16. "Crawl Space"

by Tati

The first weird thing that happened to me is already in the books. The second weird thing that happened to me is a secret. The third or fourth weird thing that happened to me was at Alex’s house.

School was out and it was a notoriously hot summer, which the adults discussed without tiring because there were scientific talking points to be gleaned from the evening news, which one could trot out to appear well-informed: La Niña, the Humboldt current, flash floods, and heat domes. We were living in Colinas by then, but the heat was just as unbearable as it would’ve been in Barrancón. I don’t know if you remember that I lived near the Plaza Sol, though at the time it was nothing like a shopping center; only the cinema and the Miranda existed. I think my parents didn’t expect to leave Barrancón before they were suddenly compelled to do so, and were now dealing with the awkward consequences. For some time we were crammed into a balmy little second-story, two-bedroom apartment, with parquet floors and barred windows. The good thing was that those years in the country had gotten my parents used to letting me run loose all day, and now it was too late to change tack. I remember being sent down for eggs and bread and stopping at the kiosk to buy stickers for my album; or, hounding the shaved-ice lady and the town locksmith with endless wide-eyed questions about their craft. It was a sleepy neighborhood with far less sprawl, and I made fast friends with the local kids, like Alex. He went to our school until he was twelve or thirteen, and he never stood out much. I remember he was teased because (allegedly) his parents had to borrow money for tuition. His father actually ran a clinic in Colinas, and the third story was the family home. It was this little apartment complex they owned. They lived across the Plaza from us, and I was going to visit him for the first time. Frequently we’d see each other while running errands on our bikes, but at school we weren’t friends, and outside I wasn’t so sure. Whenever we did get a chance to talk I felt like he was a stranger and I was free to unload all my scary stories on him, which he allowed with some trepidation. But he said that there was something in his house he wanted to show me.

So one day I walked like eight blocks over to his place, the little run-down clinic where a woman was fanning herself at the reception desk, and he came skipping down the stairs to greet me at the entrance in an old Thundercats t-shirt, I think, with worn-out jeans and dirty white Velcro sneakers. Upstairs I met his mom and his grandparents, who lived with them, and had been shrunken and diminished by age into a pair of doll-like bundles that could be picked up and set down on any sunny corner of the house for their entertainment. His grandpa was childlike and mild-mannered while his grandma was morose and alert. She said something about my dreams once, but that’s a different story. Something told me that I was Alex’s first-ever female guest, which his mom was trying to downplay, but looking back now it’s obvious that she could hardly contain her excitement. I guess she thought we were an item at school, or would be soon. I always thought it was horrible how they’d encourage kids to play boyfriend and girlfriend at that age, but she wasn’t overbearing. The upside of this situation was that Alex’s family treated me like royalty, and the downside was that we could never manage to be alone and unsupervised for more than twenty minutes.

I didn’t know if there was truly something to see in that house, or it’d all been a ruse by Alex to lure me into this friendship. I never brought it up. We had several “playdates” over the coming weeks, which my parents were barely aware of since they’d grown accustomed to my day-long absence. All I had to do was tell them I’d be having lunch at Alex’s, which was true, and his mom was a generous cook who never denied me anything, which was preferable to the sad regime of beans and stews (in summer!) that my family had established since we moved. Sometimes it felt like she was putting on a show for me, though she hardly ever inquired about my family or situation. Over the weeks we built up goodwill with her by being well-behaved, playing board games, coloring, trading stickers for our albums, and running around the park behind the building. Needless to say I was just enjoying his company and this wasn’t some elaborate ploy on my part. As a child I always made friends with boys. And this continued for long enough to become a placid routine, so I was shocked that, on the day when his mom had to leave us to run an important errand—or rather, she left us in the charge of the grandparents, who were deep in their afternoon nap,—Alex sprang to action and dragged me down the stairs, past the unattended reception desk, and through the back into a semi-basement which I didn’t know existed.

It was damp and bare down there: it was partially underground, with windows at ground level facing the left side of the building. It was clearly used as storage space for the clinic, though it must’ve been cleaned every once in a while to stave off mold. Alex pulled me through a winding path between the boxes which he had clearly made himself, and we arrived at a cupboard-sized door with an open lock hanging from the handle. This was it, I understood. Thinking about it now, I would’ve guessed it was a compartment for some kind of water valve or electric panel, but I never saw pipes or cabling inside. When Alex swung it open he revealed a straight ascending ladder covered in rubber hose. He told me that it led to a “secret room” in the building where we would find the “thing.” And at this point it would’ve been impossible to relent. To be honest I’d become perfectly satisfied with our anodyne neighborhood friendship and had almost forgotten about my original intent. But Alex went up and I followed. He’d even brought a lighter, for lack of a flashlight.

