I remember the first time I truly saw him, Papa. Not in the kindly, tweed-jacketed figure who presided over the PTA meetings or mingled cheerfully at the garden club. No, it was later, much later, when the careful veneer of respectability had begun to crack, revealing the abyss beneath. But even then, the memory is etched with a child's impossible artistry – not the grim truth, but a distorted, unsettling vision, like a painting where the colours bleed into wrong shapes.
My earliest memories are foggy, overlaid with the static hum of the old radio in the living room. Faces blur, sounds dissolve. But the basement… ah, the basement is sharp. It was always cold down there, smelling of damp earth and something else, something… metallic, like the taste of pennies in my mouth when I was scared. And it was there, in that subterranean theatre of echoes, that the real performances began. I was only a little fellow then, with too many teeth and an unfortunate lisp that made polite company a trial. But down there, silence was cheap, and terror was the currency.
I hated him from the start. Hated the way his smile could shift so quickly, one moment a grandfatherly indulgence, the next a predator's promise. Hated the way his eyes, when he looked at me, seemed to see not a child, but… something else. A reflection? Or perhaps just a mirror held up to a monstrous private world he desperately guarded.
The basement door was old, wooden, smelling of polish and neglect. It was always kept locked, you understand. A childish game was to try and guess the sounds from behind the heavy wood. At first, it was just muffled thuds, the sound of his own careful hands arranging something… bulky? Then came the whispers, sharp and terrified, rising in pitch like trapped birds. And the other sounds… ah, the other sounds. A child's scream is a terrible, raw thing, stripped of all civility. Mine was usually muffled, a choked sob twisted into gasps, but down there… down there, it was symphonies of pure agony. High-pitched shrieks that grated on the eardrum, like fingernails on slate, and deeper, guttural moans that seemed to wrench the very soul from the body. "P-please, no…!" Or just a ragged, "Nooooo…"
I'd press my ear to the cold wood, trembling, my small hands gripping the doorknob, the smooth, familiar wood suddenly feeling like the entrance to hell. The sounds were a language older than my father's polite chatter, a vocabulary of pain that defied translation. One time, I remember a piercing cry that cut straight through my childish fear – a sound that promised a terrible fate, not just a scolding. I ran upstairs, hiding behind the curtains, my breath coming in little pants, waiting for the punishment that never came for trespassing, but dreading the moment when I'd be sent back to listen, to eavesdrop on that awful, forbidden drama.
And Papa? He'd emerge from his world upstairs, perhaps needing something from the pantry, his expression placid, serene even. He'd murmur a word to me – "Go fetch me the milk, Tin" – his voice a gentle counterpoint to the symphony of terror I'd just heard. And I would obey, my legs shaky, my heart pounding, the memory of those screams echoing in the hollow spaces between my ribs, forever waiting for the monstrous performance to end, or to begin again.
It was a strange education, this listening. He taught me things no school could, things about fear, about the fragility of the human voice, about the basement itself – its cool embrace, the smell of despair, the knowledge that secrets, even the most monstrous, can be contained in a room, a house, a carefully constructed life. He didn't teach me to be afraid of him, oh no. He taught me to be afraid for him, to understand the weight of his hidden sins. He was, after all, my father. And in that understanding lay the beginning of my own peculiar silence, the way I learned to listen not with my ears, but with the intricate, terrifying machinery of my soul.
I remember one summer, perhaps I was eight, I found a key, small and old, in the bottom of a bookshelf. It was labelled, in a neat script, 'Basement'. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I stuffed it into my pocket. I tiptoed down the stairs, the familiar creak of the wooden steps seeming louder than ever. The air down there was thick, heavy, smelling of damp earth and something else – something metallic and sharp, like the taste of blood.
A high-pitched scream cut through the air, sharp and piercing, like a bird caught in a snare. It faltered, choked, then dissolved into terrified sobs. A low groan, guttural, emanated from deeper in the darkness. Then, a sharp intake of breath from somewhere nearby – the sound of a gasp, perhaps from a terrified victim, perhaps from the performer himself. And then, silence. Thick, heavy silence, broken only by my own ragged breathing. I clutched the key, my fingers white. The fear was immense, a physical force pressing down on me. I wanted to run, to flee upstairs and pretend I hadn't heard, hadn't found the key. But something held me back. Curiosity? No, not curiosity. It was a morbid fascination, a perverse urge to know the source of those sounds, to understand the man downstairs.
"Are you alright, Tin?" It was Papa's voice. Deceptively gentle. "Did you need anything?"
This was my father, who mingled with the garden club ladies, who signed my report cards with glowing praise, while he was orchestrating this… this thing. He was talking to them. He was comforting them, directing them, all while their reality was being torn apart.
I scrambled back up the stairs, my legs trembling, my heart pounding against my chest. I hid the key, not in the bookshelf, but somewhere secret, deep inside a hollow in the wooden wardrobe where I kept my model planes.
He was the architect, the director. And I, Tin, was his audience, his silent witness, trapped in the house of mirrors, always seeing the reflection of a monster behind me.