The Cellar
Nick switched on the light switch on the front of the fuse box protruding out from the cinderblock wall. He ran his hand over his close-cropped hair, and then threw both fists into the pockets of his Levi’s.
The fluorescent lights flickered on and the hum of electricity joined up with the distant drips from an ancient leak filling the basement. Nick descended the last step into the space and took in its bare bones: concrete floor, three concrete walls, and a fourth wall which was just a wall of pipes opposite the stairwell. No light from outside would reach down here. The stairs to the café two stories above were wooden and rickety and zig-zagged twice.
Nick said to nobody, “God forbid there’s a fire.”
He walked through the room to the pipe wall and turned around, now facing the stairs. He mimed holding up a microphone.
“Hey everyone, welcome to my sex dungeon!” Nick chuckled to himself, and then took out his phone and sent himself a text that read “sex dungeon.” He then walked back to the stairs and the duffel bag he’d put down and opened it. He took out a an old Shure mic, a collapsible stand, a tin can spot light, and a poorly folded piece of duvetyn. He scoped out the basement for electrical outlets, and ran an extension cord from one up to the low hanging rafters above him. He clamped the tin can light to the wooden beam, plugged it in, and threw a spotlight on the pipe wall.
It looked like the wall was a statue of snakes.
Producing two zip ties and a pair of scissors from his pocket, he cut holes in two opposite corners of the duvetyn curtain and zip tied the curtain up over the pipe wall. The spotlight now made a large yellow circle on black cloth, and nick stepped into it, blinded by the light, and felt sure that this room would work for comedy.
He unwound the mic stand and placed the Shure in its clip, and then ran an XLR cable to a hand-me-down speaker, which he plugged in next to the spotlight.
“Testing, texting, resting, vexing,” he said over and over, and listened to the sound reverberate.
Satisfied, he walked back to the other end of the room, to a doorway behind the stairwell. He turned the knob, and with some force, was able to jimmy it open, and as the door pulled away from the frame, it scraped on the concrete, almost like the concrete had been poured after this door had been put in. Looking in, he saw darkness. He pulled out his phone, turned on his flashlight, which he would also use to light comics when their set was over, and illuminated the descending corridor.
Spider webs lined the wall, as did gas lamps, presumably from when this space had been a fruit cellar.
He walked down into this sub basement. The floor was dirt, not concrete. There were a few walls hung from the ceiling, but nothing built into the floor except the beams, which held up the building. Nick shone his flashlight in both directions. On one wall were about 50 wooden folding chairs, which had collected decades of dust and then lit his way in the other direction. He could see that there was more space, but it was poorly lit and would have to be investigated later on, maybe with a few people to ensure that the ghosts of the darkness wouldn’t make him disappear.
Later, the upper room, with the pipe wall, was filled with wild and angry audience members, waiting for the show to start. Kareem, the headliner, walked down the stairs and was greeted by Nick and the five other comics on the bill. Nick didn’t want to start the show without him there because this was both a show AND a “show,” one meant to enforce the idea that Nick wasn’t small time anymore.
With Kareem’s arrival, Nick walked to the front of the room, grabbed the mic, and with his back to the audience said, “Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Nick Keller!” With that he turned around, and was greeted with tepid applause. “Welcome to my sex dungeon!” Crickets.
Nick hustled through his time and brought up the five other comics, all of whom told good jokes which were received poorly. Nick had filled the room with his co- workers, past and present, and people from the neighborhood - none of whom seemed to be enjoying themselves. The headliner went up. Kareem was an observational comic, thoughtful and deliberate with his words. But after three minutes of his A-game failing miserably, he turned on the audience. A woman in the front row, a local from the neighborhood, took out her phone to check a message.
“Oh I’m sorry, “ Kareem said snidely, “Am I boring you? Or was it the rest of the show?”
The woman looked up from her phone and said, “Can’t it be all of you?”
The room seemed like a frozen pipe about to burst. No one made a sound.
