Now

Ten years old, watching Unsolved Mysteries on the floor, dunking Oreos in my Keebler Elf glass of milk. A husband and wife are fighting. Not the real husband, not the real wife. A reenactment. The wife strikes the husband with a skillet, but they staged the scene poorly so the skillet clearly doesn’t connect with his skull, doesn’t even come close. He falls to the kitchen floor anyway.

I like the UFO ones. I like the lake monsters, the sasquatches, the little kid who shows up at some truck stop and nobody can figure out who he belongs to. I don’t care about embezzlement. Insurance fraud is boring. People fight all the time and sometimes they kill each other. Some mysteries are just better than others.

The action stops and Robert Stack walks into the scene. He never does this. He’s never part of the mystery. “Chris,” he says. That’s my name. “Did you know there’s a basement under your basement? The previous owners didn’t tell your parents about it when they bought the house. The mystery is: What’s down there?”

I leave the Oreos and walk downstairs. In the basement the television is on, and Robert Stack is waiting for me, his gray trench coat perfectly still against a black void. “In the closet under the stairwell, remove the wood paneling.” I do what Robert Stack says, and find concrete steps leading into darkness and a dim light at the end of it. Obviously I don’t want to go down there. “If you go down there,” Robert Stack reads my mind, “I’ll tell you the truth about Champ, the storied sea monster of Lake Champlain.”

In the basement under the basement, there are beer cans and bottles and ashtrays covering all the tables and furniture. It smells awful. There was a party here. Another television clicks on and it takes me a few seconds to realize I’m looking at the same basement I’m standing in, crowded with high schoolers. One kid clearly looks like me, just older. “Is that supposed to be me?” I ask the television. “It’s an actor,” Robert Stack’s disembodied voice replies. “There is a family of plesiosaur descendants in Lake Champlain, smaller than their ancestors were during the Triassic Period. Currently there are three, two adults and an adolescent. But sometimes there are as many as a dozen and sometimes as few as two. They have survived against all odds over tens of millions of years, almost entirely undetected, except for the rare sighting of course.” The party on the screen speeds up, so now I’m just watching older me chug beer after beer. Shot after shot. Passing out on the sofa, the same sofa I’m sitting on. “These are not the only plesiosaurs still alive on Earth, but, interestingly, none of them have ever lived in Loch Ness. Time for the next basement.”

In the basement under this basement there’s another television and Robert Stack is mid-sentence. “– but what the passengers of Delta Airlines Flight 294 saw that day were not, in fact, extraterrestrials — who have never visited our planet — but a research vessel built and operated by fellow human beings from the distant future.” This basement is even more crowded with empty bottles of alcohol, piled up everywhere. Robert Stack is looking right at me now. “How did you come to be in your family? Were you switched at birth? Did your mother abduct you from another mother? Is your real family still out there somewhere, looking for you?” The screen cuts to a man and woman sitting on this same sofa. The woman brushes aside a pile of empty vodka bottles and holds up a photo of me as a baby, dabbing her wet cheeks with a tissue. The man puts his arm around her. The screen shuts off and I walk down to the next basement.

This basement is clean. On the TV Robert Stack begins walking around lifting up couch cushions, opening drawers, revealing the many cleverly concealed bottles of booze everywhere around me. “You will eventually learn how to hide it,” he says. “You will spend every night puzzling over the only mystery you can’t solve: Why you are the way you are. With no instigating incident to point to, no logical explanation for your behavior, just the hurricane of your life, nothing but meaningless destruction and fear.” Robert Stack opens a handle of cheap gin and dumps it onto the carpet. “The last Bigfoot died in 1973.”

Every basement is darker, moldier, damper than the one before it. More oppressive and inescapable, and after a few days I can’t remember what upstairs looks like. Robert Stack tells me the truth about almost every mystery I can possibly think of. I watch the actors portraying me at all ages trapped in an endless cycle of hurting and numbing. “Why is it like this?” I ask him. He doesn’t respond. “Why does this have to happen?” I ask every version of this question I can imagine, in each basement I arrive at, until eventually he stops talking altogether.

In the last basement, I’m met with standing water halfway down the stairwell. I wade, terrified, to where the television should be, but it’s submerged and off. No more Robert Stack, nobody left to solve anything for me. I feel something brush against my legs under the water. My mind runs wild with every nightmare I can conjure up, cycling through monster after monster. The lights go out and I’m alone in all this dark. But I’m not really alone. I reach down, fingers grazing the cold slimy skin of the creature below. Both arms under the water now, feeling the outline of a tail the length of my body. A flipper. Two flippers. A long neck leading to a small and impossible head. Down here under everything, I find my answer.

__________

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs, HAD, Okay Donkey, BULL, ergot., scaffold, and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.