Hissing sulfur broke the stillness as Heather fumbled her first match to the floor. Brittany touched her successfully lit candle to Heather’s and a few feet of the dining room was revealed. Every shadowed corner danced with dangerous potential in the flickering flames. So quickly and completely the outside world had disappeared. It was just Heather and Brittany, contained in their alarmingly small bubble of candlelight.
“Okay, I guess let’s get walking?” Brit said. Heather only nodded, not trusting her voice. The dining room had seemed like a safe point to start. But everything was different now, even the air had changed. Something was looking for her.
They circled the table once, unsure what they should be doing. They got to a shelf full of old china when Brittany’s candle went out. She quickly had it burning again. Heather’s candle hadn’t even flickered.
“That was weird,” Brittany said.
“Yup.” was all Heather could say.
Then the sounds began. Footsteps, distantly. Occasional sounds of soft breathing that Heather told herself were just Brittany. Heather was supposed to be asking questions as they walked, but she couldn’t. Brittany seemed just as unwilling.
They inched from the dining room into the kitchen. They’d already raided it earlier and didn’t find anything new, not that they could see much by candle light. They didn’t linger.
The cloak room felt taller, the grandfather clocks stretching towards a ceiling neither could see. But again, there was nothing else to find.
When they gameplanned they’d agreed to avoid the staircase and the mirrors until they’d gotten a feel for how the game worked, shaken off their nerves. Now they were quickly exhausting other options. Heather felt the dread certainty solidifying in her gut; she wasn’t leaving tonight without facing the upper floors. With each room they cleared, another piece of the wall she’d built between herself and that certainty crumbled away. She was being inched to a cliff’s edge. She began to dread turning to leave a cleared room, each time expecting to see a shadowy form standing just behind her waiting in the doorway of her only exit. The phantom footsteps were getting louder.
It was too much. Heather turned on the walkie, “Is anyone still out there?!” In the ensuing static she tried to picture Sera and Jake, parked and waiting in a world that already felt like a distant memory. Heather must have sounded terrified because Serafina spoke to them in something other than her usual dismissive monotone.
“We’re here. What happened, over?” Heather could hear Jake in the background sounding panicked.
“Not really anything yet just, I feel like I’m losing it.”
“You’re doing great. Just keep walking, and ask questions. I’ll be right here, promise.” Heather didn’t have the heart to tell her they hadn’t asked a single question.
Their last unexplored room was the bathroom off the stupidly spooky hallway. The place conjured old memories of Bloody Mary and grade school pranks. Heather could tell Brittany remembered too by the way she avoided looking at the mirror. The bathroom was huge with a window looking out into the back yard. Through the dusty fogged glass Heather could make out the limbs of endless trees stretching into woods. The state forest the Pinardi man had vanished into.
Brittany was gazing out too, but not seeing. “It’s really different now, isn’t it?” Brittany whispered.
“Yeah. I didn’t think I could be more terrified than before,” Heather said, guarding her suddenly flickering flame. “I’m holding on by my fingernails.”
“Nothing too bad has happened. ”
“We haven’t gone upstairs yet either. Or asked a question. Have you been hearing the footsteps?”
Brittany continued looking out the window, brow furrowed. “It feels like I’m tied into something bigger now. Like there’s so much I didn’t know about and I just have to reach out somehow…” Brittany looked up to the ceiling and shut her eyes, “Whoever is in here with us, where should we go next?”
“Brit?” Heather snapped her fingers. “Brit!” Heather shouted. “I am not letting my only friend in this place check out on me!”
Brittany opened her eyes and said, “the basement. It’s creepy but I kinda felt the answer. It’s the right place.”
Heather’s throat tightened and she picked up the walkie. “Serafina, we’re going to go into the basement, not sure how good the reception is. But Brittany says it’s promising. Over.”
“Roger. All’s quiet out here. Jake seems very bored now that he knows you’re alright. Over.”
“Tell him I’d gladly trade places. Hopefully we’ll have something entertaining to share soon. Over and out.”
