Splinter

46

It took Marc three times longer to descend into the darkness than it had to dash upstairs.

He had always avoided spending more time in the cellar than absolutely necessary. Not from a childish fear that some faceless monster was lying in wait for him behind the boiler, but because he felt satisfied that people were no more born to live in windowless dungeons than they were to fly through the air at an altitude of ten thousand metres.

To him, cellars were like the dark bed of a lake. Much as you enjoyed being on the surface, you had no wish to know what was swimming around below you. Brave souls held their breath and duck-dived a couple of metres down, but no one swam right to the bottom, where mud harboured the lake’s secrets, without a convincing reason – unless they’d lost something perhaps. A wedding ring, for instance, or a key.

Or his wife.

The plywood door leading to the steep flight of rough stone steps had been bolted from the outside. Whoever was waiting for him below was locked in. Marc wondered whether he really wanted to know who it was.

He slid the bolt aside, opened the door and felt for the switch on the wall, an old-fashioned black knob like an outsize wing nut. He turned it twice clockwise, then in the opposite direction. The darkness persisted.

‘Hello?’ he called down the steps. No response. The intercom display, which had been flickering a moment ago, suddenly went out. He remembered that mobile reception on some networks got worse the lower you went. On the other hand, the phone in his hand was independent of any provider.

‘Are you down here?’

He descended another step. His stomach gurgled and his persistent nausea sent bile surging up into his throat. Ignoring his body’s cries for help, which urged him to go to bed at last, take his pills and sleep for two solid days, he groped his way slowly down the rope the previous owner had installed in lieu of a handrail. A psychologist by profession, he had turned the cellar into a makeshift consulting room by facing the walls with tongue-and-groove and laying some grey industrial carpet. Sandra and Marc had always wondered what sort of people had consented to entrust a stranger with their mental problems in the bowels of the earth, especially as the old house often emitted such mysterious noises that even hanging up laundry down there could be an unnerving experience.

‘The old girl’s breathing,’ had been Marc’s stock joke when the creaks and groans overhead became louder than usual. Built in the 1920s, the house should have stopped settling long ago.

There were no creaks to be heard now, and the central-heating pipes were silent.

Marc had reached the foot of the steps. Blindly, he opened the fuse box secured to the wall in a niche beside them. He felt around, avoiding the toggle switches, until he found the lighter kept inside the box for emergencies.

The sulphurous yellow light of the little flame created an almost cosy atmosphere. Marc couldn’t understand why the cellar lights weren’t working. All the fuses were intact. Still, there were plenty of other more important things that were defeating him tonight.

‘Where are you?’ he called, raising his voice to drown the roaring in his ears. The quieter his surroundings, the louder his internal noises seemed to become.

With the lighter in one hand and the baby monitor in the other, he made his way into the passage connecting the former consulting room with the boiler room. They had removed the ugly, louvred sliding door, and Marc could see, despite the inadequate lighting, that the bare little room was deserted.

That leaves only one possibility.

He stepped over a redundant cable drum with the lighter held up in front of him like an Olympic torchbearer. His shadow followed a few metres behind.

Just before reaching the grey concrete fire door he paused to give his thumb a rest. When the flame went out, darkness enveloped him like a cloak. Depositing the useless baby monitor on the floor, he thumbed the flint wheel again and shielded the lighter with his hand when the flame started to flicker. Then, although everything within him balked at doing so, he pushed the heavy fire door open and entered the boiler room.

He was so startled he uttered an involuntary cry.