“You got a smart mouth. Maybe the back of my hand could teach it a thing or two.”
The woman’s camera phone was immediately on and in Kareem’s face. Nick, at the back of the room, was biting through his nails.
“Oh, you’re gonna film me? Because I’m calling you a stuck up bitch? I just call em like I see em. And lady, you’re a bitch.”
Kareem dropped the mic and smacked the phone out of the woman’s hand. Another man in the second row stood up and pushed Kareem with both hands. Kareem wobbled, but kept walking to the back of the room.
Nick tried to say something, but Kareem gave him the finger and walked up the stairs, taking out a cigarette and lighting it before exiting the café.
That night on the subway, Nick watched people read the story about what had happened at the show.
Rolling over in bed to check his phone the next morning, all of his feeds had blown up. It was on ACTUAL television, and Nick got a call from an old friend from high school who had their boss on the phone, a manager looking to book talent on Nick’s next show. It was a gift from the universe, and nick wasted no time in crafting an eloquent response, using flowery language to constantly compensate for self-doubt.
It didn't matter. The heat was on after the nightmare that was Nick’s first "cellar door comedy show," and people wanted to see what would happen next, both out of perverse curiosity to watch something crash and burn and the hope that maybe they could still be entertained after all these jaded years.
Nick booked the show in record time, and the following Friday the room was packed with comedians and audience alike, both sides of the stage having come out to see what was in store. There was even some press in the back.
The first three comics went up, and as they performed, the room’s energy seemed to visibly dwindle. The energy, which existed as people filed into the room before the show started, was now nonexistent. People were not having a good time, they were just staring blankly at the performer, and each comic who got even the slightest laugh had to sweat for it, go dark for it.
Nick had set up the show with five smaller acts, Deanna as the headliner, and he'd even convinced Kareem to come back and do a surprise guest spot. It was a gamble, but after three straight bricks set-wise, and then Nick’s tepid three minutes of crowd work, bringing up Kareem woke the room up.
His energy was electric for his first two jokes, but, after a bottle being kicked over echoed out at the end of a joke, he too fell victim to the same slump as the audience. Kareem seemed to feel this suck occurring and snapped out of it, latching onto the clothes of a dude in the front row. He patted him with some solid jabs, and then went one step too far.
“Tell whoever got you those clothes to kill themselves.”
“She did.”
Kareem had used that deflection before, out of his own personal tragedy. But he hadn’t ever had it thrown back.
“What are the odds,” Nick said into a clenched fist from the back of the room. Deanna had just arrived in time to see this. She stepped into the basement and Nick walked over to her. The awkwardness in the front of the room stirred the energy as far as the back row, and a young improv dude stood up to smoke a cigarette. Nick knocked into him as he was rising from the folding chair and the smoker fell onto the young woman sitting next to him. Her boyfriend, in the next chair, stood up and threw the smoker off of the woman.
“What’s goin on back there, Nick?” Kareem said over the microphone, in the hopes that he could dump on literally anyone else in the room besides the audience who could be to blame for this debacle.
“Get off of her, asshole,” said the boyfriend.
The smoker was thrown across the middle isle of the room onto two young comics sitting in the back on their phones. One of them kicked over another beer in the fall, at which point Nick stepped away from Deanna, and on her foot for good measure, and pushed past two comedy blog photographers, and intended to separate the boyfriend, the smoker, and the comics.
Instead, the smoker, standing in the middle of the isle, grabbed a beer bottle out of the hand of another audience member, and cracked it across the back of one of the wooden folding chairs, sending glass shards flying.
Kareem said, “holy shit,” as he dropped the mic and walked up the middle aisle toward the fight.
The smoker swiped at the comics in big haymaker swings, saying, “You laughin’ now!”
All of the people in the room were now turned and facing the back row, watching the smoker fend people off. There was hysteria in the air, and the photographers were shooting every second of it, to say nothing of everyone else’s cellphone cameras, trained squarely on the commotion.
