PHOBOPHOBIAS final for KINDLE Read online

  She sat in her car listening to the engine ticking over and contemplated the house where she’d spent her formative years. Of course, she’d visited her parents fairly recently, so Lorraine wasn’t surprised to see that it hadn’t changed, but they could have paid someone to do some maintenance on the place. Guess they were just too old, too tired and too disappointed with life to give a damn.

  After locking her car, Lorraine walked down the concrete path to the front door, fumbling her keys out of her purse. Her heart was pumping, adrenalin coursing through her veins. Why? She couldn’t figure it out. Why the fear response? Maybe too many bad memories? But her charmingly disaffected, fear-fuelled childhood hadn’t been that bad, had it?

  She hesitated before putting the first key into the rusty screen door. Struggling to hold it open (the hinges needed oiling, that’s for sure), Lorraine opened the weather-beaten front door and came into the hallway, which led down to the kitchen. On the left, there was a wide arched entry into the living room. It was like a time capsule: there was her mother’s beloved sapphire blue Indian rug decorated with flying birds and flowers, the turquoise blue couch and armchair, the modern paintings on the wall and, the real talking point of the house, a large fossil stone mantelpiece that took up the whole western wall of the living room, with a large dark green slate platform in front of the fireplace.

  Nothing out of place. All dusted and neat. Empty of life. Totally, utterly depressing.

  Lorraine turned and went down to the kitchen, stopping at the hall closet to turn on the electricity. She heard the hum of the fridge starting up and it was a strangely comforting sound. She nervously walked past the door to the basement on her left, turning to look down the opposite hallway where the three bedrooms and the bathroom lay. All the floors, with the exception of the kitchen and the family room, were highly polished wood. She remembered sliding around these same floors in her socks when she was a kid, pretending to be an ice skater and driving her mom nuts.

  Maybe she should sell the place. Even in today’s market, she’d get a fairly good price. It would give her a bit of a nest egg. Some travelling money, so she could get out of Washington State and far away from Seattle, where the ex-asshole still lived. Maybe southern Californian Palm trees. That would be nice.

  Lorraine poked around the house, discovering that all her parents’ possessions were in good order. She folded up their clothes (keeping a few items of her mother’s costume jewellery and some of her outfits for sentimental reasons) and then packed the rest of it off to the ‘Sally Ann’, as her Dad always used to call the Salvation Army. She couldn’t bring herself to move into her parents’ room, so she took over her old bedroom, the smallest one with the pink walls and the white and gold four poster bedroom and desk set. The creepy doll nightlight that her mother had given her was still there, complete with dusty pale blue crinoline dress and starring blue eyes.

  God how she hated that lamp.

  Every night Lorraine would turn the doll’s head right around Exorcist-style to the wall so the doll wouldn’t look at her while she slept. And every day, her mother would come into her bedroom to clean and turn the head right around again, thinking that her daughter had lost her beans. After all, how could anyone be frightened of such a pretty doll?

  The one place that she didn’t check out immediately was the basement. She’d always hated it. It was still its unfinished shadowy state, with the concrete floors and bare wood wall frames and ceilings, the better to hid the face-eating spiders that she was convinced lay nestled between the rafters. Unfortunately, Lorraine came from a family of scientists and artists, so they couldn’t understand her morbid and unreasonable fear of going down to the place where her mother sat happily for hours drawing portraits and her father read his tattered collection of sci-fi and fantasy magazines, lying on the bare mattress of one of the old bunk beds that didn’t fit upstairs.

  And then there was THE ROOM, a locked storeroom in the far corner of the basement that her family weren’t allowed to have access to. Whatever lay behind the locked door belonged to the owners of the house, as her family merely rented their home for many years. When she was a kid, Lorraine would lie in her bed for hours, wondering what was going on down there. What if there was a dead body in the room, lying in an ebony coffin? Some poor soul horribly murdered by their landlord, who she’d never met, but was sure had to be a weirdo. And what if the dead body wasn’t dead? What if it was a vampire, or a werewolf, or a zombie?

