Kelly

He wanted a rabbit like it for a pet and had asked his father to help him catch it by propping up a box with a stick tied to a string. But his father said the rabbit would die if he caught it and kept it in a cage. Kelly had seen rabbits in cages, but they were tame rabbits that people kept to eat. They weren't wild and had never lived in the woods. Kelly had never eaten a rabbit.

The rabbit hopped slowly across the yard and disappeared behind a bush. Kelly stood up so he could continue to watch it. When the rabbit saw him move, it ran behind the garage. He picked up his X-Ray gun and ran after it. The space between the garage and the house next to it was dark and narrow. An old lady lived in that house. She hardly ever came out. Kelly had seen her only twice, and the way she looked scared him. She looked old, like a witch. But he felt safe behind the garage because no windows or doors from the old lady's house opened there. Places where a door and a window had been were covered over with shingles, newer and cleaner than the older ones around them.

Kelly searched behind the garage. He couldn't see the rabbit. A pile of wood near the alley and junk piled up everywhere made it hard to move around. He walked across the top of the junk, balancing himself with one hand on the garage or on the house. He could not reach both at the same time by only a few inches.

"The rabbit probably lives in a hole back here," he thought. As he searched for a hole, he dropped his X-Ray gun. It fell into the woodpile. While he looked down into the spaces between the boards, the rabbit ran out past him suddenly. It scared him for a second, and he froze as he watched it disappear at the other end of the garage.

Kelly ran after the rabbit and found its hole. Bending over, he stared down the funnel into darkness. "It would be fun to live in a hole," he thought. "You could dig out rooms of different sizes and shapes. It would be like living in a house without windows." He decided he would leave some lettuce out in the yard to see if the rabbit would eat it.

Kelly went back to the porch and sat down on the chair beneath the dining room window. Last night he had been playing on the floor in the dining room beneath that window and something had frightened him. He didn't know what it was. He had slowly turned his head, afraid, and looked up at the window out of the corner of his eye, hoping not to see anything. He saw the light of the room reflected on the glass against the blackness outside. He ran into the kitchen to tell his mother something had scared him.

"What?" she asked.

"On the porch," he said, pointing into the dining room.

She went into the dining room, and he followed her.

"At that window," he pointed.

She walked over to the window and looked out.

He saw her face reflected against the blackness.

"There's nothing out there. It must have been your imagination." She went back into the kitchen. He looked at the window again, then he went into the kitchen to play.

He remembered the time he and his father came home early from vacation. The rest of the family stayed at the beach, but his father had to go back to work. Kelly came home to stay with his grandmother because he didn't want to fly back later. He was afraid to fly.

They stopped at home to get some of Kelly's clothes, but they were locked out of the house because his father had forgotten to get the key from his mother. He told Kelly to climb in through the cellar window.

"I don't want to. I'm scared," Kelly said.

His father said, "Don't be silly."

The cellar window was too small for his father to fit through. It looked old and dirty. Kelly couldn't see through it, because it had frosted glass with wire in it. The glass was cracked in a lot of places.

A heavy screen covered the window on the outside. His father pulled off the screen and forced the window open, and Kelly climbed feet first backwards into blackness of the cellar. His father helped him by holding his arms and lowering him as he stepped down onto the top of an old toilet.

After he was inside, it didn't seem so dark, but it still scared him. Standing in the light from the window, Kelly could barely see the wooden stairs. Beneath them, in the still blackness, he imagined the missing concrete blocks in the wall where it opened into the crawl space under the kitchen. His father had set traps inside the crawl space and caught mice that his mother heard scratching around down there.

Kelly walked very slowly over to the stairs and felt his way up, step by step. He felt the openings beneath each step where the blackness entered into the space beneath the kitchen. He could see light from the kitchen through the slit at the bottom of the door as he climbed up the steps. But when he got to the top, he couldn't open the door. He remembered, then, that his father had locked it from the kitchen side and put the key on top of the refrigerator before they had gone on vacation. The light switch for the cellar was in the kitchen beside the refrigerator.

Kelly made his way back down the stairs and scurried across the cellar. He climbed up onto the toilet and out of the window.

"It's locked," he yelled to his father, who had already walked around to the back porch to wait for him to open the door. He felt a great relief at being out of the cellar.

Kelly and his father drove to Kelly's grandmother's house and borrowed a lot of old skeleton keys that looked like the key to the cellar door. When they got back home, Kelly crawled into the cellar again. He felt just as afraid this time. But the first key he tried opened the door, and he stepped into the light of the kitchen.

"Crawling into the cellar isn't like crawling into the attic," Kelly thought. He liked to go into the attic. To get in they had to get a ladder and climb through a trap door at the top of the closet in his parents' bedroom. When his father went into the attic, Kelly went with him. He liked to go up the ladder first and push the trap door open. Yellowish light shined from each end through small windows covered by dusty blinds. They had to walk on the rafters because the attic had no floor.

"Don't step off the rafters," his father would say.

"If I do, what will happen?"

Kelly knew the answer, but still he always asked.

"You'll fall through the floor."

"And where will I end up?"

"In the bedroom."

When he went into the attic, Kelly liked to look through the box of old pictures of his grandmother and grandfather. He remembered the time at his grandmother's house when he told her he saw a mouse from the cellar steps in the space between the rafters and the basement wall. He was on his way down into the basement and he felt scared. He turned around and went back upstairs. When his father came to pick him up, his grandmother made Kelly tell him about the mouse. His father didn't believe him, but his grandmother made his father set a trap anyway.

The next day at dinner his father told everyone that the trap had caught a mouse. Kelly's mother told everyone how good he was for seeing the mouse. She said that everyone should believe Kelly and not doubt him when he told them something. Every time Kelly looked at the pictures of his grandparents in the attic, he remembered the mouse. He never really did see it. He just told everyone he did because he thought they wouldn't believe him if he told them he felt it looking at him in the dark.

Kelly could have stayed in the attic for hours looking at the pictures, but his father wouldn't let him. He thought he would fall through the floor.

From the porch where he sat, Kelly saw the rabbit hopping back into the yard. He moved quietly into the kitchen to get a piece of lettuce, but when he came back out, the rabbit was gone. He put the lettuce in the middle of the yard and went inside.

That night Kelly dreamed about the trap door. It opened into the center of his parents' bedroom instead of into the closet. He dreamed he got a ladder, by himself, and climbed up to the trap door. He could look down and see his parents sleeping below.

He pushed the trap door open. But he could see nothing. It didn't glow with the yellow light, but looked pitch black. He was afraid, but he began to climb into the attic anyway. Something was in there he needed to get. He didn't know what it was, but he knew he needed it. When he was halfway through the opening, it started to get smaller. It began squeezing him tightly. He could see only blackness all around him.

Kelly woke up in the dark afraid. He wanted to go and tell his mother he had a bad dream. She would let him sleep in her bed. But he didn't want to go into that room. He lay in his bed in the dark looking across his room with the covers pulled up tight around his neck. The closet door hung open. He forgot to close it before he went to bed. He almost always remembered to close it. The blackness inside the closet stared at him. To its left, through the window, a silver light shined.

Kelly rolled very slowly to the edge of the bed, hardly moving at all so he could pretend he was asleep if anyone or anything was there. He got his feet onto the floor. Then he stood up and walked slowly over to the closet and shut the door. The silver light lit the room. He went to the window. The light came from the moon. It lit the porch roof, the yard, and the garage, making it brighter than night outside, halfway between night and day. He looked across the yard to the garage, not quite able to see anything, and he remembered the X-Ray gun he had lost in the woodpile. Tomorrow, he would go and look for it. He didn't like to lose things.

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