The God in the Basement

Account of Janice Bellman, resident of the Windy Knoll apartment complex in Brooklyn. Selected from Annex D-4234T.

There is a god who rests in the basement beneath my apartment building.

This was not a shock, not some slow discovery made over years of piecing together ever-more cryptic clues and odd happenings in the hallways. Rather, it was in the lease – tucked away in a paragraph titled “Respecting the Downstairs Tenant”.

In this paragraph, it spells out exactly what I have already said – that there is a god currently lounging beneath the building, and that keeping it content is every resident’s collective responsibility. It states that, in addition to monthly rent, each tenant must make one small offering to the god at or before sunset on each day that a full moon rises. Should you be traveling or otherwise indisposed, it is perfectly acceptable for the building manager to bring your contribution on your behalf, provided that a short note is written explaining the offering’s source to the god.

The offering can be anything, so long as it carries some importance to you. As I am quite busy, I usually bake a tray of brownies once every few months (following my grandmother’s secret recipe), toss it in the freezer, and each month pull out a small serving to bring to the god. This offering, though meager, is more than enough to satisfy the deity’s sweet tooth, and often earns me a glowing bit of good luck when I need it most at some point within the next week.

Those that are even more intentional with their offerings tend to receive boons of accordant value. Terry on the 3rd floor had a big job interview coming up the week after the full moon, and as such cooked a lavish meal for the god, leaving a piping hot ribeye, homemade fries, and a caramel shake in front of the chain link gate that separates the basement storage areas from the darkened corner that the god calls home. Three days later, as he walked to the job interview, he pulled an oblivious man from the crosswalk just before a rogue purple triple decker bus ran the light, saving his fellow pedestrian from being turned into mincemeat on 3rd avenue. It just so happens that the man he saved was his future boss and interviewer of the day – and thanks in no small part to his quick thinking (and the appearance of said rogue bus) Terry was hired on at a salary of nearly $10,000 more than he initially hoped for.

In turn, those who spurn the god are bound to, at one point or another, face the tendrils of its displeasure. A woman moved in last year, a devout catholic, who refused to offer anything to what she believed to be the demonic spirit dwelling beneath our building. Despite signing the lease and agreeing to the terms, she cited her 1st amendment rights and stated that she would offer nothing to it at any point. For the first couple of months, all was quiet – the god seemed to be giving her time to reconsider. Then, after her 3rd missed offering, her air conditioning unit began belching a foul-smelling yellow gas. The HVAC technician she called couldn’t find any way to fix it (or turn it off) and the flow of the noxious fumes was only stemmed when, after being berated by the woman, the building manager went to the basement and offered an apology to the god on her behalf in addition to a single glass of his prized vintage malt whiskey. This fixed the woman’s AC, but did nothing to earn her favor in the eyes of the peeved divinity that now had its eye(s?) firmly fixed on the obstinate resident of unit 4B.

Rather than learning from her mistakes, or simply moving out, the devout woman doubled down. She hung rosaries all about her apartment, the halls, the lobby, and even the basement below. The building manager removed those hung in the halls and public spaces, but it didn’t take long for them to reappear as the woman relentlessly waged her own personal holy war against the tenant downstairs.

After 4 weeks and a seemingly limitless supply of rosaries, the time for her 4th offering came and went. I and a few others attempted to beseech her, to reassure her that the offerings to the god in the basement were not an affront to her faith – rather they were the least we could do for a deity that had, in ancient days long past, cared for these lands with beneficence before it and its people were displaced by tides of colonists and their foreign faiths during the age of discovery. Our offerings were no more reverent in nature than a piece of salami and a scratch behind the ears offered to a friendly stray cat – just small acts of comfort for a being that was no longer at home in our world. If it helped, we said, she could view the being below not as a god but rather as a spirit; as a manifestation of a set of conditions in the human psyche that had long faded into the fog of history. To us it was not an object of worship, but rather one of sympathy.

She spat in our faces, called us heathens, and slammed the door on us. From beyond the threshold we could hear her praying, not for us, but for herself, for her own salvation in the face of such monstrous evil. We shrugged and returned to our own homes, each silently curious about what would happen next.

The very next day we awoke to a delegation of clergy gathered in the lobby, and the building manager engaged in an extremely vehement argument with a man in a cleanly pressed cassock. Apparently, in the early morning hours, the woman had arranged for an exorcism to take place in the basement, and the building manager had awoken to a small team of priests shuffling in and out of the downstairs corridor. The woman stood smugly in the corner as the priest and the manager traded increasingly escalatory jabs, occasionally tossing in her own. In the end the clergyman’s work had already been completed, in their words, “the malignant entity was purged” from the basement below. After making a grand show of charity by choosing not to charge the building manager for his services, the priest and his team of robed affiliates finally left the premises, and the woman returned to her apartment. As I departed for work, I saw the building manager dutifully removing the rosaries left hanging on the walls and setting up fans to air out the incense that was now working its way through the building’s ducts.

