Sixteen steps down from the back door--I know it was sixteen because I sent my green slinky down those stairs hundreds of times one afternoon--was the basement of Grandma's house. Across from the bottom step was a cellar, unfinished, with a dirt floor and roughly-fitted brick walls. These had been lined with jars, as I recall, but of what? I never knew. I never went all the way into that room to inspect them.

One word echoed in my mind as I hovered on the threshold of that cellar, breathed in its damp coolness, squinted against the fuzzy shadows cast by the bare, dirt-caked bulb hanging on its thin chain from the center of the ceiling: tomb…tomb…tomb. The cobwebs and ever-floating dust created in my child-mind sound where there was none. I heard the scuttlings and scrapings of beetles and spiders who had made their homes in the corners and walls of this cellar-tomb.