Someone here

She lived alone in the two story home where she and her late husband had raised their children. Kathleen, who married at twenty and has her own girls in college now, and Andrew, who is going through a divorce and could only squeeze in a quick visit for Thanksgiving. She had bought a whole dinner but Kathleen didn’t show and Andrew only stopped by to say hello and goodbye.

‘There is someone here….’ She told him as he rushed out the door. She held his wrist as tight as she could which was not tight at all.

The sound of footsteps echoed from the basement, pacing around the dank ground below. A basement she would not dare to venture down into now; wooden stairs as weak and fragile as her bones. She could only stand at the steps looking down into the Dark.

‘Would you please check?’

Andrew was frustrated with her worry, annoyed, and assured her he’d look the next time he came to visit. Certainly some animal had found it’s way into the old crawlspace.

Meredith frightfully explained to her son when he returned that it was not just sounds in the walls.

She heard voices at night.

Whispers climbing up the walls; singing, weeping. The voices were the loudest in Kathleen’s old rooms where words and songs rose up from the floor. Conversations shared by people who weren’t there. Only Meredith alone, her ear pressed against the wall.

His visit only left him frustrated and Meredith helpless. There was nothing to be found, and he unloaded his stress on his mother, pinning his everyday problems on her neediness. When he left she regretted upsetting him and wished he’d come back. When he wouldn’t, the voices began again.

Meredith had never believed in the supernatural, and had lived half her life in this house. But in the morning she’d find basement door ajar and all the cupboards wide open, her living room disheveled.

She’d sit awake at night in her bed listening to the footsteps crawling around her house. She listened to the Thing from the basement make it’s way up the steps, down the hall, towards her room. The door a transparent shield between Meredith and what lay beyond it. A madness paralyzed her as she listened to the door knob twist, the door whining open….

Meredith was near tears the last time she saw her son. There was a something in her house, tormenting her. She said it was a man. The footsteps had grown more frequent, unpredictably during the day but always at night. The presence came from the Dark in the basement, she was certain.

‘Please,’ she pleaded with her only son, ‘Please just go look and see what’s down there!’

But Andrew had already concluded there were no animals in the house and if his mother did not get a grip on herself he would have to find another place for her to live. He couldn’t afford an in home nurse so it would have to be an assisted living community. And Meredith wept because her son was rushing out and couldn’t be bothered and she knew that at night the thing from the Dark would return.

She had realized then that she alone would have to see what waited in that Darkness.

In the basement there was a crawlspace. In years past it had been used to hide holiday presents. Now it hid in the shadowed corner of the basement just out of view from the top of the stairs.

The stairs threatened to murder her. The steps whined and shuddered beneath her weight, and the railing was rot. Outside it had snowed and the cold crept in through the basement. Meredith trembled and whined as she descended, thankful for each step that didn’t fall through. The cold froze through her slippers, like walking on ice.

She could hear the music, coming from the dark of that crawlspace. The voices seeping through the door. Weeping and laughter and screaming and static.

Meredith stood before the crawlspace door trying to find the courage to open it. Instead something from within opened it for her.

Andrew knew something had happened to his mother when she hadn’t called him for over a week. She had been ringing him daily with one complaint or another, which had driven him nuts. As the silence grew so did his worry, and when she could not be reached by phone he called the police before heading over.

Andrew found his mother dead in the basement, the crawlspace door wide open. He stood there for some time before the authorities arrived.

The paramedics said that Meredith had had a heart attack. When the police checked the crawlspace, they found a sleeping bag, food wrappers, a radio, empty plastic bottles and a man. A homeless man had been living in her crawlspace for winter.

Police arrested the vagrant, walking him out of the house in cuffs. Andrew could still feel his mother’s grip on his wrist.