An adult would have to crouch and crawl inside the cupboard, then stand erect to climb the ladder up a tight half-cylinder of concrete which I assumed was the inside of a hollow wall. They would climb up all the way to the second story of the clinic. Up there they’d emerge into a similarly tight and dark crawl space going left and right, where the insulation and electric cabling would usually be. Even as kids we had to crawl on all fours here, across the grime, cobwebs, and (worst of all) puddles of mysterious liquid. Alex led the way, torch in hand, and I focused exclusively on following this single point of light out of fear that my nerves would otherwise fail me and I’d realize that I was in way over my head. It all came as second-nature to him, as he clearly had experience with this route. Occasionally you’d hear dull bumps outside, where patients and equipment were constantly being moved. At least in there it was cool, if not dry. It was an improvement over the house, which seemed to absorb all heat.

During the five or so minutes it took us to climb and crawl to our destination my mind was blank, or at least that’s how I remember it. When Alex stopped and told me to stand I didn’t question him. I couldn’t actually see past my own nose, anyway. We had reached what must’ve been the corner of the building, where the crawl space widened into a vertical chamber between the inner and outer walls, and suddenly I was standing on something that creaked, like a plank. I kicked something and it rattled like a chain. These sensory stimuli arrived independently of each other and I wasn’t even trying to reconcile them. Alex raised the lighter to the inner wall. If he wanted me to read something scrawled on it, the conditions were less than ideal. He said: Look. There’s a picture painted here with blood. A worker died here and they buried him in the construction. But they marked the place so they would know.

I squinted and put my face up right against the wall before I realized it wouldn’t help. I tried taking a step back but there was no room. I followed Alex’s hand over the rugged surface which was so covered in stains and off-color patches that it was impossible to tell what was intentional and what was not. Without something to shine a light on the whole thing at once it was hard to make a mental image. He continued: Others say that the previous owner of the house buried his baby here when he discovered that he wasn’t the father. I felt the nagging impulse to ask where he’d gotten these stories but instead I was following the light, entranced, trying to see “it” and failing. I absentmindedly asked: Did your grandparents tell you that? It was a shot in the dark, but he stopped and dropped the lighter. “How do you know that?”

Submerged in complete darkness I immediately became disoriented and groped around, first for the walls and second for Alex, when we heard the whole structure rumble, and in a matter of seconds it had escalated into an earthquake, at least in volume and cacophony, as if a river were running over our heads or the air were being sucked out of the world. Truth be told the house wasn’t shaking but the walls became strangely warm, and the noise was so overpowering that you couldn’t help but associate it with a cataclysm. I became incoherent. In a blacked-out state opposite to the one I came with, I desperately wailed and crawled back to the ladder, this time with Alex behind me, and in my desperation I almost lost my hold and fell face-first down to the basement, but managed to get a grip halfway down and tumbled, like an animal, down the rest of the ladder, haphazardly switching orientations, while Alex climbed down properly from above, as he was quietly terrified and I was screaming. By the time we emerged covered in dust and paint flakes the earthquake had subsided. Alex’s mom stopped us at the basement entrance.

Immediately the act she’d been keeping up was dropped and I became a peripheral concern as she locked herself with him in the bathroom for a thorough inspection and a shower, but not before a thrashing of course, and I waited outside not knowing what to do with myself, as I hadn’t received instructions. I tried to listen through the door but the shower drowned out everything. From the hallway I could see into the living room where Alex’s grandpa was catching sunrays in a state of absolute contentment. He was smiling in my direction, though I don’t think he knew I was there. Then the door opened and Alex’s mom greeted me, vacilating. I suppose she could send me home as I was and raise several questions, or she could bathe me and wash my clothes, and raise others. But hospitality won and ten minutes later I emerged fresh in borrowed pijamas without another word spoken between us. Alex had been completely defeated and peered silently out of the towel over his head.

Eventually mom gathered her thoughts and told me, in confidence, that she had warned him in the harshest terms to never go in there, and therefore she couldn’t believe that he had not only disobeyed but dragged me along as well, but in the end it was fine because nobody got hurt, and suffice to say it would never happen again because she was going to lock it up, so I shouldn’t worry my parents about it, which I suppose was a thinly-veiled appeal for my silence. It wasn’t needed of course, I had no intention of discussing this with anyone. When my clothes were ready I got dressed and went home without exchanging more than three words with Alex.

Our friendship petered out quite naturally after that and I never visited his house again, I’d grown weary of his mom, and anyway I think Alex had been grounded for the rest of the summer, as I rarely saw him biking around after that. Back in school we were in different classes and barely made an effort to talk beyond casual acknowledgements in the yard. This all makes me sound so sophisticated but you have to remember we were kids: something weird happened and we got scared, that’s all. By the time he changed schools I’d already moved out of Colinas and then we completely lost contact. I’m pretty sure he moved as well.

Needless to say there had been no earthquake, though Alex’s mom had explained that away as the rumbling and squealing of a garbage truck outside. The only thing that doesn’t add up, for me, is the space itself. I’ve driven by that building many times for various reasons and it makes no sense, right? There’s no room for it to exist, and there’d be no purpose for such a structure. I’ve asked my dad’s contractor friend (without divulging many details) and he agrees, not that I needed confirmation. The child-sized entrance, the ladder in the wall, the hollow hallway wrapping around the house, I don’t get it. But I never got the chance to follow up on it. I think I saw Alex’s grandma at the Miranda a few times before we moved away, but every time she saw me she’d immediately avert her eyes, like she wasn’t supposed to be there.