Kareem was shouldering his way through the throng of people toward the fight. He’d had enough of this show and whatever bad ju ju was floating in this basement. He pushed body after body until he entered the mosh at the back of the room.
Nick was holding the boyfriend back, and the two comedians were shouting at the smoker, who was desperately trying to back out of this fight, at least inside. Something had come over him, however, something that seemed like it was the desire to go outside and smoke, but that had blossomed into a full-blown need for a fix of violence. He’d never felt it before, and he never would again.
Kareem said, “Hey! Cool off. Everyone.” He squared his shoulders.
The smoker craned his neck slowly, and met Kareem’s gaze. Kareem could swear that the smoker’s eyes were crossed, or pale, or something loose. The smoker looked drunker than anyone Kareem had ever seen.
The smoker laughed to himself quietly, and then like a viper shot his forearm forward at Kareem with the jagged glass cutting Kareem’s cheek, sending a small spurt of blood flying onto the faces of the audience behind him. Kareem grabbed the smoker’s arm, which held the bottle and spun him around, hoping to get him to release his grip.
The room was too small. The bottle grazed the throat of the girlfriend and her left carotid artery , and her throat expelled a geyser of blood all over the audience. People’s clothes and faces were spattered with blood, as the audience blew up the stairs. The blog photographers were shooting pictures left and right as Nick, Kareem, and the boyfriend desperately tried to hold pressure on the young woman’s wound. The smoker ran out the door, and no one stopped him. The two comics also left, feeling like they hadn’t anything to offer the situation.
Ambulances and cop cars littered the scene on Bushwick Avenue, as Nick sat on a bench outside of the cafe smoking a cigarette, his face smeared with blood. He looked on his Facebook and twitter and saw nothing short of apocalypse.
TMZ had gotten the bloggers pictures and was running wild with it. Deanna, who’d just gotten a supporting role on an NBC pilot, was photographed with arterial spray cascading over her perfect facial symmetry. “Bloody Bad Time.” Nick’s name was mentioned as the producer of the show, and Deanna’s management promised swift legal action toward the organizers.
The Detective, looking every inch the funeral director he’d wished he’d been, sat down next to Nick, and lit a cigarette. He pulled his trench coat in around his waist to cut off the chill.
“Did the girl make it?” Nick asked through a plume of smoke.
“So far,” said the Detective. “What the hell kinda show you putting on down there?” “Stand up comedy.”
“And after the woman’s throat was cut, you, as the host, organizer of this show, let everyone in the audience leave.”
“It all happened so fast. Are you arresting Kareem?” Nick said as he motioned to Kareem, who was sitting on the hood of a car parked in front of the café being questioned by two other Detectives.
“Should we?”
“No, no, not at all. He was only trying to help, seriously.”
“So he says. He stuck around, and so did you, and that’s in both your best interests.”
“Officer there’s something wrong with that room.”
“Yeah, it needs some drywall.”
“No, people act weird in it. People were different when they sat in there. I don’t know.” Nick pulled on his cigarette again. “Maybe a gas leak? I don’t know. The guy who cut her, who Kareem was fighting with, he looked dazed or something. But I didn’t see him drinking, and –“
“And he didn’t stick around for us to find out. You did though. I’m gonna need you to come down to the station and make a formal statement. Tonight.”
The next morning, Nick arrived back at his apartment. He’d spent the night telling the police everything he could remember. Throughout the evening, his memories began to fade, and contort. But, come sunrise, Nick and Kareem were both released, and told not to leave town for the remainder of the investigation.
Nick had offered to buy Kareem breakfast, which Kareem curtly declined. Nick then went to Tina’s Diner by himself, had two eggs over medium, six strips of bacon, and a slice of whole wheat. He drank two cups of coffee, paid cash, and went home to take a shit and sleep.
