There’s a trapdoor in my uncle’s shed

It’s funny how your brain can just erase a bunch of your memories, block them out for years and years, and then one day you hear, see, or smell something and they all come rushing back.

It was a wooden elephant that did it for me. It was the first thing I noticed as I stepped into Uncle Rick’s living room, seemingly for the first time, but it appears I have been here before. The sight of it resting on the mantelpiece, above the open fireplace, made the whole room feel familiar.

My dad shuffled past me and began to assemble the stack of flat-pack moving boxes I’d carried in from the van, while I just stood there, staring at the elephant. He wasn’t in a talkative mood. His brother, my Uncle Rick, died of a heart attack last week, and with my dad being the elder of the two, I guess it had him thinking about how long he had left.

I never knew my Uncle Rick very well. Growing up, I saw him once a year if that. He came round for Christmas a handful of times when I was a kid. I saw him at a couple of weddings over the years, a couple of funerals, and for the final time last year, on his seventieth birthday.

He kept to himself at family gatherings. Always the first to crack open a beer or pour himself something a little stronger. Always the first to leave as well. He was the walking embodiment of being worn out, both physically and mentally. The deep, darkened bags under his eyes had been there since I was a kid, some thirty-odd years ago.

The few times I did interact with him he often got my name wrong. He’d call me Ben, then quickly correct himself. I always found that quite odd, it’s not remotely similar to my name.

“William,” my dad snapped, “are you going to give me a hand or what?”

“Yeah… sorry. I was in a world of my own.”

He grunted in response. He’d already filled two boxes. I grabbed a box and took it over to the fireplace. The mantelpiece was covered in little trinkets, mostly carved from wood. I studied them as I packed them carefully away; an acorn, a hand, a dragon, a skull, a pig, all made from the same wood, probably by the same hand.

I picked up the elephant last, and as I held it, my uncle’s voice came rushing back to me.

“Ben! —William, that’s not a toy, put it down.”

I remember him lurching out of his armchair and stumbling across the room towards me, his hand outstretched before him.

“Sorry,” I had said, as I scrambled to put it back before he reached me.

“Why don’t you play outside, in the garden?” he suggested, his face full of worry.

He led me through the kitchen and opened the back door.

The memory faded. As I came back to my senses, I realised I had placed the elephant back on the mantel. I kept thinking about it as I carried on packing. I had this nagging feeling that there was someone else there too, but I couldn’t quite recall who.

I thought about asking my dad about it, but he looked to be in a terrible state. He doesn’t deal with death too well, not after Mum died. Uncle Rick was our last remaining relative.

That was another thing my brain had blocked out. I remember my mum alive and well, and I remember her funeral. But I’ve got nothing in between.

She died of breast cancer when I was ten. By the time they’d found it, it was far too late, and she’d deteriorated rapidly over a couple of weeks. Anyone who’d visited her in her final moments described her end as a blessing, a mercy.

I have always been thankful that my brain had allowed me to forget.

We finished up the living room and piled it all into the van. My dad poured us both a mug of coffee from his thermos and we sat in silence on the tailgate, the summer breeze cooling my sweat-stained t-shirt.

“Well,” Dad said, patting my knee as he rose to his feet. He finished his sentence with a wordless grumble as we began to head back inside.

I gulped down the rest of my lukewarm coffee and followed after him. He was disappearing up the stairs with an armful of flat-packed boxes as I stepped through the front door. I grabbed a few myself, then wandered through to the kitchen.

Even with the lights on, the room felt oppressive. The only window was on the side of the house, and pointed directly at the neighbours’ garden fence. The sink was piled high with dishes, so I had to wash and dry them all by hand before I could pack them away. It was the most basic kitchen I’d seen in a while; no kettle, no toaster, no microwave. The fridge appeared to be the only thing plugged into the wall.

Once all of the cupboards were empty, I unrolled a black bin bag and opened the fridge. I took a step back as the smell reached my nostrils.

Each shelf was stacked high with shrink-wrapped cuts of steak. The door pockets were stuffed full of pig ears, trotters and various other cured offcuts. I pulled my t-shirt up over my nose, trying to block out mental images of Uncle Rick eating pig snouts for dinner, as I emptied the contents of the fridge into the bag. Some of the steak must have gone off long before he had died. I hoped he had been feeding a whole pack of stray dogs or something.

I wrapped a second bin bag around the first and tied them both tight to contain the smell. I would not be putting that in the van, the bin men could deal with it on their next round. I lugged the bag over to the back door, turned the latch, and stepped out into the garden. I caught a glimpse of the shed at the far end, and it all came rushing back to me.

I was ten years old when I last visited my uncle’s house; I am sure of that now. I remember my dad dropping me at the door on his way back to hospital, I remember my uncle saying:

“I’m sorry about your mother, I truly am. You have to stay strong for your father, and for yourself.”

I remember crying on his doorstep, him awkwardly patting my shoulder. Worst of all, I remember my mum, my last true memory of her, lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes, a skeleton of her former self, the colour drained from her skin, the warmth drained from her eyes.

I wish this version of her had remained forgotten, but instead it overwrote every other image I could bring to mind.

I dropped the bag of rancid meat into the grey bin and looked back towards the shed, the small pond.

