![]() They’d taken lessons to surprise their wedding guests. They’d talked about the way the two of them would dance, as gracefully as they danced now. Every piece of cake would be served with a glass of pink champagne. They would import them from some other city’s summer. They’d been married a few years, but had already talked about their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the way they’d throw a party for everyone in their town, the way there’d be a twenty-five-layer cake with strawberries in it, even though they’d been married in December. “An iron nail for every inch,” the husband said, and took a left turn toward the freeway ramp. “Fourteen planks of poplar,” the wife said. They read the directions aloud in the car. They had a book of how-tos from another century. Mostly she eats bologna sandwiches.Ī couple drove to a big-box hardware store two towns from the town where they lived. The Banisher’s entirely self-sufficient, though sometimes she cries. There’re things she’ll never be allowed to have again, but she can live without them. It’s rare that a homeowner wishes to acknowledge that they’ve become a bed-and-breakfast to pests. Her customers have her come to the back door, her equipment hidden in a sack. The Banisher doesn’t have friends, nor does she have family. The Banisher wears a coverall she found at a Salvation Army, a hat with earflaps she acquired at a lost-and-found, and a pair of cowboy boots with spurs. She has all her limbs, which is somewhat miraculous, but she’s missing the little finger on her right hand. She’s got the kind of nose that runs, and the kind of skin that breaks out in rashes. When that happened, she went underground for a while to avoid being busted. Once, all of her fingernails fell off, and another time, she lost all of her hair, even her eyelashes, which made her even uglier than she was before. She’s had three broken noses, and she’s also had worms. Her elbows are too pointed, and her eyes are shifty and make people nervous. The Banisher’s teeth are crooked, and her hair grows in knots the color of mud. The worst children on earth are the pretty ones, and that’s something that’s been known to ugly children for centuries. The Banisher isn’t one of these pretty little children. They’re too pretty and too little for that. If they wake at night and hear a roar, they don’t go down the nursery stairs and through the cellar door, nor do they go to see what’s roaring beneath the cellar floor. The pretty little ones in the Banisher’s town sometimes tantrum from joy, but when they do, even their crying’s pretty and little. Sing it long enough, and someone’ll give you candy. At the end of the rhyme, there’s a reward. There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor. There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor, little darlings, and it wants more and more and MORE. There are sugarplum visions in their pretty little heads. The children dream, and as they dream, they wriggle in their beds like worms pressed under stones. If you wake at night and hear a roar, perhaps you’ve heard the awful thing that roars behind the cellar door. Things press their noses up through the dirt. When they nod off to sleep, all’s well and right, but beneath their houses, things are fell and wrong. The rhyme’s sometimes sung as a lullaby to pretty little ones, who curl in pretty little chairs, and play with pretty little rolling horses and pretty little rocking dogs. There is an awful thing that comes up from beneath the cellar floor, up and through the cellar door. There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor, little darlings. The nurseries are upholstered in chintz, and the walls are padded, as though they’re asylums and the babies inmates. It’s chanted in nurseries in the Banisher’s town. There’s a rhyme someone invented for children. Now cellars are used for all sorts of purposes. Every cellar floor was built over the ceiling of something else. Buildings were built, in the beginning, everyone knows, to hold the dead down.
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