“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” ~John Muir
The sky was its usual dull, monotonous gray at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. Gerry didn’t have to check the weather widget on his smartphone to know that it was going to stay that way all day--and probably all weekend--as he looked upward through the branches of the massive Douglas Fir; the stalwart guardian of his Northeast Portland frontyard. Gerry was wearing only his tartan plaid, Pendleton bathrobe, and the ugly, green Crocs that he kept on the front porch for gardening and quick trips to the mailbox. The light drizzle coming down from the sky dampened everything except the walkway beside the Doug Fir. Raindrops rarely made it all the way through the thick canopy of needles and cones provided by the tree, and Gerry was sincerely grateful for the shelter. He felt an odd kinship with the old tree; that it possessed some kind of innate honesty that he really couldn’t describe.
Gerry wondered how old the tree was. The trunk was almost eight feet around at its widest point and it had to be almost forty feet tall. Considering the age of the house, the tree was probably at least 100 years old, he postulated, but he really had no idea. He had considered suspending a hammock from the tree’s impressive trunk to another lesser pine tree fifteen feet away, but somehow that seemed like an inappropriate indignity--an insult to the great tree’s stature and grace. Gerry liked paying the Doug Fir an early visit every morning. The communion with its natural beauty made him feel like all was right with the Universe--at least for a few minutes.
RATATAT-TAT! RATATAT-TAT! RATATAT-TAT!
A loud staccato, from seemingly out of nowhere, startled Gerry and almost caused him to drop his coffee mug. A good portion of the steaming, hot liquid spilled onto the front of his robe, and into the holes of the Crocs, but he managed enough of a contorted juggle to save his most recent Father’s Day gift from destruction. I’d Rather Be Drinking BEER, the mug proclaimed.
“Goddamn fucking woodpecker!” Gerry was more embarrassed than angry. He wondered if anyone saw him doing his impromptu St. Vitus dance so early in the morning. Most of his neighbors liked to sleep in. The woodpecker was a neighborhood resident, too, or at least it had been for the past week or so. Every morning he (or she--Gerry wasn’t quite sure) would perch atop the streetlight mounted in the parkway across the street and let out several loud, trilling calls. Those calls were subsequently followed by the red-headed avian bashing his beak repeatedly into the metal dome that covered the light.
Clearly, the bird had decided to mix things up a bit and start this Saturday symphony with a bang, rather than a tweet. The insane hammering sounded exactly like a machinegun, and Gerry wondered how the bird didn’t get knocked senseless or end up with a broken beak. He thought about going back inside and googling “woodpecker skull”, just to find out why the annoying creature didn’t have a perpetual concussion. Instead, he went back to sipping his coffee and admiring his tree.
“Gerald Hoffman! Why are you cussing out there? What is wrong with you? I could hear you from the bathroom!”
Gerry’s wife, Elda, was quickly descending the newly power washed steps of the front porch. Until yesterday, those concrete steps had been covered with a thick, green carpet of moss. The 108 year old Craftsman was in need of some significant TLC and Gerry took a moment to admire the success of his latest project. They had only moved into the house a month ago, with grandiose plans to restore the old mansion to its former state of preeminence in the neighborhood and with the most sincere but naive intentions to do all the renovation work themselves. Unfortunately, Gerry was far from being a competent handyman and Elda was much better at directing tasks than she was at actually doing the physical labor needed to accomplish them.
“Hey, those steps look pretty spic and span, don’t they?” Gerry called to his wife, raising his coffee mug in toast; hoping to distract her from her immediate mission to scold him for cursing within earshot of the neighbors.
Elda looked down at the steps below her pink, fuzzy slippered feet. “Oh, yeah! They do look great! Wow, what a difference. The porch looks brand new!” She toasted Gerry back with her own coffee. I’m the Queen of Everything, her mug decreed.
“Get your filthy mouth inside, Mister. You owe the swear jar five dollars...and I made waffles.”
Before entering the house, Gerry kicked off the Crocs and they landed haphazardly near the power washer he failed to return to Home Depot the day before. Shit! He couldn’t believe he forgot. Of course, he did eat four pot brownies immediately after cleaning off the moss--a chore that took all of 15 minutes to accomplish. At the time, the $125 for the extra day rental didn’t seem like such a big deal. He decided he’d better make the most out of his irresponsibility and give the basement walls a rundown with the washer. He would tell Elda that was his plan all along.