  Upstairs, it was perfectly modern, sunny and cheerful, beautifully decorated by her mother, but downstairs lay all sorts of terrors. Maybe aliens had taken up residence underneath the floor by the bunk beds, issuing forth to drill her father in the back of the neck to deposit a mind-controlling crystal as he snoozed in the downstairs cool of a late summer afternoon, a la the 1950s, black and white, sci-fi paranoia-fest, Invaders From Mars. Like countless other kids in America who were persuaded by the film to think that their parents had been taken over by Martians, Lorraine checked her father’s neck for evidence of an extra-terrestrial wound every time he came up from the basement. Not an easy task, as he was six feet tall and she was only a pint-sized seven-year-old.

  What if the face-eating spiders (creatures that a friend of hers in Brownies had sworn had killed her cousin while she was sleeping in her grandmother’s basement near Fairchild Air Force Base) came out from the corners, crept up the stairs and found their way to Lorraine’s bed, nibbling Lorraine’s face off, but not killing her. Faceless in Gaza! She’d never get a date to the High School Prom without a face!

  What if a sinkhole of quicksand opened up underneath the dusty pink picnic table where Lorraine’s mother laboured on her artwork, slowly swallowing her up while her loving daughter was at school, no one hearing her mother’s plaintive cries for help, which is exactly what happened to one of the hapless white hunters in Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan series.

  Basically, although basements (and spiders, and aliens, and quicksand, etc. etc.) were to be feared, the real problem with Lorraine was her over-active imagination, at least that’s what her mother told her again and again.

  Eventually, Lorraine’s parents bought their house, but for reasons that were never explained, The Room remained locked and sealed.

  One day, after visiting a real estate agent to put the house on the market, Lorraine decided it was time to face her fears. She hadn’t been in the basement for years, but she had to make sure that all was well down there for any potential buyers. After bolstering her courage up with a couple cups of coffee, she opened the basement door and turned on the lights. She could see from the top of the stairs that the dusty pink picnic table was still in place. She walked down and her heart started pumping again, just like the day of her arrival. How many dreams of this dank horrible place had she experienced since she’d left to go to the University of Washington in Seattle all those years ago? The leaving of this place physically didn’t mean that it had left her mind. It haunted her for decades.

  In additional to the bare light bulbs, daylight filtered in from the dirty windows. It was a big space and it was a shame that Lorraine’s parents never had the money to finish the basement. There was even a brick fireplace in front of the picnic table where her mother used to draw.

  It was cool down there and she walked towards the bunk beds, determined to check out that damn mysterious room that had caused her such nightmares. It was still there, still locked, still impervious to the world. She looked down at her Dad’s ‘Sullivan Road Industrial Park’ key ring festooned with every conceivable useful and not so useful key and started to try each one of them in the lock. Why the hell her Dad needed nearly twenty keys was beyond her. Finally Lorraine came across one that looked different than the others, smaller and older. There was a stamp on the key: a griffin, the legendary creature with the body, tail, and back legs of a lion; the head and wings of an eagle and an eagle’s talons as its front feet.

  That’s the one, she though
t. Her heart leapt in her chest and she thought how ironic it would be if she had a heart attack right then and there, just because of her stupid basement phobia. Lorraine put the key in the lock and tried to turn it, but it was very stiff. She wiggled it around, making a bit of noise and that’s when she heard it.

  A sound. In the long-locked basement room. The sound of something shifting inside.

  Goosebumps ran riot over Lorraine’s body. All her bodily reactions said “flee!” but her mind, stubbornly attempting to be rational, said “it’s probably a rat” which was bad enough, but not (hopefully) life-threatening. Her parents had lived in this house for forty years, so there couldn’t be anything really dangerous in there, or they would have found out about it years ago. Right?

