Hide-and-Seek

“It’s hide-and-seek, not hide-and-go-seek.” Gillian clenched her little fists into balls. Braylen was about to see the receiving end of those fists. The little brat. He enjoyed being difficult.

“It’s hide-and-go-seek, dipwad. Once you hide, everybody goes and seeks you. You can’t seek if you don’t go.”

Gillian put her hands on her hips. “You’re the dipwad, dipwad. Going is implied. You don’t need to include it in the name. It’s soccer, not go-and-play-soccer.” 

“Whatever, twattlebreath.”

“Scumbucket.”

“Barfbrain.”

“Roachsucker.”

The trading of insults would continue until the perfect zinger landed. Even though Gillian was two years younger than her brother, she usually came out on top. Girls matured faster than boys. They also had better vocabularies, even made-up ones.

Adam and Eve, their twin cousins, watched with wide-eyed fascination, holding hands and not speaking as their eyes ping-ponged back and forth between them. Grandma’s house used to be filled with cousins on Sunday afternoon—an even dozen if everyone came—but most stayed away after Grandpa died. 

For a month after he died, Grandma told everyone to stay away. She didn’t tell anyone why she wanted them to stay away until Mom and Dad paid a visit, at which point they learned that Grandpa had passed. He had been dead a month and no one knew. 

Grandma said she couldn’t handle the emotional scene of a funeral, so she had him cremated. Three of her five kids still wouldn’t speak to her. But Gillian and Braylen’s parents, as well as Adam and Eve’s, were making an effort to understand.

“I say this time we go to the basement.” Braylen’s eyes had a dark, devilish look. Gillian hated that look. Nothing good ever happened once that look settled in. 

“We can’t go in the basement. You know its off-limits. Grandma would have a stroke if she caught us down there. Plus, it’s locked.”

Braylen produced a dark, devilish smile, the perfect complement to his eyes. He reached in his shirt pocket and produced a skeleton key. 

Gillian’s eyes opened wide as dinner plates. “Where did you get that?”

“The junk drawer in the kitchen.” Braylen stooped down in front of Adam and Eve, meeting them face to face. “What do you guys think? Should we play hide-and-go-seek in the basement?” He twirled the key in his fingers, like it was a piece of candy. They grinned widely and nodded vigorously. Braylen turned to Gillian. “Looks like you’re outnumbered, pimplepuke.”

“Fine.” Gillian shook her head. She hated to lose to her stupid brother, but then again, she didn’t like her grandmother much these days. 

She’d never been the doting grandmotherly type, but lately she’d become downright mean. Last week she smacked Gillian’s hand when she reached for another dinner roll. Gillian wanted to smack her right back, but what with Grandpa dying and all, she forgave her, or tried to.

The adults were sitting outside on the back patio and since the basement door was in the front of the house, Gillian figured they had a good chance of not getting caught. She led the way. If they were going to do this, she would act like it was her idea. She held out her hand for the key but Braylen closed his fist tightly around it.

“Do you even know how to use a skeleton key?” Gillian asked as Braylen stuck the key into the skeleton key-shaped hole. 

“What’s to know?” He inserted his tongue in the corner of his upper lip as he fingered the key into the lock.

Gillian’s heart leapt as she heard a click. She exhaled deeply. No guts, no glory.

Braylen left the key in the lock as he turned the doorknob. The door opened with a painfully loud squeak. He turned to Gillian. “See. What’s to know?”

Gillian took another deep breath. “Okay, should the seeker stay up here and count, or should we all go to the basement first?”

Adam and Eve, still holding hands, had backed away from the doorway. “I thought you guys wanted to go in the basement?” Gillian asked sweetly.

Eve shook her head slowly, and when Adam saw her, did the same.

“You’re not scared, are you?” Braylen made his voice sound like a monster.

“Shut up, diphead.” Gillian punched him in the arm. “What’s wrong with you?” She turned toward the twins. “What’s wrong?”

Eve still shook her head. “I changed my mind.”

“That’s okay. Basements can be scary. How about you and Adam hide together?”

Eve took another step back and pointed to the doorway. “Grandpa’s down there.”

Gillian forced a laugh even though she didn’t find the comment funny. “Grandpa died. He’s not in the basement.”

Eve continued shaking her head. “Daddy said Grandma killed Grandpa and put his body in the basement. That’s why it's locked.”

