moisture and humidity.

Glancing upward, I saw that the sky, which had previously been entirely clear, was now choked with oddly still and dark clouds.

The stillness was cold and frightening, but what was more frightening was how fake it was.

I had been so preoccupied by this strange new world that I hadn't been paying attention to my peripheral vision. This changed, however, when I noticed a certain ugly buzzing inside of it.

I looked left, right, up and down. No matter where I looked, the buzzing remained in the there in thin, sickly lines that bordered my sight. But I soon discovered a terrible thing: if I cast my vision in any direction quickly enough, the buzzing... lingered.

This whole world, so close a copy of the one I had just left behind, was nonetheless incomplete and plainly artificial.

It was was if something had known that I would be coming, as if something had known who I was and how deep and irresistible my curiosity was, as if something wanted me to be unable to tell the difference between these two worlds... it was as if something had wanted all this, and prepared a place for me to stay.

This... was too much.

I wanted to run, but could not. My entire body was too heavy. My lungs gasped for air, but found little, my heart was beating, but found my blood thick and viscous, my mind tried and tried and tried to make sense of it all... but found no sense anywhere.

As I lumbered back toward the door that had spat me out into this deeply artificial world, the buzzing in my peripheral vision began to grow and enclose my sight, and as the buzzing took more and more of what I could see, I saw that it wasn't buzzing at all, but bubbling and undulating.

I began to hear sounds all around me: meeping and glibbing that almost sounded like evil laughter, laughter that was far, far too excited.

I found strength in my fear, and at last made it to the door. I was able to shut it, and in the darkness found enough wood and stone to hastily erect a barricade, as the all-too-smooth doorknob had no lock.

Having forgotten the sticky cobwebs and the prospect of spindly spiders and gnawing centipedes, I crawled and crawled.

The distance from that secret staircase back out from the hole and into the real world seemed much longer than it had before, but finally, I tumbled back into my own world, the world of wholesome sunlight and healthy winds.

Bursting out back onto the surface, I fell, and let myself rest. I laid there, for a time. Though I was panting and my heart was pounding, my eyes darted everywhere, making absolutely certain that nothing was out of the ordinary, and that I was, in fact, how it needed to be.

After I had regained my senses and my fear had waned, somewhat, I returned to my mother, and helped unload the last of our boxes.

She asked me if I was all right. I opened my mouth to tell her everything that had happened, but found myself unable to. How could I tell her? So I told her I had been climbing trees.

Later, when everything had been unloaded and set up, after we had thanked our neighbors, after we had eaten a humble dinner, I sat at the foot of my bed, while my mother slumbered.

Every time I thought to climb under the covers, I thought of how they would cover me and restrict my movements, rendering me unable to jump up and run, if I had to.

I slept, eventually. But not under the covers.

It's been years since then, after my mother passed away and I found work as a clerk at a grocery store, after I alone moved out of that fourplex into a studio apartment further in town, so blissfully far from that basement, that hole in the wall, that hellish hidden staircase, and I awoke this morning to a segment in the newspaper about a fire, there at the old fourplex I had once called home. I learned that everything had been destroyed, that nothing was salvageable, and that the city was planning to bulldoze it and turn it into a small park.

This news has brought me a comfort I haven't felt in a very long time.