Buried in the Basement

by Brian Harmon

  “All right,” he said. “But you have to understand that I really don’t know what’s going on. You can’t say I’m crazy because I don’t know what I even believe.”

  “Already sounds like you’re sane to me.”

  Allan told him his story, beginning with the night Selena heard the strange noise from the vicinity of the spare bedroom. He described every odd experience he could remember that followed, right up until he landed in the snow bank. When he was done, he half expected Ted to be laughing at him, but he simply sat there thoughtfully.

  “Wait here for a second,” Ted said, and he stood up and left the room. A moment later he returned with a large duffle bag. He placed it on the table and unzipped it. “You said you started thinking of ghosts because you were a fan of those ghost hunting shows, right?”

  Allan nodded. “Yeah. They’re fun. I thought this would be fun too. But it’s not.”

  Ted pulled an object out of the bag and placed it on the table in front of Allan. He recognized it at once. It was an electromagnetic field detector, just like the ones he’d seen them use on television. “I’m a fan, myself.”

  “More than a fan, I’d say.” Allan picked up the detector and examined it. A tool of this quality couldn’t have been cheap.

  “My mom’s house was haunted, back before she died,” Ted explained. “It’s what got me interested. She was always hearing footsteps and closing the basement door. I got involved with a local group of investigators and just fell into the hobby. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of weird things, but I’ve never heard of one as aggressive as yours.”

  “Me neither. Especially since it just started up one day. I swear it wasn’t remotely haunted a month ago.”

  Ted nodded. “That’s weird. It’s been my experience that ghosts are harmless. At most, they just want our attention.”

  “So you actually believe me?” Allan peered into the duffle bag. There were more EMF detectors inside, as well as digital thermometers and several audio recorders. There was an old Polaroid camera and even a video camera, but he didn’t have any infrared or thermal cameras. He either hadn’t been able to afford the more expensive toys or didn’t consider them worth the price. Probably the latter.

  “I do believe you,” Ted replied. “I’m not completely dismissing the idea that you might have misperceived something, though. This kind of thing requires a completely open mind, after all. But for now, I’m going under the assumption that you’re a hundred percent right and there’s something very dangerous living over your bedroom closet.”

  Allan replied with a quick laugh. “This is absolutely absurd.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “I guess so.” He turned away from the duffel bag and looked at Ted. “So what do I do now?”

  “I’d say we’d better go back and take a closer look at that box you found.”

  “That thing almost killed me,” Allan reminded him.

  “So let’s go see if we can figure out what it is before Selena gets home and it tries to hurt her.”

  Allan couldn’t argue that logic. “Yeah. I guess so, huh.” This all felt so surreal. He could barely believe he’d actually told anyone about what he thought happened, much less that he was now going to have some help dealing with it.

  Ted put the EMF detector back in his bag and the two of them returned to Allan’s house next door.

  “You just relax for a minute,” Ted said. “I’ll get some readings; see if maybe I can get a feel for what’s here.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Allan replied, seating himself in his living room chair. Ted could take all the time he wanted. He was not excited about going anywhere near that spare bedroom closet again.

  Ted placed digital recorders in the closet and spare bedroom and then spent the next ten minutes wandering through the house, searching for electromagnetic fields and temperature fluctuations. He started in the spare bedroom closet and worked his way out from there.

  “I hope I don’t look too ridiculous,” Ted remarked as he returned from scanning the basement.

  “You look like one of the professionals to me.”

  “Well I’m hardly that.” He turned his attention back to the spare bedroom. “It’s strange. You said the basement was the only place that seemed safe. That’s the only place I found any high electromagnetic fields.”

  Allan shrugged. “My cat seems to think it’s the safest place in the house.”

  Ted returned to the spare bedroom closet and righted the fallen ladder. Then he glanced up at the hole in the ceiling and jumped. “What was that?”

  Allan rose from the chair and rushed to Ted’s side. There was nothing up there that he could see. “What happened?”

  “There was a… I don’t know. A face, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “It was distorted,” Ted explained. “Or something. I don’t really know. It looked strange.” He picked up the flashlight that Allan dropped and climbed up the ladder for a better look.

  “Like the thing I saw in my bedroom, maybe?” Allan remembered the horribly gnarled and vaguely human thing that was reaching for him when he switched on the bedside lamp the night before. It still gave him a shiver. “Be careful up there.”

  Ted was shining the flashlight all around. “Nobody here,” he said, sounding surprised.

  “Come on down. It’s dangerous up there.”

  “I see the box you were talking about.” Ted pulled his head down and turned to Allan to say something more. Just then, a horrible growl came from the space where his head had just been. It was threatening enough that Ted scrambled down off the ladder and all the way back through the closet door to where Allan was standing before turning and shining the flashlight up at the hole.

  “So does this mean I’m not off my rocker?” Allan asked.

  “Not unless it’s catching,” Ted assured him. He turned and looked at him. “Did you see the broken lock on that box up there?”

  Allan nodded.

  “You said this house was perfectly normal until a few weeks ago, right?”

