A Sinister Staircase by Susan Buffum
It
appeared in the center of a traffic island where Main Street branched at a
ninety degree angle onto Elm Street, at a gentle curve to the left around the
town green, or continued straight onto the narrower School Street. The island
was triangular with multiple traffic signals like tall, yellow pines with
bristling light cones—red, yellow, and green—controlling motor vehicle flow.
Brick pathways trisected the island, converging at a central junction, each traffic
light situated on its own raised dais enclosed by granite curbstones.
It
wasn’t there one afternoon. But, it was there the following morning. It created
traffic snarls as drivers slowed to a snail’s pace as they craned their necks,
tilted their heads back trying to look upward. Several rear end collisions
occurred during the morning commute when drivers abruptly stopped to gawk. A
number of verbal altercations took place, but they were brief due to the fact
that those involved were more curious about the staircase that rose from the
center of the traffic island in a lazy, looping coil.
So
high it rose that it appeared to vanish into the low lying, steely-gray clouds
hovering just a story or two above the tallest building, which happened to be
the three-story corner building that now housed a trendy coffee shop on its
lower level. There were people sitting at the counter on stools facing out
toward the green, eyes raised to the gray clouds, hands wrapped around ignored wide-mouthed
cups of coffee in which sweet, creamy hearts surrounded by delicate curlicues
floated atop their contents.
A
half dozen brave souls had made it up to the second floor and out onto the
small balcony where there were several tiny, round, wrought iron café tables with
spider-legged matching chairs. There was an occasional stiff breeze gusting
down the street in unpredictable bursts. The air smelled heavy with impending
rain and slightly poisonous with exhaust fumes trapped beneath the clouds..
“That
wasn’t there yesterday, was it?” wondered a woman with long, unruly
strawberry-blonde hair who wore a leather jacket and jeans to a woman of
indeterminate age who was sitting alone at the next table, her cellphone held
like a prayer book in both her slender, pale hands, her face cast in a slightly
bluish light.
“Nope,”
came a masculine reply. “City must have slapped it up after five o’clock last
night. Another damn waste of taxpayer money, if you ask me,” he muttered. He
was dressed in work coveralls, was leaning against the brick wall near the
doorway leading back inside the building from the balcony. “I’ve got to get to
work so my taxes can pay for more crap like this,” he grumbled as he
disappeared back inside. The thudding of his steel-toed boots as he descended the
wooden staircase to the first floor felt like the reverberations of thunder
beneath the feet of the people on the balcony.
“Is
it some sort of art installation?” asked a college-aged girl with bright
turquoise hair who stood up from her seat to walk to the short wrought iron
railing on the parapet that prevented people from jumping and deterred others
from climbing over onto the ledge and falling to the brick sidewalk below. “I
bet it’s some artist’s doing, but what’s the point of placing it in this town?
No one here appreciates art.”
Her
companion, a tall, lanky young man with a fall of brown hair obscuring the
right side of his lean, chiseled face shrugged as he furiously texted on his
cellphone. “There’s nothing holding it up, you know,” he pointed out. “No supports.
Another strong gust coming down Elm Street and that thing will topple over. Mark
my words. Someone’s going to get killed.”
“You’re
such a fatalist,” the girl muttered, grabbing her backpack from the tiled
floor, slinging it over her right shoulder before grabbing her coffee that was
in a takeout cup. “C’mon, we’re going to be late for class.” The lanky boy
rose, stuffing his phone into his sweatshirt pocket before grabbing his own
backpack and cup of coffee. He followed the girl with the turquoise hair to the
door, ducking as he passed through.
This
left the woman with the blue glow illuminating her face, the woman in the
leather jacket, and a middle-aged man with a doughy face, receding brown hair,
and black-framed glasses that magnified his watery blue eyes on the balcony. “Is
that a kid on the staircase?” he asked, reaching up to adjust his glasses. He
squinted through the smudgy lenses at the staircase diagonally across from the
balcony. “I think there’s a kid on the staircase,” he said.
The
woman with the phone glanced up, her gaze falling on the staircase. A slight
frown creased her brow and she gave an elegant one-shoulder shrug before
returning her gaze to the screen of her phone. “More a young woman, I’d say,
not a young girl.”
“No,
it’s a child,” he disagreed. “All gangly legs and bare feet on a day like this.
Where’s her mother, I want to know,” he replied.
“She’s
probably downstairs having coffee. You know how kids are. Easily bored and
restless. They like to play,” the strawberry-blonde woman said.