As the walkie switched off, their candles started flickering violently. They had been standing still for far too long. Heather ran for the door and glimpsed the mirror. She saw herself, Brittany, and a third person, watching her as if from very far away. She grabbed Brit’s wrist. “Come on!” but her own feet seemed stuck.
The person in the mirror got closer, so close that it looked like its breath would fog the glass. Heather heard a voice echoing dimly in her ear. It said nothing that could be understood, but still it spoke sounds with cwuhs and settes, whispers, almost a hiss. She couldn’t turn away.
“Heather move!” Brittany screamed, coming to life dragging her to the bathroom door. The movement put out their candles.
“Oh shit oh shit!” Brittany said. She got the matches from her pocket, hands shaking so badly her first went out in smoke. “Fuck, fuck!” The voice from the mirror was now all around them, drowning out all other sound except the loud pounding of blood in Heather’s ears.
“Brit, I’ve got it.” Heather grabbed the candle from Brit and held her match to it until it burned her fingertips, then relit her own. The whispers pulled back, and the two lunged into the hallway, babying their candles. Heather grabbed the walkie as soon as they were in the hall, “Serafina, something found us. We’re okay, we’re moving. But your mom was right, something is definitely, undeniably in here. Over.”
“That’s great, keep moving!” Serafina said. “Put as much distance between yourself and that thing as you can. And it may not be the only thing in there tonight. Over!”
“Get us to the basement!” Heather said to Brittany, who nodded, eyes wide and jaw set. She took them around the corner, as quick as their flickering flames would allow, and pulled open what had looked like a closet door. Cold stale air attacked them, stinking of mold and chemicals and decayed root vegetables. They tried to move quickly, but if the stairs to the third floor were bad, the basement stairs were an outright hazard. Bits of old plywood kept breaking out from under Heather, which made her cling to Brittany. The groaning stairs did not like them both on the same step. Somehow they made it to the cold dirt floor of the basement, and the door slammed shut behind them.
“We’ll be okay down here for a while,” Brittany said. “I think we lost whatever that was up there.”
“But who knows what’s down here…” Heather whispered to no one. Their candlelight was pitiful in the huge darkness of the half finished cellar. It seemed the place had been an endless dumping ground for whoever lived here. As they walked her candle revealed half dismantled futons, a splintery kitchen table, woodworking tools, a couch that looked like several cats had shredded it, a whole row of open cardboard boxes, an old tube tv, several sacks of potatoes stained with black sludge, nothing even remotely helpful.
“What made you so sure we had to come here?” Heather asked.
“I asked, and the answer felt right. Besides, I saw some stuff down here earlier. I promise there’s more than garbage. Whoa, look at this.” Brit held up an old framed photograph.
“Oh.” Heather said, taking the picture. “That’s so sad.” The picture was a full family portrait for a holiday. The mom and dad were in their early 40s, both brown hair. They had three kids: a tall girl with black hair, an even taller boy with sandy brown hair, and a small kid sitting in his dad’s lap with a doofy smile on his face and teeth missing. The girl was holding a surprisingly well behaved cat. The tall teen boy was in a huge flannel, Heather pegged him as the musician. Everyone looked so happy, so alive. Heather wondered how long the happy people in this picture had before their world had been ripped apart.
“Heather, this way!” Brit called. “It’s close.” And it was. The two clambered over a precarious pile of 2x4s and found a white child sized writing desk piled high with spiral bound notebooks.
“Last time as soon as I got close to these it felt like something was screaming at me to get out. They’ve gotta be important.”
“Then why’d it tell you to come down here?”
“It’s hard to explain Heath… Whatever chased me away before was different from what answered me in the bathroom. I trust that answer.”
“But wouldn’t the police have already combed through these?”
“Maybe they missed something,” Brit said with a grim smile. “I know a way to find out.” She shouted to the sky, “Whoever is stuck in this house, we want to know what happened to you! Will these notebooks help?” She closed her eyes and waited. After a minute, she raised her candle and tried again. “Will these notebooks tell me what happened to you!” Heather sighed in relief when nothing answered. There was only the soft sound of a wick being consumed by flame.
