by Bill Adler
It's 3 AM and there's a noise. You were sound asleep,
hanging out with Johnny Depp on the beach, and there's a noise. It's not
terribly loud, but it is unnatural, like a breathless cat dragging a broken leg
along the floor.
Would you rather that noise come from the basement or
attic? Which place would you rather have to investigate, protected only by a
tepid flashlight with batteries that may only have minutes left? Which place is
scarier in the middle of the night?
The basement has more real dangers. Burglars, deranged
murderers, crazies, rabid deer -- it's possible that any of these could have
entered the basement through a door, window, or by cutting through the wall.
It's not likely that a burglar is going to scale the
walls and enter your house through the attic. But it is, in my estimation, more
likely that in the attic you'll find a ghost, vampire or some unnamed creature.
The attic is the place of unknowable dangers that you can't see until it's too
late.
That noise in the basement -- if it's a murderer, things
will be over quick. Unless it's the kind of murderer who wants to entomb you in
a wall, still alive, where you'll stay in pitch darkness until the end comes,
but only after you've gone mad from thirst and the dark.
The noise in the attic could lead you to something that's
out of the most frightful Lovecraftian nightmare. Something that puts its hand
--its deformed, decaying, hand-- on you, and when it touches you, your body
feels like it's been dropped into ice-filled gorge. It is something half dead
that cannot die as long as it consumes the living and you are next. The room
smells of rotting, dead flesh and you...
Okay. Back to the question: Which is scarier, basement or
attic? Never mind that crickets are more likely be found in the basement, and
invisible spider webs in the attic. For me, it's a toss-up. Do I want to be
axed to death by the death row inmate who's escaped and is hiding in the
basement, or to I want to become a zombie, after that thing, that earth-covered
thing that rose from the beneath the soil in Rock Creek Park, bites me? The
whole axe-murderer scenario is kind of possible, and I unless I absolutely have
to, I'll wait until whatever is upstairs returns to the earth at sunrise.
---
Bill Adler is the co-publisher of the Cleveland Park
Listserv, www.cleveland-park.com.
He is the author of "Boys and Their Toys: Understanding Men by
Understanding Their Relationship with Gadgets," http://amzn.to/rspOft and "Outwitting
Squirrels," http://amzn.to/VXuLBh. He
tweets at @billadler.
Fire Breathing Toaster is a new column on the Cleveland
Park Listserv. It doesn't yet have a home on a particular day. What does Fire
Breathing Toaster mean? It's doesn't mean much, but it's a fun image, and once
the column name popped into my head, it stuck.
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