The Closet

Chapter 3

            A week later, the James family was well and truly settled in their new home.  Frank was learning his new job, and the kids were settling in at school.  Jarom’s head had healed and his dad had removed the stitches. Even his hearing was back to normal.  Other than the bald spot and a slight Frankenstein line, it was as if nothing had happened. 

            Everything in the boys’ bedroom had been put away, but somehow it looked again like a tornado had come through it. The beds were unmade, clean and dirty laundry littered the floor, and toys and books were everywhere.  Jarom and Jason shared a bunk-bed on the wall opposite the door while John had a twin bed on the side wall across from the window.  The boys had been sent to bed but there was still a lot of noise coming from the room.  Frank, used to being obeyed, climbed the stairs to deal with the uprising. He walked into the room and was stunned at the disorder. He flipped on the lights and in his practiced command voice, said, “ON YOUR FEET!”

            The boys were experienced and knew that you could only get away with sloth for so long before the day of reckoning arrived, and like a train rushing into a station, they could feel that it was there. They all leaped to their feet and stood at what passed for the position of Attention. 

            “This room is a disgrace!” said their Dad.  “I will leave for 5 minutes, and when I return, it had better be ‘Spic and Span’.” 

They weren’t aware that ‘Spic and Span’ had been a popular household cleaner, but they got the drift and began to hurriedly put the room to rights.  Jason handled the dirty clothes while Jarom put the clean clothes away, or tossed them back into the dirty clothes bin, whichever was more convenient.  John put the toys and books away on the shelves and when Frank returned, he was mollified. 

“OK” he said.  “This is more like it.  Now, hit the rack and I don’t want to hear another sound out of you!” 

He walked out of the room leaving the door open and the boys settled down to go to sleep.  Jarom looked out through the doorway and down the hall to the closet door that had been his undoing.  It had been stuck tight when he had tried to open it, but when his parents had tried the door later, it opened as a door should.  He slipped out of the bottom bunk and crept to his dresser drawer which he opened and from which he retrieved a small flashlight.  Then, he began crawling down the hall.  His parents were still downstairs and his sister was asleep in her small room next to the master bedroom. 

“Jarom!” John whispered, tension raising the timbre of his voice.  “Get back here.  You’ll get us all in trouble.”

Paying no attention to his older brother, Jarom reached up to try the doorknob on the closet door.  It turned and the door opened easily.  With his flashlight switched on, he inspected the door jamb and tried to see what had made the door stick.  There was nothing there.  It had almost been as if someone had held it closed and then released it when he had pulled with all his strength. He looked over the floor of the closet and once again noticed the screw heads in the wood. 

“John,” he whispered, “Come here!” 

Knowing he should be in bed, but not willing to have his brother appear bolder than he, John slipped out of his bed and crawled down the hall. 

“What do you think of these screws?” asked Jarom. 

“They look like screws,” replied John.  “They probably hold the floor of the closet down.”

“No, look closely!” commanded Jarom.  “The screw heads aren’t positioned right.  Everything else in here is nailed except for these 4 screws.  There are only two on each side.  And look, they are clear back on the other side of the floor.  Let’s see if we can pry this floor up.”

He began to crawl back to his room to get something to use as a pry bar.  John followed him back, and said, “Jarom, let’s just go back to bed.  We’ll look at it later.”

Silently Jarom looked around the room and, finding nothing suitable, said, “I need Dad’s big screwdriver.”

“Not tonight” whispered John animatedly. It’s in Dad’s toolbox in the basement.  If he catches us out of bed, it will be all over for us.”

Wild-man wasn’t Jarom’s real middle name, but it might as well have been.  He crept out of the room and started down the stairs.  Because they were concrete, they were creakless and not to be left behind, John crawled down after him.  They slithered past the living room where their Mom and Dad were talking about their new home and continued down the stairs to the basement.  They snuck through the laundry room and, guided by the glow of the flashlight, entered the 8’x10’ room which had become the shop and storage room for the house. Pipes and electrical conduit hung from the ceiling and large electrical boxes lined one wall.  One window nearly at the ceiling opened out into the back yard through a window well.  Jarom opened the toolbox quietly and pulled out a screwdriver when the lights in the laundry room were switched on and the voices of his Mom and Dad got louder as they came down the stairs.

“Busted,” John thought, but he and Jarom slid under the workbench on one wall and tried not to breathe. 

Lacy and Frank entered the laundry room and began to inspect the washer and dryer.  The house was small by American standards, maybe 1200 square feet and they were still struggling to find a place for everything.  A desk and filing cabinet filled most of the rest of the laundry room and they were trying to decide what else they could use the space for.  Frank offered to build some shelves over the top of the laundry equipment, and after a quiet kiss, they retreated back upstairs. 

Five painful minutes went by before the boys decided the coast must be clear.  They unwound themselves from under the workbench and began creeping up the stairs, Jarom with flashlight and screwdriver in hand and John with a pair of pliers.  They passed silently by the living room again and arrived at the familiar hallway at the top when they saw their little brother walking down the hallway toward them.  He was rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he walked toward the bathroom when he saw his brothers crouched on floor next to the closet door.

“Hey, you guys,” he whispered.  “What are you doing out here?”

“Shhhhh,” they whispered back in unison. 

Jarom opened up the closet door and, switching the flashlight on again, began to work the screwdriver between the floor of the closet and the threshold.  It moved a little sideways, but didn’t lift a bit. 

Jason said, “You guys are crazy!  You are going to get into SO much trouble!”, but he didn’t leave. 

Jarom looked again at the screws and with the screwdriver, began to thread them out.  After removing the fourth screw, he once again tried to pry up the floor, and this time was rewarded with the floor lifting up from the threshold.  As the floor began to rise, John noticed a steel pin resting in the threshold that would fit neatly into a hole in the bottom of the door. He felt the bottom of the door and, sure enough, there was a hole that seemed to have been made just for the pin. As the floor tipped up in the front, Jarom shone his flashlight under it only to see an elaborate hinge mechanism that the floor had been attached to.  Someone under the floor could trip a lock on the hinge and the floor would rise up in the front.  The pin that locked the door extended down under the threshold and could be pushed up from beneath to lock the door, or pulled down to unlock it, like a safety feature for someone wanting to enter the house from under the door.  Jarom looked below the hinges and saw a ladder bolted to the wall and descending into the dark. 

Jason said, “You guys!  The lights are going off downstairs.”

Jarom closed the trap door and he and John threaded the screws back in to the hinges finger tight, and then the three boys flew to their beds just as their parents entered the hallway from the stairs.  They both stopped to look in on the boys, and Frank said to Lacy, “You wouldn’t know by looking at those angelic faces that there can have a little devil in them,” and they walked down the hall to their bedroom.