The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley [Mosley, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780786262427
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2004-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

15

After I’d locked him in, I brought my prisoner some water and a dry ham-salad sandwich that I made from white bread and a can off the shelf. There was a small space between the bottom of the cell door and the floor. This space was large enough to pass the tin plate and squat glass through.

“Lights out,” I said at the hatch.

The look in his eyes was both frightened and resolved.

I pulled the string on the lightbulb. I decided to put a lock on the hatch door in the morning. For one night in the hole, he could go without security.

I didn’t sleep much that night. Fidgety and nervous, I broke out into sweats every now and then. Sounds that could have been the hatch to the basement drove me from the bed a half-dozen times. I looked out the window and once even ventured into the yard. I didn’t lift the cellar door though. I didn’t want to show Bennet how scared I was.

He was locked up in a nine-foot cell and I was still afraid of him. Actually the fear started when the lock engaged. He was empowered by the fact of his helplessness. And I was at risk. I lay in bed worrying about kids sneaking into the cellar and finding Bennet. Then they’d tell their parents and then the police would come . . .

One of the few times I fell off to sleep, I dreamed that I was in a courtroom. Lainie and Mr. Gurgel and Ira Minder testified that I was a bank robber. They said that it was armed robbery because I had carried my pocketknife to work and, somehow, the pocketknife turned into the .22 rifle that was in a box on the shelf in my father’s library. The judge found me guilty. I was convicted, sentenced, and put into Bennet’s cell. But it was much smaller than nine by nine, more like three by three. I couldn’t stand up and there was barely any light. A wave of despair so profound went through me that I was standing next to the bed before I came awake. I wanted to run. I wanted to cry. I definitely wanted Anniston Bennet out of my life.

I roamed the rooms of the house after that, going from floor to floor trying to figure out how I could beat this thing. I wanted a drink but my stomach and intestines were roiling. I couldn’t even make out words in the books I paged through.

I was up in the old fortress, my mother’s sewing room, when the sun hit my great-grandfather’s old oaks. Amber, orange, a hint of yellow, and deep-blue strips made the horizon line. They were the colors of majesty’s approach. I was arrested by the promise of morning light. I imagined those deer I had seen all dewy and shivering in the morning chill. The night was behind them, and if the air smelled clean and clear of danger, they marked another night gone with hunger and thirst for the next.

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