Dwight loved the cellar. It wasn't just the earthy smells or the presence of his grandfather's heirloom plastic katanas on the Wall of Honor. It wasn't just the mystery of all those locked trunks with the names of all his dead relatives, waiting under wax seals for the day when the hundredth anniversary of their owner's death rolled around and they could be opened. No, it was something humbler that made him feel safe and secure: his mother's beets.

The pantry shelves were made of plain 1 x 10 planking; he'd helped his father put them up when Dwight was still too young to operate a power nailer safely. He'd watched in fascination as his father clicked the trigger -- bam bam bam -- and shot the two inch nails through the boards. In hindsight, Dwight thought that a simple hammer and nails would have been more efficient, and perhaps his father's choice of a nail gun had been an early sign of the Alzheimer's that eventually led to his life in the attic, but still, it warmed Dwight's heart to remember that moment of father/son bonding.

(His father used to hum while he worked. Never the same tune twice, never a tune he could name. Maybe it was something his father made up as he went along. All his life, Dwight had tried to hum the same tune but never got it quite right. Sometimes he would dream that he was singing along with his father, loud and bright in the sunshine, back in the days when his father had been healthy and tall, before The Accident. But then when Dwight woke up, the tune was gone and no matter how much time he spent with his recorder, he couldn't recapture it.)

And of course, carrying the jars of pickled beets down to the cellar had been fun, because it was fraught with danger. Dwight would load up his arms with glass jars of pickled beets still warm from the canning kettle, and would ease down the stairs from the kitchen. The steps were weak, and the third one from the top was cracked. One misstep, and Dwight might tumble to the bottom in a blizzard of smashed glass. If he was really quiet, he'd see a mouse scurrying back to its hole and would note its direction so he could track it later with his crossbow. But for now he would concentrate on the steps, taking them one at a time.

(The stairs would creak and bend. Just like in those horror movies where some fool hears a noise in the basement and decides to investigate alone. Even as a boy, Dwight had nothing but contempt for someone who would go into a dark place like that unarmed. At the very least, one should carry nunchucks.)

He filled the shelves carefully, starting at the bottom and working his way up. He could always tell whether the beet harvest had been good or bad by his mother's canning. In good years, there were dozens of jars of large, red beets sitting in their blood-colored pickling brine, gleaming under the light of the single electric bulb as if they had captured sunlight. In bad years, there were a few pint jars of scrawny-looking roots in pale liquid, looking like body parts preserved in formaldehyde (like the two-headed pig fetus his Aunt Tamar kept in her parlor). But no matter what kind of year there had been, there were beets and that meant there would be food all winter.

He had never really believed the old family legend that in lean times, the Schrutes ate their offspring. Dwight had no younger siblings, so sometimes that story made him nervous.

(Mose had had a sister two years younger, but one summer she got sick and then disappeared and Dwight never did find out what happened to her. Mose said she was in an iron lung in Philadelphia, but Dwight thought maybe she lived under the barn. There were noises down there late at night that could not be adequately explained by rats or raccoons.)

The other thing Dwight liked about the cellar was the photo collection. It had started in the 1920s, when one of his ancestors had nailed up a fading photograph of himself standing next to a horse-drawn harrow that had maimed his hand. The year after, someone had put up a picture of his great-great-grandmother as a little girl, astride the plow horse that, five years later, threw her and broke her shoulder. Then there was the photograph of a crushed Studebaker, upside down in the creek, with his great-great-uncle Silvanus standing on crutches beside it. And, of course, the famous shot of his grandfather haughtily exhibiting the stump of his arm next to the thresher that had mangled it. The old man's contempt for a mere machine that had dared to attack him came through loud and clear.

Upstairs, in the walnut-paneled parlor, there were many silver-framed pictures of Dwight's family. They were carefully posed, formal, iconic. They were for visitors. This gallery in the cellar was private, for family only, for people who knew and understood and would not be ... dismayed ... by them. Picture after picture of accidents, disasters, calamities, all of them with the survivor sitting or standing proudly. Every time Dwight suffered a setback, a humiliation, a failure, he would come down here to the family's secret shrine to triumph. No adversity was too great, no catastrophe too dire, for a Schrute. They soldiered on, legless, armless, blind, deaf, crazy. Nothing stopped a Schrute.

On a day like today, as he looked over the contents of his own death trunk, he felt safe and secure, surrounded by these proofs of love and survival. He rummaged through the open trunk, shifting high school yearbooks, shooting trophies, and several rusty daggers around in his trunk. He made a note to tell Mose to be sure to put his Dundies in this trunk when he died. He would have put them in already, but he enjoyed having them on the shelf above his bed. It gave him a warm feeling to look up at night and see proof of Michael Scott's affection and respect above his head.

(Dwight heard a scurrying sound in a corner and wondered if Angela would let him have one of her kittens to train into a warrior cat. Probably not. She was squeamish about the strangest things.)

"Ah, here it is!" he muttered. He reached into the trunk and brought out a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string in fifty or sixty intricate knots. Patiently, he untied each one of them. He could have sliced through the twine with any one of the sharp implements hanging on the wall of the cellar, but that would have been disrespectful to the younger version of himself who had tied all these knots. It took him over an hour, but he persisted. Dwight prided himself on his dogged tenacity. It was a Schrute family trait.

Finally, the twine fell away and the brown wrapping paper fell open and there they were: small, white, curved, delicate. The bones gleamed in the dim light as if they were lit from within. He carried them carefully over to the small workbench and set them down in a cleared space. He picked each one up carefully and set it on a clean cloth. He reached into his pocket and brought out a silk handkerchief; no other material would do. One at a time, he polished the bones to a high sheen. He hummed to himself (his father's tune? Not quite. Close, though.).

He'd never been sure what it was. He'd shot it with a bow and arrow just after his eighth birthday, on a late summer morning down by the creek. Larger than a cat, smaller than a German shepherd or werewolf. He turned the skull this way and that, held it up to the light. Incisors like a rat, but molars like an herbivore. Not a raccoon; he still had the tanned hide on the wall of his bedroom and its brown-on-tan stripes were not those of a raccoon. It wasn't an opossum or a small fox, not a badger or marmoset. No one in his family, an extensive tribe of hunters, could identify it. Which made him proud. He, Dwight Kurt Schrute, had slain the Unnameable.

Tradition dictated that on his wedding day, he would present his bride with proof of his ability to defend and feed her. Until now, the most talked-about wedding trophy had been his great-grandfather's presentation of a buffalo skeleton, fully articulated, to his first wife. No male since then had killed any animal quite that impressive. But soon, Dwight would trump every generation of Schrutes at one fell swoop; he would present his bride with the most unusual, most powerful trophy ever given a Schrute female.

Even if he didn't know what it was.

The late afternoon sun slanted in through the high, narrow windows on the west. The beets glowed in the sun, red as life, red as love. Dust motes danced in the air, and the air smelled of earth and roots and old sawdust. Dwight polished the skull of his bridal gift and smiled.

Soon it would be time to dig a grave for his beloved.