He
hauled himself up off the tiny, spindly-legged chair to go to the railing
recently abandoned by the girl with the turquoise hair. He caught a faint hint
of her cinnamon scent hanging on the heavy air. It made his stomach growl. His
thoughts veered to the huge cinnamon roll he had seen in the pastry case behind
the counter downstairs. He’d eaten breakfast before leaving home. However, he
thought he might have to buy that obscenely enormous pastry and take it to work
with him this morning. It was too much temptation to ignore with that scent
teasing his olfactory sense. “I think she’s carrying a basket.”
The women didn’t answer him. One was too
absorbed in what she was reading on the small screen of her phone. The other
was watching a crow that had landed with a flutter of dark wings on top of a
nearby streetlight.
“She
doesn’t even have a jacket on, or a sweater. She should at least have a
sweater, or a sweatshirt. And some sort of shoes on her feet. She must be
cold.” He thought he should go down there and offer her his jacket, but people
were such alarmists these days. His kind gesture might be misconstrued as an
attempt to molest the girl if he fumbled while trying to button it around her,
if he accidentally touched her. One couldn’t even be a good Samaritan in this
day and age without someone taking offense or misconstruing good intentions.
Down
on the street, the girl hesitated, stopping on the bottom step of the
staircase. Across from the island, on the corner, was a hair salon with
sparkling golden letters painted on the Main Street side windows. Beside that
business was a small bookstore. The proprietor of that shop stood outside the
door on the granite stoop smoking a cigarette, one hand thrust into the front
pocket of his jeans as he surveyed the morning traffic. The sleeves of his
hoodie sweatshirt were pushed up to his elbows revealing lean arms with sinewy
muscle snaking around the bones beneath his skin. He wore high-top canvas
sneakers as bright a shade of red as arterial blood. Next to the bookstore was a café, the heads
of its patrons in the booths against the front window were bowed over their
breakfasts, already having dismissed the mysterious staircase as some sort of
advertising ploy, or ridiculous addition to the recently renovated downtown.
The
girl seemed to take in everything with one sweep of her calm, dark eyes. She
shifted the basket, and then leaned down, setting it on the brick pathway. It
rested against the bottom step of the staircase.
“Gathering
eggs, little lady?” asked an elderly man who walked crooked over so that he
appeared to be the living personification of the cane he gripped in his left
hand. The girl gave him a frank and curious look. He nodded toward the basket
at her feet. “In your basket, you got eggs?”
“No,
sir,” she replied softly. “It’s empty at the moment.”
He
dipped his right hand into his deep trouser pocket then dropped a shiny quarter
into the bottom of the basket. “Now it’s no longer empty,” he said, nodding his
head with satisfaction as the white silhouette of a striding man lit up
indicating he could cross the street safely.
A
woman holding the hand of a toddler dug her free hand into her jacket pocket,
plucking out a dollar bill that she dropped into the basket as they passed by,
following the elderly man across Elm Street to the sidewalk in front of the
coffee shop. The girl’s head turned as she followed their progress along the
sidewalk toward the library on the corner.
Then
she frowned down at the money in the bottom of the basket, squatted down and
plucked it out, tossing it onto the bricks and then standing up with a defiant
scowl on her face, as if daring anyone else to defile her basket by dropping
money into it. She folded her thin arms as two men crossed Elm Street to the
island. One walked past her to press the button to make the light change so
they could cross. The other stopped, looked down at the girl who tilted her
head back to look up at him, her face still set in that jaw thrust forward
expression. Their eyes locked and held as he crouched down, picking up the
dollar bill and the quarter. He rose to his full height again, stuffing the
money into his windbreaker pocket, his expression daring her to remark upon his
taking it. “You got something you want to say to me, little girl?” he asked, a
hint of mockery in his tone, a subtle dare shadowing his words.
“There’s
lots more of that, you know,” she replied.
“Lots
more of what?”
“Money,”
she said, her thumb popping up and flicking in a backwards motion over her
shoulder to indicate the staircase.
“What
do you mean? There ain’t nothin’ up there,” he retorted.
“Yes,
there is. There’s lots and lots of money up there.” He started to scoff at her,
but her face was suddenly cherubic, full of that innocence young children
radiate. She cocked her head slightly toward her left shoulder, then bent and
grasped the handle of the basket. “You’ll need this to carry it back down in.”
She held the basket out to him.
He
looked skeptical, but reached out and took the handle in his hand. “Chuck,
c’mon, man,” said his friend from near the light signal pole. “She’s pullin’
your leg. There ain’t nothin’ up there but sky.”
“Doesn’t
hurt nothin’ to run up and take a quick look. Kids don’t lie, right? She’s too
young to know how to lie. It’ll just take a coupla seconds. Up and back. Hang
tight.” He gave the child a little shove to one side and quickly began climbing
up the staircase.
“What’s
really up there?” asked the other man who pushed his long, dirty, blonde hair
back from his face with one hand. He didn’t know why Chuck thought the girl was
a kid. She was older than his teenaged daughter. There were the subtle curves of an
adolescent girl beneath her simple white shift. They were rather intriguing
curves, with their promise of filling out to become womanly curves in a few
years’ times. “You can tell me.”
