There are certain realities I have come to accept over the years. Ever since I saw the preview to the 1991 horror flick, The People Under The Stairs, I have known that there are, in fact, people living under the basement stairs. I have adapted accordingly; if a basement door has a lock I keep it engaged, and I take a nice clip on the stairs when laundry duties require me to visit the basement. Living in California afforded me eight years of freedom from this particular, um, issue.
Another certain reality is the presence of skeletons in the closet. I don't mean this metaphorically; this is not a reference to some great sin I'm hiding. There are dead people in most (if not all) of those attics you access from closet ceilings. My first encounter with this hard truth was that summer in elementary school when my friend confessed she was certain that her grandfather had been the victim of foul play, and that his body was probably in the attic crawl space in her bedroom. We spent the summer trying to solve the mystery, never once actually summoning the courage to go explore the space for ourselves.
I have known for some time that the closets in this old house are absolutely terrifying for a person who is tuned into these realities. They are tucked under the overhanging roof of our deceptively charming Dutch Colonial; each one has access panels to storage vaults of varying creepiness. One is almost sweet, actually, paneled with pine. With a few light fixtures it could be a cozy reading nook for a little girl. Another is completely unfinished. I try not to think about its existence, and what might be in its darker corners.
Last night before bath time, I ran to grab a diaper from Genevieve's closet and failed to close the door. Later, Paris followed us into the girls' room, and immediately darted into the closet. Before I could stop her, she crawled into a hole in the back of the closet shelving. I was really worried at first, but after a minute her little white ears popped out. She came out grayer than before, but otherwise unharmed. I closed the shelf door, and the closet door, and because it doesn't latch I shoved a heavy laundry basket in front of the door for good measure.
Around midnight I was fast asleep in the girls' room (giving Ben and his flu germs a wide berth) when I was awakened by frantic cat scratching. I stumbled to the door of their room only to find that there were no cats in the hallway. The scratching was coming from the closet door. Let me repeat that in a way that might help you grasp the manner in which I processed this information last night: THE SCRATCHING WAS COMING FROM THE CLOSET DOOR.
Of course it was the cats, both of them. On the other side of the very tightly-secured closet door, impatiently requesting to be let out.
Even in my half-asleep and wildly freaked out state, I was able to connect the dots. There must be another entrance to this space. There is a whole hidden tunnel in my house that I did not know about, and there is something there that is very, very enticing to my cats. Indeed, this morning they were scratching at the closet door again - to get back in.
If I were not so well-acquainted with the certain realities of the world, I might chalk it up to mice.
But I know better.
Kenna told me that there were dead people hidden behind the wood paneling in our Lynwood basement when I was little. You could push it and it had give. AND I HAD TO PRACTICE PIANO DOWN THERE FOR YEARS, with my back to the dead people. It's a wonder I'm not on 800 different kinds of medication now.
ReplyDeleteOne Sunday morning, when I was in college, my roommate and I awoke to the sound of a cat's meow. We had no cat, or no pet at all. At first we thought it was coming from upstairs, perhaps a hungry cat meowing near a connected air vent. But no, the sound was too loud, too immanent. We kept searching, listening, until my roommate said, "It's coming from the closet!"
ReplyDeleteHe creeped the door open, appropriately terrified of what would be inside. Suddenly, an equally terrified cat darted out of our closet and into our living room. We both screamed. We both climbed on top of furniture. The cat darted back and forth. After the screaming stopped, my roommate and I devised a plan while standing atop the furniture. I would climb down and go open the front door. He would grab the blanket from the couch and shoo the cat out the door. After the count of three, we rushed to our roles, shooed the cat out, slammed the door, and looked at each other with looks that were equal parts confusion and fear. How did this happen?!
It turns out there was a huge, cow-sized hole in our closet floor behind the hot water heater. A few days before, someone had left the crawl-space open underneath our apartment building, letting the cat in. Eventually, though, they closed it, unknowingly trapping the cat. The cat followed the warmth of the heat our apartment was dumping out into the crawl space, jumped up to follow the light, and became trapped. That's when the meowing started.
We were late for church that Sunday, and we have never opened a closet the same way again.