and like the first it opened. She pulled it all the way back until it scraped the wall beside her and stopped; she stepped in. And here she was, in her own basement.
It was a gray, industrial space, almost clinical. There were old pipes along the ceiling, dusty and utterly dry, bearing no beads of moisture; there was the same gray cement floor, stretched out from where she was standing. In rows stretching along the far walls, and then spaced neatly between them like library stacks, were banks of metal cabinets that looked like high school lockers, and between them aisles with enough space to walk. There was the thick smell of mothballs and also something else—a chemical scent she couldn’t identify.
It was surprisingly dry. She scoped her flashlight around again, looking for another lightbulb, and finally saw a switch on the wall. After she flicked it there was a pause, then a series of clicks and flickers and the overhead fluorescents went on, long bulbs in the ceiling, mostly out of sight beyond the tops of the cabinets. They cast a sickly, clinical light. She turned off her own. Other than the closed cabinets everywhere she noticed only one other element: sacks marked with printed words, lying along the tops of the cabinets and piled on the floor at their ends. She leaned down to the pile nearest her and read the words on the bags: SILICA GEL MIXTURE. DESICCANT.
Desiccant, she thought. Desiccant?
She heard someone call, then—it must be Portia. She propped the basement door open quickly with a bag of the silica so the light would fall into the hallway, then ran back along the hall.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. No 911 needed,” she called up from the bottom of the well. “It’s a basement. It’s just a basement. But there’s a lot of storage space and I want to check it out.”
“I’m curious,” came Portia’s voice. Flashlight beams shone into Susan’s face.
“Relax, get on with your evening,” said Susan. “I’ll give you a full report. Go inside and have dinner, don’t wait outside in the dark. Really—it’s just a basement. Concrete and brick and there are lights that work. The walls aren’t going to fall in on me.”
She waited till they took their flashlights and left, then went back down the hallway. In the morning, she was thinking, she’d bring Jim down and he could help her look for the connection between the basement and the main house—there must have once been a door, must have once been a passage between them. It made no sense, this isolation.
The metal cabinets were of all different widths, she saw, some tall and thin like lockers, others as wide as a walk-in closet, and all closed tightly, though she could see no locks. When she pulled at the handle on the first locker she felt another pull against her, as though the door was vacuum-sealed. But the handle moved down, there was a pop, and the door was open.
She thought at first it was a fur coat. But it was simply a fur—beautiful, striped—or maybe more like a hide, not as thick as a fur, coarser and more like horsehair. Striped horsehair, golden-blond and white.
She pulled it out gently—it was fastened inside somehow, maybe hanging from a hook or something—and saw it had a mane, and even the mane was striped. Moving up from the mane, it had ears, eyelashes and eyelids. It had a face. It was a whole skin, maybe—a whole beast, minus the architecture. On the inside of the door a sticker bore careful notations in ballpoint block letters: Africa Mammals 2.1.6.11. Damaged. Equus quagga quagga. South Africa native. Collection. Zoological specimen, Artis Magistra, Amsterdam. @ 1883. In wild, @ 1870s.
She let the hide fall back into its closet. You couldn’t mount it, she thought, at this point—she suspected it was too late for that, though she was no expert. Maybe her uncle had kept it because of its monetary value. An antique skin had to be worth something—possibly even for DNA study, if he had known about that, although he’d never struck her as much of a scholar.
She counted the doors, moving back through the room—dozens of separate compartments, hundreds even. She would open a couple more before she went upstairs. Possibly these were the spillovers from his collection, the skins that were substandard and therefore not fit to mount.
She was near the back, standing in front of one of the larger compartments; it had double doors,