Crawlspace by Herbert Lieberman Read Free Book Online Page B

banging at the front door. Someone was rapping the knocker and alternately pummeling the door with fists. In all the years that have passed since that moment, I have not been able to get that sound out of my head.
    Alice was up in a moment—her head swiveling about—as if she were trying to shake herself awake. It suddenly occurred to me that I had been waiting for that sound for a long time, and now that it had come I felt a fist close over my heart.
    I was out of bed and across the room when Alice cried out behind me, “What are you going to do?” She knew as well as I who was at the door.
    I turned to look at her cringing behind the quilt, while the pounding echoed up from beneath. The sight of her cowering there gave me a pang of satisfaction. When I turned again and started down the steps, she was still calling out after me. “Let him in,” she cried. “Let him in.” In the next moment I was standing before the door.
    The pounding had increased to a fearful intensity. It came regularly like pulses throbbing through the door. After each concussion I could see the frame of the door shudder and the hasps straining at the hinges. I stood there watching the hinges, and quailing before the noise, with a terrible fascination. Each blow had the force of a clap of thunder. But for me it had the sound of destiny. Richard Atlee had come home.

Chapter Four
    It is curious how Richard Atlee became a member of our family. I’m not sure if we adopted him or he us. It really doesn’t matter which. Perhaps it was an act mutually and tacitly agreed upon. He was lonely and so were we. Hence, all was right for the encounter.
    The circumstances of his life with us were always strange, but at first they were downright bizarre. In spite of our protestations, he insisted upon living in the crawlspace—like a pet that can’t be trusted to come upstairs for fear he’ll mess himself and everything around him.
    We offered to fix him a spare bedroom on the ground floor, off the parlor, but he would have none of it. He wouldn’t come up to eat with us, so we devised a pulley system whereby food was lowered and refuse raised.
    He came and went according to his own whims. He continued to spend his days, despite the inclemency of weather, out of doors, leaving the cellar through the garden door and going out into the gray, chill hours of dawn, then returning at night shortly after we had retired. We believed that at night he hovered in the woods around the house, waiting for our bedroom lights to go out, so as to avoid any possibility of having to meet us head-on. As a result, we learned to listen for the squealing hinges of the cellar door as a signal that Richard was home safely and thus we could go to sleep.
    It was strange having him there and never actually seeing him. After a while we grew eager for glimpses of him. There were mornings when we rose at dawn and crouched by the windows in the chilly, darkened room just to watch him slip off across the yard swiftly like a young deer and vanish into the deep forest behind the house. He was like a wild creature in that way, solitary and fiercely private. Because of this, when we wished to communicate something to him, we learned never to approach him directly, but rather, obliquely. For instance, since I’d changed all the locks in the house, it was necessary that he be given a new set of keys. I couldn’t simply go to him and give him the keys, since it was made abundantly clear to us that he didn’t wish to meet us face to face. So instead, I merely made the keys available to him by leaving them in a place where I knew he’d find them—namely, the entrance of the crawl.
    In the early days of December, Alice bought yam and needles and began a wool sweater for him which she hoped to complete by Christmas. This was a tall order for a woman who hadn’t knitted in years and had arthritic fingers, yet she went at the task with a passion that was astonishing. Hour after hour, like