Phrog Spirits #3
So, if it wasn’t a residual spirit, that meant it was an intelligent one. There was something… alive in that eye she’d seen. Only a ghost that was aware of the little girl in the bed across the room would make eye contact. Right?
And that scared her so much more.
Dad went down to the basement then. She could hear him rattling around in his new workshop, which wasn’t much more than a three-foot high tool chest on wheels with empty drawers and a bench vise mounted on top.
Remy went upstairs, deciding in the moment that she wasn’t going to be afraid of her own room.
At least not while the sun was up. That helpless feeling from this morning was back, and she was determined to resist it.
She couldn’t control the circumstances, and she couldn’t stop herself from feeling afraid, so the only thing left in her control was how she handled that fear…
and right now she wanted to face it head on.
She stepped inside the door, took one extra step just to make sure that she was inarguably inside the room for the first time since last night, and stood stock-still, listening.
Scanning. Something pinged her radar. Something in the space was different or not as it should be even though it was silent.
Her subconscious wanted her to notice, but wouldn’t give details.
What is it? she thought. What’s different?
No answer from her pesky subconscious. She took one long inhale, held it, and swept her gaze across the entire space.
Yes, something was different. Something was missing.
Fear rose in her chest again, her feet turning instinctively back toward the door, but she squashed it down and pushed herself toward the desk in the corner, set her backpack on top, and took out her math folder.
All in your head, she said to herself. It’s all in your head. Just the disruption. The new place. All the sudden, unwelcome change in your life. Anxiety is not the same as danger.
Again, like this morning at school, she couldn’t focus, the numbers on the math worksheet jumbling, switching places, transmuting into foreign symbols.
Remy decided to try reading instead. She had talked Dad into letting her pick up a book which, at first, he said was too old for her.
But she was seeing it everywhere and that piqued her curiosity.
She still didn’t quite know what it was about, but one of the main characters was a talking cat, and that idea fascinated her.
She’d always wanted a cat. Maybe she could use these crummy circumstances to talk Dad into it.
It was no good, though. She couldn’t focus on the book either, and after rereading the same paragraph four times without paying attention to it, skimming her eyes over the words without taking them in, she called out, “Dad?”
He didn’t answer, must still be downstairs.
Remy went down to talk to him, taking a half step back to grab her flashlight (in case he was in the basement), and having decided that her campaign for a pet was maybe the only thing that could keep her from panicking as the sun began to set.
She didn’t want to think about spending the night in that room, and he’d sworn she wasn’t sleeping in his bed again.
Out in the hall, she heard him screaming, and she ran downstairs toward the sound.
Less than a minute after she’d left the room, the sound in the walls returned. It started somewhere below the floorboards, tracked upward along the wall with the vent, and then disappeared up into the ceiling. Warbled, helpless screams came with it.
Then…
Shouting, which hadn’t been heard in the house for a long time.
***
“Dad?” Remy called. “Dad?!”
No answer. But she’d just heard him screaming. Terrible, ear-wrenching screams. He was clearly in pain, full of panic. Even two floors up she’d been able to tell that.
The basement was damp, and even darker than her room.
Much smaller too, a cramped space, with a low cave-like ceiling and no windows, and only a single light bulb on, casting a weak glow over less than a quarter of the space.
She slid her feet carefully along the dirt floor, squinting as she made her way from the steps and toward the corner where Dad had set up his tool bench.
As she walked, she pulled a chain to turn on another bare light bulb.
The quiet weighed down the air around her, adding to her sense of claustrophobia.
What if someone suddenly shut and locked the door behind her? Her heart slammed in her chest, the only sound available.
Dad’s tape measure was laying on the dirt floor.
Suddenly she became aware that it smelled like mold down here.
Like rot. The walls were made of loose stacked stones, like this cellar had been carved out in a hurry.
Had “bare hands grandad” dug this entire pit with only a shovel?
The more she lingered, the more it seemed… uneven all around her. Malformed.
