Chapter 13 - I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement.

It took a little persuasion, but I eventually got Brian to agree to head down to the basement with me.

I admit, I was actually curious to see what it was like down there. The flip side to a love of beautiful architecture is an insatiable desire to investigate the less beautiful underpinnings of the same buildings. Whatever it is that holds them up. The ‘bones’ of the building.

The bones aren’t usually as attractive as the outward face of a building, but you can tell a lot about an edifice by looking at the foundations. Is it just a pretty nothing, thrown up quickly, but without taking care to make sure it’s built to last? Did the builders use cheap materials and not really care how it was built? Is it thrown together in a muddle without any real, coherent planning? Or did they put real effort into the structure, with the clear intent of creating something that would last for a long, long time? It was those types of buildings - the ones designed with longevity and purpose - that turn out the most sexy, if you ask me. So, I was really hoping that MY building would be one of the latter sort. The kind of building whose very roots are sensual and strong and make you want to live inside them.

When I mentioned some of this stuff to Brian on our way down, I swear I could literally hear his eyes rolling into the back of his head.

“What?” I asked, as I tried my best to sound offended.

He laughed quietly to himself before he turned and spoke to me. “If Wikipedia was a person, it would look like you.”

I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t exactly a compliment, but I guess I do have a tendency to randomly spout off facts I have learned along the way. I’ve always done it though. It’s definitely something Daph gets great pleasure in teasing me about. The more I think about it, the more I was sure those two would get on - once my Eggy got past the whole agoraphobic thing.

Right away, though, I was reassured by the bones of this building. Brian led me down to the main floor and unlocked a door to the old Pizza place that had occupied the western side of the building. I myself had never been in Monte Cello’s Pizza back when it was open but it looked like it was a fun little space and I wondered why it had closed. Brian ignored the empty restaurant, though, making his way into the small but adequate kitchen area and then unlocking another door hidden in the back that revealed a poorly lit stairwell leading down into the depths of the city’s underground.

The walls here were plain, uncovered, red brick. The wooden risers of the steps were solid, looked like they were made of some old-growth wood, and had clearly held up well to the ravages of time. And even though we were in a basement passage, the builder hadn’t skimped on headroom so it didn’t feel too cramped. Yep, this was my kind of building - I could already tell.

It was a little less dingy and had fewer cobwebs than the staircase we’d found upstairs, but it wasn’t exactly clean and I could tell my OCD Buddy wasn’t nearly as sanguine about walking down those steps as he tried to pretend. I heard Brian take a deep breath as he pulled a wad of tissues from his pocket and used them to open the door to the basement itself. Once the door was open he shoved his hands back deeply into his pockets. The guy was a nervous wreck, his shoulders were practically touching his ears they were so tightly hunched.

“Are you gonna be okay?” I asked worriedly.

This was a big deal for poor Eggy and I could see from the way he was holding his body so tightly that he was feeling extremely anxious about the whole thing. As I waited for him to answer, I let out a small cough . . . the dust down here wasn’t even that bad, and I’d taken an allergy pill which should be kicking in soon, but my chest was still aggravated from my asthma attack upstairs.

Brian ignored my question - another coping mechanism of his that I had noticed and stored away to discuss with Daphne later that night.

“Are YOU going to be okay?” He asked. “Maybe you should take a puff from your inhaler before we go any further.”

He stood there watching me until I reached into my pocket and pulled out my asthma medication. His eyes were on me the whole time - even as I shook the damn thing - as though he was worried I wouldn’t do it right or something. Who knew what was going on in that beautiful brain of his.

“All done.” I grinned as I waved my little blue pump in his face like the annoying brat that I was. “Now, you wanna lead the way?”

He thought about it for a moment and then nodded his head.

The room was dark and I didn’t even think to check if there were any working lights down there, I just pulled out my phone and switched on my trusty flashlight app. Brian huffed at me with amusement and took a few steps over to the wall where he flipped a switch and turned on the lights for the whole basement. Okay, so here’s me feeling embarrassed that I was secretly hoping it would be all dark and scary and 19th Century romantic down here, and my Eggy would have to cling to me for comfort in the dark and all, only to find that, yes, we were still living in the 21st Century so of course there are lights. But whatever. I can fantasize about anything I want in my own mind, right?

