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I ducked underneath the stairs and walked straight towards the open doorway hidden beneath the stairs.
I hesitated before stepping into the dark space, After what I'd seen in the first room and the smell down here I did not want to walk willingly into a dark room just to stumble into what ever nasty thing that lie in wait for me. Blindly, I reached up, searching for a string to a light and felt nothing. I stepped further into the room with my right arm up-stretched high above my head. Finally, my fingers came into contact with what I was searching for. I pulled on the string and a light clicked on.
I frowned as I looked around the space. The walls in here weren't black but gray and, even though the smell still lingered in the air the further I walked into the room, I could tell it originated in the other room.
"Did you find your dead bodies?" Uncle Quint shouted from the other room.
Even though he couldn't see me, I shook my head.
Boxes upon boxes upon boxes lined the walls and covered almost every ounce of floor space. Thankfully, no dead bodies but the shit was a fire hazard to be sure. Most of the boxes were old and weathered with time.
"Well," Uncle Quint shouted. "Don't leave me hangin'. What the hell's in there and why in the fuck aren't you saying anything?"
"It's just boxes," I yelled back.
"What's in them?" Quinton shouted.
I rolled my eyes.
Like I'd had time to check out the insides of the boxes yet. What an asshole.
I didn't reply. If he wanted to know so badly, then he could look for himself.
Curious myself, I stepped up to the box closest to me and peeled open the top flaps. A puff of dust blew up in my face. I covered my mouth and nose with my hand as a coughing fit seized me.
"Ty?" Quinton shouted in concern. "What's happening?"
The sound of heavy footsteps pounded on the floor behind me, coming closer with each step. I ignored him and dug around in the box. There was nothing special inside, just a bunch of old photo albums filled with people probably long since dead.
I made it to the next box just as the pounding on the floor stopped right behind me. Uncle Quint was smart enough to not ask me what was in the box again and instead decided to look for himself, for which I appreciated.
We moved through the room in silence as we each took a look inside box after box. It was like a whole lifetime worth of shit had been stored away down here. I gave up after finding a bunch of dirty pans inside box five and shook my head.
"It's like a goddamn storage unit down here," I muttered disgustedly. "Who in their right mind holds onto dirty pans?"
"Is that what you found?" Quinton asked in an amused voice.
I ignored him and headed towards the door.
"Don't you even want to know what I found in my boxes?"
If it was anything like what I'd found then the answer was a big fat no.
"There are detailed journals in the ones I've looked through," Quinton said to my back.
Damn it. He'd gotten my attention with that one.
I turned to face him and asked, "What are they about?"
Uncle Quint smirked at me but thankfully told me what I wanted to know without hassling me beforehand. Mostly unheard of.
The smirk faded away from his face. "I've scanned a few pages in each one I've found so far. Some are lists for the store, but they aren't what you'd think. They're not about inventory. More, they're about the people who've walked in the front door. Descriptions, names, and every single item they purchased. She wrote in notes about them in the margins, what she thought about them, whether she liked them or not and what she thought they were gonna be doing with the items they bought."
That seemed weird to me and I wondered if there were detailed descriptions of my father and I in one of those journals.
Then a weirder thought came to me.
"But she was blind," I told Quint. "How did she know what everyone looked like when she was blind? I mean, I always knew she could see things better than most people but different than actually seeing them."
