It wasn't a smile. More of a rictus.
The basement greyed. The furnace leered. The hot water heater growled. Background noise: it faded when the sump pump screeched its curses.
The doll he held for comfort had a hole in its plastic face, right where the mouth should be. The hair, originally green, stood stiff and moldy black. Chunks of it had been ripped out by the entity.
He couldn't see the entity. He felt its presence all around. It pressed down from the cobwebbed beams overhead. It lurked from the sideroom. It rattled its chains in the root cellar.
The dank smell of the root cellar stung his nostrils. He still stood across the basement from the latched door. In his mind he saw the mason jars and their jellied vegetables placed on the concrete shelf by his great-grandfather. He felt the cold, spongy potatoes in the concrete tub, the tickle of their white roots that sprouted from blind eyes to caress his forearms.
A shadow crossed the floor and his heart clinched thinking he would see, for the first time, the entity. The shadow crossed the floor again and he knew that it came from the yard. You couldn't see out the leaf cluttered window well. He watched and saw the well darken for a flash of time. Someone was walking through the yard to the backdoor behind him.
He wanted to move away from the stairs. He had no idea who was walking in the yard, what they intended. The backdoor opened; boots clumped into the mudroom. Of course the basement door had swung closed behind him. The entity had seen to that.
“Hello. Are you here?” A voice accompanied the boots. The boots moved forward and stopped just the other side of the basement door.
It was only a few steps straight ahead to the root cellar, past the furnace and the sideroom. Now the entity had distilled itself, leaving the ceiling and, for the moment, the sideroom to wait out of sight behind the furnace. The door handle rattled behind him, once. The wood of the door creaked and cracked, but the door did not open.
“I was just finishing up these dishes.”
“Yeah? Well, I'm trying to get this wagon hooked up.”
The doll grew warm. Guilt and shame flooded across his skin. He threw it away from himself. It bounced and slipped across the bare floor and banged up against the dryer. In the silence after he did not immediately hear the voices. When he found them, they were muffled and in front of him; they had moved deeper into the house overhead.
He wished he had thought to throw the doll ahead of him too, in the direction of the entity behind the furnace. Except it wasn't behind the furnace. His skin tingled as he cast feelers around the basement. It had moved a few steps closer to him, into the sideroom. Sprouted a head. Huge and leering, with Germanic features, the head cocked aside, listening for him as he listened for it.
But, he could skirt around to the right of the furnace, putting it between him and the entity in the sideroom, then dash over to the root cellar.
The floorboards creaked overhead and grew still.
He launched himself halfway to the furnace before his feet touched, ran sliding around the corner with one hand on the metal housing. The sump pump screeched alive and he almost stopped running, except the entity had seized the space between him and the stairs. It had a hand. It reached out and descended toward his neck.
He too was reaching out, for the root cellar door. He twisted and yanked the handle with both hands. Light fell inward, almost reaching the potato tub. Their eyes cried out and their white arms writhed. He rushed in, praying words he didn't hear that the door wouldn't close. Falling against the tub, he ignored the tickling roots, grabbed up a handful of potatoes, whirled back.
The entity stood in the doorway. Its head now the doll's plastic head with sprouted black hair, a punched out hole for a smile.
The white roots scraped against his forearms. They cut at him looking to penetrate. To hide. The basement door opened.
“Jimmy, have you got those potatoes?” his mother called down the stairs. “Your grandpa needs help hooking up the hay wagon. C'mon.”
The entity nodded once before it dissipated. Its face as it faded had become human, adult.
