Beast in the Basement

by J. Richard Jacobs

Eleanore Twining’s funeral was a flop, as funerals go. Oh, not that funerals can be rated on a one to ten success scale, not even pass or fail. It was rather that the turnout was dismally small. Two patrol cars from the Laurelville PD, one hearse, and five boxy SUVs. From the five SUVs, eight mourners emerged to gather at the graveside. None of them looked even slightly thrilled to be there. A chilling midmorning drizzle descended on the little group.

None had brought umbrellas because the meteorologists stated in open confidence on the Eleven O’clock News that an early Spring had arrived in Laurelville and the day would be clear, with temperatures in the high seventies and no wind. Well, the temperature soared all the way to the lower fifties and the sun remained hidden in a dense cloud curtain, gray as death, so to speak, and the wind was beginning to build to just short of hurricane strength.

The pastor turned his back to the coming storm, which meant he was also turned away from the future, eternal home of Eleanore Twining. He hunched over to shield the bible with his body and began droning out the prayer for the recently departed.

Angela Langley couldn’t help noticing that the prayer didn’t make much sense. It was obvious to her that he truncated and frequently cut full sections in some weird places, plainly anxious to get it done with and return to the shelter of his little church in the Snob Hill district. In many ways there hovered a comic air over something that should, she guessed, be at least serious, if not somber.

An old friend lay cold and pale in front of her in a fancy ebony box with intricate polished bronze hinges and latches. Eleanore could afford things like that. A yawning grave gaped. The gravedigger poked the business end of his shovel impatiently at a mound of dirt that was rapidly turning to muck under his feet. A bright yellow backhoe rented from Digger Dan’s sat a couple of yards behind the small brown mountain, its noisy engine pinging and clacking, helping the wind drown out the pastor’s weak, squirrel-like voice. It was just as well.

My God, what a farce, she thought. Good thing El can’t see what’s going on. After all, she had paid enough for this morbid show to feed and clothe the nation’s homeless for a year. She, El, paid for all this in advance and Angela knew, although Eleanore had no idea what was transpiring, that she had expected much more for her money than what she was getting.

As for the turnout, that wasn’t much of a surprise, though it was something of a disappointment. Eleanore was never the outgoing type. She didn’t make friends with any ease. Not even back in school when she had youth and good looks working for her. Breasts that stood up and out, a tiny waist, hips and prominent buttocks that rocked, both in appearance and movement—movement that would bring a lather to the lips of the dead and, supporting it all, a pair of legs most women would kill to possess. To top all of that off, she wore a face framed in golden-brown hair that was as perfect as any face could be…with a complexion to match. But she had shunned most personal contact and ran from young men as if they carried a deadly disease.

Angela wondered if El ever tumbled to the fact that Angela had used her for chum as she trolled the campus for lustful eligibles who would instantly turn their attentions to Angela when El gave them the cold, quiet refusal. Eleanore remained good bait, even into her fifties and Angela took full advantage of that whenever she could pry her out of the house.

If anything, after she retired, Eleanore’s social demeanor worsened as maturity settled on her, dragging down her attributes, and she stayed in her home the majority of the time. She even had her groceries delivered. To Angela, a wasted life lay in an ornate black box about to be covered in mud. Fitting? Maybe.

The wind gusted and one of the two meager floral arrangements went kiting into the gaping mouth of the freshly dug grave—a rude gouge in the earth puddling water at its bottom. The yawning hole awaited its due like some starving ghoul lying just under a protective veneer of perfect grass. With some effort, Angela stifled a laugh fighting its way to the surface. She blushed and hoped no one noticed.

Angela nudged Lisa Tucker with her elbow.

“Want some coffee after?” she said in a low voice, slightly more than a whisper.

“Tea?”

“Tea it is, then.”

---

“Well-l-l, you know, her heart never was much of any good,” Angela said as she reached for another tea cake.

“No, I didn’t know that. Where did you hear that?”

“Eleanore and I have been friends—well, we had been friends for years. We both moved here right after graduation, and we lived next door to each other for over forty years, you know. Until she bought that house at the end of Berger Street, anyway. A couple of months ago, she almost dropped dead in my house…in my house, for God’s sake. The doctors said it was an aneurysm, but I know it was that weak heart of hers. More tea, Lisa?”

“Oh, yes, please.”

“Anyway, this time it exploded. They say she died almost instantly.”

“That’s good—I mean, I’m glad she didn’t suffer too much. Do they know what caused it to do that—explode?”

“Not really, but I think I know what did it.”

“Oh?”

“Fear—fear’s what did it.”

“What could frighten anyone so much it would cause something like that to happen?”

“The thing that lives in her basement, that’s what.”

“You’re kidding…of course. Thing that lives in the basement. How ridic—”

“No, I’m serious. No, no, no—not that there really is any such thing, but she believed there was. The first time she mentioned it she just said she felt like there was something evil in the house. She said she could feel it closing in around her. Her insane fixation grew from there…until it became the beast in the basement. That’s what she called it. Her beast in the basement. It got so bad that she even slept with all the lights in the house turned on.”

“No. Really?”

