The Hollow Under the Stairs

I moved into the old farmhouse on Redmond Road about eight months ago. It sat at the end of a long, gravel drive, surrounded by fields that had gone to seed. The realtor had warned me it needed work, but the price was right, and I needed a place after the divorce. The first few weeks were fine, aside from the usual settling noises and the draft that whistled through the windows at night.

One afternoon, I was in the cellar, checking the fuse box, when I saw it. In the far corner, past the old wine racks and boxes of forgotten junk, there was a shape in the shadows. It was round, pale, the size of a dinner plate, and it had what looked like a face—two dark hollows for eyes and a wide, lipless mouth. It was just a trick of the light, I told myself. A stain on the wall. But my heart hammered, and I scrambled up the stairs, leaving the cellar light on and the door firmly shut.

My friend Dan, who came over that evening, laughed it off. ‘It’s just your imagination, Liv,’ he said. ‘That old house is playing tricks on you.’ I wanted to believe him. I left the cellar light burning day and night after that, a small amber glow in the darkness, a comfort against the thing I refused to name.

Then, at the beginning of July, something happened that made the face seem almost trivial. I was lying in bed, reading, when a tremendous crash shook the house. The floor trembled, the windows rattled, and I felt it in my chest. It came from the living room, a sound like a battering ram hitting the front door. I grabbed my phone and called the police, my hands shaking. They arrived twenty minutes later, and after a thorough search, found nothing out of place. The door was intact, the windows locked, the porch empty. They chalked it up to a tree branch or a car backfiring, but I knew what I heard.

I called Dan that night, but he was working the night shift at the plant and couldn’t talk long. ‘You’re just stressed, Liv,’ he said. ‘Take a sleeping pill.’ I didn’t. I lay awake, listening to the house groan, and I thought about the face in the cellar. It had seemed so real. I started to wonder if I was losing my mind.

The next week, I decided to prove to myself that the cellar was just a dusty, cluttered basement. I took a flashlight and my phone, and I went down the stairs, feeling the cold air seep through my shirt. The light from the single bulb cast deep shadows. I made it halfway across the room before I stopped. In the corner, where I’d seen the face, there was now something else. It was a small, wooden door, about two feet high, set into the wall. I had never noticed it before. It was painted the same faded gray as the concrete, almost invisible. There was a rusted iron handle.

I knelt down, my pulse loud in my ears. The handle was cold and gritty. I pulled, and the door swung open with a creak, revealing a narrow shaft that descended into blackness. A draft rose from it, carrying a faint, sweet smell, like decaying leaves and damp earth. I shone the flashlight in, but it only illuminated a few feet of stone steps before the dark swallowed the beam. I quickly closed the door and backed away.

That night, sleep was impossible. The crash had come from above, but now I was obsessed with what was below. Who had dug that shaft? What was down there? I tried to rationalize: it was probably just a coal chute, or an old well. But the face—that pale, watching thing—haunted me.

Three days later, Dan came over at my urgent request. I showed him the door. He frowned, knelt, and pulled it open. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Never noticed this before.’ He stuck his head in and peered. ‘Smells like a grave.’ I shuddered. He laughed. ‘It’s probably just a crawl space for pipes.’ But he agreed to go down with me, to put my fears to rest.

We descended, the stone steps slick with moisture. The air grew colder, and the smell stronger. At the bottom, the beam of Dan’s flashlight revealed a small, earthen room, maybe ten feet square. In the center was a low, stone slab, and on the slab lay a bundle of cloth, rotted and stained. My breath caught. It was the size of a person, wrapped in what looked like an old quilt. As we moved closer, I could see the outline of a face, sunken and dark, staring up at the ceiling.

Dan swore and grabbed my arm. ‘We’re leaving. Now.’ I didn’t need to be told twice. We scrambled up the stairs, into the kitchen, and slammed the cellar door shut. Dan called the police, and they came, but when they searched, they found nothing. The door was gone. The wall was solid concrete. They looked at us with that familiar suspicion. Dan’s face was pale. ‘I swear it was there,’ he whispered.

I didn’t sleep for days. I kept hearing that crash, feeling the vibration, seeing that face in my mind. Then, one night, I woke to a sound from downstairs. It was a low, rhythmic thumping, coming from the living room. I crept down the stairs, my heart hammering. In the gray light of the moon, I saw the silhouette of a figure standing in the corner. It was tall and gaunt, with long, thin arms. It turned its head, and I saw the same hollow eyes, the same lipless mouth. It was the face from the cellar, but now it had a body.

It took a step toward me, and I screamed. It stopped, tilting its head, as if curious. Then it spoke, in a voice that sounded like gravel and rust: ‘You let me in.’ I didn’t know what it meant. I backed away, tripping over a rug, and it took another step. The lights flickered. The thumping grew louder, from all around. The thing reached for me, its fingers long and brittle, and touched my cheek. The touch was cold, like stone. ‘You found the door,’ it said. ‘Now I can leave.’ I felt the floor give way beneath me, a rush of cold air, and then I was falling into darkness, the face above me, grinning.

I woke up in the cellar, lying on the cold concrete, the pale bulb overhead buzzing. I was alone. There was no door in the wall, no shaft, no slab. But when I looked at my reflection in a dusty mirror hanging on a support beam, I saw that my eyes had sunken, and there was a dark hollow where my left eye should have been. I reached up and touched it, and my finger went in. I felt no pain. Only a draft, like from a deep pit.

They found me at dawn, wandering in the field behind the house, my eye missing, gibbering about a face in the wall. I live in the house still. I have to. The door is open now, and something keeps calling me from the dark, and I don’t know if it’s me or the thing that now wears my skin.