“Everything
you could ever dream of,” she replied.
“You
don’t say.” She nodded, giving him a surprisingly coy look for such a sweet
looking young lady.
“She
wasn’t yankin’ my chain, Jimmy! Money! There’s piles and piles of it up here!”
came Chuck’s distant, excited, and incredulous voice from high above their
heads.
“See?”
she said.
Jimmy
put his foot up on the bottom step and grabbed the railing.
“I
wouldn’t go up there, if I was you,” said a voice to his right.
He
turned his head and saw that it was the bookstore proprietor who had come across the
street and was now standing on the island on the brick path. “What business is
it of yours, weirdo? Go on back to your shop and stick your big nose into a
book, and slam it shut!”
The
bookstore proprietor smiled affably and shrugged. “I read a lot. Maybe you
should take it up, reading. It never bodes well to climb a staircase you don’t
know what’s at the top of.”
“Money!
I’m rich!” came Chuck’s gleeful voice, followed by a metallic clatter.
Jimmy,
the bookstore proprietor, and the girl all watched as several coins rolled down
the staircase. They landed at Jimmy’s feet. He grinned smugly at the man from
the bookstore, before shoving him aside and dashing up the staircase. “I’m
comin’, Chuck! I want some of that cash!”
The
bookstore proprietor sighed, turning his eyes toward the girl. She was a small
child with short blonde hair, brown eyes, and lips that curved into a sly smile
as he just gazed at her. He nodded, and as he did, she seemed to waver in his
vision like a mirage, or an image reflected in a funhouse mirror. She appeared
to grow from child to adolescent, to young woman, to matron, to crone before
becoming a child again. As he studied her, took the measure of her, the basket
came rolling slowly down the staircase. “What do you collect in your basket?”
he asked her as she bent to pick it up as it came to rest against her bare
ankle and foot.
She
looked down into the basket and then reached inside. Half her arm seemed to
disappear into the depths of the basket, although to his eyes it looked rather
shallow. “Hands,” she said as she lifted a man’s clenched hand from the basket
by the ragged, gory stump of its wrist. The book proprietor stepped back one big
step as the girl smiled up at him. As she smiled, the hand she held unclenched
and a shower of coins fell onto the bricks at their feet with a discordant
metallic clatter. She laughed, her laughter as sweet as honey, but there was
something tainted lurking within it.
The
bookstore proprietor nodded as he kicked a nickel with the toe of his red
sneaker. “That certainly is a sinister staircase,” he remarked. The child
tossed the disembodied hand into the air. It vanished. Clutching the handle of
the basket, she turned and began to climb the stairs without replying. His eyes
followed her until she vanished into the gray clouds that still hung low over
the intersection.
As
he began to look away, his eyes fell on the woman standing on the second floor
balcony of the coffee shop on the corner. Her face was still illuminated by the
screen of the cellphone she held like an open book in her hands. Her eyes rose
from the screen to meet his from across the street for a long moment. Slowly, her
eyes lowered and her left hand moved as she tapped on her screen.
In
his pocket, the bookstore proprietor’s cellphone rang like an old bicycle bell
to indicate that he had a text message. Her eyes rose from her phone’s screen
as he pulled his phone from his sweatshirt pocket. He tore his gaze away from
hers as he tapped the screen to open the text message. I’ve got your number, he read.
“I
bet you have,” he murmured as he swiped the screen. It went dark.
He
glanced again toward the balcony, but the woman was gone. The staircase,
however, was still in front of him. The coins still littered the brick path at
the foot of the stairs. Cars flowed by as he walked to the yellow street
signal post and pressed the button, then waited for the ghostly striding figure
to light up in the small rectangular signpost across the street in front of the
hair salon. There were people on that sidewalk waiting to cross to this island.
“Let them come across,” he thought as the figure lit up and he stepped out
between the parallel lines of the sidewalk, striding quickly back across the
street and over to the granite stoop of his shop. As he opened the door and
stepped inside, he flipped the book-shaped sign that hung on the inside of the
door so that it read OPEN.
Walking
through the store, he noticed a book that had fallen from the shelf. He went to
pick it up, to place it back on top of the bookcase in the empty spot that
marked the space it had recently occupied. Turning it over in his hands, he saw
that it was a copy of Some Must Watch
by Ethel Lina White.
He
laughed.
(NOTE: The novel Some Must
Watch published in Great Britain in 1933 was adapted to the screen by
screenwriter Mel Dinelli and became the basis for the film The Spiral Staircase in 1946 , starring Dorothy McGuire, George
Brent, and Ethel Barrymore.)
