The Last Crayon

Every house has its own quiet language, a creak in the stairway, a draft under the door, a pattern of light that slips across the wall at dusk. The house Emily grew up in, a narrow Victorian on Maple Street, had too many rooms for a family of three, and some of those rooms were locked for no reason her parents could explain. The previous owners had been reclusive, and the realtor had muttered something about a ‘home laboratory’ and ‘old-fashioned remedies.’ Emily’s parents laughed it off, but they never opened the door to the attic. Emily didn’t mind; she had her own world in the basement.

The basement was cool and smelled of damp earth and mothballs. It was where her mother kept the freezer and where Emily went to play with her action figures on the old rug that always felt slightly damp. One afternoon, when she was six, she was down there looking for a lost toy car. She crawled under the stairs, where the light barely reached, and her hand brushed against something smooth and cold. It was a small, leather-bound notebook, hidden behind a loose brick that had shifted just enough to reveal it. Emily pulled it out, excited by the thought of a secret treasure.

The pages were brittle and yellowed, filled with cramped handwriting and diagrams of strange symbols. She couldn’t understand most of it, but one illustration caught her eye: a circle with a hand in the center, fingers splayed, and a dark outline around it. On the next page was a recipe for a ‘Salve of Return,’ with ingredients like grave moss, marrow of a child, and something called ‘the last crayon.’ Emily giggled at the crayon part; it sounded like a silly ingredient. She shut the book, tucked it into her coat pocket, and forgot about it for weeks.

It was late autumn when Emily started seeing the hand. It would appear in the corner of her eye, always in the basement, always near the stairs. At first, it was just a shadow of a hand, barely there. But then it became more solid, a pale, slender hand with impossibly long fingers, reaching out from the darkness. Emily would turn, and it would be gone. She tried to tell her father, but he dismissed it as a trick of the light. Her mother, distracted with work, told her to stop making up stories.

Emily began to dread going to the basement, but she had to retrieve the crayons for a school project on ‘things you see in the dark.’ That day, she stood at the top of the basement stairs, clutching the railing, watching the shadows below. The hand was there, resting on the bottom step, fingers curling and uncurling as if beckoning. Emily’s heart pounded, but something in her, the same curiosity that had found the notebook, made her step down. The hand didn’t move. It just stayed there, palm up, like it was waiting for an offering.

Emily remembered the notebook. She raced to her room, dug it out of her dresser drawer, and flipped to the recipe. The ingredients were absurd, but she noticed a small note in the margin: ‘The binding must be sealed with a drawing made with the last crayon.’ She looked at her box of crayons. Most were worn down to stubs, but one—a deep, indigo blue—was untouched, still sharp. It was the color of the night sky, and she had never used it because it felt too dark.

That evening, she took the crayon and the notebook down to the basement. The hand was gone, but she felt a presence, a pressure in the air. She sat on the rug, opened the notebook to the page with the diagram, and, with trembling fingers, drew the circle and the hand exactly as it was drawn, using the indigo crayon. As she finished the final stroke, the overhead light flickered. A low hum filled the room, and the air grew cold. The hand appeared at the edge of the rug, not just a shadow now, but solid, with veins and knuckles, reaching out.

Emily froze as the hand touched the crayon. It was cold, like ice, and it left a faint gray residue. Then, the hand slid toward her, and its fingers wrapped around her wrist. The grip was gentle but unyielding. A voice, not in her ears but inside her head, whispered, ‘You summoned me. Now you must draw.’ The hand guided her fingers, and the crayon moved across the floorboards, not on paper, but on the wood, leaving behind a glowing, indigo line. Emily watched, horrified, as the hand wrote a message: ‘LET ME IN.’

Emily screamed, yanking her arm free. The hand vanished, but the words remained, seared into the floor like a brand. She scrambled up the stairs, crying, and slammed the basement door. That night, she couldn’t sleep. Every creak in the house made her flinch. Around midnight, she heard a scratching sound coming from under her bed. She peeked over the edge. The indigo words were there, repeated, on the floorboards, glowing faintly. The hand was reaching out from the darkness beneath, its fingers brushing the carpet.

Emily’s parents found her in the morning huddled in a corner, shaking. They chalked it up to a nightmare, but when they went to check the basement, they found the floor smeared with crayon marks in patterns that made no sense. They cleaned it with bleach, but the stain remained. Emily never went to the basement again. When she was older, she moved out, but she never threw away that indigo crayon. It sits on her desk now, untouched, a reminder that some doors are better left closed.

Twenty years later, Emily’s father passed away. She returned to the house to sort through his belongings. She stood in the hallway, looking at the basement door, which was still dark and heavy. She felt the familiar pull, the same curiosity. She opened the door, and the stairs descended into a darkness that was absolute. She took a step down, and then another. At the bottom, the basement was empty, the rug gone, the freezer removed. But on the concrete floor, in faded indigo, was the same message, surrounded by hundreds of handprints in ashes. And in the center, a single crayon, worn down to a nub, lay on the floor.

Emily knelt and picked it up. It was warm, and it smelled faintly of ozone. She turned it over. Carved into the wax was a name: ‘Emily.’ A chill ran down her spine as she realized that the hand had known her all along. And in the farthest corner of the room, a shadow moved, taking the shape of a hand, beckoning. Emily clutched the crayon and backed away, but she knew, with a sickening certainty, that the drawing was not complete. There was still more to be written, and she had been chosen to write it.

She left the house that day, vowing never to return. But that night, in her new apartment, she found the indigo crayon on her nightstand, the name ‘Emily’ still carved into it. And on her bathroom mirror, written in the condensation, was a single word: ‘DRAW.’