My grandpa always taught me to fear rainy days. He would tell me these stories about Achilleus, the local maximum security prison. He would tell me about the violent criminals, and the deeds they did to end up there. He would explain to me how some of these men were so dangerous that they couldn’t be trusted to live in normal jail cells, that they needed to be chained to the cold, stone walls. My grandpa would tell me about rainy days and stormy nights. How the rain would weaken the stone, and how these men could pull the chains right out of the wall, if the weather was bad enough. He would show me newspaper clippings of the escapees, there were always a handful per year. He would tell me that, to a T, the prison breaks always coincided with rainy weather. Most escapees would flee to the surrounding neighborhoods. They would try to hide in people’s garages and basements, under their porches; just waiting for the rain to pass. Sometimes these men would break into people’s house. Sometimes these men would do unspeakable things to the people residing in the houses.

We lived only about 8 miles from Achilleus and on rainy days, my grandpa would remind me about this.

My grandpa would tell me that on rainy days, it was just best to stay in my room. To lock my door, put some music on low, grab a comic book and get my head somewhere else. He even taught me how to turn my closet into a fortress of solitude. We threw a blanket and a couple of pillows in there, I even had a few posters of superheroes on the closet wall. I kept a box of comic books and baseball cards in one corner and a metallic foot locker filled with junk food and cassette tapes in the other. My grandpa would encourage me to get in the closet whenever it rained. Especially when it stormed. I would sit in there, listening to my Walkman. I would finger through comic books and I would bundle myself up against the pillows and drift to sleep. I felt safe in my closet and I enjoyed the hours that I would spend in there on rainy days.

My grandpa would tell me that most of the time during escapes, the convicts would usually only hurt people they happened to come across. If they broke into a home to avoid police and there was a family sitting around the TV in their living room, they would strike. He would tell me that if an Achilleus prisoner escaped and if they came into our neighborhood, and if they broke into our house, that as long as I stayed in my closet, I’d be safe. It would be possible for the convict to find me and hurt me. But as long as I stayed in my closet fort, I’d be as safe as anyone in town. I would remind myself this on rainy days. I would sit in my closet and think about it and it would make me feel safe.

II

My grandpa disappeared one June. I lived with him alone. My parents had died years earlier. My grandpa disappeared and I was afraid to call the police. I know if something happened to my grandpa, the police would take me away and force me to live in a home. I didn’t want to live in a home. I had a home. I kept the disappearance to myself for over a week. I walked myself to school. I knew where grandpa kept emergency cash, so I would take a little here and there to the corner bodega and buy some milk and sandwich meats. One day, about eight days after his disappearance, they let us out of school early. Storm of the Century, they said. Thunder, lightning, and heavy rain all night. The rain was so heavy, the local streets flooded over. On the walk home from school, the water was up to my ankles. By 9’o clock, the water the water was coming up to people’s knees. I got home, climbed into my little hiding space and covered myself with a blanket. Thunder clapped outside. I was afraid. The storm unsettled me, but thinking about Achilleus and how easy it would be to escape during a storm like this terrified me.

We lost power after a little while. I sat in my closet in the darkness. I turned to my Walkman for solace. After a few hours, the music started to stutter. After a few more minutes, it stopped altogether. The batteries were dead as doorknobs. I continued to sit in silence. The power hadn’t come back on yet. The darkness and silence enveloped me. Then the silence was broken by a scratching noise some distance away. I ignored it at first, but it grew louder and more insistent. After the noise became unbearable, I relucently left the safety of my fort. In the upstairs hallway, I stopped and listened. The noise was clearly coming from downstairs. I descended the stairs, my heart beating out of my chest. I got to the kitchen and stopped to listen again. The noise still sounded as if it were coming from below me. We had no basement, so the fact that the noise was coming from below me was unsettling. There were more noises now too, not just the scratching. I thought I heard moaning. I crouched low to the floor, listening. The noises got louder as I entered the living room, louder still as I entered the main corridor. I stopped on a throw rug at the end of the hallway. The noises were at their loudest here, below me. I pulled the throw rug away and saw a trap door. It must have lead to some sort of basement or crawl space. I had no idea it existed. I had no idea that there was anything under that rug. I wondered why it was padlocked. I grabbed a ring of keys that was hand in the mud room and tried one after another. The fourth key slid into the lock like a base runner sliding into…

FTHWAAAAP! FTHWAAAAP!

It was followed by muffled voices.

“Ullo? Ebby dare?”

I could barely make out what the voices were saying.

FTHWAAAAP!

“Help us!”

I understood that. I turned the key and lifted up the trap door.

The worst smell I’ve ever known wafted up and hit me in the chest. I instantly heard a woman crying and a man’s voice sobbing “Thank god, oh thank god.” And then another. “Water. Please, we need water.”

III

The next few days were a whirlwind. Police, media, and gawkers descended on the house. Our small town in Arizona never saw much excitement. The news of a home-grown serial killer sent an electric jolt through the populace. The media was relentless and the police had a million questions.

“Where is your grandfather?”

I don’t know.

“Did you know what he was doing? Did you help him hide his secret?”

No, I said. No, never.

“Did you help your grandfather bury the bodies in the backyard?”

No.

“You must have helped.” They’d said.

No.

“You must have helped. An old man like that wouldn’t have been able to dig in the Arizona clay all by himself.”

And then it hit me.

“Rain.” I’d said.

The policeman looked at me blankly. “What?”

“He’d wait for it to rain.”