The Crooked Floorboard

My earliest memory is of the sound of something breathing beneath my crib, a wet, ragged rhythm that pulsed through the floorboards. My mother said it was the old house settling, but I knew better. It was the thing that lived in the crooked floorboard, the one that never quite lay flat, the one that felt warm to the touch even in winter. I called it ‘the Mumbler’ because it never howled or moaned; it just muttered, low and constant, like a prayer muttered backward. My parents never heard it, of course. They thought I was having night terrors.

I’m thirty-four now, and I’ve spent my whole life running from those muffled syllables. I’ve moved nineteen times, always to newer, cleaner apartments, always on the top floor so there was nothing above me but sky. I told myself it was just anxiety, a childhood phobia I couldn’t shake. But then, last month, my wife, Elena, bought an antique writing desk from a flea market. She loved the inlaid walnut and the brass handles. I hated it the moment I saw it, because the bottom drawer was crooked. It didn’t sit flush, just like that old floorboard.

That night, I heard the Mumbler again, but it wasn’t under the bed. It was coming from the desk. I lay next to Elena, frozen, my heart hammering so loud I was sure it would wake her. The voice was clearer now, almost conversational, and I could pick out words: ‘not finished,’ ‘still here,’ ‘you remember.’ I didn’t sleep a wink. In the morning, I tried to tell Elena, but she laughed. ‘It’s just the wood settling, hon. You’re being paranoid again.’ I wanted to believe her, but then I saw it: the bottom drawer was slightly open, and inside, nestled between yellowed papers, was a photograph of a toddler in a crib, and under the crib, in the shadows, was a dark shape that looked exactly like the thing I used to see under my own bed.

The photograph was dated 1987, the year I was born. My skin crawled. I dug deeper into the drawer and found a child’s sock, crusted with something brown, and a tiny silver rattle. Engraved on the rattle was the name ‘Elijah.’ I didn’t know any Elijah, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the name was mine, that I was meant to be Elijah. I asked Elena where she got the desk. She said from an estate sale in the old Garrison house, on the edge of town, the one that had been abandoned for decades because of a ‘tragedy.’ I knew I had to go there.

The Garrison house was a rotting skeleton of a building, its windows like empty sockets. I went alone, at dusk, because I knew the Mumbler would be strongest then. The front door hung open, and the floorboards inside were warped and swollen. Every step I took, a new voice joined the chorus, a whisper rising from the wood: ‘You came back.’ ‘We missed you.’ ‘You’re home.’ I walked to the room where I knew the crib had been, and there, in the corner, was a crib, rusted and covered in dust. And under the crib, a crooked floorboard, exactly like the one from my childhood bedroom. I knelt and pried it up with trembling fingers. Beneath it, I found a dead child, mummified, wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, and clutched in its tiny hand was a photograph of me, as an adult, standing in that very room. I didn’t remember taking it. I never had.

The Mumbler’s voice became a thousand voices, all speaking at once, all in my own tone. ‘We were so lonely without you.’ ‘Now you’re here to stay.’ ‘You always knew.’ I tried to run, but the floorboards themselves seemed to grasp at my feet, and the walls began to bleed a dark, viscous fluid that smelled of decay. I felt something cold wrap around my ankle, like a child’s hand, but stronger. I looked down and saw a second set of footprints beside mine, small, bare, pressing into the dust, and they were leading toward the crib, not away. I realized, with a horrifying clarity, that I had never been running from the Mumbler. I had been running back to it, my whole life. The child under the floorboard had been waiting for me to grow up, to learn to speak its language, to join it in its endless, crooning darkness. And now, as the mummified child’s eyes opened, black and deep, I understood that I was going to be the new Mumbler, and that my own child, if I ever had one, would hear me under their crib, muttering about the crooked floorboard, and they would someday come looking, just as I had, and the cycle would never end. I opened my mouth to scream, but all that came out was a low, wet murmur, a sound I had heard my entire life, coming from under my bed.