Nightingale Songs (11 page)

As he stumbled down the unlit corridor the rhythmic sound above continued, mutating into a dry rasping that seemed to increase the deeper underground he travelled. As the debris on the floor multiplied -- the paper and metal joined by fallen dry wall and more boxes -- he wondered if the destruction had been something willful that Libby and Peter had carried out. It seemed incredible to believe such a state could be created even with a concerted effort, let alone by sheer neglect. He wondered if Peter was intentionally trying to screw with him. What kind of a man did that? Why had Libby longed for him, so much so that she would marry another in an effort to forget, and then destroy that marriage so she might return? The anger in Halford, it seethed when he thought of what Libby had done, thought of how he'd been mistreated. He tried to force the emotions down, force them out of his mind, until they disappeared in the ether as they'd done so many times before. But wherever they went, whatever receptacle was holding them had become full, and he was awash in the overflow. What kind of man
was
Peter? The kind that would let his home go to rot simply to punish everything Halford held dear? Halford understood his own hatred for the pair of them, but why did they hate
him
so much? What had he done other than his best to be a good husband? Why wasn't he allowed to be happy? And, more importantly, why didn’t he remember the basement being so
large
?

The corridor opened into another room, one Halford would have no recollection of if not for the singular shape of the small semi-circular window resting beneath the ceiling on the far wall. It was made of stained glass in a floral pattern and predated his and Libby's moving in, and in its own way was what decided Halford on the house. The illusion it fostered had warmed him. Over the intervening time since he left, however, dirt and grime had dulled its glow. Light still managed to find its way through as light always does, and it caught something floating in the air that wasn’t quite dust -- it was too heavy, more like snow or ash -- but whatever it was it brought with it a different odor to add to the musty air, something akin to cardboard kept too long in the dank, a kind of sickly honey fragrance.

Nothing else about the room was familiar beyond the window. He thought he recalled another light switch on the wall behind him, but when he turned all that stood there were more uneven shelves stocked with cobwebs, and shadows that moved in the periphery of his vision. He saw in the diffused window-light a series of tools -- a shovel, an axe, hammers of various sizes and shapes -- hanging from the wall opposite, and concealed inexplicably among them was the missing switch.

Flipping that small switch did nothing to dispel the gloom. If anything, it drew more in, filling the air with a dark haze. And the sweet stench was vile. The entire place smelled of earthy decay and dread -- Halford had once spent a summer in his youth as a groundskeeper at a graveyard, and he knew the odor well; it was like an open grave after a rainstorm, both atrocious and frustratingly familiar. The floor of the basement was so wet puddles had formed, and Halford could hear a slow dripping noise from the sweating pipes overhead. As each droplet hit the concrete, it seeped into the spider’s web of cracks that had spread across the ground like veins. And there was dirt, more dirt than seemed possible. Had it been moving through those cracks like water rushing through a ruptured hull? There was a haphazard pile of waterlogged boxed and mildewed clothes in the middle of the room, and for a moment he considered using them to staunch the flow of dark earth rising up. But too many cracks -- too wide and too deep -- had formed in the once solid foundation. It was a phenomenon he knew all too well.

From that broken and soiled floor grew another set of shelves in the corner of the room, nearly hidden by shadow. They seemed somewhat intact, and he could just make out the shape of a box resting on them. There was writing on the side, Halford was positive, and he took a step forward and squinted to make it out. He wasn't sure what he saw at first, but the shapes slowly started to wriggle and form words he recognized. He felt relieved only for a moment before the anger subsumed him. The box was his; it was clearly marked, though the term Libby or her lover or both used to describe him with that marking was not one he particularly cared for. As his irritation grew, flooding back on him from the place he could no longer send it, he tried to convince himself it didn’t matter -- as long as his files were there and intact he could rebuild everything he'd lost except for his life. Leaving the house, the festering reminder of his failure and humiliation, he hoped would handle the rest. Libby and Peter could keep the crumbling remains of their house of betrayal.

Between him and the box was a deep cloudy river of waterlogged refuse, half of which was hidden by the filth and ebbing light. Halford tentatively took another step forward and felt the brackish water soak through his shoe and crawl around his foot. It was a horrible sensation, but he pushed on, one slow step after another.

The smell of the room intensified the further across it he traveled. It had changed from earthy to sour like old perspiration, like unwashed clothes, and the odor burned his eyes and sinuses. He began to cough strongly enough that he had to stop walking, and when he did he could feel himself slowly sinking into the ground as though he were taking root. He cast a glance back, if only to reassure himself that the exit had not vanished, and was horrified to discover it was not where he expected it to be. The fumes, that stench -- he was disoriented. He
had
to be, otherwise... All sorts of terrible explanations raced through his mind, each worse than the one before, the sort of explanations one only has when alone in a darkened basement and nothing at all makes sense.

A draught passed over him, a fetid gust within which it was difficult to breathe. It wafted over from the left, from a wall that would have marked the outside wall of the house had his mental blueprint been correct. Yet it couldn't be; somehow he had become turned around further for instead of a solid wall he saw an open door. And beyond it, only darkness. From that place spewed the abhorrent air in wheezing breaths, a nightmarish groan accompanying them. The pipes above shook, raining down clumps of dirt on Halford's shoulders. The dull thudding had returned, pulsing far too slowly to be a heartbeat.

Halford should have run; something in him understood that implicitly. He should have taken his box of files and fled from the house, fled from Libby and Peter and everything they had done to him. What he came for was easily within reach only a few feet ahead of him. And yet he was drawn to the door, drawn to whatever lay forgotten in the dark beyond it. The urge niggled, coaxed, wore at his doubt until there was no longer a choice no matter how much his rational side screamed otherwise.

