The Place Under the Stairs

Lazarus Bethany hated his home. All the houses looked old and every fence outside them had wood that was rotten.  He would often play with the fences, picking apart their fibres. Each flake would snap and partially crumble in his fingers. ‘It’s a piece of rubbish’ he thought. He hated anything old. Old wasn’t interesting, old just was there, like a little sister that wouldn’t ever go away. Old was annoying.   That was until his Mum had to move house.  As soon as he got to his new neighbourhood he missed Old, the rotten fences and the old houses, the familiar smell of musk and damp.  He quickly sought out anything old, filling his room full of old books that smelled and had yellow pages, old dusty guitars that wouldn’t keep tune, old rusted tins that had pictures, ones that had once had biscuits, and some that were so small he didn’t even know what they could be used for.

His new house was the only thing he liked, it was old. As it’s already known, Lazarus liked old things.  There was an old staircase, the kind that spiralled and had a thick wooden banister that always seemed to shine even though the years had withered it away.  Underneath the spiral staircase there was a small door, smaller than Lazarus but tall enough for him to squeeze through.  His Mum would often ignore it, she sometimes might mention how she had bought a house with a door that leads nowhere, or how she had saved money by cutting the costs on the doors. She tried to make everything funny, even though as Lazarus knew too well, she wasn’t very funny at all.

On opening the door Lazarus fell inside, backwards, and backwards until his rather large head thudded on the back of the small room.  It was dark, with only the light from the hallway lending any brightness to the room that was feeling ever more enclosed.  There were shelves with potions and magic scrolls, they could have been cleaning products but Lazarus knew better than to ruin a mystery.    Noticing a gust of air Lazarus turned his head to notice he had pushed an opening, the words on its door were CLOSE.  Taking a peak through the gap Lazarus recoiled as spiders pounced at his face, quickly he closed the door, just as it had requested him to. He crawled out of the space under the stairs.  The rustling of the spiders feet scurried beside his ear as their shadows passed his sight. ‘At least it was old’, Lazarus once again thought.

In the hallway Lazarus’ Mum was storming down towards him- this was never a good sign. ‘If you’re going to keep all of this tacky rubbish then clean it for goodness sake. You’re dragging in insects from everywhere with all the decaying clutter!’ said Lazarus’ Mum.
‘But Mum, it’s interesting! Everything I bring in has a story behind it. Like the old cassette that was used in the sixties and...’
‘Lazarus, I’m really not interested. Although I’m sure it is fascinating. I just want you to be a bit more tidy. Can you do that for me please!?’

Lazarus was defeated. No one quite understood the importance of his old things, they weren’t just reminders about his old house, he believed that they did have a story to them.  He also noticed that his Mum was right, he was sure he was seeing a lot more bugs than he used to see.  He felt them in his sleep, tickling over his bed sheets, lurching over his face, making themselves at home waiting to enter into his ears so they can feast on his young succulent brain.  He wondered for a moment if bugs could hatch in his head. Lazarus was sure that once when he wiggled his finger in his ear he pulled out ant eggs. Little black specks of dust that sandwiched between the flaky yellow ear wax.  The clock had just turned 10:00pm, he could tell by an old rusted clock that tick-tocked in his room, being lit up by a light that shone through an coloured glass Lazarus had found in the basement of his new-old house.  The colours would change from purple to red to yellow to green to blue as a torch light chose different colours as it circled round a fan that spiralled clockwise slowly, and repeatedly.
Lazarus pulled a string that knocked an old spoon into a fan that switched it off.  He waited for the bugs to crawl up his body, beginning to think that it may be time to finally throw out some of his new-old things. 

Lazarus got out of bed and scooped a big pile of dust off an old radio that stood at the end of his room, he thought if a space alien would listen to music on anything it would be this.  It’s speakers were huge, and it was made of wood, not plastic like everything else he owned.  With the dust in his hands he scattered it on the floor and just off the edges of his bed.  That night Lazarus slept in the corner of his room, huddling up, waiting for the marching of the insects to lead him to their nest.  Like a marching band they followed up the bed, as they had done every night looking on more Lazarus to feed on. Realising he was not there they huddled in the middle, looking as if they were discussing the mysterious vanishment of the boy they would normally be tucking into right now. 

For a moment Lazarus was sure they were talking, he could hear faint sounds coming from their tiny bodies ‘eeii eeii eeii’, it wasn’t a sound he liked. It was a sound that made him cold, one that reassured him that he shouldn’t be challenging them. He was soon realising that his magic dust trap wasn’t likely to work. It was too late for him, they had seen him.  As if they were running from fire the bugs raced for Lazarus. The faint noise of the bugs grew louder as they drew closer ‘EEII EEII EEII’, it wasn’t English, it wasn’t even a language. It was a call, a thunderous echo that said ‘DARE YOU DISTURB WE. INSECT OF OLD WE.’
The bugs lifted him off the floor and crashed him between the walls, intentionally bruising him, knocking his elbows into every corner, letting his legs beat on the banisters and his head pound against the steps as they crashed him down the stairs. 