  Allan looked up at the hole above them. “Yes. And it started with a loud bang that Selena said came from over here.”

  A loud crash from the living room startled them. Both men turned and rushed back out of the spare bedroom to find the bookshelf overturned onto the floor.

  “I’ve never seen anything this aggressive,” Ted said. “It’s not at all typical.”

  “No kidding.”

  “We need to find a way to get rid of it before it hurts someone.”

  Allan considered pointing out the bandages on his forehead, but decided to let it go. “How do you propose we do that?” he asked instead.

  Ted looked at him, his face gravely serious. “I think we need to get that box.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’m sure that noise Selena heard was that lock failing and the box slamming open. Clearly something was locked in there.”

  “That’s all well and good, but just how the hell do we go about putting it back?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we can’t. But we need to get a good look at that box.”

  “Well I can’t help but notice that something up there doesn’t care much for us getting too close,” Allan reminded him. “So how do we get it out of there?”

  “I think we just have to go for it. I have a theory. Most ghosts seem to require energy to manifest. I’m thinking they can only do so much before they need to recharge.”

  “And this one’s been extraordinarily active today,” Allan concluded. “You’re thinking it’ll be weaker now.”

  “I don’t know that for sure. It’s a theory. This ghost breaks all the other rules so far, so I could absolutely be wrong.” He turned and walked back into the spare bedroom and gazed at the open closet. “In fact, I’m not positive it’s even a ghost at all.”

  Allan nodded. “Crossed my mind, too.”

  “Demonic entity, maybe?” Ted suggested. On television, this was
how they referred to something that was never actually human, and was therefore not technically a ghost. To Allan, it had always seemed like a cheap way to classify all the things that didn’t fit into their convenient understanding of ghosts. He thought the very word “demonic” was ridiculous. It was nothing more than a device to make certain cases sound more frightening. But this thing certainly didn’t behave like any ghost he’d ever heard about, except in horror stories. It felt downright nasty, in fact. This could very well be something utterly beyond comprehension.

  Allan sighed. “I don’t have a better plan. I’ll climb up there again.”

  “Get in fast and just grab it. You can drop it down to me. I’ll take it to the table where we can look at it. Hopefully, it’ll follow me and the box and let you get down safely.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Not a good plan, but at least it was a plan.

  Allan took the flashlight from Ted and walked back into the closet. He didn’t dare think too hard about it. Without pausing, he climbed up the ladder and crawled all the way into the attic before something could knock him down again.

  Behind him, Ted seized his video camera and aimed it at the opening. If that horrible face appeared again, maybe he could catch it on film. That might at least make all this worth it. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t drop the stupid camera if Allan needed him. “Be careful!” he called.

  Allan had no time to respond. A sound rose from the silence as he balanced himself on the joists, a deep, groaning noise that made the hair on his arms and neck stand up. It was unmistakably angry, but he didn’t dare look behind him. He crawled forward, inching along the joists, his eyes fixed on the box. All he had to do was reach it.

  But before he could peer inside, something howled. The noise was ear-splitting. He cried out, terrified, and instinctively lifted his hands to cover his ears. At this moment, he was shoved sideways. His left foot slipped off the joist and through the ceiling tiles.

  “Careful!” Ted shouted again from below.

  Allan’s head scraped against a nail. His flailing hand found another as he reached for something to hold onto. He heard the same low, guttural growl that threatened Ted when he retreated from the attic, and suddenly something was upon him. He felt invisible fists pounding against his back and shoulders. Something slashed at him. Hot streaks of pain raced across his back. He cried out, terrified.

  So much for this thing needing to recharge its energy. It seemed to Allan that it was stronger than ever.

  “What’s going on up there?” Ted called.

  But Allan couldn’t respond. He thrust himself to the right, clutching desperately at the joists beneath him to keep from dropping through the ceiling and into the closet beneath him. His right foot tore another hole in the tiles.

  “Allan!”

  A wailing shriek came from just behind his head. Something grabbed him by the hair again and jerked his head back. Fear and revulsion overwhelmed him. He needed to get out of here. This thing was going to kill him.

  Then he heard Ted’s voice from behind him. “Hey! Over here! Come on!”

  Then the thing was off him and another terrible howl filled the shadows behind him. Allan looked back in time to see Ted’s head vanish back down below the tiles and some kind of gray, twisted shape swarming over the opening. He heard Ted cry out as he fled from the creature’s reach.

  Allan turned back to the open metal box and hurriedly crawled the final few inches to where it waited. He lifted himself onto his knees and shined his flashlight into it. A small bundle of old rags lay inside. He didn’t know what it could be, but his imagination gave him all sorts of gruesome suggestions.

  A horrible wailing noise screamed in his ears, loud enough to physically hurt, and he was shoved forward, onto the box. Before he could react, something seized his foot and began dragging him backwards. A terrible pain tore through his leg, as if something had just bit him.

  Allan grabbed the box and pulled it toward him. Hardly thinking, he snapped the lid shut and clutched it against him, determined to hold onto it, no matter what happened.

