A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [4]
It took a few minutes for her to calm. When she composed, she stood, and again eyed the shaft askance.
And again it stared back, innocent, harmless.
She winced when she stood, her joints creaked and ached. She limped on a throbbing knee toward the shaft, and stood a safe distance away to gaze into the charcoal depths.
The darkness swallowed the door whole. She couldn’t make out any sign of it. Several steps into the stairwell the blackness engulfed all light.
She drew a jittering breath, ran her hand down the back of her head, and smoothed her ruffled, dust-caked hair. She dug into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the phone. She considered calling Butch back, then thought better of it. He’d been unenthusiastic about her last call. She thought of calling the realtor but didn’t know what she’d ask. Maybe for her money back. She assumed that would be ludicrous without a lawyer and a lot of fighting. No sense stirring that pot. Not yet, anyway.
She checked her watch. Eleven-forty. Still plenty of time in the day to do some digging, perhaps see what she could learn about the tiny old building, in a neighborhood that struggled against going bad. But already the edges were roughening, and the seedier elements gained footholds. Part of her willingness to buy this old, quaint spinster amidst the crumbled hulks of apartments tipping toward tenements and shops bordering on roach motels was the city’s tax break. If she stayed and helped turn the neighborhood around, they offered her significant business tax and city tax reductions. They could use this as impetus to keep pushing nicer and nicer elements into the drug-and-crime infested Black Heart area of the city. Rose had been assured more than adequate police patrols and monitoring, since the city’s special pet project couldn’t fail.
But she wanted her money back now. She didn’t think the benefits of a couple of tax breaks could offset the cost of having to have the building revamped from its foundation up if something about that sinister shaft was wrong, or if it made the building unsound. She didn’t have the money to fix it, period, and since she didn’t know the shaft was there when she bought it, and it wasn’t in any of the disclosure forms, she might have a case against the realtor.
Or they could just say they didn’t know anything about it either. And they’d be off the hook too, wouldn’t they?
Rose gasped when she found herself on the top step of the staircase.
She clambered out, stepped away, watching the hole like a viper.
“How?” she asked aloud, and the sudden shift from silence gave her a bad jolt. “How do I end up in there without knowing I’m going in?”
Her heart tattooed in her chest, a bunny-quick thump that left a ring in her ears and shook her hands like palsy.
Rose backed away from the hole until she felt her heels hit the baseboards beneath the huge, square windows. However far she moved from it, it wasn’t far enough. Every time she got distracted with other thoughts, she ended up in the stairwell, farther down than she wanted to be.
An hour ago she didn’t even know the shaft was there. Now she couldn’t escape it. It seemed to move beneath her and swallow her when she didn’t stay alert, aware of the shaft.
She shuffled across the floor, sidestepping so she faced the shaft at all times as she sidled past toward the rear door. She opened it with her back to it, and went to the parking lot backward.
She shut the door, and exhaled. She didn’t realize she’d held her breath.
She collapsed in a quivery mass on the hood of her car.
“Found it, didja?”
The ruined, raking voice jarred her and she yelped. She spun but couldn’t see anyone. A wheezed whistle of laughter broke into a hacking cough, and she followed it with her eyes.
A homeless man sat beside the garbage bin, dirt-smudged so opaque his skin color seemed like barbecue ash. Matted hair clumped in ropey tangles and webbed like cocoons, his scalp flaked in oily yellow floes working their way up the gray and filth-colored hanks of hair. The mass on his head poured down the sides of a cracked, reddened