“Mm-hmm. She kept a closet full of spare bulbs. I mean floor to ceiling full. All of them a hundred and fifty watts or more. The instant one burned out, she couldn’t screw in a new one fast enough. Her electric bill—you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Yeah, really. She could afford it, though. Anyway, that’s how frightened she was of the dark…and she was utterly convinced that as long as she kept the place lit up brighter than Las Vegas, the damned thing would stay in the basement and leave her alone. Good friend she was, but she was a rampaging fruitcake, too.”

“Wow, I never realized how—”

“After a couple of years over there, she started spending at least three nights a week at my place. Otherwise, I don’t think she would have slept at all. I stayed with her a few times at her house at the end of Berger Street and I couldn’t sleep a wink, what with her chasing all over, checking the lights all night long.”

“She was like that all the time?”

“No, huh-uh—thank God. She’d always had an unreasonable fear of the dark, but nothing like that. Not until she moved into that awful house. Horrible place—cold and damp. The thing always smelled like wet dirt to me. That was what? Three years ago, I think. I don’t know where or when she heard of the Berger Street Beast, but she started spending a lot of time in the library researching what little information there was on it. She even managed to get me involved in her perverse preoccupation. That’s when the voice started.”

“The…voice?”

“Mm-hmm. It started talking to her. Can you imagine that? Of course, no one else could hear it, you know. That’s when I figured she’d popped her last cog—flipped out, if you get my meaning.”

“I guess.”

“Anyway, it’s a really strange story. Ever heard it? The Berger Street Beast?”

“Well, yes…of course. No one who was born and raised here could escape the stories. The boys here use it to scare the hell out of girls they take up to Berger’s Hill to park and make out. Most of it’s pure garbage…and the story’s grown way out of proportion to what it was when I was a girl. Ha! And to think it all got started over a teenager who got herself killed up there way back in the thirties. Killed in a most messy manner, as I remember it. All hacked to pieces, and whoever did the hacking got away without a trace. Makes me shiver to think of it. The story got embellished as stories always do and, as of the last count I heard, at least seventeen had been slaughtered up there. How the house at the base of the hill got involved, I don’t know.”

“Maybe somebody decided the Beast needed a place to hide out between its bloody forays to the summit. More tea?”

The two of them shared a nervous laugh and quickly steered their conversation into other, less gruesome topics. Angela was pale and shaking. The thought of Eleanore’s beast in the basement disturbed her more than she would let anyone know.

This is stupid, Angela. Stop shaking before Lisa picks up on it. Damn.

---

Much too early in the morning, Angela picked up the phone to hear a voice mumble something about going in to the City Attorney’s office later in the afternoon. It seemed, the mumbler told her, that Eleanore had left Angela some of her treasures. Angela’s mind immediately went to El’s rare and antique translucent bone china and leaded crystal serving sets. She had always coveted those things. They were exquisite. And worth a fortune to any collector.

The voice on the phone also wanted to know if she would go over to the late Eleanore Twining’s house to help catalog the things she left behind. There would be three officers there from the Laurelville PD to support the cataloging event. The man on the line also asked if she would mind cleaning up the place later in the evening and told her the compensation for these trivial tasks would be more than substantial. She wondered how the city could afford to send three-quarters of their police force off to list things in a stuffy, musty old house but, what the hell? If they were willing to pay her for it, why not? Her retirement wasn’t that great and she could use the extra money to pay off some of the things that were perilously close to being in arrears.

---

The day went well, though it took a lot longer to get the cataloging done than she had planned on—there was so much stuff hidden all over the house. Even the attic was filled with mountains of things El had hoarded away. She had one of the officers accompany her into the basement but, as she suspected, there was nothing there. Just some old shelves and a wine rack. El was so fearful of the cellar, even before her beast came on the scene, that she never ventured down there. It was completely empty and…filthy. Angela determined that, when she returned, that would be the first place to get scoured. When she finished down there, she could take her time with the rest. She wasn’t getting any younger and the basement would, she was sure, take away most of her energy.

---

By the time she returned to the house at the end of Berger Street, the sun had long ago set and the stars were obscured in overcast. There was no moon. It was deep dark except for the lights of the distant Laurelville and the nearest neighbor about half a mile down the road.

Angela lugged her cleaning gear into the house and set about making it presentable for the agents who were scheduled to arrive early in the morning with a couple of clients interested in buying the place.

According to her plan, she started with the cellar. Fortunately, for her, there was a sink and water service down there so she didn’t have to carry anything heavier than her brooms, mops, rags, soap, and a gallon of bleach down the wooden stairway—a narrow set of steps of questionable strength and no railing. As it was, each tread creaked and groaned under the load as if in agony. She began by ridding the ceiling corners of heavy cobwebs with her broom. That’s when the light, dangling on a wire from above, flickered a couple of times, then went out.

Oh, damn.

She started for the stairs, dimly lit by the hallway light above.

The laugh came from inside her head. Guttural, grinding, and anything but funny.

She stopped dead in her tracks. The door above slammed shut. Utter darkness. She dug her phone out of her pocket. The dim glow helped.

“Okay, who’s down here? This isn’t funny, you know.” She punched in the automated 911 call.

The voice came from out of the vague shadows cast by her phone. A voice of gravel tumbling down a metal chute, distant thunder rumbling and the wail of a banshee all blended together.

“Hello, Angela. Wanna play?”