  But just like that, all was silent.

  Allan lay there for a minute, sprawled across the ceiling joists and the broken tiles. He could feel warm blood dripping down his face from where he scraped his head on the nail. There was a dull stinging on his back. His hand throbbed and his right calf was on fire. But everything was silent.

  “Allan? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m all right.” He looked down at the box, hardly able to believe that it was over so easily. He was holding the lit closed. Was it his imagination, he wondered, or was there something pressing against it from the inside? “Hey. I need you to go into the kitchen. In the drawer closest to the door there’s a padlock. Can you get it for me?”

  “Sure.”

  An hour later, Allan sat at his dining room table, precisely where he’d been sitting when Selena first told him about the mysterious noise. The box sat on the table in front of him, a shiny new padlock holding it closed. He couldn’t believe it, but all the strange things that plagued him during the past few weeks seemed to be locked inside again.

  It was such a small box, too, for all that had poured out of it. It appeared to be homemade, just five metal plates welded together and a sixth attached with a hinge that allowed it to open. It was completely rusted over. What kind of person, he wondered, was capable of locking away something as terrible as this? How had it been done in the first place?

  He supposed it didn’t matter. The only thing left was to figure out what to do with it. Ted suggested taking it to some of his friends in the paranormal investigation field. Maybe they could find a way to safely study it. They were already going to have a field day with Ted’s audio recordings, which had caught every growl and shriek of their encounter, and there might even be a shaky image or two on the video camera.

  But Allan didn’t care much for the idea of letting this thing back out for any reason, even if it was nowhere near his home. A part of him wanted to find somewhere it would never be found and bury it, or even acquire a boat and dump it in the depths of the ocean. But he supposed it wouldn’t really matter as long as it was taken far away from here.

  The worst part was simply knowing that this box even existed. Was it unique? Or were there dozens or hundreds or perhaps even thousands more like it, hidden away in the world, each of them held closed with old and rusty locks that were ready to fail at any moment and release terror on anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity?

  The front door opened and Selena walked in. She stopped short as she saw him sitting there, his head and hand bandaged, with dried blood on his cheeks. He had changed into a pair of shorts and his leg was wrapped with gauze. “Oh my god!” she exclaimed. “What happened?” Her eyes drifted to the overturned bookshelf and to the spare bedroom door, through which she could see the scattered boxes that had been neatly stacked inside the closet when she left.

  “Hello, Mrs. Tyler,” Ted called from the closet, where he was picking up the pieces of the shattered ceiling tiles.

  Allan smiled. “It’s a long story. And you’re not going to believe it anyway.”

  She stared at him, thunderstruck. “Are you okay?” she asked at last.

  Allan heard a familiar mewl from beneath his chair and glanced down to see Kikki purring beside his bandaged leg. He smiled. If she’d returned from her self-appointed exile in the safety of the basement, then everything really was back to normal. “Yeah,” he assured her. “Everything’s perfectly fine.”

  The Hell Within the Heart

  Roger awoke with a shout and sat upright in his motel bed. An icy chill washed over his naked skin and his heart thundered in his chest. For a moment, he was engulfed in crippling terror. But the images of the nightmare were already fading, unraveling into confusing snippets of thoughts until he could no longer remember what had frightened him.

  The woman beside him spoke his name as she lifted her head from the pillow,
concerned.

  “Wendy…” gasped Roger, somehow relieved to hear her voice.

  Wendy sat up and placed her warm hand against his breast. Almost at once, he could feel his wildly beating heart begin to ease.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked in a sweet whisper.

  He placed his own hand over hers and tried to give her a smile. “Just a dream,” he replied. His tone was part assurance and part relief. “It’s okay.”

  “What was it about?” she asked as he lay back into his warm pillow.

  Roger stared up at her. There was just enough light creeping around the motel room’s heavy curtains for him to make out her pretty face. “I can’t remember,” he replied. It was the truth. It was completely gone, lost as if in a haze. “Something about…” An image surfaced in his memory—something about the window—then disappeared again without a trace. “I can’t remember,” he finished at last. His eyes met hers again and he smiled a smile which was much more convincing than his last.

  She was still sitting up in bed, gazing down at him. Her blue eyes were black in the shadows, but he could still see the worry in them. He had frightened her a little. “You’re sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  “Never been better,” he replied coolly as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her onto him. “I’m with you, aren’t I?”

  Wendy giggled softly and then kissed his welcoming lips.

  He felt her naked body as her weight pressed down against him. Her skin was blissfully warm. Again, his heart was pounding, but no longer from fright. He rolled over onto her, gently pressing her down onto the bed.

  They made love for a long time. Roger savored every kiss, every touch, every soft whimper that escaped her sweet lips. He loved Wendy more than he had ever loved anything or anyone in his entire life…even his wife.

  * * *

  Roger lay silently as Wendy’s warm breath tickled the tender flesh of his neck. He could feel her heart as it beat softly against his chest. His hand explored the supple curves of her naked bottom as he stared off into the shadows.