“But the door’s always locked,” Gillian said.

“That’s what he said.”

“Did he tell you this?”

Eve glanced over at Adam. “He was talking to Mommy. We heard him.” Adam nodded.

Braylen chimed in. “How would he know what was in the basement if the door’s always locked?”

Gillian hated to admit it, but her brother had a point. “Tell you what,” she said to Eve, “why don’t we go down and take a look before we hide? That way we’ll know.”

She opened the door the rest of the way and flicked the light switch on the wall. The stairway remained dark but a light in the recesses of the basement appeared.

“I’ll go first and you guys follow. Braylen will be right behind you.” She started down the steps before she lost her nerve. 

“Why do you get to go first?” Braylen protested. “It was my idea.”

“Shut up, fecesface.” 

The musty smell of the basement penetrated her nostrils. It was a different kind of mustiness than, say, an attic, or a barn. This was earthier, more damp, like earthworms. With each step down the creaky wooden steps, the temperature dropped a degree or two. The steps dead-ended into what looked to be an ancient wall of rocks. A sharp left turn led into the basement. Grandma referred to it as the cellar, which somehow sounded more ominous.

A narrow walkway ran between rusty metal shelves piled high with junk that pushed against the ceiling, blocking out much of the light. A shadowy critter scurried parallel to the walkway and then abruptly made a right angle, crossing directly in front of Gillian. She could swear its whiskers brushed against the toes of her flip-flop clad feet. It wasn’t a mouse but a rat, a fat Norway rat with a black naked tail. It made a high-pitched squeal as it slid under a pile of debris. A shudder ran through Gillian’s entire body as she gasped and lunged backward, colliding with Adam and Eve, who followed close behind. 

“Do you even know where you’re going?” Braylen talked much too loudly from his position at the rear.

“Shhh! Do you want everyone to find us down here?” Gillian stopped to let her heart rate return somewhere close to normal. She turned back and whispered as loud as she could. “Where do you think I’m going? There’s only one way to go.” 

As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, objects came into sharper view. Paint cans. Stacks of old newspapers and magazines. Bulging cardboard boxes full of jars. Cobwebs everywhere. If Grandma did want to put Grandpa down here, she couldn’t imagine a nook or cranny big enough to stuff him in.

As the path wound through the cellar, deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast, Gillian let her imagination run wild. She imagined the cellar—which did indeed seem a more appropriate word choice than basement—to be a living, breathing thing, currently in the process of ingesting them. She knew what followed ingestion: digestion. Once it digested Braylen, it would likely experience indigestion. She laughed out loud at her little internal joke. 

At the far end of the cellar, the walkway stopped at a little wooden door, its light-green paint peeling off in thin vertical strips. It contained a little metal latch, darkly discolored with age. The door stood about half as tall as a grown person; Adam and Eve could walk through it without hitting their heads. It looked like a cupboard of some sort.

“If Grandpa is down here, he’d be behind that door.” Braylen pointed to it.

Gillian felt Eve’s grasp on the back of her T-shirt tighten. “Should we open it?” 

“I don’t see why not,” Braylen said. “Otherwise we came down here for nothing. Looks like a good hiding place.” He looked at Adam and then at the door. “Hey little buddy, why don’t you hide in there and we’ll try to find you.”

Adam shook his head and tightened his death-grip on his sister’s arm.

Gillian scowled at her brother as she bent down to open the latch. She paused, putting her ear to the door. “Do you hear that? There’s a noise coming from behind the door.” 

“Very funny,” Braylen said. “You can’t scare me.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. It’s like something scratching.”

“Well, it’s either rats or Grandpa.”

“Or rats feeding on Grandpa,” Gillian said in a monotone.

“So that gives us three options.” Braylen held out his fingers. “A live grandpa, a dead grandpa, or no grandpa.” He met each of their eyes. “What do you all think?” A wicked grin crossed his face.

Eve moved closer to Gillian and stuck out her lip. “I don’t believe you.”

Braylen rolled his eyes and shook his head. “What do you mean, you don’t believe me? I gave you three options. You can’t not believe all three.”

“I don’t care. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe anything you say.”

Braylen held his hands up, as though on the receiving end of a stick-up. “Fine. Whatever.” 

“Okay, enough already.” Gillian studied the door. “I’m going to open it. I will warn you, though, if a rat jumps out, I will totally freak out.” Gillian’s hand grazed the knob but she stopped when she heard footsteps above them. 

