Ode to a Cellar Monster
- jasonleewillis
- Jun 3
- 3 min read
The Alchemist’s Tomb Dedication:
Dedicated to the cellar monster that lived
at my childhood farm in South Dakota.
You were persistent, but you never got me.
Since I was a child, I had a fear of something old and evil “lurking beneath.” While most people imagine that danger lurking under the bed, my childhood fixated on something deeper and older.
Strangely, this concept came out of left field before I’d ever been exposed to any media portrayals of vampires or mummies. My life began in Sioux Falls, SD, which in 1971 was on the verge of a population boom. From the time I was born to the time I graduated, the city almost doubled in size and has continued to expand to this date. Consequently, my first home was on the outskirts of town in a place called West Mesa Pass. I can still remember the kids on my block: Cipher (Christopher), Lori, Angie, Lindsey, the kid with the banana seat bicycle. I can still remember where everybody lived, too. It was a modern city block right out of a TV show.
But in the back yard…
The backyard was open construction, and as a Gen-X kid, I was able to explore that construction site. We’d climb Mount Everest (dirt piles) and journey into the bowels of the earth (excavated basements). Something about that deep, cold earth touched a nerve with me. During one of these visits to an excavated basement, my mind crossed a line. It was the stuff of horror novels. My poor mother. Looking back, she was only a 20-something young woman living the American dream when she caught her child coloring.
“What’s that, honey?”
“It’s my other family,” I explained.
And what did she do? She kept asking me questions, and I kept talking. Truth be told, I’d entirely forgotten about this stuff until I was about to leave for college. In packing up my stuff, I found something curious: old reel-to-reel recordings. Somewhere in a closet was the player, and I assembled to contraption and began listening to my younger self rambling on in an interview conducted by my mother where she asked me about my “other family.”
WTF, I thought back in 1990. There I was as a boy of 4 or 5 rambling on and on about my “Indian family” as if they were one of the kids on the block. I knew details about my mother and father—and get this—I could even tell the story about how we died. Yep, my mother gathered it all on tape.
Imagination?
This freaked me out in 1990, and I packed it all away into a box that I still have to this day. It’s been 3 decades since I’ve “gone there” but I know it’s still in the box.
By 1976, my folks decided to buy a farm out in the country, and we moved into an old, run-down acreage with chicken coops, pump houses, and a big (formerly) red barn. This was a playground on an even grander scale. The big boxelder tree was the USS Enterprise, the barn was a great Scottish castle, and the woods were a medieval forest filled with creatures from fantasy.
Oh, and we had a cellar.
Having just left a modern housing development, an old dirt cellar with an exterior door left an impression with its dim lights, damp air, and musty scents. While the first room looked like an underground military bunker, the next room was properly terrifying. It also had an old rock foundation, but in the northeast corner (you’ve seen The Blair Witch Project, right?), there was a hole in the foundation where a sleeping immortal rested.
Was it a vampire?
A mummy? An ancient alchemist king?
The goosebumps on my arms and the hairs standing on the back of my neck could not quite discern the type of monster, but at night, I’d hear it leave the basement and come climbing up the stairs to feast.
So when I had to come up with my dedication for The Alchemist’s Tomb, I reflected on my two harrowing experiences as a child. For Antoine Clement, he’ll return to the frontier explored by Joseph Nicollet to not only search for the Philosopher’s Stone but to also search for the man who created it long, long ago. For Lord William Drummond Stewart, he will try to locate the tombs of six kings of old. Perhaps one of those dead kings will be found in a cellar in South Dakota.
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