Crawlspace by Herbert Lieberman Read Free Book Online

it was that I had to lean against the furnace.
    It passed in a moment, like a wave that crashes over you, then boils on leaving nothing but a series of quiet little eddies in its wake.
    For several moments I stood there clinging to the furnace and wondering what it was that had happened to me. I was urgently aware that I wanted to do something—that I had to do something right then. But I didn’t know exactly what.
    In the next moment I took the flashlight, crossed quickly to the crawl, and hoisted myself in.
    It wasn’t as dark as I’d recalled it, nor as damp. Curiously the stench of oats seemed to have gone completely. Through a chink in the far wall, a jagged gash of sunlight seeped into the gloom, dappling the ground where it fell. Within that slender thread of light, motes of dust swirled like galaxies. In that strange light I had the curious sensation that I was floating. I was moving past stars and through centuries and eons of time.
    Stooping, I worked my way through the crawl. I had no conscious idea of where I was going. Some interior compass seemed to be guiding me. When I reached the place, I turned my light on it. It was all there, just as I’d left it—the straw, the bones, the tin can, toppled and lying on its side, with the cheap, wretched toiletries spilling out of it. A pathetically crude semblance of life lived at an almost prehistoric level.
    My foot scraped against something light and brittle in the dry earth. When I turned my light on it, I saw the skeleton of a small rodent at my feet. I imagined it to be a squirrel, or possibly a rat. The flesh had been picked clean with almost clinical perfection. It had been done so meticulously that the entire skeleton had remained intact. There was the small, delicate skull with its tiny vacant eyesockets, and the jaw clenched over tiny razor-teeth, all frozen into a lurid grin.
    I swung the light around in a wide circle scanning the rest of the crawl. When the beam fell once more over the straw pallet, something I’d never seen before caught my eye. Just above the pallet, carved into the old timbers and beams, were a number of recently made scratchings. At first they looked like thin white trails gouged deep into the old wood. They were less than an eighth of an inch in width and looked as if they’d been made with a nail or possibly the point of a key. At first they appeared to be nothing more than random lines—curving and crisscrossing and wandering off into nothingness. But the more I studied them, the more they began to take the form of drawings. Rudimentary shapes like circles and squares. And then stick figures. The sort of thing you see in a child’s doodling. The drawings had been made recently. I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to represent. At one point they looked like children playing; at another, like a hunting scene. For some curious reason they filled me with a deep unaccountable sadness.
    In the next moment I sat down on the straw pallet and propped my back against the wall the way I imagined Richard Atlee sat when he had been down there—head tilted backwards, legs drawn up, and eyes closed.
    It was an act totally beyond my will or understanding. As I was doing it a shudder of revulsion shot through me. But I was responding to a consciousness much stronger than my own. I sat there, eyes closed, crouching against the walls. I could smell the pipes overhead and hear the pulse of water flush through them like arterial blood. Small beads of water sweated off their casings and dropped periodically down onto my face.
    Then slowly, irresistibly, I lay back in the shadows—back until I lay fully flat on the bed of straw, feeling the dampness of the earth seeping into my clothes, through them and into my bones. And the most curious thing of all was that after the initial shudder of revulsion, I felt fine. Almost detached, like a scientist going about some elaborate experiment. Then it suddenly occurred to me that what I wanted was to