The adults were back in the house. 

Braylen looked ready to cry. “If Grandma catches us down here, she’ll kill us. She’ll probably stuff our bodies in there with Grandpa.” He quickly turned around, leading the way. Adam and Eve whimpered, barely muffling their sobs. Gillian pushed them along.

They ran up the stairs like a herd of wild buffalo—an expression Grandma liked to use—but stopped at the top. Braylen put his ear to the door. “I think the coast is clear,” he whispered.

Braylen reached for the knob and tried to turn it. The door was locked. Gillian tried it. No luck.

Tears welled up in the corner of Braylen’s eyes. “She killed Grandpa. And now she’s trying to kill us too.”

“It probably just locked behind you. I told you you didn’t know how to use a skeleton key.” Gillian looked down at Adam and Eve, who were close to a full-blown meltdown, bottom lips quavering in unison. Gillian smiled. “Don’t worry about him. He’s just joking around. That little door we found, that’s probably the way out. Let’s go check, okay?”

“That’s not the way out and you know it,” Braylen said. “Let’s just knock on the door and take our licks.”

“Be my guest. But we’re going to check, aren’t we guys?” Adam and Eve nodded, a faint trace of a smile gracing their lips. “All these old cellars have an outside entrance, like in the Wizard of Oz. But if the door doesn’t lead anywhere, we’ll come back up here and knock. What do we have to lose? Plus, I guaran-dang-tee you we’ll never get down here again, so let’s once and for all find out about Grandpa. It’s a win-win.”

Braylen sighed heavily. “Fine.”

As they navigated their way back through the oppressive aisles, Gillian’s bravado waned. Butterflies battered the inside of her stomach. When they got to the door, it sat partway open. 

A bolt of panic shot through Gillian, a jolt to the central nervous system. “I must have opened it without realizing it when I touched it.” She extended her hand toward her brother. “You go first. Stupidity before beauty.”

Braylen’s eyes blazed but he held his tongue. “I saw some boards earlier.” He walked back and returned with a light-colored board, maybe two feet long. A fibrous egg sac from a daddy longlegs dangled from the bottom of it. Standing as far away as possible, he used the board to push the door all the way open. 

Gillian slow-walked her way to it and peered inside. It wasn’t a passageway, just a storage closet, the ceiling being the bottom of a set of stairs, most likely stairs that once led outside but had been sealed off. 

The space wasn’t empty, though, not by a longshot. What Gillian saw she would never forget. Braylen never spoke of it. And the twins, to put it mildly, didn’t handle it well.

They didn’t see their grandfather’s body, or his bones, or his decaying corpse. He’d only been dead a month—if his body were in there, they would have smelled it long before they saw it. 

The space went back a ways, and you couldn’t see the end of it. About three-quarters of the way back, a white string dangled, the kind you pull to turn on the light. Gillian pulled it. A single incandescent light bulb lit up the space like daytime. Straight ahead, at the far end of the closet, an old mirror hung on the wall. 

Gillian recalled a story Grandma had told her. When she was just a young girl, she worked for a carnival, in a hall of mirrors. One particular mirror was housed in its own little room, hanging all by itself. After looking into this mirror, visitors would run out screaming in terror.

Grandma said it would reveal the true you, the person you were on the inside, the one you hid from the rest of the world. People couldn’t bear what they saw. She said it was a simple funhouse mirror, that manipulated light and shadows, that could portray your face in a sinister light, or if the angle was just right, might reflect back an angel. But when Grandma described it, the look in her eyes said there was more to it than she let on.

The carnival closed for good at the end of the summer, and she asked for the mirror. She had never looked into it, afraid of what she might see. She wrapped it up and took it home. Someday, she said, she might dare to gaze into it—but only when she was ready to know what it might reveal.

Gillian assumed it was just a story and didn’t think about it again. Until now. 

Gillian looked in the mirror. When she came out of the closet smiling, Braylen came in after her. He rushed out, his face drained of color, like he’d seen a ghost. He didn’t say a word. Adam and Eve went in next. They became hysterical, their screams so loud all the adults in the house heard them and came rushing down.

Grandma died that winter. Before they sold the house, Gillian snuck into the basement and retrieved the mirror. 

It still hangs in the back of Gillian’s closet. She likes what she sees.