Daddy said it was dangerous, said not to listen and always stay away from the cellar when I was alone, and to stick my fingers in my ears and say prayers real loud or yell 'Smuck you mother, smuck you mother-fucker, smuck you and the horse you rode in on,' because that and prayers both came to the same and at least they'd shut him out, but not to listen, because he said Paul was gone and there wasn't nothing in the cellar but a bool-devil from the Land of the Blood-Bools, and he said 'The Devil can fascinate, Scoot, no one knows better than the Landons how the devil can fascinate. And the Landreaus before em. First he fascinates the mind and then he drinks up the heart.' Mostly I did what he said but sometimes I went close and listened...and pretended it was Paul...because I loved him and wanted him back, not because I really believed...and I never pulled the bolt..."
Here there falls a long pause. His heavy hair slips restlessly against her neck and chest and at last he says in a small, reluctant child's voice: "Well, once I did...and I dint open the door...I never opened that cellar door unless Daddy was home, and when Daddy was home he only screamed and made the chains rattle and sometimes hooted like a owl. And when he did that sometimes Daddy, he'd hoot back...it was like a joke, you know, how they hooted at each other...Daddy in the kitchen and the...you know...chained up in the cellar...and I'd be ascairt even though I knew it was a joke because it was like they were both crazy...crazy and talking winter-owl talk to each other...and I'd think, 'Only one left, and that's me. Only one who ain't badgunky and that one not even eleven and what would they think if I went to Mulie's and told?' But it didn't do no good thinkin about Mulie's because if he 'us home he'd just chase after me and drag me back. And if he wasn't...if they believed me and came up to t'house with me, they'd kill my brother...if my brother was still in 'ere somewhere...and take me away...and put me in the Poor Home. Daddy said without him to take care of me an Paul, we'd have to go to the Poor Home where they put a clo'pin on your dink if you pee in your bed...and the big kids...you have to give the big kids blowjobs all night long..."
He stops, struggling, caught somewhere between where he is and where he was. Outside The Antlers, the wind gusts and the building groans. She wants to believe that what he's telling her cannot be true - that it is some rich and dreadful childhood hallucination - but she knows it is true. Every awful word. When he resumes she can hear him trying to regain his adult voice, his adult self.
"There are people in mental institutions, often people who've suffered catastrophic frontal-lobe traumas, who regress to animal states. I've read about it. But it's a process that usually occurs over a course of years. This happened to my brother all at once. And once it had, once he'd crossed that line..."
Scott swallows. The click in his throat is as loud as a turning light-switch.
"When I came down the cellar stairs with his food - meat and vegetables on a pie-plate, the way you'd bring food to a big dog like a Great Dane or a German Shepherd - he'd rush to the end of the chains that held him to the post, one around his neck and one around his waist, with drool flying from the corners of his mouth and then the whole works would snub up and he'd go flying, still howling and barking like a booldevil, only sort of strangled until he got his breath back, you know?"
"Yes," she says faintly.
"You had to put the plate on the floor - I still remember the smell of that sour dirt when I bent over, I'll never forget it - and then push it to where he could get it. We had a bust' rake handle for that. It didn't do to get too close. He'd claw you, maybe pull you in. I didn't need Daddy to tell me that if he caught me, he'd eat as much of me as he could, alive and screaming. And this was the brother who made the bools. The one who loved me. Without him I never would have made it.
Without him Daddy would have killed me before I made five, not because he meant to but because he was in his own bad-gunky.
Me and Paul made it together. Buddy system. You know?" Lisey nods. She knows.
"Only that January my buddy was cross-chained in the cellar - to the post and to the table with the printing-press on it - and you could measure the boundary of his world by this arc...this arc of turds...where he went to the end of his chains...and squatted...and shat."
For a moment he puts the heels of his hands to his eyes. The cords stand out on his neck. He breathes through his mouth - long harsh shaking breaths. She doesn't think she has to ask him where he learned the trick of keeping his grief silent; that she now knows. When he's still again, she asks: "How did your father get the chains on him in the first place? Do you remember?"