  Her hands shaking now, Lorraine tried to turn the key again, but it was still stuck. She removed the key and beat a hasty retreat upstairs, locking the basement door behind her. She walked into the sunny kitchen and stood by the sink, still freaked out by the sound inside the room. But she had to know. She had to face her phobia. She had to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. Screw the monster in the basement room and the horse he rode in on.

  She checked the cupboard under the sink, but then Lorraine remembered that her mother insisted that her father keep all his handyman stuff in the double garage, so she went out there and searched the shelves on the back wall, where she eventually found an old greasy can of WD-40. She marched back into the house and down the stairs, but not before grabbing a flashlight, just in case the light bulb in the mystery room wasn’t working, if there was one at all, that is.

  Lorraine squirted the oil through the attached red straw into the lock and put the can down on the floor. She struggled with the lock again and was finally rewarded with a snick of the key turning. She pushed on the door, but it was still stuck. “Fuck!” she said under her breath, “fucking open, you fucking monster door!”

  Lorraine’s wish was granted after she put her shoulder into it and the door popped inwards. She stumbled in and grabbed the flashlight out of her pocket. She was right, the light bulb wasn’t working. And disappointingly, the room seemed empty, except for what looked like a wicker Victorian toy baby carriage in the corner. She shone the light all over the room and (with visions of the face-eating spiders dropping on the back of her neck) up in the rafters.

  Nothing. Not even dust. Not even cobwebs.

  She walked over to the baby carriage and peeped in. She squealed in alarm and jumped back, nearly dropping the flashlight. There was a dead baby in the carriage! She edged closer and shone the light inside. It wasn’t a baby. It was almost something worse: a mummified dead cat lay curled up on the moldy mattress, paw in mouth, for all the world looking like it had tried to eat itself as it starved to death in the hellhole of the locked room.

  Lorraine shuddered, but she was determined to search further. She noticed an alcove in the far left hand corner of the room. Since the back of the room seemed to be level with the walls of the basement outside, this alcove looked like it had been dug into the ground outside the walls of the house.

  Lorraine moved forward, wondering why she hadn’t just paid a handyman to come down here and do this. Well, because she didn’t have much money for one thing, but now she definitely thought that hiring some hunky guy to do her dirty work would have been worth a few weeks of beans on toast.

  She stood opposite the alcove now, shining her light into it, marveling at the fact that it wasn’t just some kind of shallow opening. Instead it was as deep as a hallway. What was in there? Lorraine listened intently, but she couldn’t hear a peep. The shifting sounds must have been her imagination.

  Hey, maybe this was a tunnel to a fallout shelter! She remembered back when she was seven years old, begging her Dad to build the family a shelter in the back yard during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said in his rational, scientific way: “What’s the point, Lorraine? So we go into a fallout shelter. We’d never be able to come out because of the radiation, so we’d have to live in there for decades before it was safe to emerge. Much better to die in seconds in a nuclear holocaust than suffer for years starving in a shelter, going quietly insane.” Needless to say, this was not exactly the comfort that Lorraine was looking for.

  The idea of her house having a secret fallout shelter was irresistible. It could potentially bump up the asking price as well. Lorraine cautiously moved forward, into the darkness of the alcove.

  There was a corridor stretching beyond, dingy and miasmic. She followed it for a few yards and then came up against another door. Lorraine searched through her Dad’s keys again and found an even older one that looked like the ticket.

  This key slid in like butter and turned easily. Flashlight at the ready, Lorraine again used her shoulder to push the inner door. It flew open; she staggered in and found herself in a massive, brightly lit, white tiled room, the walls lined with large crystal tubes. There was a Perspex bed-sized table at the left of the room, complete with a strange mechanism over the head of the bed that looked like a fine, surgical drill.

  The door slammed automatically behind her. The flashlight fell from Lorraine’s nerveless fingers, a chill came over her body and she began to tremble uncontrollably.

