I didn’t intend to turn last week’s blog installment into a two-parter, but you readers are adventurous and curious souls, and you spurred me on into searching for the bomb shelter. For that I thank you. Enjoy part two today.
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“Where’s your sense of curiosity?” Our friend Todd said when word of our possible bomb shelter slipped out over gyros last Saturday night.
“I don’t know. We’ve been busy?” I said. “Wanna go and look now?”
Todd and his wife Trixie left their food and traipsed downstairs with me. I opened the door to the storage closet under the stairs, the only possibility I had seen that could lead to the shelter. I pointed at a piece of plywood propped over an opening inside the closet. I heard Husband, tinkering around with dishes in the kitchen upstairs, his curiosity level apparently matching mine.
“Go ahead and look behind it, if you want,” I said. “If it’s anywhere, it’s behind there.”
Todd hunched over to fit into the closet and crouched in front of the wood covering. A sliver of dread poked me, but Trixie and I followed anyway, armed with a battery-operated lantern.
Todd wrestled away the makeshift door and hollered. Trixie and I screamed, and from upstairs, Husband belted out something in response. Todd laughed.
“Just kidding,” he said, “but there it is. It’s awesome.”
The void—about a hundred square feet, maybe bigger—smelled of dank dungeon. Inside were a few items: a commode-like chair, two five-gallon buckets, and a bag of something weird. Todd jumped about four feet down into the space. Suddenly Husband was there, taking the bag from Todd.
“What is that?” I said, wrinkling my nose at what appeared to be a sack of water.
“Something that pulled the moisture out of the place, it looks like,” Husband said.
We spent time gazing at our new-to-us square footage, but only Todd actually walked around in it.
Later that night in bed, I thought about the two five-gallon buckets. What could be inside them? Stacks of cash? Gold bars? It was possible, wasn’t it?
By morning, my curiosity was fully roused. I summoned Flicka.
“Hey, wanna go down into the bomb shelter and check out what’s in those two buckets?” I said, realizing it was a sentence I had never before spoken in my life.
“Sure,” she said.
I held the lantern while I watched my oldest kid drop into the musty mystery room. She pried the top off the first bucket. Why was the lid rusty if it was plastic? Nervousness rattled me.
“Ew,” she said, peering inside.
At the bottom of the pail was a charred black substance. She replaced the cover and tugged the lid off the second one. Inside was a black liquid.
“Ew,” she said again, grimacing.
She replaced the second cover, brushed off her hands, and climbed out of the hole.
The End.
What do you make of that?
The weird bag.
The bomb shelter.
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.