I remember ten-year-old me sulking through the garden, crouching down by the pond, staring vacantly into the water. I had been looking down into the murky, green abyss when the shed door slowly creaked open. I watched as someone stepped out onto the grass, with bare feet: A little boy, much younger and smaller than me.

He wore only a baggy, tattered t-shirt, far too big for him, trailing down to his ankles. His skin was almost paper-white, and he didn’t have a single hair on his head. His face lit up with pure glee when he saw me. He scampered towards me holding a wooden aeroplane above his head, trying his best to sound like one.

I remember playing with him in the garden, chasing after him as he giggled to himself, running away when he tried to catch me. I’m not sure how long we played in the garden for, but I recall that he never spoke a word. He wouldn’t let me play with the wooden plane either.

I remember him snatching it from me as I picked it up off the grass. I remember there was something not quite right with his hands, something strange about them, but I’m not sure exactly what.

After a while he led me to the shed. He opened the door but there was nothing inside. He got down on his knees and lifted a panel on the floor. The hinges groaned as the trapdoor opened, revealing a wooden staircase that went down into darkness.

“Ben!” Uncle Rick called from the back door. “Sorry—William, your dad’s here.”

The boy scuttled down the stairs and the trapdoor slammed shut behind him.

I remember the feeling of dread resurfacing. My dad standing in the living room with red, puffy eyes. His choking wail as the words spilled out of him.

“It’s your mother… she’s… she’s gone.”

Fresh tears rolled down my cheeks as I stood frozen in the garden, my eyes locked on the shed, my hand still holding up the lid of the grey bin. My feet started carrying me towards the shed before I’d even made the thought to move, my subconscious mind prioritising curiosity as my conscious mind overwhelmed itself with feelings I had not yet processed.

I pulled open the creaky door. The shed was empty, except for an old, ragged rug that covered most of the floor. I rolled the rug back, exposing the well-worn edges of the trapdoor. The hinges must have corroded long ago, the entire panel came free in my hands. I stacked it against the wall of the shed and looked down into the dark. I pulled my phone from my pocket, turned on the torch and descended the stairs.

The first thing I laid my eyes on in the dim light from my phone, was a wooden elephant. Not just one of them but a whole pile of them, all almost identical to the one in Uncle Rick’s living room.

The space down there was much bigger than I had expected. The ground, walls, and ceiling looked to be raw earth, like the whole place had been dug out, yet had somehow not collapsed. My phone only illuminated a few metres ahead of me, leaving a black void up ahead, the silence unsettling.

I walked further along, dragging my feet. There were piles upon piles of wooden carvings littered about, some similar to the ones I’d packed, some like nothing I’d seen before. I continued on.

My light caught the edge of a bright white branch or tree root, gnarled and twisted, spanning the length of the space up ahead. I shone the light from one end to the other.

It appeared to sway a little, then it folded in the centre, and the end of it reached out towards me. It stopped just a foot shy of my face then came to rest on the ground, and I suddenly realised what I was looking at. That strange hand with too many fingers, too many thumbs, some fingers thicker than others, some bending the wrong way.

The boy’s hand.

His face drifted towards me from the darkness, his cheeks gaunt, his skin sallow, his eyes sunken. His head lifted towards the ceiling, turning at a right angle on his neck when he ran out of space. His other arm clawed into the wall on my right as he dragged his foot beneath him, his knee almost reaching the ceiling too.

I turned to run and he shrieked, sending a jolt of pain through my ringing ears, turning my legs to jelly. Lumps of earth rained down on me as he forced himself through the space behind me. Adrenaline took over and I ran faster than I had in years, the narrow rectangle of light on the stairs getting closer and closer with every step. I could hear his rasping breath following closely.

My foot made contact with the bottom step, then his hand squeezed tight around my waist. He lifted me effortlessly towards his face, he sniffed at me and his expression shifted. He looked into my eyes and smiled a crooked, haggard smile, faintly reminiscent of when he was young.

I heard clumsy footsteps coming down the stairs. His smile faded as he looked beyond me. I craned my neck to see my dad standing on the bottom step, his arm juddering uncontrollably as he pointed at me.

“Ben! You put him down now!” he shouted with false confidence in his voice.

The next few seconds were a blur.

I heard the sound of bones cracking, saw my dad rush past me like a rag doll in Ben’s other hand as I fell from his grip. Pain burned through my wrist from my awkward landing.

I looked up from the floor in horror. My dad hung limp, his arms at his sides, his head fully enveloped in Ben’s mouth, a strangled groan coming from within. Ben wrapped a hand around my dad’s feet and pulled down as his head tugged up, ripping my dad’s neck from his body.

He chewed noisily as I dragged myself to the stairs, fighting the urge to gag. His long arm reached over my shoulder, his hand opened in front of my face. A wooden aeroplane lay in his palm, he jerked it closer to my face, as if he was offering it to me.

Without thinking, I took it and looked back at him. He smiled, entrails hanging from his teeth, blood pouring down his chin, then went back to eating.

I climbed up the stairs and replaced the trapdoor, then the rug, and drove home in silence.

I don’t know what’s come over me, but tomorrow… I’m going to buy as much steak as I can.