Gerry hung his robe on a decorative hook by the front door, right next to his wife’s flower print kimono, and strode into the kitchen au natural. Now that the kids were all grown up and out on their own, Gerry and Elda decided it was time to live out their long-suppressed desire to practice nudism within the confines of their own four walls. Elda was wearing nothing but her fuzzy slippers and was busy trying to unstick a burning waffle from the top of the iron.
“Fuck it!” Elda yelped, as the rising smoke briefly set off the fire alarm.
“Should I go get the swear jar...and your purse?” chuckled Gerry as he reached his arm around his wife’s waist and moved in to nibble her ear.
“Oh, shut up, you old geezer and get away from me with THAT, or you get the burnt waffle.”
“It’s not so burnt, and I like my waffles like I like my women: hot and smokey.” Gerry made a move for the other ear and without turning around, Elda swatted at his groin with the spatula she was wielding. Gerry knew she meant business, so he turned his attention to finding the accoutrement for the waffles. He was disappointed to find that there was only the tiniest pat left in the butter dish. It was Gerry’s most ardent conviction that each and every little well in a waffle had to be filled with melted butter, and right now, there was only a hard, unspreadable stick in the fridge. He tried not to let his irritation show, but Elda could read him like a book.
“There’s plenty of butter already IN these waffles,” Elda admonished, tensing at her husband’s audible clucks and passive aggressive posture. “The last thing you need is more fat coursing through your cloggy veins. Those cardiac roto-rooters are expensive.”
There it was. Elda had to bring up the hospital bills. Of course! She brought it up every day, even though they were finally, completely, totally paid off. She just couldn’t let it go. Sure things were rough for a while, but didn’t it all turn out fine? They were able to buy the dream house--it just wasn’t quite as dreamy as that extra $100,000 would have made the remodel go.
It happened more than three years ago. Gerry left his corporate job and launched his own consulting business. He had always been as healthy as the proverbial horse and didn’t think it was too particularly risky to go without health insurance until the business started to take off. He had new clients lined up and a tidy book of business that he was bringing with him. There was no way anybody could have anticipated the mild heart attack and the balloon angioplasty needed to unclog that goddamn coronary artery. In the end, Gerry only missed three weeks of work and his recovery was exemplary, but the Hoffman Family finances took a massive hit.
RATATAT-TAT! RATATAT-TAT! RATATAT-TAT!
“Goddamn that fucking woodpecker!” Gerry shouted. He tossed the butter dish across the counter with a bit more force than he intended and it carromed into the sink with a loud clatter. Elda started to protest but the look on her husband’s face deterred her. She knew that look. Gerry was heading down the dark passage to one of his “moods” and she had no desire to go there with him. “I’ll be in the basement working,” he muttered under his breath. “You can have my fucking burnt waffle.”
The basement was actually one of the main reasons Gerry wanted to buy the old Craftsman. It spanned the entire area of the house and was completely unfinished. Except for the heavy wooden support beams, it was a massive, open space. The walls were the mortared stones of the foundation--smooth, round rocks of various sizes, expertly jigsawed together. Gerry had big plans. The basement was going to be his home brewing operation, speakeasy and man cave par excellence. Of course, right now, it was a filthy mess. Decades of accumulated dirt, dust, and cobwebs as thick as rope made the room look like something out of an old horror film. There was also a huge pile of trash and old junk in one corner that likely dated back to the McKinley Administration.
A sloped drain had been installed in the middle of the floor and there was an ancient double sink that still worked. Modern hook-ups for a washer and dryer were located near the staircase, but otherwise, a trip to the basement was like walking into a time capsule. A single light fixture provided only enough illumination for a small area around the stairs, resulting in the far corners casting spooky shadows and allowing the imagination to conjure up shapes of unnamed monstrosities that could very well be lurking in any creepy, old basement.
Gerry decided that it would probably be safe enough to use the power washer on the walls and floor. He would run the machine outside and pull the hose down through the outside door. The floor drain would take out the water and he would use a couple of box fans to make sure the joists and beams dried out completely. The last thing he wanted to do was create a black mold habitat. There was only one daunting task standing in his way: getting rid of the pile of junk. There was a dumpster parked in the backyard for the ongoing clean-up. He would have to haul everything up the back stairway and toss it in. Easy job, really, and Gerry decided that it might actually get done today, if all the planets aligned.
