Nell Read Online Free Page A

crawl. The ceiling was low, with old pipes that crossed just above her head, growing cobwebs and dust jungles in spite of all her efforts to clean. It was not a modern basement, and the floor was cracked here and there and the furnace was monstrous and creepy and there was another room leading off the main room, a room that didn’t even have a cement floor, a room with one lightbulb in the middle. Nell hadn’t gone into that dirt-floored room for years. She pretended it didn’t exist. The dark door loomed behind the furnace like the portal to hell. She was always amazed that her children liked playing in the basement. She could scarcely bring herself to stay down there long enough to do the laundry.
    Just last night, on her way down the stairs with a load of laundry in the willow basket, Nell had noticed in one dark corner of the basement an unusual and foreboding object: a bundle of what? Old clothes? A sheet? Blood-covered fabric?
    “Jesus God!” Nell had shouted, dropping the basket and rushing back up the stairs. “Jeremy! Hannah! Help! Come here! I think we have to call the police!”
    Her children had come thumping down the stairs at once. “What’s wrong, Mom?” they had asked.
    “I think there’s a—oh, sweeties, I don’t want to scare you, but I think there’s something dead in our basement.”
    Jeremy looked at Hannah. Hannah looked at Jeremy.
    “Where?” Jeremy asked.
    “In the corner across from your playroom. By the door.”
    “I, um, don’t think it’s exactly a, um, dead thing, Mom,” Jeremy said.
    “Do you know what it is?” Nell asked, aghast.
    They had known what it was. They had heard at school, from an older child, that if you went to a darkened room and put ketchup on a mirror, a ghost would appear. The ghost of the house would think the ketchup was blood and his spirit would be summoned up. Several nights ago Jeremy and Hannah had sneaked a sixteen-ounce bottle of ketchup to the basement and spread the mirror with ketchup. And spread the mirror with ketchup—they had not realized how ketchup flowed on a surface that did not absorb. In desperation, trying to clean up the mess, they had grabbed whatever was at hand: Hannah’s dress-up clothes, some old baby doll clothes, and a sheet.
    “I have told you never to take food to the basement!” Nell had screamed, freaking out. “Food in the basement will bring rats! God. I’ve told you never to take food to the basement.” Her children looked at each other, conspirators’ looks, looks that indicated they were now going to have to deal with a madwoman’s raving with their superior patience. “ I’m serious about this! If you leave food in the basement, rats and mice and moles and God knows what will come. You aren’t taking me seriously. Oh, I just hope you wake up in the night with a rat in bed with you, it would serve you right. No wonder you had a mouse in your umbrella!”
    She had marched them down the stairs with a black plastic trash bag and made them clean up the mess while she loomed over them, threatening them with rat bites and disease and finally the definite possibility that they would be orphaned because if she did see a rat in the basement while doing the laundry, she would die on the spot of a heart attack, from terror.
    Just cleaning up the mess was lesson enough for the children: the ketchup had congealed on the clothes in disgusting sticky splotches that not even they wanted to touch.
    “I will never eat ketchup again in my life,” Hannah had said quietly.
    Nell had made them remain in the basement protecting her while she did the laundry.
    But this afternoon she would throw open the hatchway door that led up from the basement to the backyard. That would let the warm April air in to freshen the basement—and give any scrambling little live thing the opportunity to scurry up and out while Nell and her children cleaned. She would sleep better tonight; she always slept better after the spring-cleaning of the