When his head hit the pillow, he only saw blood flying. He saw the room full of people there to see a thing he’d created, they were drowning. There was something about that room, something that was stuck in Nick’s throat.
Nick stared at the ceiling. He had to get ahead of this thing. He had to prove that it wasn’t just a bad show he’d put together. He had to find out why everything went so poorly. He needed to get back into that basement, and see if there was anything he could photograph, and share online, that would explain. He started to think it was a gas leak, or maybe some toxic waste that had piled up in the basement, or bad mold, or something that made people not themselves.
He went back to the café, and ducked under the caution tape and walked into the restaurant. A uniformed patrolman stood at the counter looking at his phone.
“They’re closed, you can’t be in here,” said the Patrolman.
“Hey, I just came from the station. I left my notebook downstairs. I hosted the show last night.”
“Sorry, nothin doin. Anything left down there stays down there for the time being. Detective’s comin back any minute and if anything is messed with it’s my ass.” The Patrolman got back on his phone and scrolled through his IG feed.
Nick left the front of the building and took a left on Bushwick Avenue. He hooked his next left around the block and made his way to a chain link fence leading to the alleyway running along the back of the buildings on Bushwick Avenue and, parallel to them, on Broadway. Nick pushed the two doors of the fence apart and squeezed in beneath the chain and padlock.
The alley was six feet wide if it was an inch, a tight, garbage filled concrete gauntlet. Rats scurried back and forth. It was 8 am, so the alley caught no natural light. It was unnaturally dark. Nick counted the porches until he came to the back door of what appeared to be the café.
There were two wooden storm doors with a chain looping through the handles. Nick pulled on it and realized there was no padlock. The chain spilled off the doors and he pulled the right door open. With a slow creak, the cold basement air blew a mushroom cloud all over Nick as the door rotated within its hinges. The handle was loose in the rotted wood of the doors. Nick put his foot on the door, pressing it at the hinge to ensure it remained open, throwing whatever light he could get into this hole.
He took out his phone, turned on the flashlight, and went down.
There were five steps downward onto a concrete floor. The walls on either side were lined with bumper stickers of 70s ephemera, punctuated by a repeated chorus of ‘Where’s the Beef.’ The hallway then ended at a wooden door with a black iron knob.
Nick was correct when he thought that the building was old, and that this door had been there since the beginning. Nick touched the cold of the metal and heard a siren wail in the distance, undoubtedly flying around morning rush hour traffic on Bushwick Avenue. Nick’s gaze returned to the door, and the thought of the night that occurred beyond it. Then the storm door slammed closed.
Nick flashed his cell back where he came from and caught a swirl of dust disappear into black. Nick ran to the doors and pushed on them. He could feel a weight holding them closed. He pushed with the entire might of his shoulders on the doors, but couldn’t shift the weight above.
He flashed the light back to the iron handle. He walked over to the door and opened it, suddenly smelling dusty fabric. It reminded him of high school, or his old catholic church, or his library. Something was ancient and familiar about the air, and Nick was surrounded by it. The second corridor was a storeroom running the width of the building and half the length. The walls held no other door.
On the three other walls in the room were one continuous mirror, beneath which was a makeup counter. Chairs were amiss underneath. Lipstick, cigarettes, brass knuckles, needles, matchbooks, and the stray bullet were spread around the room, covered in a thick layer of dust.
Nick looked around the counter for the least dusty thing and found an 8’x10’ picture poster for a concert. ‘Pistol Patty and the Vomits’ had played here, and ‘Sass Rabbits’ opened for them. Pistol Patty was a name he remembered.
They were a small time band out of Nick’s hometown, and he’d gone to high school with some of the members’ younger siblings. They had been within a few meetings of signing a major contract when they did a string of shows in the city and the bass player Roger Backyard cracked his instrument off the nose of an audience member, killing the audience member instantly. The guitar broke and the strings snapped back across Roger’s fingers, cutting straight through them.