Brittany pouted and turned on her walkie. “Serafina, nothing is answering the spell anymore. Is there a certain way we have to say stuff?” But static was the only response. “Hey, do you hear us? Over?” More hissing. “I guess there really is no reception down here?”
Heather had gone very still. “Yeah, I hope that’s what it is.” The first floor may as well have been miles away, in directions unknown.
Brit started to leaf through the notebooks, and Heather joined her. Most of them looked like journals with some doodles. Heather flipped through a stack until she found one of the more recent ones. The author filled most of the pages with chatter about what they couldn’t wait to play when they got home from school, gossip from class, and lots of drawings of meteors crashing into the school. Timeless stuff really.
Heather noticed a pattern after a while. The final words for each entry were written in bed at night. This kid, named David apparently, was having a lot of trouble falling asleep. Anxiety, paranoia, nightmares.
“Brit come here.” They read together. The bedtime entries got more frantic. Heather turned a page and gasped. There was a rough drawing of a figure. Brittany examined it quizzically but Heather recognized exactly what it was. The shadow from the stairs.
A piercing shriek of feedback made Heather jerk back and drop the book. “What the fuck?” Brittany said, pulling the walkie back out. The static was humming with a rhythm. The rhythm became a word; one syllable in over and over. Her throat closed, cutting off a dry heave.
“Run. Run. Run.”
The garbled voice said it faster, and faster, until the walkie fizzed and went dead.
Heather and Brittany shared a moment of stunned silence staring at one another’s horror stricken faces. Then they ran.
Behind them they heard notebooks burst into the air and scatter to the dirt. Something pushed Heather, guiding her towards an unexplored corner of the basement. Brittany had started to falter. Heather sped up, grabbing Brit’s hand.
They jumped over piles of decaying wood and tools. But they quickly saw Heather had run them to a dead end. “Brit, get the salt.” Heather could feel more than hear something closing in on them. She forced herself to breathe and look around. Candlelight revealed a small trap door, almost a crawl space of rusted metal and latched shut. And nothing else.
There had to be somewhere else to go, but when Heather took even one step away from the crawlspace the walkie screamed again.
“I think we have to go in there!” Heather shouted above the noise.
“Are you…I… Heather I don’t think I fucking can.” Brittany’s eyes were full of tears. “I’m feeling so much.”
Heather held onto her friend. “New rooms, crossing thresholds, that’s how we lost it last time!” Something large crashed onto the ground not far from where they stood, shaking through the floor. Heather’s legs went to jelly.
“Come on,” Heather said. “We can do this.” She got on her knees and pulled at the latch. The old rusted thing popped open almost on its own. Inside was a small square room with a dirt floor. She crawled in holding her candle before her. She had to hunch over to keep her head from hitting the cobwebbed ceiling. She helped Brittany through behind her. The oppressive feeling from the basement faded a little.
“What is this place?” Brit said.
“I have no idea. What would someone even use it for?”
Old bricks lay discarded all around on a silt sand floor. The place was small enough for their two candles to light up the whole place. They weren’t missing anything.
Heather picked up one of the bricks and the room grew dimmer. Brittany, the candles, the room, all faded away into the background. She saw a little boy in old fashioned clothes pounding on the firmly latched door. He was screaming and scratching at the walls until his fingers turned bloody. The boy faded, replaced by a man. Then several men. They were face down, groaning and writhing in the silt, their blood turning it a rusty brown. Some wore feathered headdresses, others vests and hats. They cried out as flames licked buildings all around them. One man in a deerskin tunic clutched a wooden staff against the wound in his chest. The cry of his last breath shook Heather’s soul.
The walkie talkie shrieked. Heather snapped back to the basement and saw her breath misting out. She only had time to hear Brittany shout, “Salt!” before the metal door slammed shut and their candles went out.