The Hollow in the Floor

The house on Marlowe Street had a smell my mother called ‘old cake,’ but I knew it was the scent of something forgotten. I was five, maybe younger, when we moved in with Roger and his boys. Roger wore a leather vest with patches that jangled when he walked, and he laughed too loud at things that weren’t funny. My mother smiled a lot then, but her eyes had a way of not meeting mine.

My room was at the end of a hallway that creaked even when you stood still. I had the top bunk, and my stepbrother Carl had the bottom. The ladder was at the foot of my bed, and I hated that because it meant I had to crawl over the gap to reach it. At night, after the house went quiet, I’d lie in the dark and watch the ceiling, counting the water stains that looked like faces.

The first sound came on a Tuesday, I think. It was a soft scraping, like something dragging across the floor above us. But there was no upstairs—just attic space, sealed shut with a panel in the ceiling of the hall. I called out, but no one answered. Carl snored below, and the sound stopped.

It got worse. I’d wake to find my bedsheets on the floor, though I never moved. Once, the ladder was reversed, the rungs facing the wall. Carl swore he didn’t do it, and his face looked pale when he said it, like he’d seen something too. We started sleeping on the same bunk, huddled together, pretending we weren’t scared.

One night, I heard a voice. It wasn’t Carl’s or my mother’s. It was low and gravelly, like it had been speaking to no one for years. It said my name. Not the one Roger used, but the one my absent father gave me. ‘Emmett.’ I covered my ears, but the voice came through my hands. ‘Emmett, come down.’

I looked over the edge of the bunk. The room below was dark, but there, near the door, was a shape. It was tall and thin, with arms that hung too long. Its face was a smudge, like someone had tried to erase it. It pointed at the floor, where the floorboards had warped, leaving a gap. ‘Down here,’ it said. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

I screamed, and the shape vanished. Carl bolted upright, and my mother burst in, her nightgown tangled. She saw the empty room, the cold draft from the hall. She said it was a nightmare, but the gap in the floor was wet, and there was a smell like rotting leaves. She told Roger, but he just grunted, said it was a draft.

But the hollow under the floor grew. It started as a small patch of damp, then became a dark stain that spread across the boards. No matter how much we mopped, it stayed. At night, I could hear something moving beneath it, slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat. Carl heard it too. We stopped talking about it, because talking made it real.

One afternoon, I was alone. The sun was setting, and the house was quiet. I knelt by the stain, and I saw it wasn’t a stain—it was a hole. The boards had rotted through, and below was blackness. But when I leaned closer, I saw a face. It was the same face from the door, but clearer now: pale, with hollow cheeks and eyes like dark pits. It smiled, and its mouth stretched too wide, full of teeth that were too many.

It spoke, but the voice came from all around me. ‘You’re the first one to see me clearly. The others just hear me. But you—you’re special.’ I tried to run, but my legs wouldn’t move. It reached up, its hand coming through the hole, fingers long and white. It touched my cheek, cold like the deep of winter. ‘Come join me. We’ll wait together.’

I don’t remember what happened next, only that I woke up in my bed, with my mother crying over me. She said I’d fallen through the floor, that she found me in the crawlspace. But I know what I saw. The hole was gone, replaced by new wood. But that night, I heard it again—not from under the floor, but from inside the wall, right behind my headboard.

We moved out two weeks later. Roger said it was too damp. But Carl and I knew. We never spoke of it, but we both had the same scar on our right palms, a thin white line that looked like a smile. Years passed, and I tried to forget. But sometimes, when I’m lying in bed, I hear that voice, gentle and patient: ‘Emmett, come down. The hollow is still here, and it’s growing.’