Free Good Lord, Deliver Us by John Stockmyer Page A

Stewart stopped at
a thick-painted hallway door located between the kitchen and the
bath.
    "Basement," she said. "On the floor
plan, anyway."
    Jamie Stewart was still using her
"quiet" voice. Perhaps, because louder noises in the hollow house
sounded so ... ugly.
    Trying to unlatch the door's simple,
old-fashioned bolt -- but failing -- she gave way to Z, Z using his
strength to squeak the rusty bolt from its keeper, the girl turning
the wobbly, tin doorknob and pulling, the warped door shrilling
open to reveal the basement's black throat.
    Starting her descent without a word,
all Z could do was follow, the two of them tramping down steps that
were dirty, concave, splintered, narrow, and steep.
    Down ten steps only, the
girl stopping on the final riser, Z coming to a halt on the step
behind her, the basement at their feet not the kind of space a
clean person wished to enter. Z didn't like the place's smell,
either. An odor, less of age than of ... death ... prompting him to
wonder if the loony Bateman prof had buried her cleaver-killed cats
down here ? (More
realistically, the cellar smelled of ... long-dead
rats.)
    Z watching, the girl gave the black
pit a quick once-over with the light, the basement turning out to
be the root cellar Z had thought likely.
    Opposite the stairs, concrete steps
trudged up a steeply slanted cinder-block shaft, those risers
ending at the underside of the padlocked, overlapping backyard
doors.
    The girl continuing to slash the light
-- here -- there -- Z saw that the ceiling of this crypt-like hole
was so low the open crossbeams would barely clear his head, the
ceiling nothing but exposed, angle-braced floor joists.
    Rickety shelves hugged the walls, the
shelving for canned goods back in the days when people still did
canning, the ledging now empty, looking like it could barely hold
its own rotted weight.
    The floor was ... powdered dirt ... as
uneven as wind-waves on a lake ... the dirt's dryness a testimony
to the effectiveness of drainage around the outside of the house.
Here and there, but mostly to the right, flattened pieces of
cardboard boxes covered the bare dirt.
    Near the top of the old cellar's
concrete walls were narrow windows, the wavy glass in them
sometimes cracked but everywhere intact.
    Spider webs sagged between the
ceiling's open floor joists. ... Old webs. Ragged.
Dirty.
    The only positive thing to say about
this ... hole ... was that, since it was below ground, it was
cooler than the house above.
    As the girl continued to carve up the
gloom with her little light, Z saw that decrepit tools had been
left leaning against an open space along the far right wall. A
cankerous sharpshooter spade. A rusty garden rake. A thick-handled,
old-fashioned pick. An ancient manure-fork, minus a middle
tine.
    To sum it up, this was a small,
decrepit basement -- under a small, decrepit house.
    Making sure the little flashlight's
knife-edged beam didn't cut its way out a basement window, the girl
directed the light up and around Z as best she could to show the
way out of the pit.
    Finally up and in the hall, Miss
Stewart beside him, Z creaked the door shut, the two of them
scurrying back to their bedroom sanctuary.
    After Z shut the sleeping room door
behind them, the young woman switched on the lamp, at the same time
pocketing the penlight.
    "Now, what?" Z muttered, blinking
rapidly to get his eyes adjusted to the sudden light. In this
unpleasant house, he was almost pleased his voice was
shot.
    "Now, we rig the place."
    Squatting like a duck, knees
impossibly wide, the girl began searching in a box again to drag
out an old-fashioned, gooseneck office lamp, the bulb inside the
beat-up metal shade a purple color instead of white, something Z
thought curious. The lamp's cord ended in electric jacks: no doubt
because of its conversion to DC current.
    The lamp clear of the box, Miss
Stewart got up to place the fixture on the mattress, bulb
up.
    Back to the cardboard box, coming out
next was something