His data forgotten, his attention was filled with the door of nothingness in the dim of the basement. Halford walked toward it, across the concrete floor marked with fissures that spread wider the further he travelled, allowing dirt and water to continue to creep out at an alarming rate. The distance across the ruins was difficult to judge and seemed farther than it ought, perhaps farther than the house above was long, and with each step the air smelled worse.

On the cusp of the darkness, at the edge of the doorway, the draft was warm but stale. There was a metallic taste to it that only exacerbated the nauseating undercurrent of damp earth. The foundations of the house surrounded Halford, humming with electricity as pipes and wires reached down the walls like roots searching for something to feed upon, something they found within that unlit room that Halford was convinced should not have existed. He reached inside tentatively to feel for the remaining switch, and though the damp air congealed around him he nevertheless allowed his fingers to glance the softened plaster until they came in contact with a familiar shape. Before he pushed the switch however he heard the wafting air turn into a rasp, and then that rasp into strained grunts.

What the light revealed, what was until then hidden by the deep underground shadows, was a sight so bizarre that his mind rebelled against it. It was impossible, and yet there it was before him: a giant so large, so massive, that it was tightly wedged into the tiny room. The creature was hunched over, kneeling on one massive knee while its immense back propped up the wall, its broad shoulders the low-hanging ceiling. Dirt caked its enervate form, but its two eyes revealed an almost blinding white even while they looked directly at him. Those eyes struck Halford as familiar. They were sad eyes, haunted eyes, and Halford knew them as well as he knew his own.

Halford tried to speak but his tongue would not work. The giant shifted in the restricted space, the house creaking in complaint, and Halford's attention was drawn to its exposed foot and the deep grooved skin that covered it. It was like the bark of an old oak and thin tendrils like roots sprouted from fissures and burrowed into the soft ground. Warmth radiated from the room, enveloping Halford in a stale miasma that was familiar, primal, and he took a step closer, his foot sinking slightly into the dirt that lay beneath the house's fractured concrete foundations. It was as though the thing has sprung from some horrible nightmare, and Halford could not stop staring. Shadows grew and amassed around it, but what those shadows contained he could not discern. Were they leaves and stems and fruits, all the color of a humid night's sky? Did he hear insects chirping, or was it noise from the pipes above? Somewhere inside his mind a voice screamed, urging him to flee, but he could not move. The giant's head was moving, creaking as it pivoted, and as its slow blinking white eyes peered at Halford he was startled to find he recognized its face.

A shiver of electricity ran down his spine. The giant, the misshapen creature, was him, Halford, blown out into exaggeration, as though it were the sink for all of Halford's pain and resentment, as though it had been fed on it and kept being fed even after Halford had left. It was all Halford kept stifled inside made flesh, grown from the many seeds of his discontent until it filled every spare inch of space in the room. And yet Halford knew it was not enough, that even as the thing was filled to the limit still his anger needed more. It was bottomless, the well of resentment he drew from, and nothing satiated him. He spent and spent it and still it did not slow or diminish. Instead it fed the giant as though it were a malignant tumor, and as it grew it weaved its way into the structure of the house, entwined with Halford's misery, until they were impossible to separate. All that anger and resentment and despair -- each fed off the others in a viscous cycle, one that Halford was desperate to break, if only to be free from the chain the house and Libby had around his ankle. It was killing him, siphoning everything he had until he became a vessel of nothing but hate, doomed to live out his days in the periphery of his old life with nothing left to offer. He was an empty shell, a husk, withered by the engorged giant he could no longer afford to feed. He had to do something, had to make some change to break the cycle and leave it all behind. It was the house that was the root of all his problems, it was the house built from all that was tearing him down, and he started to kick and scratch at the giant, making nicks and cuts in its wooden skin. If it felt Halford's claws scrapping, it didn't utter a sound. Instead, it closed its eyes and let Halford rail until he could no longer lift his arms, and even then it still stood, an Atlas holding aloft the world of resentment Halford had been building for over a year. He and it were bound together by so much, and the umbilical cord was choking him. It had to be cut. It had to be cut so Halford might survive.

The tools hanging on the wall in the room behind Halford were rusty from being beneath the ground for so long, but the blade of the axe remained sharp. There was a mumbling overhead, something like Libby's voice speaking but Halford couldn't hear the words over the blood that rushed through his skull, like a waterfall against his ears. His focus was on that dark rectangle in the shadows, and he stalked towards it through water and mud four inches deep. In his hands was the axe, his sweating palms wrapped about the handle tightly, and in his crazed delirium he was only dimly aware he had picked it off the wall. He didn't know what he was going to do until it was done, until the first strike had landed. The screaming awoke him. But it did not stop him.

He continued to hack at the giant's rooted foot, working his way through as sap poured copiously from the wound. Everything seemed muted behind the rush of blood, but even as he worked he knew the distant screams he heard had not come from the giant but from somewhere else, from that garden that seemed to grow behind him in the dark. The insects swarmed, the flowers wilted, and if there were animals they stared at him with narrowed eyes and exposed teeth. Yet he knew there was no choice. Chunks of wood were ejected each time the axe came down, and when the final blow was landed, when Halford, drenched with sweat and ichor, sent the blade through the last piece of trunk, the giant finally made a noise of its own.

The groan was that of a tie being severed, of a building collapsing.

The sight of Halford's own face made large in a paroxysm of terror frightened him to his very core. It screamed, the sound like a home being torn apart, and spasms overtook the giant's arms and body. The extremities flailed, snapping supports, punching holes through wood and through concrete. The house was being brought down, a terrible cracking noise spread across the ceiling. Great chunks above Halford's head fell, buried by their weight in the muck. Halford dropped the axe to the floor, and tried to wipe his hands free of the sap that coated them but it would not come off. It stained like blood.