Chapter 5 - Locked Below
“Clara!” Marcus shouted, slamming his palm against the heavy wooden basement door. The wood was solid oak, reinforced during a renovation years ago. It didn't budge an inch. “Clara, open the door! The latch caught!”
On the other side of the door, muffled by thick wood, came the sound of running footsteps—not two feet, but four, moving with a bizarre, skittering cadence that made Marcus’s stomach turn.
“Dad? Dad, can you hear us?” Zuri’s voice called out through the crack at the bottom of the threshold, thin and terrified.
“Zuri! Listen to me, get out of the house right now!” Marcus yelled, pressing his ear against the door. “Take Maya and Clara and get in the car!”
“We tried, Dad,” Zuri shouted back, her voice breaking into a sob. “The front door won't open. The deadbolts... they're turning by themselves!”
Marcus spun around in the pitch-black basement, flicking the switch on his heavy metal flashlight repeatedly. The bulb flickered weakly, casting erratic, dancing shadows across the concrete foundation walls. In the dim, intermittent light, he saw something that stopped his heart.
The pile of dirt near the crawlspace was moving. Small clumps of dark earth were shifting upward as if something were burrowing out from beneath the concrete slab itself.
A low, guttural whispering filled the damp air of the basement—dozens of overlapping voices speaking in a language Marcus couldn't understand, yet somehow felt vibrating inside his own teeth.
He gripped the flashlight like a club, backing away until his spine hit the cold stone wall. The beam stabilized for three seconds, long enough to illuminate a small, pale hand reaching up out of the dirt pile, its fingers clutching a half-eaten noodle of cold spaghetti.
“You left her outside in the cold, Marcus,” a voice hissed directly behind his ear—a voice that sounded unmistakably like his own mother’s, even though she had passed away ten years ago.
May you like
Marcus whipped around, swinging the flashlight into the empty dark, his breath turning to frost in the freezing air as the basement temperature plummeted toward freezing.
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