Page 87 of Beneath Her Skin

She finally conjured up the courage to ask him about it after summer faded into autumn. It was a particularly pleasant Friday evening, her thoughts warm and blurred from drinking sangria during a dinner party. All their friends had gone home, and it was just her and Kenneth tucked into bed, the moon bright through the bedroom windows.

“Have you been fixing up the fallout shelter?” she asked, posing the question suddenly, like an ambush.

“What?” Kenneth laughed. “Darling, you know how I feel about that thing. Of course not.”

“There’s a lock on the door.”

“Well, yes. I was worried about the local kids trying to break in.” Kenneth put a bookmark into his book and turned toward her, his cheeks rosy from being out in the sun.

Judith had never seen local kids on their property. She still hasn’t, to this day.

But she didn’t have time to say that to him, because Kenneth leaned forward and kissed her. “Don’t worry about that old hole in the ground,” he muttered, kissing along her neck. “It’s not bombs from the Soviets we have to worry about anymore. It’s radicals at home.”

Then he pushed her back onto the mattress and rolled on top of her, his breath warm against her cheek as he slid up her nightgown. Judith knew he was distracting her. But it was a welcome distraction, having him touch her.

And a month and a half later, she realized she was pregnant.

Still, she notices things. Like how she no longer sees him stepping out from behind the inkberry shrubs, although he still goes for long walks in the forest on the weekends. Or she’ll wake up and find his side of the bed empty. “Insomnia,”he said once, unprompted. “I’m just worried about work.”

She’s seen a light bouncing through the trees like a will-o-the-wisp, late at night, on those nights when he doesn’t stay in bed.

Judith knows that there’s a bolt cutter in the garage. Kenneth has quite a workshop of tools in there, in fact. It would be easy, she thinks as she drinks the last of her coffee in the kitchen, to cut the lock and buy another before he returns. He took the car, but she can call a cab to take her into town once the snow’s cleared. She has a week, after all.

It’ll be worth the trouble to see what he’s hiding underground.

3

Judith trudges through the snow, clutching the bolt cutters at her side. The air is heavy with the impending storm, and the clouds droop overhead, already releasing a few wayward flurries. The sharp, biting wind flings them around, and Judith ducks her head and moves a little more quickly, her breath fogging the air.

The entrance to the fallout shelter looks as it did this past summer, with the same heavy padlock. The snow in front of the door is thinner than it is elsewhere, as if someone swept it away before the snow fell this morning.

Judith swallows, her throat scratchy. Of course she knew Kenneth was lying about the shelter. But that he lied so brazenly—that he had likely been stomping around out here yesterday as she cooked that stupid beef stew for him—sends little tremors of anger into her chest.

She hoists up the bolt cutters and positions them around the padlock’s ring. The wind howls, sounding like a weeping woman. The air sparks. The storm will be here sooner than the newspaper said.

Judith squeezes the bolt cutters, slicing cleanly through the padlock. It falls to the snowy ground with a dull thud, and she drags the door open, releasing a damp, musty warmth and revealing a flight of metal stairs.

Still holding the bolt cutter, she picks her way down the stairs, fingers trailing along the wall for support—the stairs are steep and feel like they’re plunging her down into the center of the earth. With each step, they rattle and clank, but there’s also the quiet hum of electricity in the background, the soft blowing of heated air.

Don’t worry about that old hole in the ground.

That liar.

The stairs deposit Judith in a small, cramped space, and she feels around on the wall until she finds a light switch. The light that comes on is a single bare bulb, its glow sickly and yellowish. But it shows everything:

Not shelves of canned food from the fifties. Not musty old bunkbeds or ancient gas masks or whatever it was people thought they would need in a nuclear apocalypse.

No. Judith finds weapons. Dozens of weapons.

Saws and hunting knives and machetes and axes, all different sizes and styles, hang from hooks in the wall, gleaming a little in the light. A metal shelf in the corner is lined with what looks like surgical equipment, and Judith wonders, briefly, how her architect husband even got ahold of such things. There are loops of chains lying in piles on the floor and another chain, single and menacing, hanging from the ceiling, a large meat hook at its end like the curved claw of a raptor. A roll of clear plastic. Buckets covered in what Judith recognizes immediately as old blood, thanks to her childhood in Texas.

The bolt cutters slip out of Judith’s fingers and clatter against the cement floor. She walks into the middle of the room, next to the dangling hook, and turns in a slow stupor, taking it all in?—

That’s when she sees the door.

It’s metal, like the stairs, and it has a padlock identical to the padlock that locked this place away from her.

Judith bends to pick up the bolt cutters and walks up to the locked door. Her heart hammers furiously, and she hesitates for a moment, considering all the things she might find inside. For a moment, she presses her ear to the door, holding her breath?—

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