Nick’s mind was a blank screen, on which was projected an image he couldn’t shut off.
He’d seen it once in high school, and then never again. It had become an urban legend in his mind, something he associated whenever the Faces of Death or the dark web were mentioned. It was of Roger, after having killed the audience member and losing his fingers to the snapping strings, bleeding on stage. His eyes blank, tears streaking down his cheeks. His digits were scattered on the floor. He was standing in front of the wall that Nick had hung the black curtain over. The Vomits’ career had ended in the same room as Nick’s comedy show.
He looked at his phone. No service.
“Building must be made entirely of lead paint,” he said to himself.
He shined the flashlight across the floor and noticed a golden circular handle. Nick walked to the center of the room, knelt down, and looped his finger into the golden circle. The circle lifted up from the floor and Nick realized it was the handle to a trap door. Nick opened the door, and another gust of cold basement air enveloped him. He shined his light downward and saw a wooden ladder descending into darkness. Barely, he could make out a dirt floor at the bottom of the ladder.
Nick swung his leg into the hole, looped his foot onto the rung of the ladder, and then began to climb downward, hoping it would lead to the other side of the pipe wall, and he would be able to leave.
As he climbed down the ladder, one of the rungs gave way to dry rot, cracked, splintered right into Nick’s palm, and sent him hurtling to the floor. He landed with a crack, and the wind flew out of him.
He rolled over, on his side, coughing. It was pitch black. He’d dropped his phone. There was a low hum coming from somewhere. The smell in the room was death.
His mind raced, his heart pounded in his ears. He rolled onto his back again and snow angel-ed with his hands and feet, hoping to run across his phone. He felt it, and grabbed at it with his entire being. Turning the phone over immediately threw light on the space he was in.
It appeared to be another kind of dressing room with all four walls covered by black velvet curtain hanging from rings on a wire. Nick laid on the ground staring at the room around him. The ladder from the ceiling terminated at a patch of dirt floor, but beyond where he was laying were patches of hardwood floor, dilapidated and eroded.
Nick looked at the gash in his hand. It was serious, bloody, and throbbing. Nick sat forward, pushing up from his elbows, and felt something underneath his arm. Looking around, he saw the room was littered with empty flask bottles of booze and cigarette butts. And used condoms. There was a filthy mattress on one corner of the room, stained brown. Next to it was a 12” Power Ranger toy, also stained with brown.
Nick brought one leg under him and, holding onto the rickety ladder, pulled himself up. His back screamed with pain, and when he put pressure on his other ankle, it rolled, sending him flying into the wall.
He grabbed onto the curtain for support, but ending up yanking the entire apparatus out from its supports in the ceiling. The curtain fell all around the room at once and the cellphone flashlight illuminated the now bare walls.
Except they weren’t bare. There was graffiti on one wall, tagged from corner to corner with an eye like the one at the top of the pyramid on a dollar bill. It was in gold paint, and beneath the eye was a line of text in characters Nick didn’t recognize.
On the second wall hung a portrait of a middle aged black man wearing glasses. His eyes were glassy, and his expression, cold. There was a gash through the center of the canvas, and brown handprint at the lower corner of the painting. The hand was small, Nick noticed. Probably a child’s.
On the third wall, behind the mattress, was what looked like a painted sunrise, streaks of brown drawn clumsily upward and outward, about two and a half feet in diameter. The same brown of the handprint on the painting and the stains on the toy seemed to explode away from a circular shape at the center of the brown, untouched by color.
On the fourth wall was another door. It had a padlock on a hinge above another old time doorknob. Next to it was a slot that could slide open from the other side, presumably so someone could lock it from the outside. Nick limped over to the door, and noticed around the knob trenches in the wood. Scratches.
Nick’s phone beeped. A call? Did he have service? It wasn’t a call. His battery was dead. Using the light had killed it. The phone shut off and Nick was enveloped in darkness.
