The Lady in The Basement

I was the one who found Jake dead, Tucked in the dark corner of the parking garage in his idling pest control truck that vibrated minutely.

The parking garage always had a humming from stainless metal fans to circulate the humid and hot Virginia air. Walking closer to the truck I saw his chemical box in the bed of the truck was open with the top flap sticking straight up . I thought nothing weird about the open box because it's not just us in the pest control company that lives there and from time to time we steal from other trucks. For the summer the company buys out dozens of rooms for the employees to stay. Most employees are door-to-door salesmen who make a living selling pest control as a same day service. Where Jake and I, with a few others, come into play is after the sale. The ones who actually spray your house, the ones who interact with the customers and bring them down to reality after the salesmen fluff our feathers, or are they fluffing their own? We are the ones who click the rap trap mouths in place, with black jagged teeth…waiting, with the delicious neon blue food for the rats to nibble on and share with their newborns. We had 7 other trucks in the parking garage and from time to time chem went missing. Sometimes us technicians didn't want to wake up early and drive 30 minutes to the office to pick up materials, truckers were closer, much closer. I'd be lying to you if I didn't steal a de-weber now and then off a truck, but I always made no trace of the thievery. I can't speak for everyone though. So when that lid was pointing up to the rusty pipes and concrete ceiling above, I wasn't surprised, hell I might have had a smirk on my face.

With the swing of my arm I slapped the box closed, a whiff of chemicals spewed out and hit my nose which gave me a feeling of a stinging sneeze that never comes. I gave the window a knock to see if he would turn around.. silence. I got closer to see if he was glued to his phone and didn't hear me or didn’t bother looking. I put my hands up on the window and smushed my eyebrows against my index fingers to get a better look. I saw the seat was fully reclined back, him laying there…still as a morning lake. I knocked on the smaller back half door. Tap tap TAP. No movement. It was too dark to see so I dug my hand in my pocket to get my phone light out and put it flush to the back oval airplane-shaped window. That's when I saw this face—— god his face—— skin a purplish hue and pulled taught by swelling, eyes adrift and red which were bulging out like they wanted to leave, jaw open with dark fluid sitting in his mouth, escaping on the sides. The streaks of the dark liquid rolled down his purple face, curving down the back of his neck, and dribbling down the strands of hair meeting the headrest. My eyelids opened so wide they touched my eyebrows. His fingers curled limply around a chemical bottle, cap off and the liquid color matching that of the pool in his mouth…

“Jake” I whispered, my voice felt like it was stolen from me, my skin tingling like an unknown channel on tv as heat takes over… I begin to fall, the last thing I notice are my fingers streaking down the window. I passed out.

4 months pass

I'm moving out of the building where it happened. I’ve wanted to get out of this building since it happened but didn’t have the financial backing. Now I plan to stay in Virginia for the winter and move in with roommates from the pest control company. The salesmen call this time their “off-season” due to them all leaving and going back home, most to Vegas. My other two roommates run the regular technician routes which consist of stopping at 14-15 designated houses a day, spraying chemicals and setting traps to take care of the contracts those grimy salesmen sell.

I used to share a room with Jake. All of his things were taken out either by investigators or the maid service. The other roommates in the building told me to combine the abandoned twin bed with mine but I never touched it, I couldn't.

I’m making this entry due to finding something. Something I believe was very close to Jake. The last day of moving I had everything packed but my mattress and box spring. While moving my mattress lazily with the sheet still on I lost grip and it hit his mattress sliding it off the box spring and hitting the wall. I let go of my mattress automatically and wanted to fix his bed…. Preserve it. I wrapped my hands around his mattress when a wave of dizziness veiled over me. My hands became clammy and I didn't want to touch his mattress anymore, like a kid that doesn't want to touch an old person. I had to put it back! If I didn't it would haunt me forever my mind yelled at me.

Just as I forced myself to slide the mattress back, my middle knuckle dropped into a slight groove, and I stopped in place. I pushed the mattress to the right and traced where my knuckle had been and found a slit in the box spring. I hesitated, staring at the unnatural slash in the cloth, Thinking about when Jake and I would make fun of our manager which always had a bone to pick with Jake ever since the first day they met. The new manager two years younger than us yelling at Jake to tuck his shirt in while his own untucked, covered his belt and belly.

A smile slowly disappeared from my face as I snapped back to life with my whole forearm now submerged in the slit of the box spring…. searching. My fingers met and clutched a ice cold object that resembled a book. I pulled My arm out of the box spring like pulling a calf out of its mother, now half expecting to see red viscous liquid and tiny wet legs, my eyes shut slowly like elevator doors closing from the thought.

But My hand appeared dry and my fingers clenched around a book of sorts. The outside of the book was void of color, almost like it absorbed it instead. I sat down on my thrown mattress and the empty apartment surrounded me. I flipped to the first page as the spine creaked at me, I saw Jake's name and it clicked in me that this wasn't a book. It was Jake's notebook! I flipped page after page reading Jacob’s writings about days of killing bugs and missing home till I got to the page. Sometimes I wish I wasn't lazy, I could have taken the sheet off the bed, this would have never happened, and I would have never found the notebook. The apartment seemed to be silently closing in on me now like I was in the digestive tract of some huge monster. God the page—— in big dark letters he had written: “THE LADY IN THE BASEMENT IS THE REASON WHY I AM GONE.” I was stuck reading the words again and again thinking I was seeing things. My heart was pumping so vigorously I could hear it agitate the fabric of my shirt little by little with each beat. There was a dark arrow so dark that seemed to suck in light and pointed toward the right of the page wanting someone to flip it or something to flip it, so I did. For the next pages, he wrote why…. And I clinging to every word …began to read.