The basement was obviously unfinished. There was some rough framing put in to shore up the old brick foundations, and some steel support posts that seemed to have been added more recently, probably to bring it up to code. The floor was rough concrete. But, except for that and what looked like some high-end HVAC equipment, it was just another old, dank, dusty basement. At least it was cleaner than the hidden staircase, though, or my OCD Man would have been freaking out even more than he already was.

“God, there’s so much shit down here,” Brian signed loudly as he took in the stacks of boxes and old furniture that filled most of the room.

I wandered around a bit while Brian headed straight over to one particular set of stacks. I immediately saw that my assumptions were proved right - this building was built to last. The materials they’d used were of excellent quality and, even though they were over a hundred years old, seemed to have held up remarkably well. Good, solid brickwork. Large, old-growth timber beams in the ceiling. Yep, it definitely had good ‘bones’.

Over near the eastern end of the foundations, I could see the outline of where an old door had been bricked up. There was a matching, bricked-in, window next to it. This must have been the ‘rear entrance’ back when the building was first erected. Judging by the fact that this door wasn’t all that elaborate, though, I figured that the big, main door on the floor above - on what was NOW the ground floor - must always have been intended to be the main entrance. This indicated to me that the land here might have originally been much more steeply sloped than it was these days - something that I remember my professor talking about in class, along with how large swaths of Pittsburgh had been flattened out to make the downtown area less hilly - a fact which comported with what Brian had told me earlier about how the street level had once been lower. And that also explained why there was a ‘Pittsburgh Toilet’ and a utility sink installed just to the left of the old door, so that workers and others coming in from the less than hospitable muck of Pittsburgh’s environs of the day could relieve themselves and clean up before going upstairs. Typical Pittsburgh construction, obviously.

As I wandered around, I noticed fairly quickly that even though there were lots of boxes down here, they all seemed to be neatly labelled, and at least cursorily organized, so hopefully it shouldn’t take us too long to find what we were looking for. I watched out of the corner of my eye as Brian kicked at one stack of boxes blocking his path, hoping that would be enough to move them and that he wouldn’t have to actually touch anything. Sadly that wasn’t the case.

“Fuck,” he cursed loudly, the frustration etched so clearly and painfully on his face.

“I can do it,” I suggested; I had planned on doing it all anyway as I really hadn’t expected Brian to touch anything down here in the first place.

He huffed loudly. Silently resenting how much he was struggling. “No . . . it’s fine.”

I watched proudly as he used some clean tissues he’d pulled out from his never ending stash and used them to help him turn the boxes around until he could read what was on them. It didn’t take long to find a box marked ‘Building Repairs’.

“Ah ha. I think this might be what we’re looking for,” Brian announced as he lifted the box up with a slight grunt and brought it over to me.

I took pity on his tissue clad hands and tore the tape off the box myself. It was full to the brim with yellowing papers, but after only a couple of minutes of digging around, I found what we were looking for. There, in my hands, was another set of building plans - these much older and looking like they’d been hand drawn - this time including the secret staircase leading off the boardroom.

“Look, look, we found it!” I grinned, waving the papers in Brian’s face.

Using his tissue hand protection, Brian took the yellowed old building plans out of my hands and laid them out over the top of a neighboring stack of boxes so he could examine them more closely. I looked on from the other side, which meant I was forced to read everything upside down, but that happened to be another of my wondrous talents, so it didn’t bother me. There on the plans you could clearly see the demarcation of the hidden staircase, marked ‘Private Stairs’ on the plans. It showed that the staircase did indeed go all the way from the top floor down to the basement, which at the time had been the ‘Ground Floor’.

“Hmmm. If these plans are correct, then the staircase would open out somewhere over here . . .” I surmised, moving towards the westernmost apex of the building’s foundations to try and find the bottom of the missing stairs. “That’s odd. It seems like the basement ends here,” I said, patting the bricks of what looked like a solid wall, “but there should be at least another four or five meters of space down here. You’d expect the basement foundations to mirror the shape of the building up above, right? So, why is there a wall HERE? Why doesn’t the basement carry on to the end of the building’s western triangle point?”

“Beats me,” Brian sighed as he looked around the room as if mentally measuring it. “Hey, can we maybe go figure this shit out upstairs . . . I never really liked it down here.”