  People were strapped inside the tubes; standing propped up, eyes closed, very obviously dead from their coloration. Lorraine walked closer and was shocked to recognize some of them. Neighbors who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, never to be seen again (although at the time, it was always assumed that they had simple done a midnight flit, fleeing bad debts, or the taxman, or other financial horrors). There were the Rosenblads. He was a dentist and their house was the only one on the street with a pool in the back yard. There was Mrs Hauglon, Lorraine’s busty fourth grade teacher. One of the few that she’d actually liked.

  Dead.

  They were all dead.

  Lorraine was horrified to spot her mother in one of the tubes, although she was supposed to have been incinerated in a car crash three weeks ago. She ran over to the tube, but there was no way of opening it. However, for her poor mother, rescue had come far too late anyway.

  Overcome by her devastating discovery, Lorraine sank to her knees in front of her mother’s tube, crying and pounding the crystal walls, trying to make some sense of the whole macabre scene. Eventually, she gave up and turned around. She was startled to see a different kind of crystalline globe-like object on a pedestal to her right. Inside was a silver and green octopus-like creature with a humanoid face. Its emotionless black eyes stared back at her. Her mind did a fast rewind to Invaders from Mars. This creature was exactly like the Martian Mastermind who was plotting the takeover of Earth! She nearly had a seizure right then and there, expecting the Mastermind’s large, bulky, almond-eyed, green cronies to materialize and start drilling into the back of her neck, but then she noticed that the creature was motionless. She edged closer and saw to her relief that it appeared to be a painted, plaster cast, fake monster.

  That’s when Lorraine spotted another door, barely visible in the corner beyond the Perspex bed. There was no door knob, just a cleverly embedded silver button. Figuring there was no turning back now, Lorraine pressed the button.

  The door opened and she walked through to another brightly lit room, however, this one was the mirror image of her father’s den upstairs, complete with desk and packed bookcases, with the added luxuries of a small fridge, stove and a comfy camp bed in the corner.

  A man was sitting at her father’s desk and Lorraine wished she’d kept hold of the heavy flashlight from the other room. Then he turned around in his chair and exclaimed: “It took you long enough. I thought you were never going to arrive.”

  It took all of Lorraine’s control not to pee her panties, as she realized that her father was not dead. He was still alive, living down here in the fallout shelter of her dreams.

  “Dad, what the hell is going on? I thought you were dead! What happened to Mom?” Lorraine yelled.
She wanted to rush towards him and give him a big hug, but the disturbing memory of the dead bodies in the outer room kept her at bay.

  Her father stood up and raised his arms up in an almost heavenly salute. “I’ve been waiting for this moment to show you my work,” he said. “For all these years, I’ve been working on a project for my Martian masters. I was sworn to secrecy, Lorraine. They promised me that they wouldn’t hurt you if I did their will.”

  “Dad, what have you done?” Lorraine asked.

  “Let me show you. It’s amazing,” her father replied with a gleeful smile.

  He led her out to the outer room. He gestured to all the people in tubes and said, “Under the instructions of my Martian masters, I tried to implant the precious mind-controlling crystal in our neighbors’ brains. Unfortunately, I had to invent the crystal delivery system machine myself, as the Martians kept their machines on their spaceships. It’s been a bit hit and miss. As you can see, I’m still perfecting the technology. But I’ll get there in the end, don’t you worry. They’re all vacuumed packed in the tubes in case the Martians can revive them at a later date.”

  There were a lot of things that Lorraine had thought were odd about her parents over the years: their total inability to explain sexual matters to their teenaged child, their lack of outward emotion, their sometimes strange financial choices, but nothing on the planet could have prepared Lorraine for her father’s confession to being a serial killer. However, it was quite evident that he was also totally, utterly psychotic. If anyone had a chance at an M’Naughton’s plea for mental disease or defect, it was her Dad.

  “Dad, this is so fucking wrong. You’ve got to come with me now. We have to get you some help. It will be OK, honestly. I’ll make sure that you get a good lawyer.”