Knocked out cold Lazarus woke up in a cold and dank place, where webs strung against the walls, shapes like stars and snowflakes, torn and made into a massacre for their own pleasure. He was strapped to a chair with the same webbing that he could see decorated the cave he found himself in.
‘SO YOU THINK YOU CAN GET RID OF WE’
‘Get rid of you? I don’t understand what you mean? Where am I? Oh God.’
‘WE HEARD THE QUEEN. WE HEARD SHE WANTS US DEAD.’
‘Where, where am I? Who are you?’
‘WE. ARE. HOME.  WE. ARE. HOME.’
‘Who are you?’
‘WE. ARE. HOME.’

Lazarus could barely see a thing, he knew that it wasn’t just spiders but a collective or spiders, ants, cockroaches, woodworms, termites, bedbugs, fleas, things that liked to make him bleed, things that liked to make him shiver.  Terrified he did what he could only think of to do and thought of old things. Old things, they were why the bugs were after him.  They lived in his old things, they needed him to keep them.  ‘You can’t keep me here. You need me.  If I go missing then Mum will throw all that stuff away.  You won’t have anywhere to live. You won’t have anything to eat.’
‘THEN WE EAT YOU BOY.’
‘But I’m not very tasty! I don’t eat well! I’ll just taste of chips and ketchup. Pretty gross really!’
‘THEN WE EAT YOU.’
‘Did I say ketchup? I meant mayonnaise!’
‘THEN WE EAT YOU.’

There was one last option Lazarus could think of doing and that was standing up and running away.  Tightening his fingers together he formed to fist and pulled the webbing free of his wrists, a hustling of insects roared through the room crawling up and between his feet. Chasing up his legs and pushing themselves between every pour of his body, gushing themselves down his throat.  Lazarus gipped as he forced himself sick, letting a pool of vomit escape his mouth and rush onto the floor.  His watering eyes caught a small glint of light.  The bugs were merciless, eating the trailing vomit that dripped down his chin then rushed back in to his mouth, some being crushed into a paste between his teeth and others falling down and homing themselves in the back of his throat.   Lazarus pulled his fingers down and once again the insides of his bowls emptied on to the floor with every eight legged creature that entered him.

Weak but not wanting to lose his strength Lazarus crawled towards the light. It was a small door that wouldn’t open.  He banged hard against its thin wood and eventually the buckle on its lock loosened and gave way.  He slammed the small door shut and found himself in a small room that was filled with cleaning chemicals, quickly realising where he was he pushed forward into the hallway.  It was pitch black.  The only sound he could hear was that off a million insects on two small doors away.  Lazarus ran upstairs to his bedroom, grabbing every dust collected thing he had, picking them up and throwing them out of the window crashing on to the garden bed below. 

His room was empty, without even a trace of old left in sight. Everything he had collected was in pieces in the flowerbed below.  Wanting to take no chances Lazarus went outside and lit alight everything in the garden, sending a fume of black smoke into the blue midnight sky.  Faint sounds of ‘Eeii eeii eii’ could be heard as the fire perished a thousand bugs that had found themselves living in the old furniture and antiqued crevasses.   Seeing his fears burn away Lazarus’ heart began to race a little less.

Sitting in the room Lazarus had decided it might be time to start enjoying new things, and not wanting to hold on so much to what has been.  Letting his heavy eyes rest he drifted off to sleep thinking about tomorrow, unaware of the marching insects thundering from underneath the stairs.  One by one they climbed into his ears and began to eat away at his brain, whilst others climbed into his mouth, and suffocating in him by burying themselves in his nostrils.  Lazarus’ eyes popped open as he was being ambushed by a million angry bugs.  Unable to cling on to air his eyes popped out of their sockets, blood tearing down from his nose and ears and an expression of hopelessness on his face. The bugs feasted on Lazarus that night, leaving nothing but the bones of a young boy for his Mum to find.  She cried relentlessly as she saw her little boy as nothing but bones.  She screamed in despair as a black army or mites raced out of the sockets of his large skull, crawling up her arm to claim their next victim. 

Below the stairs there was a dusty little room full of chemicals and a door with a little less dust on that had recently been slam shut.  It once read something very different to the warning it now left: THE BUGS ARE ALWAYS CLOSE.   It took only a few months until the body of Lazarus and his Mum were found and taken away, and only two more months until that new-old house was filled again.  The new family were quick to find the little room under the stairs, and it took only a week for another little boy to find a room full of potions and magic that politely asked him to close the door.