I could see how on edge the basement made Brian, and I wanted nothing more than to go straight back upstairs with him because, clearly, he had some unpleasant memories of this place. And that was what I was just about to do when something about the brick wall I had been standing against caught my eye. I’m not sure what it was exactly - but the bricks weren’t completely aligned and that was really grinding at my artistic mind. The craftsmanship of this building was incredible, so the shoddy brickwork stuck out - to me at least. Maybe to a normal human being it wouldn’t be noticeable at all. I simply couldn’t leave an anomaly like that be, however.

“Yeah, sure. Why don’t you head on up . . . I’ll join you in a minute.”

Poor Egbert didn’t move; he just folded his arms across his chest and let out a really loud sigh. “Why ‘in a minute’ and not right now?” he asked, undoubtedly frustrated with me and my shenanigans.

I pointed to the odd brick wall. “I just wanna take a closer look at that.”

With my supervising angel watching over me, I began to feel along the length of the wall. I wasn’t sure what I thought I might find by doing that - it wasn’t as though I would come across something as crazy (and exciting) as a time portal that would suddenly whisk me away to another time period. Fuck, how crazy would that be? I laughed quietly to myself as I continued to press against the brickwork. You could clearly feel the demarcation line where the smoother, normal brickwork seemed to jut out a couple of extra centimeters. It wasn’t really that much, but it still didn’t make sense when everything else around us had been crafted so perfectly, with exact plumb lines maintained at all times. I let my fingers glide up and down this line of offset bricks as they zig-zagged upwards and confirmed that the break went all the way from floor to ceiling. One of the bricks, however, stood out even further than all the rest - this one at about chest height - making it possible to run my fingers all around the entire outline of the dark red building block. There was just something about this wall that didn’t make any sense.

I’m not sure what induced me to try and press on that one brick. Maybe it was just my inherent sense of order exerting its influence or something, but I felt like I needed to push that one out-of-alignment brick back into place, you know? It was wrong. It was messing up my whole building. You can’t have one offset brick maring the beautiful bones of an architectural wonder. It was obscene.

So, I shoved at the brick with the palm of my hand and . . . It moved!

There was some initial resistance, of course, but I’d felt just the tiniest hint of movement so I pushed even harder and, to my astonishment, the entire brick slid inward creating a brick-shaped indentation in the wall. Intrigued, I just kept pushing it, further and further, thinking it would eventually stop when it hit a solid foundation or the surrounding dirt and rock that the building was supposedly built upon, but it didn’t stop. Apparently, there was just empty space behind that one brick, and it kept sliding further and further back until I heard an audible ‘click’. The sound surprised me and I let go of the brick, which popped back out a centimeter or two with another metallic click before stopping short of being flush with the other bricks. And, at the same time as the second click sounded off, that entire offset section of the wall shuddered and then started to swing away from me, leaving a gaping hole in the previously solid expanse.

“Shit, Sunshine. Quit breaking my damn building, will you?” Brian complained as he hurried over to stand behind me so he could look at whatever I’d done now.

“I can’t seem to help myself. I’m a menace. You’d better stop me before I knock the whole place over,” I bemoaned my actions as I stepped back away from the dark entrance to whatever lay behind the fake wall. “This does explain why we couldn’t find the bottom of your hidden stairs, though. I’m assuming they open out onto whatever’s on the other side of this wall. But this room wasn’t on either set of blueprints.”

I could physically feel Brian shudder beside me as he looked into the deep, pitch dark hole.

“I swear to God, if there are bats or ghosts or any of that shit living in there I’m gonna be pissed.” Brian muttered, glaring at the opening as if it where the Hellmouth itself. “You just HAD to go and find another mystery, didn’t you? As if one secret staircase wasn’t enough? You have to find a Pit of Despair in my fucking basement? It was bad enough as it was. I hate it down here. Always have. Always will. And now there’s this to add to it? Shit. Can we go back upstairs now? Please?”

“It’s not a Pit of Despair, Eggy, it’s just an unused room,” I tried to reassure him as I pushed the fake brick doorway a little wider, revealing even more darkness behind it.

“Maybe not to you it isn’t. But it is for me.” He hesitated a moment, as if debating with himself whether or not to speak, but apparently deciding to continue. “I hate the dark almost as much as I hate the idea of germs. I . . . I used to dread being sent down here . . .”

