Page 9 of A Little Love

“I think we’re ready.” Eyeing the marks he’d put on the wall, Nolan stepped back from the wall. He aligned himself beside Tricia, careful not to touch her, not even accidentally. His jeans were already feeling too tight in the crotch.

She rubbed her hands together. “Let’s do it.”

“On three.” Standing side-by-side, both he and Tricia grabbed their sledgehammers and drew them back. “One… two… three!”

They swung in unison. New windows all around the basement let in plenty of light as they slammed the ugly wood-panel that was their target. It was the only wall in the whole house that he intended to get rid of, but after so many years of flooding, the entire length along the bottom was rotted out and black with mold. He didn’t even know why it had been built here. It wasn’t load-bearing and unlike the perimeter walls, which were poured cement, this was the only wood-construction in the entire basement. Without doors, windows or vents of any kind, Nolan couldn’t quite fathom its purpose apart from the obvious: to close off a space of roughly two-by-twelve feet.

Half-expecting to find a boarded-up fireplace, Nolan kept up a steady battery, knocking chunks and splinters out of the ugly wood paneling until it (made stronger by having been glued to the basement drywall) finally gave way, knocking a massive chunk of reinforced sheetrock into the hole they had doggedly created.

Breathing heavily, Tricia let her sledgehammer rest on the cement floor between her sneakers. Her eyebrows quirked as she stared at the open hole. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a foundation wall back there?”

Fishing a thin LED flashlight out of his back pocket, Nolan stepped up to the hole to peer inside. “Huh,” he said.

“What do you see?”

“A whole ‘nother room,” Nolan answered in surprise.

“Closet-sized or ‘room’ room-sized?”

A small hand touched his shoulder and Nolan stepped back, relinquishing his flashlight so she could take a look.

“Holy Hannah!” Tricia declared, sticking her head and one arm in as far as she could, angling in all directions to bettersee the dark, window-less interior. “What’d they do, bury a body back here?”

“Ha!” Nolan laughed, his chuckle not quite matching the warning in the look he gave her. “Somebody just landed herself some serious TV restrictions.”

“Only until I go home.”

He swatted her.

“Ow!” Only half withdrawing from the hole, she perked and leaned back in again. “Hey, I can see something. There’s a chair in the corner and… Oh my God, it’s got eyeballs on it!” She slammed full into him when she jumped back, her whole body erupting into a shuddering dance. “There’s eyeballs in there! I always thought this was the creepiest freakin’ house! And those Smith sisters—” Tricia stopped freaking out long enough to point at him. “I always knew there was something off with them. Always!”

He gave her a Look. “I distinctly remember you saying this was a good house with good bones, and how it was a pity it had been left derelict for so long—”

“Hey,” she cut him off, still trying to flick the creepiness off her hands. “I work off commission.”

Taking his flashlight back, Nolan nudged her out of the way to take his second peek. He spotted the chair in the far corner. The bright shine of his flashlight reflected back at him off the curve of a dirty, quart-sized jar, resting on the hard-wood seat. He peered as close as he could without actually crawling into the hole, which would have to wait until he’d enlarged it. His shoulders were too broad. He could barely squeeze his head and the flashlight through at the same time.

“It’s marbles, not eyeballs,” he said, retreating back out of the wall again. “Seriously. No more horror movies for you.”

Moving her well out of the way, he picked up the sledgehammer again. Knocking the rotted sections out of awall this size should only have taken ten minutes. Strength re-enforced by the glued paneling, it took Nolan twice that to take it down to nothing but studs. One look at the black mold saturating the lower portions of every board and he knew the whole wall would have to go, but at least now he could squeeze through into the small bedroom-sized space that had been fully enclosed for who only knew how long or why. The broken concrete floor turned to crumbles just a few steps in. Cement and rock crunched under his boots until he stepped off into the soft mud beyond, leaving footsteps in what was otherwise a pristine dirt floor. The chair was the only piece of furniture, with a couple of empty antique liquor bottles and the jar of marbles making up the sum and total of hidden treasures waiting to be re-discovered.

Picking up the jar of marbles, he carefully wiped away decades of dust and brought it back out into the light. “Watch out for broken glass,” he cautioned as Tricia slipped through the studs to explore the tiny room behind him.

“This is Depression Era,” she said, bending to pick up an empty liquor bottle. Wiping it clean against the denim of her thigh, she turned it over in her hands. “The glass is blue! Look at this, how pretty. And how creepy. Why would anyone wall this up?”

“Probably so he wouldn’t have to fix the floor before selling the property,” Nolan guessed. Great, now he was going to have to. He toed the broken floor, seeing nothing but a lot of dollar signs flying straight out of his wallet.

“Or maybe,” Tricia countered, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Maybe he walled it up because he pick-axed through the floor and put a body under there. I saw this movie once. I’ll bet if we dig down a few feet—”

“No.”

“Oh, but—”

“I said no, and I suggest you drop it.” He gave her another warning look. “Tricia, you are one more gruesome suggestion away from a hot butt, a grilled cheese sandwich, and an early bedtime.” Very early. It wasn’t even noon yet.

Huffing, Tricia took the marbles from him. “Grumpy butt,” she muttered, rolling the jar between her hands and peeking at him from out beneath the bright pink swath of her bangs. The sparkle of a Little gearing herself up to push buttons was very much alive and well in her calculating eyes. “You don’t have to get short with me, you know. It’s not my fault you’ve a body in your basement. Kinda shines a new light on the whole Dungeon thing.”

“I do not,” Nolan frowned, “have a body in my basement, and if you say that one more time, I will not warn you. I will simply spank you. A real spanking. Not the threat you got at breakfast or the two light swats I gave you yesterday; the real deal. Pants and panties down, bottom bare while I paddle your backside to the kind of hot cherry-red that Martians will be able to see from space. And if you say, ‘With or without a telescope’, I promise I’ll paddle you twice.”

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