The basement diaries part I

Prompt: You are renting a room in someone’s house as you transition to living in a new city. The owner tells you that basement is absolutely, 100% off limits. You don’t bat an eye at this request, until you start hearing noises from the basement at night. After several week of this, you sneak downstairs to see what’s going on. Finish the scene.

Source

Note: I obviously failed at following the prompt. This is therefore going to be a two-parter.

I had been warned.

They were a nice Nepali couple, with a daughter who was in the ninth grade. They lived in the second floor, I took the drafty tattery first floor. There was a makeshift kitchen and a toilet that could give any charpi in Kathmandu a run for its money. I was desperate, first time moving to the City. Friends told me to get a nicer apartment closer to Manhattan. Money was not the object. Time was. The job was starting in ten days and nothing had been confirmed. They were rather desperate for someone to help them pay the monthly payments. Nationalistic feelings may have been involved.

You can take the room, the landlord told me as I signed the lease, but under no circumstances must you go to the basement. It is nothing bad, we have some personal items there and the lock hasn't worked so haven't been able to do that. Have put that in the lease too.

Oh what have you there, dead bodies or something, I said laughing, should I be worried about my safety. Maybe I'll sleep with a khukuri under my pillow.

No nothing like that, he said, in a tone so serious I got nervous. It's nothing bad or illegal just some personal property that if I find you were there there could be room for me to accuse of doing bad things to it, if something were to happen to it. So I'm doing it for your on protection. Don't worry bhai, we are a very normal couple we have a daughter we are not some psycho American murders it'll be fine.

His mood had improved. I didn't ask him about the basement again. People have their quirks. It could be the gold and diamond jewelleries that people store in bank vaults in Kathmandu. Or something else. Not dead bodies, as he so cleanly explained. Nothing worth losing sleep over. I let it go.

Few months later in the middle of the New York winter I heard noises from the basement at night. The first time I thought it was rats or mice scurrying about. Cockroaches possibly. Or a rat-cockroach hybrid which had been discovered in the subway system. Some days after that, I heard it again. On Saturday night it was quite loud. Those rattles and creaks weren't regular, couldn't have been made by a rat by the way they sounded. A few times in the height of suspicion when nobody was in the house I shouted at the basement from the floor. Hello, is anybody there, do you need help? You can tell me now nobody is at home. Hello. I said that in the four languages I knew. No replies. Not even a tap. I daren't do that at night, at the fear of losing my lease. It's not like the ghost stories where you just do whatever. A place to live in matters when you're in the city.

My curiosity got the best of me. A few weeks of hearing the noises, and I made my way to the basement when I was confident nobody was home.

My world turned over when I discovered the secret of the basement.