The way he’d said ‘sent down here’ sounded so ominous, it even caused goosebumps to raise on my skin. “You mean as a kid? Why would anyone send you down here?” I asked, not sure where he was going with this.

“Yeah . . . My gra . . . Don . . . he didn’t like it when I would get upset. Which, when I first came to live with him, happened a lot . . .” He cleared his throat and I could hear the sadness in his voice. “He used to make fun of me when I’d get sad and cry about my parents. He called me a ‘sissy boy’ and said he’d ‘give me something to cry about’. Then, if I didn’t stop, he’d shove me down here in the basement and tell me I could come up when I finally ‘grew some balls and stopped snivelling like a fucking baby’. So . . . yeah . . . I spent a fair share of my time down here. Of course, that’s before I had the lighting put in and all, so . . . Let’s just leave it at I just don’t like the dark. Or basements. Or dirt.”

Brian’s explanation tapered off, leaving me feeling lost and sad and so enraged at this long-dead, abusive grandfather that I felt like I was about to explode. How dare that old prick traumatize a poor kid - his own flesh and blood - like that. For what? Being sad that he’d lost his parents? That was fifteen ways of fucked. It did go a long way to explaining some of the reasons behind my Eggy’s many psychological hang ups, though. Shit, with a monster like Donal raising him, it was surprising he wasn’t even more fucked up than he seemed, to be honest. It also left me wanting more than anything to wrap him up in my arms and comfort him, which I couldn’t do for obvious reasons, and fuck Donal for that too. If I ever came across that old man’s ghost I would definitely have a few choice words for the fucker.

Thinking about taking out my ire on the man’s ghost, however, might have been a mistake. It seemed my wayward conjecture had conjured a ready apparition right out thin air when, a moment later, we both almost jumped out of our skins as a dull clattering sound emerged from out of the fathomless blackness we’d been staring into. I was momentarily frozen in place, not sure whether to just run or to try and reach in, grab the door, and pull it closed so as to barricade ourselves from whatever was coming for us. Meanwhile, Eggy had squeaked a tiny moan of protest - a fucking adorable sound, might I add, not that I would comment on that fact for fear of somehow challenging the poor thing’s manhood - and I could almost hear his bones chattering as he started to quake with trepidation. Of course, this had an invigorating effect on me, and I immediately realized I needed to quench my own sense of fear so I could be the rational one here.

Obviously, we were both overreacting. There was probably nothing to fear from whatever was back there. It was more the unknown and the surprise that had thrown me than anything. Logically, I knew there was no such thing as ghosts; there would no doubt be some completely reasonable explanation for whatever had made that noise, right? I just had to man up and face it and then reassure poor Egbert before he totally freaked out here.

Before I could respond to my Eggy’s fears, though, the source of the noises coming from the room appeared, and I almost laughed at how ridiculous I had been acting a second before.

It wasn’t a ghost, it was just a curious feline who’d apparently made his way through whatever secret passages he’d discovered and come out the other end to find his master. Poor Bill was covered in cobwebs and dust but looked thoroughly pleased with his adventures nonetheless. He sidled up to me, purring with happiness, and snaked his body around my ankles, leaving a contrail of cobwebs on the leg of my borrowed sweatpants in the process. It wasn’t till our dear William began to head towards Brian’s ankle that his person finally came to life and started to back away from the dirty kitty.

“Oh no,” Brian wagged his finger at Bill and continued to back away. “If you think you’re coming ANYWHERE near me looking like THAT, you have another thing coming,” he scolded the poor cat, who, strangely seemed to sense his master’s distress and started purring away at him in kitty language like he was apologizing for his wrongdoings.

“At least we finally found, Bill . . .” I offered, bending down to pick up the poor puss before he threatened Brian with another dirt attack.

Brian scoffed loudly and turned around, heading towards the exit of the basement. “First it was a freaking cat, now I’ve also got a resident brat, and they appear to be conspiring together to destroy my entire house. I can’t get rid of either of them. I’m starting to think I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed at all today,” he announced, stomping up the stairs and intentionally shutting off the light so as to leave me and my kitty burden alone in the darkness. “Well, are you two trouble makers coming, or what?” He yelled from halfway up the stairs.