New to the story? Start here: Memorial Day Chapter 1: Welcome to Bright Hill

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11 - Topside

Finding the keypad, which the engineers had helpfully put on the outside of the gate, was the most frustrating task thus far.  He managed it, but found it annoying.

The sound of the maglock releasing almost made his ears hurt.  He knew it was loud in the stairwell, but it sounded much louder than he remembered it being.  He waited until the echo trailed off; he counted it in his head and was mildly concerned that he got past “three.”

He took back what he'd thought a moment ago about the engineers.  The fact that they didn't build the gate to open up directly to the stairs, which they very easily could have done and which he wouldn't have even noticed before now, probably saved him a backwards tumble.

He held the gate open.  His pistol, holstered on his leg, banged against it loudly but fortunately didn't startle him.

The white six-panel door was only locked from the outside with a typical residential lock.  He turned the knob and carefully stepped through, his toe catching momentarily on the threshold.  He would have sworn there wasn't a threshold on this door, yet there it was.  He'd never noticed it.

He let the gate close slowly behind him, internally cringing before it even shut because he knew the electromagnet would catch and slam it the last millimeter or two.  It did, and he heard it echoing up and down the stairwell.

Being outside of the stairwell, in the basement itself, the sound seemed to project out at him as if from a speaker.  He found it disorienting in a way he hadn't expected.  It made him dizzy, like the early stages of motion sickness.  Then the dizziness evolved into mild nausea—bothersome, but not disabling.  He stood there, listening to the echo of the gate reverberating, and forced himself to take a few deep, slow breaths until it passed.

When the echoing fully died down, he carefully shut the white door, and then again he stood and listened. After a few moments he realized his ears were faintly ringing, or more realistically, his tinnitus was aggravated now.

This made him revisit his earlier internal conversation.  What am I listening for and why am I being quiet?

He concluded that right here, right now, under these operational constraints, he was marginally more afraid of other people than he was of the phenomenon.

"Afraid" was an interesting choice of words, he then thought.  He wasn't normally fearful of people as individuals.  He did however have a healthy respect for the harm they could cause, intentionally or unintentionally.

Something nagged at him.

You have to be up here, he thought, *and there's possibly a thing up here that can kill you if you look at it.*That tracked, it had almost been a mantra earlier.

But I can't look at it with this thing over my eyes, so what the fuck am I worried about?

He chewed on that thought for a moment or two, but concluded it was a reckless way of thinking.

He didn’t spent a lot of time in the basement.  He knew there wasn’t much between him and the stairs, but he had already discovered that standing still for too long was disorienting.  He turned to the left and felt for the shelves by the white door, carefully following them.

He ascended the basement stairs, which was more challenging than he anticipated.  They were boring, average, just like the house itself.  They weren’t decaying or flimsy—the house was nondescript, not cheap.  But the wooden steps had a very slight give to them as he put his weight down one foot at a time, and that threw off his balance in a strange way.  His brain repeatedly failed to believe that it wasn't falling, and he could only convince it of that by stopping with both feet on the same step and holding tightly onto the railing.

It was distracting, and took more concentration than walking up stairs ought to.  That was both good and bad, because it gave him something to focus his attention on to the exclusion of other thoughts.

He experienced an odd moment at the top of the stairs, of the sort that reminded him that the brain is really just a lump of fat with a high opinion of itself.

He knew what the sound was before he opened the door.  He was certain of it.  He heard it, recognized it, and still opened the door in spite of that.  Only as the door was opening and he was cautiously taking his first step through it did he consciously realize the significance of it.  He realized that had he properly processed the significance, he wouldn't have opened the door at all.

Yet there he was, stepping through the door already, fully aware of all of these facts and powerless to stop himself because his lump of fat was busy remembering which side of the door the knob was on.

Crickets.  Chirping happily amongst themselves, considerably louder than he remembered them being inside the house.

He stood there stupidly with his hand on the doorknob, standing centered in the doorway like he was doing it for dramatic effect.  He felt foolish, not really because of his awkward pose, but because he couldn't for the life of him remember if the crickets always used to sound this loud in the kitchen.

His brain registered a smell: sweet, earthy, not strong and present in the way a fragrance is, but subtle and another of those things the brain likes to edit out.  Trees, he thought, feeling stupid again for a moment,the…big ones…with the big leaves.  The ones that shaded the whole southeast corner of the property, whatever they were; the ones that grew close to the house on the short side of the yard.

He didn't shut the door, but took one cautious step further into the kitchen.