The Salt Mimic

The four of us sat in the basement den, the only light a flickering candle on the coffee table. I’d drawn a circle of salt around the room, a habit from my grandmother, though Karen said it was more for our peace of mind than for Cade. He came and went as he pleased, she said, and the salt wouldn’t stop him. But it made me feel better, like a child hiding under a blanket from the dark.

My husband, Marcus, was on the love seat, directly facing the open door to the old coal chute that we’d converted into a storage closet. We’d never used it, actually, because the door always stuck, but tonight it was ajar, just a crack, and the darkness beyond seemed thicker than the rest of the basement. Our daughter, Lena, sat cross-legged on the floor, her eyes closed, her breathing slow. My older daughter, Tessa, was beside me on the couch, scrolling through her phone, her skepticism a shield against the chill that crept up my spine.

We were trying to reach Cade, Lena’s twin, who had passed when they were six. Lena had always been the sensitive one, seeing things the rest of us couldn’t. Marcus had his moments, too, but he never talked about them. I was the anchor, the one who kept the family from drifting into the supernatural abyss. Tessa was the skeptic, our grounding force, but even she couldn’t deny the way the air in the room changed when Lena began to hum.

The humming was low, a single note, and the candle flame leaned toward the coal chute door. A draft, I told myself. But the door swung open, slowly, with a creak that sounded almost like a sigh. Marcus tensed, his eyes fixed on the opening. I saw it then, a small shape in the shadows, the size of a child, but hunched and wrong. It moved with a stuttering gait, as if it were a marionette with tangled strings.

‘Lena,’ I whispered, but she was in a trance. The shape stepped into the candlelight, and I choked back a gasp. It wore a mask, a crude thing made of paper mache, painted to look like a smiling face, but the smile was too wide, the eyes just holes. It walked on all fours, its limbs at unnatural angles, and it made a sound like wet paper tearing.

‘Cade?’ Marcus’s voice cracked. The thing tilted its head, and the mask slipped, revealing a glimpse of something that wasn’t skin but a pale, waxy substance, like a candle melted over a skull. It scuttled backwards into the coal chute, and the door slammed shut, so hard that a cloud of dust puffed from the frame.

Lena snapped out of her trance, gasping. ‘That wasn’t Cade,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘That was something else. It was wearing his face, like a mimic.’ I looked at the salt circle, and in the dust around the coal chute door, I saw a trail of tiny footprints, bare and wet, leading from the door to the center of the circle, where it stopped at the edge of the salt. The salt was blackened there, as if something had burned it.

That night, we tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. At 3:00 AM, the house was silent, but I heard a sound from the basement. It was the sound of paper rubbing against wood, a dry scraping. I woke Marcus, and we crept downstairs, flashlights in hand. The coal chute door was open again, and the air was cold, carrying the smell of wet earth and something else, something like vinegar.

We saw it again, but this time it was wearing Cade’s face, a perfect mimicry of the boy we’d lost. It was crying, its cheeks wet with tears that left streaks in the waxy substance. ‘Please,’ it said, its voice high and thin, ‘let me in. I’m cold.’ But Lena, who had followed us, screamed, ‘Don’t believe it! It’s made of salt and lies!’ She threw a handful of salt at the thing, and it shrieked, the mask dissolving to reveal a hollow space where a face should be, a swirling vortex of dust and shadow.

We slammed the door and nailed it shut, but I know it’s still there. Sometimes, at night, I hear it scraping at the door, trying to get out, or maybe trying to get in. It learns, you see. It watched Cade, and now it watches us. And every time I see a puddle of water on the floor, or a patch of damp on the wall, I think of it, waiting in the salt, waiting for a gap in our defenses. It wants to wear our faces, too.