When I returned from work that evening I found several of my neighbors in the building lobby engaged in hushed discussion, while the building manager spoke to a rather confused looking police officer at the leasing desk. Apparently, the woman in 4B was missing – but after asking for more detail from a neighbor, I was simply told to “go to her room and see for yourself.”

As the elevator doors opened to the 4th floor, the lingering scent of incense wafted in, swirling around me as I strode down the hall. As I arrived at the woman’s apartment, my mouth hung agape – for where the door into her domicile should have been, now there was only a freshly painted patch of drywall. I knocked on the wall, which returned no echoes indicative of a hollow interior, and put my ear to the newly dried paint to try and listen. The silence you’d expect from a doorless wall was all that greeted me.

“I tried that already.” Offered Fred, the woman’s next door neighbor, who I only just noticed was leaning casually against his doorframe, tea in hand, steam collecting on the lenses of his wireframed glasses. “Manager tried taking down the drywall too. Nothing but brick on the other side. And on the other side of that brick? You guessed it – more brick.” He idly sipped his tea, its faint scent of chamomile mixing with the stronger lingering aromas of the ritual that had taken place this morning. “Only one thing that may know where she’s gone, and it sure as heck ain’t telling.” He took another sip. “Cops aren’t doing anything. According to them, there’s no record of her ever living in this building. They’re saying she can’t really be missing if she was never here.” He shrugged, flicking a small crumb off the collar of his robe. “Suppose we’ll see.” He said, turning to enter his apartment and shutting the door behind him.

I stared at the space where the door to apartment 4B once stood, contemplating for a moment, then got back in the elevator, went back to my apartment, made dinner, and went to sleep. That night a low rumble emanated from the bowels of the building, echoing through the pipes and ducts, carrying away the last of the oppressive incense as it did.

Another day passed. 2 days. 4 days. A week. 2 weeks. 3 weeks. And then, the day before the full moon’s rising, the entire building was awoken at 3am by a slamming door, a piercing shriek, and loud foot falls down the stairs then out the front doors of the building. The next day Larry, an insomniac writer that likes to work in the lobby late at night, said that he was scared nearly half to death when the woman from 4B came barreling out of the stairwell, wild eyed, covered in mud and moss, sticks and brambles in her hair, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her that stank of a fetid swamp. He even said he saw a small frog hop out of her pocket as she cleared the building’s threshold and tore down the street, screaming bloody murder all the way.

We all visited 4B at separate intervals the next day. The blank drywall once again held a door, and behind that door sat a perfectly clean, perfectly empty apartment. The building manager said it was the first time he hadn’t needed to hire a cleaner after a move-out, though in my opinion calling what had just transpired a “move-out” was not an entirely accurate way to describe the situation.

That evening, before the full moon rose again, I pulled out and reheated my standard brownie offering, walked out my door, then paused as I entered the hallway. I turned around, went back to my freezer, and pulled out the quart of cookie dough delight ice cream I had purchased for myself as a treat the other day, and scooped a small helping onto the top of the hot brownie. After walking downstairs, I laid it at the base of the chain link fence in the basement and ascended the staircase to go for a stroll through the warm summer streets. As the sun set through the skyscrapers, I passed through my neighborhood park, pausing to remove my headphones as I heard from the bushes a quiet mewing.

Parting leaves and branches, I saw the small sound’s source in the form of a tiny black kitten, distinguished from the surrounding shadows only by its piercing green eyes and a perfect spot of brilliant white fur in the middle of its tiny forehead. As I drew it into my arms it began to purr nearly as loud as the engines of the cabs that raced by. I carried it home, swaddled in my flannel, and laid it in a bed of blankets in cardboard box. As it drifted into blissful slumber, I sat at my window and watched the city pass, its lights growing brighter against the darkening sky, until at last I sat in darkness and silence, the only sounds to be heard the perpetual hum of the city beyond my window and the incandescent purrs of the small being that now rested alongside me.

There is a god who rests in the basement beneath my apartment building. It, like many things in this world, is neither good nor evil; it just reflects back  that which you offer it. Give it kindness, and kindness you shall receive. Give it hate, and you may find something unpleasant swimming in your coffee tomorrow. I only hope that the next tenant of apartment 4B understands this better than their predecessor did.