“Here,” I said, handing it to Mr. Patel. Then I gave Roger the next-largest one. I didn’t take a flashlight myself, even though there were two left. I guess it was a mistake on my part, considering what happened later. But if you had only one good hand like I do, you might have hesitated, too, about not keeping it free.

“There’s one more place to look,” I said.

Then I led them around the corner to the cellar door.

As soon as I looked at it, I felt my knees grow weak. It was unlocked.

22

THE CELLARWAY

THE HEAVY CELLAR door creaked on its ancient hinges as Mr. Patel pulled it open.

I’ve always been freaked out by cellars.

With all the reading and movie watching that Roger and I do, I know some of the theories about why this is. Roger’s mom even incorporates it into some of her lectures, especially when she is talking about Providence’s own first master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe. The “motif of premature burial” is how she puts it. When you descend into a cellar or a cave, you are “presaging your own interment,” walking down into your own grave before you are dead. The worst thing Poe could think of happening to any of the characters in his stories was to be walled in or buried alive. Like that guy who is walled into his own wine cellar in “The Cask of Amontillado” or Ligaea in her tomb. Poe was so scared of being buried alive himself that he even designed ways to put bells and speaking tubes into his own casket.

Back in Poe’s time, they didn’t embalm people, but just buried them really quick before they started to smell bad. Sometimes they did make mistakes and put people into the ground when they had just gone into a coma or something. Then they would wake up six feet underground in a coffin. That is also, according to Roger’s mom and some of the stuff we’ve read, one of the sources of the whole vampire myth. People would dig up a coffin and find the dead body in it still sort of fresh, with blood on its hands and a contorted, scary face. But that dead person didn’t look like that because he or she was a bloodsucking monster. It was just because that unlucky person had been buried alive, came to, and then tried to claw out before finally dying of hunger and thirst and suffocation.