Hide and Seek

EiqffTEB/

It was fun at first.

Where's Casey? Casey in the kitchen?

Nope.

Casey in the living room?

Unh-unh. Casey in the shed?

Then it stopped being fun abruptly.

Casey in the basement.

Oh, shit.

There was a little light on the cellar stairs filtering down from the

first-floor windows, but you can imagine how far that got me. Not even

off the stairs. And from there on it was a dark such as I'd never

experienced before and hope never to experience again. I could almost

feel my pupils widening, struggling to accommodate to the idea that

this was a whole new ball game for human eyesight.

For a while all I could do was stand and wait. It was wait or grope

and I didn't feel like groping. Leave it to Casey, I thought. Down

here it was scary. Not like traipsing through the bedrooms. Down here

you could fall on your ass and die on the flat of an axe or the tines

of a pitchfork. It made me worry a little about that sound I'd heard

earlier.

I must have waited five minutes on the stairs. It never got much

better than a dull gray, filled with shapes of solid black. I was glad

we'd explored earlier, otherwise I'd never have known that heap of