Chapter XI: The Maniacs in the Basement

Tommy Burton and Deb Flanagan were good kids once. Now they’re maniacs. I don’t even think they’d recognize each other. It happened to a lot of people who ended up at Morgenthau. The lost souls that were beyond saving ended up either in the woods with the addicts, where they lost their fear and their faces or they ended up down in the basement of the Main Residence Hall sucking on chemicals and howling late into the night. They lived in complete filth, walked around naked during the summer and often froze to death in the winter. Even Nolan and The Watcher refused to go down into the basement to deal with the maniacs—they were that horrifying. Yet, while the rest of us paid our shares of the rent, the maniacs made our lives worse and paid nothing.

The addicts were shady, but the maniacs were downright dangerous. Both shadowy groups were insane, yes, but at least the addicts had method to their madness. The addicts stole from the thieves, violated the violators and tortured the tormenters. The maniacs, on the other hand, were the lowest of the lowlifes. They preyed on the weak, the vulnerable and the fearful. We feared the addicts, but if it were not for them, the maniacs would take over the entire campus.

Arguably, the two groups constantly waged a silent war against each other. The addicts relied on their dark, ninja-like personae while the maniacs were very visible and very, very audible. On my first night in the Main Residence Hall, when I lived in the freshman wing on the first floor, I could not catch a wink of sleep due to the relentless wailing of the maniacs in the basement. I banged on the floor and radiators and screamed back at them, but it only encouraged the maniacs to grow louder and in a greater chorus. They howled like coyotes at the moon. Their voices were sometimes filled with angst and bottled rage and at other times they let out deep, painful moans as their intoxicants began to eat their bodies from the inside out.

The maniacs had inherited the basement of the Main Residence Hall around the time that Alistair converted one of the water closets on the first floor into a somewhat useable latrine. Before that, most people just went down to the bowels—as they called the basement—and did what they had to do there. It was rare that any of the residents would attempt to clean the place up, and those attempts usually involved pouring out a bottle of bleach in the affected area, trying to cover up the foulness and wash it away down the basement’s flood drains.

There were closets full of disinfectants, cleaners, solvents and other hazardous liquids. Their attempt to clear the air of the awful stench actually created an even bigger mess, as the fumes from the chemicals drove out a number of residents, some of whom had begun to develop serious breathing problems.

When Alistair built his latrine, the basement’s usefulness—or lack thereof—became obsolete. Instead, it became a place where the junkies would go to get high and where some of the emancipated whores would come to turn tricks in exchange for drugs or rent money. Tommy and Deb met during the latter. One night, after realizing that they had been burned by a cheapskate dealer from the Tri-Towns, the two started looking around the basement for a hidden stash or a wayward joint. Instead, they found the closets full of old chemicals. Tommy, thinking back to the days in junior high when he occasionally huffed paint, encouraged Deb to huff some solvent with him. Within a matter of minutes, they lost their senses. Within a matter of weeks they lost their minds.

There was plenty of solvent to go around and as more residents watched their money disappear, more people started coming down to the basement to get stupid with Tommy and Deb.

The regular drugs did awful things to those who abused them, but huffing those chemicals took away the few things that made them human. With every brain cell lost, they morphed into maniacs. Their motor skills were replaced by those of a zombie, and their attitudes, social conduct and behavior became as polluted as the former latrine they called their home. The heroin and cocaine killed a lot of druggies, but their death was slow, painful, and for the most part, anticlimactic. In contrast, the chemicals seemed to kill the maniacs faster, more painfully and always with one last insane outburst, usually directed on the innocent squatters who lost sleep while the maniacs lost their souls.

While the addicts hid cloaked in their woods and secret hideouts, the maniacs lurched about campus like the living dead. They broke into rooms, stole food, and were known for violent—albeit non-sexual—attacks, usually provoked by something they imagined. They looked like harmless shambles of human beings, but they could be very dangerous. Nobody told me that, and unfortunately, nobody told that to Eva either.

