Something in the cellar

by Stanley Salmons

It was a pair of eyes. I shone the torch in that direction and they glowed back at me. Two eyes, close together, like a tractor’s headlamps.

I was reading upstairs when the lights went out. A power cut? From here, there was no way of telling. If you live in a street you can poke your nose out of the front door and see if anyone else’s lights are on. If I poke my nose out of my front door, I look down the broad drive and past the high wrought iron gates into total blackness. Sometimes a bit of moonlight differentiates the trees from the fields, but there are no other houses in view. The electricity tracks along the cables, swooping from pole to pole across more than a mile of open countryside before it disappears mysteriously into this house.

No, the chances were it wasn’t a power cut. The chances were that the problem was right here.

It all started a few weeks ago, when I was rash enough to decide I needed another power point in the kitchen. I mentioned it to the newsagent in the nearest village and he recommended a ‘good man’.

The ‘good man’ duly arrived and asked where the main fuse box was. I conducted him triumphantly to the cellar. I found the wooden door and the flagstone staircase behind it about a year ago, when I first moved into this house and went on an exploratory tour. It was a cool, creepy, cobwebby place and I didn’t spend any longer down there than I had to. But even someone as technically inept as I am couldn’t fail to notice, on my way out, the jumble of dust-laden cables, wonderful old white ceramic insulators and cast-iron circuit breakers that occupied the wall opposite the entrance.

I suppose the shaking of the head should have alerted me that something was amiss. That and the venting of short laughs as he investigated further. Apparently things were not up to his standards.

There was a spare length of cable on the floor, and he showed it to me. He brushed the dust off the finely crazed rubber sheath and cracked it away to reveal the red and black conductors inside. To my mind, that’s what a cable should look like. It was a friendly old cable that looked like it could do the job.

He rubbed the red insulation between his fingers and it crumbled to dust, exposing cheery pink copper wire. Then he did the same with the black one. Throughout the house, he assured me, the same thing was happening. The whole house needed rewiring with modern, PVC cables.

I wasn’t so sure. Those cables must have been around for eighty years or more. I wasn’t going around rubbing cables between my fingers and so long as no one else was, I didn’t see why they couldn’t go on for another eighty. I’ve heard about these modern PVC cables. People say they last for ever. But people don’t know about the population of mice and rats, squirrels and bats which, to judge from the noises at night, this house supports. Mice love PVC. In all probability rats and squirrels and bats are fairly partial to it too. I could imagine them all sitting down, knives and forks at the ready, impatient for the installation to finish so they could get stuck in.

Out of pure politeness, I tentatively enquired how much it would cost to rewire a house like this. Just approximately, say to the nearest ten pounds? He couldn’t say. He could, however, venture an estimate to the nearest thousand pounds.

My jaw fell so low I had to rearticulate it before I could speak again. It would, I suggested, be cheaper to knock the house down and start again. He agreed. Only he meant it, and I didn’t.

I began to think there was a lot to be said for candles. For one thing you didn’t need to run PVC cables from room to room. Candles were portable and they gave you light where you needed it and nowhere else. Above all you could buy them without remortgaging the property. At one time, of course, there was no alternative: if you needed light you lit a candle. But for the most part you simply didn’t do so much after dark. Night was the time to sleep and day was the time to work. The days were shorter in the winter, but then there was less work to do. It all seemed rather well regulated.

Was I aware, he asked, of the fire risk?

I was about to assemble a retort to the effect that one didn’t use naked candles, of course, but put them in candlesticks of one sort or another, when I realized he was talking about my electrical installation. Fire risk?

At the very least, he said, I should have an effective fuse box. He had a look at the fuses. They seemed all right to me, but he muttered some imprecations about barbed wire and marvelled at the miracle that I hadn’t been reduced to a heap of ashes long before now.

We compromised. He fitted a new circuit breaker box with MCBs or RCDs, or both, I’m not sure. After he’d left I went back to look at it. There it was, sitting on a wooden board on the wall, a self-satisfied, clean, shiny plastic box among all the dusty rubber-and-ceramic paraphernalia of the distant last century.

