Stories about Jerks #1

I ask Pat, who owns the cottage, whether there's meant to be a basement in the guesthouse. He's working on nailing some wood and he's got the nails held in his teeth. He's bent over this wood and he talks out of the side of his mouth. No, he says. A cellar or anything? I ask. No, he says, nothing like that. Did the website say there was meant to be one? Its not right if it did. No. No just wondering. Then he stands up straight and pauses and says, Why wonder about that?  But I pretend I don't hear him. I'm already walking back to the guesthouse where my wife's getting ready to go into town for dinner to divorce me. She's putting on her divorce dress. She's dressing frumpy because she wants me to think I don't want her anymore. Ready? I will be soon, she says. She goes into the little guesthouse bathroom and starts combing her hair and when she sees me watching her in the mirror she smiles and closes the door with her foot. I know why she's dressing frumpy because I've made friends with all her ex-husbands. All three of them, and none of them know that I'm married to her now. And she doesn't know that's I'm friends with them. Isn't that something? While she's combing, what I do is I go to the wall where the carpet's frayed, where I accidently pulled it up when I was dragging my case in this morning, and I pull it back and grab the handle to the trapdoor and I lift it open. What was that? I hear my wife say. I can't see what's down there when I’m down there. I can feel at the foot of the ladder a bunch of big sacks filled with something heavy and I step down onto them and kneel down and try to open my eyes up wide but it’s so dusty I have to shut them. I hear my wife say something again but I can't hear what it is. It’s hard to breathe and I stop myself from sneezing. The sacks are hard and chalky and covered in cobwebs and dust but I lie down, I lie down on my side with my arms folded. There's probably spiders crawling up to me from inside the sacks and from the corners of the basement and theres probably spiders hatching from eggs, white and translucent and never disturbed by any other living thing until now. I couldn’t see anything if I did but I still don't open my eyes. What I don't know can't hurt me. Only in this case it can. What I don't know can poison my blood, it can make my skin go necrotic and fall off. What I don't know can turn me into a skeleton. But what I do is I lie there and don't move and I hold my breath and wait for the floorboards to stop creaking under my wife’s feet.