Snow Day: a Novella by Maurer Dan

Author:Maurer, Dan [Maurer, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Rapids Press
Published: 2013-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

7

CLANG, CLANG... CLANG, CLANG...

Tommy looked at me. He heard it too and knew what it meant.

“Your Ma’s calling, Billy.”

“Who, Tommy?”

“I... I... didn’t d-do nothing wr-wrong, Billy,” Tommy whined. “I just w-wanted to play.”

“Tommy...”

“It was ol’ George,” he finally said. “He did it. Stay away from ol’ George.” And then he started to cry again, whimpering. “I just wanted to play,” he mumbled through the tears. “...just wanted to play...”

Clang, clang... Clang, clang... Clang –

The sound of the bell ceased. My mother must have had enough.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

Just above my head, there was a footstep and a floor board creaked.

Tommy stopped his crying, frightened into silence. We both looked up at the exposed beams and boards that made up the cellar ceiling, as if trying to see through the dusty floor boards. I lifted the lantern to look and saw some granules of dust fall. Tommy crept closer and stood beside me, listening.

There it was again, a step and a creak; then again. They were tentative at first, then a little more certain. The footsteps were slowly moving from the back of the house toward the front, in the direction of the cellar stairs. I turned to run out the way I came in, but Tommy grabbed me, his hand pistoning out in a flash to grip my forearm.

“No, not that way. He’ll catch you.”

The footsteps stopped. At the top of the cellar stairs, a door opened slowly, its rusted hinges complaining with a soft, sputtering squeal.

Tommy quietly hurried me to another part of the cellar, partitioned off by a long row of floor to ceiling shelves cluttered with old paint cans, rags, and dusty boxes. He led me around the shelves, past a dormant furnace, an old washer-dryer unit, past a paint-splattered utility sink to a secluded back corner of the cellar. As the lantern’s light touched the wall there, I saw a set of concrete stairs leading up to large metal storm doors. They were double doors, the kind that opened upward as much as they opened out, like in the storm cellar in the Wizard of Oz, only these were made of heavy metal, not the wood kind that Auntie Em huddled behind during the twister. I looked at the slide bolt on the storm doors. I’d seen this kind before. On one door, there was a handle attached to a large metal rod that passed between the two doors, holding and locking them in place. The handle was folded down and secured there by brackets on either side so the handle and the bolt couldn’t slide right or left. To open the door you needed to lift the handle away from the brackets, which turned the slide bolt. Then you pulled the handle and the attached bolt to one side, withdrawing it from the second door and unlocking it. This was all familiar to me because Bobby had a door like this leading down into his basement from his backyard. One day, when his dad wasn’t around, he showed me how it worked.

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