Going up back the way he came was no use. Nick began to hyperventilate. He leaned on the door and heard it creak. He began to slowly press himself into the door, hearing the wood crack and pop, until it finally gave way. The wood splintered and Nick fell through dropping down onto one knee.
Nick heard the sound of hissing, of snakes. He jumped to his feet. Fear had taken hold. It was not time to investigate anymore. It was now time to run out of this place with every inch of his being.
Nick stepped lightly, his hands in front of him. Based on where he had come in and hoping he hadn’t gotten too badly turned around, he assumed he was walking toward the back of the pipe wall. Maybe he was ten yards from there, maybe only ten feet. He put his hands out in front of him.
He couldn’t see anything. He felt the cut in his hand throb faster and faster. He could feel blood trickling down his arm from his hand, running up to his elbow and dripping downward. The air was freezing cold, and the smell he noticed in the last room grew exponentially in this new space. What he’d first thought smelled like death was nothing compared to what he was experiencing.
He walked faster now, holding his good hand over his mouth and nose. A sharp snap echoed behind him. The sound of wood breaking. The sound of another person? Nick turned around, hoping to grab someone who could lead him out. There was no one. He turned back around, to move forward again. But had he turned around entirely? Was he still walking in the right direction? Nick felt all around him and couldn’t find a wall. He dropped to his knees and patted the floor beneath him. It was dirt.
He dragged his palm across the floor. He could feel the earth, small rocks, and dust spin as his hand passed over it. His fingertips touched something. It was cold and smooth, and thin. He slowly wrapped his fingers around it, hoping it was an electrical wire, leading to something, anything. As his hand fully enveloped the cylinder, it stopped feeling slack.
It suddenly wriggled in his hand. A shrieking hiss emanated from the dark and Nick’s hand lit up with the pain of a bite. He dropped whatever it was and took off running at full speed. His chest was exploding within his body. Sweat was pooling all over his face. His shirt was slick with the blood from his hand.
His sprint took him directly into an immovable object. He hit it and fell backward, landing sitting down again. For the first time in what felt like days, he sensed something visual. He could make out a figure standing in the darkness in front of him. He could see light shining off of his glasses.
The figure, shrouded in darkness, took a step toward him. It was the man from the portrait. He locked eyes with Nick, and then vanished like a plume of smoke in the wind.
Nick heard the hissing again, this time like a snake was coiled around his neck. He scrambled to his feet, not even noticing the pain of the rocks and dirt in the wound in his hand. He ran toward the light. He could see a series of glints of light on his left.
The folding chairs. He was emerging from the darkness of the fruit cellar he’d been inside the night before. He got closer and closer to the chairs. He reached out his hand to touch them and they were there, he could feel the wood. His heart sang. Tears streaked down his face. He turned to look in the direction of the stairs and toward an open door, mercifully letting in the rays of sunlight on a Brooklyn morning.
The Detective stood at the bottom of the stairs.
Nick saw that the Detective’s eyes had gone lame. “Detective?” Nick asked.
The Detective didn’t respond. He raised his gun and fired twice.
The Patrolman practically fell off of his stool at the sound of gunfire. He drew his weapon and walked toward the steps, terrified of what would emerge. The Detective was walking up the stairs, holding his service weapon.
“DETECTIVE! What happened!? Are you hit?!” the Patrolman asked. The Detective wasn’t listening. He couldn’t hear anything.
The Patrolman noticed that the Detective’s eyes were cloudy, like a blind animal. He grabbed the Detective by the shoulders and stood face to face with him, shaking him. The color came back to his eyes.
“What just happened?” the Detective asked. He could only remember the feeling he was in the process of being released by: violence.
The Patrolman sat the Detective at the counter of the café. His gun still drawn, the Patrolman slowly inched his way down the stairs. He saw Nick’s body lying on the concrete floor, silhouetted by the light from the doorway. He clicked onto his radio and said, “We need an ambulance. Bushwick Avenue.”