Now fully dressed in his favorite Grateful Dead t-shirt and a pair of hole-riddled overalls, Gerry hooked an extension cord and trouble light up to the solitary electric socket and approached the junk pile like the hippie version of Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom. Hopefully, there would be no snakes in this scene, he mused. The pile went from floor to ceiling. Errant chair legs, boxes, lampshades, pallets, garden tools and scraps of splintered boards were sticking out in every direction. Rat feces was scattered across the floor and Gerry recognized the rank, fetid, unwholesome odor of rodent nests. This was going to get nasty, he thought, just as a rat the size of a chihuahua chittered across the floor and into the pile.
Piece by piece, Gerry carried the junk up the stairs and chucked it all into the dumpster. Some of it looked like viable antiques--four old hurricane lamps, a half dozen horseshoes, a grocer’s scale, two sauerkraut graters--and he placed those items on the kitchen table for Elda’s inspection. The rest, he decided, could go to pickers at the city dump. He really just wanted the basement empty for his power washing job--and to make room for his brewing operation.
Gerry fully expected to disturb several rat’s nests and brought down a garden spade to dispatch whatever vermin he might find, but after greatly reducing the pile, he had yet to spy any rodents. The putrid smell, however, only got worse the deeper he dug in. The stench was so bad, in fact, that he had to tie a bandana over his face and take several breaks for fresh air. He was certain he would eventually uncover something truly ghastly. Elda even complained that the smell was starting to drift upstairs to the rest of the house.
The final item for discard was a small steamer trunk of indeterminate age. It certainly looked old. Gerry pulled it away from the wall and discovered the source of the horrible putrescence: a large, soapbox-size hole in the foundation wall that was sloppily plugged with a weird, roughly cast, iron hatch. This was obviously the point of egress for the rat he saw earlier, as there were several gaps between the wall and the hatch large enough for a rat to squeeze through.
The smell was unbelievable and when Gerry pulled the handle to open the hatch, a disgusting ooze that he could only surmise was raw sewage seeped from the hole and began making its way across the basement floor. The stuff certainly smelled like shit, but there was a weird luminescent quality to it that was like nothing he had ever seen before. The color was certainly not found in nature. Regardless, it absolutely looked like the makings of a major repair bill, even by Gerry’s unhandy estimation. It could even require an incredibly expensive hazmat clean-up. He could have none of that. Holy crap, he could hear Elda now, endlessly berating him for failing to adequately inspect this fucking money pit of a house.
Gerry hauled over the trouble light and crouched over to inspect the tendril of lightly glowing ooze that was slowly creeping toward the drain in the floor. As he moved the light closer, the ooze appeared to stop moving and actually recoiled--retreating against gravity. “What the holy fuck?” he muttered.
Gerry held the light closer to the ooze and it reversed its direction even more quickly, back to the cast iron hatch. Is this goo actually alive? He started to reach his index finger toward the substance, just to give it a poke, but thought better of it. Whatever the substance or organism might be, it certainly was alien and probably toxic, he theorized. Within thirty seconds the slimey ooze was back behind the hatch and the smell began to diminish immediately. Gerry closed the hatch and noticed a crude inscription etched upon it.
Intra Iacet Tsathoggua
“Tsathoggua” sounded like it could be a small town somewhere in Oregon, although he’d never heard of it before. An Indian name? Perhaps where the hatch was manufactured? He quickly closed the weird aperture and considered what materials and tools he might require to seal it permanently. He decided that a few large stones and some cement would probably do the job most effectively, and he could get that project completed next weekend. He concluded that the ooze was probably some kind of mold or fungus. It was clearly light sensitive. He had never seen anything like it, but perhaps it was something common that he had just never read about or encountered before. He would have to do some research on the Internet, he decided.
Gerry turned his attention to the little trunk. There was an ancient, rusty padlock securing the latch. Gerry made quick work of that with the garden spade, completely knocking it off the trunk in one shot. He brought the trouble light down to inspect the contents. The only item inside the trunk was a dusty, dog-eared book. Gerry brushed away the dust and uncovered a title that appeared to be handwritten with a fountain pen flourish: BIER
To be continued...
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