The Cipher Under the Linoleum

My name is Elias, and I’m nineteen now, but the thing that happened when I was ten still sits in my chest like a swallowed stone. We lived in a converted schoolhouse in rural Nebraska, a sprawling building my parents had bought at auction, hoping to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. The place was a labyrinth of classrooms and hallways, and the only finished living quarters were on the top floor, where the old teachers’ lounge and a few adjacent rooms had been gutted and rebuilt. My room was on the second floor, a former art room with high windows and a long counter that still smelled faintly of turpentine.

The lower floors were a wreck: peeling paint, broken tiles, and a maze of storage rooms. The basement, though, was the worst. It wasn’t just the damp or the dark; it was the feeling that the walls themselves were listening. I avoided it as much as I could, but the furnace and the water heater were down there, and my dad made me go down with him to check the pipes after a storm.

The first time I went down, I was nine. My dad had a flashlight, and I clutched the hem of his jacket. The concrete floor was uneven, and the air was thick with the smell of mold and something else, something sweet and wrong, like rotting fruit. We didn’t stay long, but as we were heading back up the stairs, I heard a sound behind us—a soft, rhythmic tap, like a finger on glass. My dad didn’t hear it. I didn’t mention it, because I thought I was imagining things.

Then, a few nights later, I woke up on the floor of my parents’ bedroom. I didn’t remember walking there. I was cold, and my feet were dirty, as if I’d been walking on the basement floor. That’s when I started drawing. I had never been particularly artistic, but I found myself scratching shapes into the margins of my schoolwork, and then on the walls of my room with a pencil. They weren’t anything I recognized—geometric, almost like a language. My mom thought it was a phase; my dad told me to clean the walls.

One Saturday afternoon, my dad was fixing a light fixture in the hallway, and I was playing in the living room, which used to be the school’s library. The floor was covered in old linoleum that had been laid over the original hardwood. I was lying on my stomach, tracing a crack in the linoleum, when my finger caught on a loose edge. I pulled, and a whole section of the linoleum peeled back, revealing a small, hidden compartment cut into the floorboards. Inside was a rusted tin box.

I opened it. Inside was a notebook, its pages yellowed and brittle, filled with handwriting in a language I didn’t recognize, but the shapes were the same as the ones I’d been drawing. And there was a small photograph of a man with a gaunt face and dark eyes, standing in front of what looked like this very schoolhouse. On the back, in pencil, was a date: 1952. And a name: Arthur.

I didn’t tell my parents. I hid the box under my bed. That night, I had a dream. I was in the basement, but it was bright, and the walls were painted a cheerful yellow. A door that I’d never seen before stood at the far end, and from behind it came that tapping sound. I woke up screaming, and my parents found me in the hallway, trying to push open the basement door. I didn’t remember walking there.

Things escalated. I started sleepwalking more often. My parents found me in the kitchen with a kitchen knife, staring out the window. I didn’t remember. But the drawing got worse—I would wake up with ink-stained fingers, and the walls of my room were covered in those symbols, some of them written in what I later realized was my own blood. I was terrified, but I couldn’t stop.

One night, I woke up in the basement. It was pitch black, and I was standing in front of the furnace. I felt something behind me, a presence, and I turned. There was a silhouette, taller than any man, with long arms that ended in fingers like twigs. I couldn’t see its face, but I knew it was the thing that had been watching me. It said, in a voice that seemed to come from all around, ‘You opened the door.’

I woke up in my bed, covered in sweat, and the notebook was lying open on my pillow, next to my hand. The page was blank, but there was a fresh cut on my palm, and a drop of blood had fallen onto the paper, forming a perfect circle.

I knew I had to destroy the notebook. I took it to the backyard and tried to burn it, but the flames wouldn’t catch. The pages were wet, as if I had dunked them in water. I threw it into the compost bin, but the next morning it was back under my bed.

Finally, I told my dad. I showed him the notebook, and the symbols, and the photograph. He frowned, but he didn’t dismiss it. He studied the photograph and said, ‘This man… he looks like my grandfather. He was a schoolteacher here in the ’50s. He went missing in 1952. They found his body in the basement, but they never found the cause of death.’

The next day, my dad and I went down to the basement. We found the door from my dream, hidden behind some old boxes. It was locked, but my dad jimmied it open with a crowbar. Beyond it, there was a room that had been sealed off, maybe a hundred years old. In the center of the room was a chair, and on the chair was a pile of bones. The skull was split open, not by trauma, but by something that had grown from the inside out, twisting the bone into a shape that looked like a flower.

And on the wall, carved into the stone, was the same set of symbols, and beneath them, a new phrase: ‘He came through. It will take him home.’

I don’t know what that means. But I do know that I never sleep in the dark without a light, and I’ve since moved to Arizona, where there are no basements. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see that flock of shapes descending, and I hear that tapping sound, just behind the wall of my skull, waiting for me to open the door again.