She wanted to leave, badly, yet something urged her to stay. Dad should be down here, and he was probably hurt.
“Dad?” she called out once more. Then Remy noticed a wet spot in the clumpy dirt, a foot or so away from where she stood.
A dark liquid, enough to form a puddle the diameter of a coffee mug.
Next to that was a flattened path like something big had been drug across, away from the tool bench, then in an arc that led behind the steps.
Next to the water heater, its surface marred by spots of rust visible even in the low light.
Her breath caught, as her brain served up dark thoughts that could explain what she was seeing.
Still, she followed the trail around, turned on the last remaining light source, and noticed something she hadn’t seen the last time she’d been down here with Dad and Brett.
They must not have seen it either, too focused on the hack job the builder had done welding copper pipe fittings together.
There was a small alcove near the back corner of the basement that looked like it had been formed by hand, as if someone had pulled a few dozen of the flat stones out and then clawed at the Earth behind them to form foot- and hand-holds.
And near the top of this improvised ladder, a jagged hole which opened up into the subfloor, big enough for her to fit herself through.
She didn’t have to guess to know that a small person (or a rodent, but not a ghost) could pull themselves up into that hole and then scurry around behind the kitchen walls.
And probably farther. In her mind, she already knew that someone who used that path could have free reign of the entire house.
And look out through the vents, if they so chose.
But, Dad couldn’t be in there. He was too big. Even if someone, or something, had knocked him out and tried to drag him up there, it was impossible. They’d get no further than his shoulders. She thought of that small puddle, decided to take a closer look.
Remy touched her fingers to the wetness in the dirt, then held them to the light.
Blood. It must be. She held in a scream as she searched the floor, finding a line of drops that followed the flattened path and led her all the way to the hole in the ceiling.
“Dad” she called up the shaft between the walls up there.
This time, he answered, with another agonizing scream, carried down through the darkened space above her. Without another thought, Remy scrabbled her way up into the liminal space between those walls, and climbed.
It was tough going, negotiating her body up through the crawlspace, but she found strength she didn’t know she possessed as she wormed and snaked out of the basement, scraping her arms and elbows against rough plaster, catching one of her shoes on the tip of a nail and kicking it loose.
But she didn’t slow down. Dad needed her.
Remy pulled herself up through the interior of the walls, flashlight beam leading the way, until she found herself on the first floor, then walked along the narrow opening (inhaling dust and angling her shoulders so they didn’t brush the boards on either side), toward what she believed was the back of the house, the side her room was on.
There was blood all over the floor, collected in small puddles and sprayed across the plaster in wide swaths.
Along with the blood, she saw evidence someone else had been in here.
Not just recently, but frequently, and for a long time.
There were tick marks carved into the yellowing plaster, as if someone had been counting days for quite some time.
Dirty dishes. Folded magazines. Some sort of stained linens, either bedsheets or thin towels, piled in the corner.
She stepped over these and rounded into the wall gap that lined the rear of the house.
There, she saw another makeshift ladder (this one formed by adding additional crosspieces between two of the studs), above which was another ragged hole in the ceiling, a matching opening in the flooring beyond it.
Unless she had lost her bearings (not likely, she had a great sense of direction), this would be the wall that her vent was in.
So, it wasn’t a ghost at all, she thought, with a feeling of sinking dread. The eyeball in her room didn’t belong to a rodent either. But a person. Someone had been living inside their walls, probably the whole time they’d been here, and probably for weeks or months before they’d come.
Why? What were they doing here? What could they possibly want? What were they doing to Dad?
Remy dry heaved as she fought the instinct to kick and punch her way through the wall to her left and back into the open space, instead climbing the rudimentary ladder with its crooked, splintery steps. Twice, her hands slipped on the blood. It felt warm.
Another scream came from overhead. There must be an attic up there, after all.
“Hang on, Dad!” she shouted. “I’m coming!”
Up, she climbed.
***