Chapter 5
The rattling of the cellar door vibrated through the floorboards, shaking the rug beneath Mark's feet. Sarah grabbed a heavy ceramic vase from the entryway console, her fingers trembling as she raised it defensively. "There’s someone down there," she hissed, her voice barely a whisper. "Mark, you said the basement was sealed off when we moved in. You said the previous owners locked it permanently."
"That's what the real estate agent told us," Mark replied, stepping in front of Sarah and Leo while sliding the brass key into his pocket. He reached for the brass knob of the cellar door, his palm slick with nervous sweat. The scratching sound beneath the floorboards stopped instantly, replaced by a low, rhythmic tapping—three slow beats, followed by a pause, exactly the Morse code signal Mark and Arthur used to use during late-night debugging sessions at the office.
Mark froze with his hand on the knob. "He's inside the house," Mark whispered, the realization hitting him with sickening clarity. "The front door was just a distraction. The basement connects to the old drainage tunnels running underneath the entire suburban block."
Leo tugged at the hem of Mark’s navy blue T-shirt, pointing his small finger upward toward the ceiling vent in the hallway. "The vent is open," the toddler said calmly, his eyes fixed on the metal slats where a faint plume of gray smoke was beginning to curl into the air.
Sarah dropped the ceramic vase; it shattered against the floorboards, sending white shards flying across the entryway. The smoke smelled sharply of burning paper and electrical wire—the distinct odor of a high-capacity hard drive being fried from the inside out.
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"They're destroying the backups," Sarah gasped, running toward the stairs leading to the second floor. "Everything we kept from the audit... it's in the attic trust. If they burn the house, we lose the proof."
Mark turned the cellar knob, throwing the heavy door open to a pitch-black staircase, only to find a pristine, brand-new laptop sitting on the top step, its screen glowing with a single blinking text cursor.
