March 15, 2016

PodCastle 407: The Cellar Dweller

42 minutes

* Author : Maria Dahvana Headley

* Narrator : Tina Connolly

* Host : Rachael K. Jones

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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First appeared in Nightmare Magazine.

Rated PG

The Cellar Dweller

by Maria Dahvana Headley

Buildings were built, in the beginning, everyone knows, to hold the dead down. Every cellar floor was built over the ceiling of something else. Now cellars are used for all sorts of purposes. Roots. Paint cans. Pantries. Workshops. Other.

There’s a rhyme someone invented for children. It’s chanted in nurseries in the Banisher’s town. The nurseries are upholstered in chintz, and the walls are padded, as though they’re asylums and the babies inmates.

There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor, little darlings. There is an awful thing that comes up from beneath the cellar floor, up and through the cellar door.

The rhyme’s sometimes sung as a lullaby to pretty little ones, who curl in pretty little chairs, and play with pretty little rolling horses and pretty little rocking dogs. When they nod off to sleep, all’s well and right, but beneath their houses, things are fell and wrong. Things press their noses up through the dirt.

If you wake at night and hear a roar, perhaps you’ve heard the awful thing that roars behind the cellar door.

The children dream, and as they dream, they wriggle in their beds like worms pressed under stones. There are sugarplum visions in their pretty little heads.

There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor, little darlings, and it wants more and more and MORE.

They wake singing. They giggle and make faces. There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor. Run in circles and put on a pinafore. At the end of the rhyme, there’s a reward. Sing it long enough, and someone’ll give you candy.

The pretty little ones in the Banisher’s town sometimes tantrum from joy, but when they do, even their crying’s pretty and little. If they wake at night and hear a roar, they don’t go down the nursery stairs and through the cellar door, nor do they go to see what’s roaring beneath the cellar floor. They’re too pretty and too little for that.

The Banisher isn’t one of these pretty little children. The worst children on earth are the pretty ones, and that’s something that’s been known to ugly children for centuries.

The Banisher’s teeth are crooked, and her hair grows in knots the color of mud. Her elbows are too pointed, and her eyes are shifty and make people nervous. She’s had three broken noses, and she’s also had worms. She may still. Once, all of her fingernails fell off, and another time, she lost all of her hair, even her eyelashes, which made her even uglier than she was before. When that happened, she went underground for a while to avoid being busted. She’s got the kind of nose that runs, and the kind of skin that breaks out in rashes. She has all her limbs, which is somewhat miraculous, but she’s missing the little finger on her right hand.

The Banisher wears a coverall she found at a Salvation Army, a hat with earflaps she acquired at a lost-and-found, and a pair of cowboy boots with spurs. The Banisher doesn’t have friends, nor does she have family. She’s the only Banisher in the area. There’s no competition. This is her own business.

She’s an exterminator.

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