I knew then it was a mistake. This isn’t a mass-produced, loft-insulated, double-glazed, centrally heated, UPVC-window-framed dwelling of the sort that springs up overnight on new estates. This house has been lived in. Her floors have been swept by the skirts of ladies wearing frilly, high-necked blouses and stern expressions, and rose-cheeked, mob-capped maids, leaning sideways against the weight of buckets of coal being carried to open fireplaces in every room. Her floors have creaked under the hand-made leather boots of men of substance, men who wore waistcoats all the year round, disappeared during the week to occupy themselves in some obscure fashion in the city, and returned to their country seat at the weekends to entertain and spend evenings in the library smoking cigars and drinking brandy. In this house, the walls flickered with soft shadows cast by candles and warm fires, while beyond the heavy curtains the windows twinkled under a generous frosting of ice. In a later era, gas mantles would hiss out their lime-hard light and the achingly bright walls would disappear into impenetrably black corners. But another generation or two would pass before those walls were ravaged, and polished oaken floorboards prised up, to make way for the new electric light.

You don’t take an elderly lady and fit her with three-inch high heels. It doesn’t look right, it doesn’t feel right, and she’ll fall over. My house was now falling over with monotonous regularity, and the culprit was that circuit breaker. It wasn’t just electrical surges it was sensitive to. All it took was a momentary draught of air, or even a careless thought, and it would snap over like a mouse trap. I would turn the radio down and creep around on tiptoe, but to no avail.

I’d taken to keeping a torch within reach at all times. I groped around on the side table and picked it up with a sigh, then went down to the cellar, swinging the thin beam in front of me. Of course, I flicked on the light switch from pure habit, and of course nothing happened. Then, for some reason, I swung the beam around and that’s when it illuminated a pair of eyes. It wasn’t a mouse or a squirrel; they’d have cleared off as soon as my shoes came scuffing down the stone steps. A cat could stand its ground and give you a malevolent stare like that, but a cat’s eyes glow greeny-yellow and these looked bright red. I couldn’t see the outline of it at all—the glow from the eyes was too bright—so I twisted the lens end of the torch to widen the beam. Two more eyes came into view.

These were greeny-yellow all right, but they were close together under the first two. Something the size of a grapefruit materialized in my chest and made its way into my throat. I continued to twist the torch and two more eyes came into view, out to the sides. Then two more, and two more. That was it. Eight eyes, four pairs. And by now my rudimentary biological knowledge was screaming into both ears. The only land-based creature I knew that had eight eyes was a spider. And this one was the size of a wolf.

I backed towards the mains panel, keeping the torch trained on the creature. It didn’t move, perhaps because my torch was dazzling it. I was so used to resetting the circuit breaker by now that I could do it by feel alone. My fumbling fingers raised the cover, found the plastic tab—in the down position, just as I expected—and lifted it. I heard the satisfying click, and simultaneously the room was flooded with light.

The spider had gone. In its place there was a neat stack of bottles, the highly reflective bases turned to me. Eight of them in all.

A few days later the engineer gave me a ring.

“I was checking to see if things were all right with that new circuit breaker,” he said.

“Actually, no,” I said. “The thing goes off all the time, for no good reason. I’m up and down to the cellar all day.”

“Ah, I thought that might be a problem. It’s the old wiring, you see. Too much leakage. Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll fit a less sensitive one. It’ll still be safe, but it’ll fix the problem.”

He did install it, and it has fixed the problem—so far.

I didn’t tell him about the spider. I didn’t tell him about the wine bottles, either, which must have been left down there by the previous owner. I understood he’d lived in the house for years, but he’d recently passed away. He must have died from happiness. There were two bottles of 1978 Château Margaux and six bottles of 1947 Château d’Yquem.

I invited a few friends round for a rather enjoyable dinner party. We had the Médoc with the main course, and consumed two bottles of the Château d’Yquem with dessert.

Oh, and dinner was by candlelight.

Just to be on the safe side.