Nobody Would Ever Believe You
Don't go down into the basement...
“What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you?”
You instantly tense up, even though you know that the question isn’t aimed at you.
Not specifically you, at any rate. You and your friends are having your weekly meetup to ‘strengthen your bonds of friendship’. That’s how you all describe it at anyway; some less-fun people describe it as ‘drinking before noon’, but you can’t please everyone.
In any case, you all lead busy lives trying to be responsible adults and productive members of society, but you all made a promise when you graduated from high school. You promised that you wouldn’t let your circle of friends drift apart. And it’s these lazy sessions of lounging on chairs and beanbags and chatting, while getting pleasantly buzzed, that made the last ten years of growing responsibility bearable.
They’ve also helped to ease your night terrors over the last three years.
As your friends eagerly jockey to volunteer their own ‘crazy’ stories of meeting minor celebrities or attempting to join the mile-high club, you drain your bottle of beer in an attempt to drown out the memories leaping forward.
OoOoO
The day it all happened had started promisingly enough; you’d been on a day off and one blessed with beautiful weather. You’d planned to spend it productively, but there were TV shows that weren’t going to watch themselves. In order to alleviate the feeling of being a lazy slob, you’d taken a break at the end of season 1 in order to go for a walk. You’d been strolling down your street, idly bouncing a rubber ball, when things started to go wrong; you fumbled a bounce and the ball ended up flying over a garden fence.
You could have just let it go, it was just a rubber ball after all, but why worry? You were sure that whoever owned the house wouldn’t mind if you quickly retrieved your ball.
What you weren’t sure of was who lived here. It was a fairly rundown building by the standards of the houses in the neighbourhood. While you could put a face to the owner of it with relative confidence, you couldn’t add a name to them.
However, you didn’t really give this much thought as you vaulted the fence and landed in the unmown grass. The lack of garden maintenance made finding your ball a bit of a challenge, which was why you found yourself next to the basement windows. You wouldn’t have given them a second glance except for three reasons.
The first was that your own house didn’t have a basement, nor did the houses of anyone in the neighbourhood that you knew. The second reason was that you noticed that they had thick looking blackout material fixed to the inside.
The third reason was the smell.
One of the windows wasn’t quite shut and from this slim gap was coming one of the most revolting smells you’d ever encountered.
The smart thing to do would have been to leave; God knows that’s what your nose and stomach were voting for. Instead, cat-killing, curiosity got the better of you, and you pushed the window further open.
You weren’t able to immediately take a closer look inside as opening the window had allowed the full force of that gruesome smell to hit you in the face. After a minute or two of retching, the greater flow of air dispersed the stench to the point of being bearable; allowing you to regain your composure. With the last of the dry heaves having passed, you glanced through the window, wondering what exactly the source of that awful smell was.
There were no lights on inside, but the illumination coming through the opened window allowed you to see shelves filled with a wide variety of tools, gardening equipment and… other implements whose nature you couldn’t quite make out from that distance. Your eyes were then drawn to the centre of the room where there was a large wooden table. On top of it was something covered by a ratty and stained blanket.
In hindsight, you couldn’t have been more obviously looking at scene right out of a slasher movie if a guy in a hockey mask, with a chainsaw, had been gesturing you to come closer. At the time, however, you just found your curiosity increasing; you didn’t really know anything about the guy who lived here apart from what he looked like. Was he into hunting? Was that some sort of rotting animal carcass under that cover? It didn’t make much sense why he’d do so, but what would turn out to be the actual truth was so absurd to your mind, you didn’t even consider it.
Instead, you noted that your shoulders would fit comfortably through the window, which would also be within easy reach from inside the basement. It seemed a little crazy, true, but a stubborn little voice pointed out that you often wished that the day-to-day grind of being a responsible adult could have a bit more adventure in it. You felt, (erroneously as it would turn out), that you’d regret it more if you walked away without taking at least a quick look.
So, following a hasty glance around, you slid feet first through the open window. They landed on a plastic stool you hadn’t been able to see from outside, causing you to stumble dramatically. You managed to regain your balance before you could fall against something and make a racket; albeit in a pose that wouldn’t have looked out of place in ‘Saturday Night Fever’.
Straightening up, you fought down your resurgent gag reflex (you were closer to the source of the stench, after all) and approached the table. Expecting to take a glance and then go back to your lazy day off, you twitched the blanket aside.
You were greeted by the sight of a corpse whose, unseeing, eyes stared back up at you.
There were a couple of seconds where you stood frozen; utterly unable to move. Your transition back to the world of the mobile was marked by a wheezing gasp as you took a staggering step backwards. You just needed to calm down and get the fuck out of there; once you were safely locked in your home, you could call the police about the lunatic owner of this house-
-Who had just opened the door to the basement, sandwich paused halfway to his mouth as he stared at you in surprise; surprise that swiftly became decisive anger.
“Who the hell are you?!” he shouted as he lunged towards you; hands outstretched.
You staggered backwards as you fought his grip, caught your hip off the edge of the table and went down in a tangle of limbs. It wasn’t that he was stronger than you, but he was clearly highly motivated to snuff out the guy who’d discovered his unpleasant habit. He kept alternating between trying to punch you in the face and attempting to get his hands around your throat. Fortunately, this gave you the opening you needed to stop him pinning you to the ground. As his fist descended again, you moved your head to the side, and he ended punching the floor. As he cried out in pain, you tore his other hand off your throat and shoved him off you. You leapt to your feet, stumbled backwards, and fell against some metal shelving. The other guy pushed himself up and charged at you, still roaring, as terror clawed at your very lungs.
Which ultimately turned out to be his undoing; if you hadn’t been so frightened, you might not have defaulted to sheer reflex and grabbed the first heavy tool your hand could find on the shelving. One frantic swing and sickening crunch later, your attacker hit the floor in a decidedly final manner.
For a few moments, there was no sound except for your ragged breathing as you stared at the still figure. Horror was spreading through you the way blood was spreading across the floor from his gaping head wound. Once you reached peak horror saturation, panic set in and one singular objective took total priority.
Get out of there. Now.
You would have sprinted, but you couldn’t manage anything above an unsteady wobble. As you carefully walked around the slowly cooling corpse of your attacker, you remembered that you were still holding the tool (a large wrench). Thought was action at this point and your fingers reflexively opened; letting it hit the ground next to the spreading pool of blood.
You quickly wriggled back out of the window and walked as casually as you could back to your house. By sheer luck, no one was around to see you make your way back to your house and lock the door behind you.
But, despite your fears, there was no hammering on your door by police officers that day or any day that followed. It would turn out that, due to how reclusive your psycho neighbour was, it took over a month before someone noticed that he was missing and went to check. The story of the secret serial killer who was, himself, mysteriously murdered dominated the headlines and local gossip for a long time afterwards. The fact that no one even glanced in your direction suggested that any evidence you’d left at the scene had been lost in the intervening month.
OoOoO
When your turn comes around, you tell the story of the time you briefly met a ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ quarter finalist at a car wash.
Hilariously enough, most of your friends didn’t believe you.