Crawlspace by Herbert Lieberman Read Free Book Online Page A

feel what it was like to sleep on wet straw and have the dank smell of mold and sewage in my nostrils. I tried to imagine myself homeless and penniless. I tried to imagine hunger. For a brief time I tried to become Richard Atlee.
    How long I stayed there I don’t know, but when I climbed out of the crawl and emerged from the cellar later that day, it was already dusk. My body ached with cramps from the position in which I’d lain. My clothing was damp and smelled faintly of mold.
    When I entered the house I could smell supper in the kitchen. It was comforting to be up above again in the lights and warmth, with the sound of Alice moving about in the kitchen.
    “That you, Albert?” she called out.
    “Yes.”
    “You about ready for supper?”
    “In a moment.”
    I washed very thoroughly, changed my clothing, and then without a word of greeting to Alice, took my place at table.
    In the days that followed, I never mentioned a word to her about my strange experience in the crawl. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it myself, and to have recounted it to her, precisely as it happened, would’ve marked me as a lunatic. So I remained silent.
    The weather continued unnaturally mild, and one beautiful day toward the end of November we went walking in the forest. The air was bright and clear, and though the trees were completely bare of leaves, they looked precisely as trees look at that time of the spring, just before they’re about to bloom.
    We walked for several hours along a trail we knew well. To the right of the trail we passed a pond in time to see a covey of geese light on its surface. They hit the water all at once—a single noise and motion for all of them. And where there had been a flat, still surface with trees hanging upside down reflected in it, you could now see a series of watery, concentric rings moving like pulses, skimming over the water, growing larger and larger.
    When we crept up close to get a better look at the geese, they suddenly rose in one motion again, and honking, circled the far fringe of the pond. At one point they wheeled so low overhead that the drumming of their purely wild, so terrifyingly joyous, that for a moment I thought I would cry.
    Alice looked at me uneasily. “Albert? What’s come over you?”
    “Nothing,” I said and watched the line of geese recede in the distance. “Nothing at all.”
    One day it was like that—the weather warm and clement—and a few days later we were back in winter again. Icy gusts came down from the north. Great schooners of grayish clouds followed, gathering on the horizon like an armada of warships steaming our way.
    I put up the storm windows one afternoon and while the wind cuffed me about I replaced all the old shingles on the roof. We had a full supply of fuel, and I stocked the woodbin with choice dried hickory and birch.
    That night the barometer fell and a wind started up out of the north. Shortly after, the snow began to fall. It came down in huge, lacy flakes and drifted silently past the windows.
    We watched the fire simmer brightly on the hearth, till all that was left of a huge hickory log was a mound of gray, powdery ash and a few smoldering chips.
    At last I rose and wound the grandfather clock in the parlor. Then we climbed the stairs and got ready for bed. Alice had taken our eiderdown quilts down from the attic, and when we settled under them for the night, and listened to the snow hissing on the roof, I had a sense of expectation.
    For some unaccountable reason, I said prayers that night, my hands clasped under the blanket so that Alice couldn’t see me. I hadn’t said prayers in bed, before sleep, since I was a child. I’m not sure what I prayed for.
    Late in the night and half in sleep I turned, thinking I heard a sound—a low, barely audible whining, like an animal in distress. It came and then it was gone. I pulled the blankets higher around my head and settled deeper into the pillow. The next moment there was a loud