After discovering Eva pregnant, bruised and shivering in the Gardens, several residents and I had taken it upon ourselves to protect Eva like we had failed to do for Kendra. Upon moving in, Eva got situated in the room Kendra had kept before she moved in with The Professor. The old dorm on sat on the second floor, down the hall from mine and across the hall from The Steve and Willie.

The Steve had not said a word to anybody since he had returned to the world of the living after his short stint with the addicts in the woods. The day that we moved Eva into Kendra’s old room, The Steve suddenly perked up in his bed and left his room for the first time in more than four months.

In the days that followed, he started hanging around Eva, usually asking her about the stuff she liked, like music, movies and the normal things that teenagers got involved in. In the beginning, a few of us were skeptical of The Steve’s motives, unsure if he was some kind of creepy older man who had developed a fancy for the very pretty 17 year old girl who had just moved in.

But after a week or so, I began to see a change in The Steve that I had never seen before. He had always lived under a dark cloud up until the time that Eva came to Morgenthau, but after that, his life was once again filled with purpose, and just as he had been determined to succeed in his previous life as a programmer, he was not going to let anything stop him from protecting Eva. Late at night, when Eva was asleep on Kendra’s old comfy couch, The Steve could be seen sitting by his door across the hall from her room, keeping guard. When The Steve got tired, Willie would relieve him of his duties and take another watch.

But of course, we couldn’t be with her every moment of every day. One night Willie was in town stealing cars for the tow truck company, The Steve was exhausted after helping Alistair build a fire pit outside the dorm to keep the snakes away and I was passed out after hoofing it all the way into the Tri-Towns to score some free soup from Grover, only to find the mission closed for—of all things—a religious holiday. We were all upstairs, but we needed sleep. The night watch was on break.

Eva was still getting to know the old building, which became treacherous to navigate in the pitch-black night. With nobody around, she got up after midnight and tried to find latrine that Alistair had built. She had always followed one of us down there and she forgot which set of stairs led her to the water closet.

In the darkness, she picked the wrong door, and accidentally entered an ugly, ugly place. She couldn’t see anything down in the basement except the eyes of the maniacs. She was stunned by the unexpected gust of chemical fumes that blew into her sinuses. They started moving towards her, raising a slow groan that built like the sound of an oncoming train whistle. She moved to back up, but her feet slipped on the staircase that permanently dripped with the runoff of water from the first floor.

She tried to scream, but the maniacs raised their howls so loud that it covered her screams. The sudden rabble woke us up, but that was nothing new. Admittedly, I opened my eyes, let out an annoyed groan and tried to go back to sleep. However, The Steve was the only one to realize that there was nobody keeping guard of Eva. He bolted out of bed and ran down the stairs, his traction-less shoes sliding on every wet step as he vaulted down to the basement.

Down in the bowels, Eva had become paralyzed with fear, having still not fully recovered from the incidents with Simeon. She couldn’t scream while she coughed up the harsh toxins that floated around the basement. The stinking, sweaty creatures made such an awful cacophony of noise and had completely surrounded her. She reached her arms up to try and reach for the handrail and suddenly felt herself being lifted up out of the darkness but a force so strong, it nearly ripped her shoulders out of their sockets.

After hearing The Steve’s manic rush for the stairs, several residents followed behind him, realizing that Eva might be in trouble. I made it down the stairs first, where I saw Eva, coughing up the fumes on the ground. Above her stood The Steve and two shadowy figures speaking to him in whispers barely audible above the coughs of Eva.

Apparently, The Steve had made friends with some of the addicts with whom he had so briefly enlisted himself. Upon seeing me walk down the stairs, they quickly turned their backs and ducked into a corridor, their footsteps vanishing into the night. The Steve and I met eyes, and exchanged a nod of understanding. He knew I had caught him talking with the addicts, and I knew that he would never offer me any more insight than that. The addicts were loyal to the Steve, for reasons only known to him.

Eva didn’t see the addicts, no one ever truly did. The first person she saw when she came to was The Steve. She thanked him dearly for saving her life. He felt so guilty accepting her thanks. He had failed her. What if those fiends had done something to her? What if she had lost the baby? Had he not been so ashamed of himself, he might have realized that she was falling in love with him.