The Something in the Beanstalk

I was born in the damp, industrial sprawl of Burnley in 1968, a town that clung to the hills like a barnacle to a sinking ship. My parents, Vera and Clive, bought our house on the steep, cobbled street of Syke Lane in 1967, a narrow, two-up two-down with a cellar that always smelled of earth and cold. I was their only child, a fact that weighed on me like a shroud. My father, now 81, still lives there, in the same house, with the same cracked linoleum, the same gas fire that never quite warmed the front room. My mother left when I was eight, her suitcase packed with cheap perfume and resentment. I don’t blame her. I blame the house.

My first memory is not of sunshine or lullabies, but of the cellar door. It was a heavy oak slab, painted a green so dark it was almost black, and it had a brass knob that gleamed in the weak light from the hallway. I remember the day I saw the thing. I was four, maybe five. My father was at work, my mother was upstairs, presumably crying or drinking or both. I stood at the top of the cellar steps, drawn by a faint, rhythmic sound, like a heartbeat coming from the walls. I opened the door, which was never locked, and peered down. The steps were stone, worn smooth in the middle, leading into a pit of black. But I didn’t see black. I saw a face, pale and wide, with eyes that were too far apart, and a mouth that was too wide, smiling at me from the bottom. It wasn’t human, but it wasn’t a monster either. It was like something that had once been human and had been left to rot in the dark. I screamed, and my mother came running, but when she looked, there was nothing. She slapped me for lying, for crying, for making her climb down those steps.

My mother left a few years later. She didn’t take me. She said she couldn’t stand the house, couldn’t stand the whispering she heard at night, couldn’t stand the way the walls seemed to close in. I thought she was mad. But after she left, I started to hear it too. Not whispers exactly, but a low, steady murmur, like a distant conversation just below the threshold of hearing. It came from the cellar, always from the cellar. My father never seemed to hear it. He was a man of few words, and he spent his evenings in front of the television, untroubled by phantom voices. I tried to rationalize it. Old houses make noises, I told myself. Pipes, rats, drafts. But the murmur was not mechanical. It had a cadence, like a question being repeated over and over, and sometimes, I could swear I heard my name.

As I grew older, the house grew stranger. The cellar door, which had always been firmly shut, began to swing open on its own. I would close it, and an hour later, find it ajar again, a sliver of blackness inviting me to look. I never went down there again after the face. But the presence grew stronger. I would feel it watching me from the cellar, through the floorboards, through the walls. At night, I would lie in bed and listen to the murmur, and it would seem to synchronize with the beating of my heart. My father, oblivious, would snore in the next room. I started to sleep with a flashlight under my pillow, not for light, but for the small comfort of a weapon.

The summer I turned sixteen, I decided to investigate. I was tired of being afraid. I armed myself with a torch, a kitchen knife, and a crucifix my mother had left behind. I opened the cellar door, which had swung open again, and descended the stone steps for the first time in a decade. The air was cold and thick with the smell of damp and something else, something sweet and sickly, like rotting fruit. The cellar was small, with a concrete floor and a boiler in the corner. There were cobwebs everywhere, and old boxes of junk. But at the back, behind the boiler, there was a metal grate set into the floor, about a foot square. I had never noticed it before. I pried it up with my fingers, and underneath, there was a hole, dark and impossibly deep, and from that hole rose the murmur, clear and loud, like a congregation praying. I shone the torch down, and my light was swallowed by an absolute blackness that seemed to drink it. I felt a draft on my face, cold and breathing, and I heard a voice, not a murmur now, but a distinct, hoarse whisper: ‘Sssstephanie…’ It used my name. My name. I dropped the grate, scrambled up the stairs, and slammed the door. I didn’t sleep for three days.

I never told my father. What would I say? That the house is alive? But I couldn’t ignore it. Over the years, I left and came back, each visit worse than the last. The house seemed to have aged me. My hair turned grey before thirty. My health deteriorated. I became a recluse, and the only constant in my life was that hole in the cellar. I tried to block it with concrete, but the next day, the concrete would be broken, as if something had pushed through. I tried to fill it with soil, but the soil would vanish. I once threw a lit flare down there, but it came back up, still burning, as if thrown by an unseen hand.

My father, now 81, has never once acknowledged anything wrong. He says I’m imagining things, that I have a weak mind. But last week, I found him in the cellar, crouched by the grate, his head cocked as if listening. He didn’t see me. I watched him, and for the first time, I saw fear in his eyes. He spoke to the hole, his voice trembling: ‘I know you’re there. I’ve always known. And I’m sorry for what we did.’ Then he saw me, and his face went white. ‘Stephanie,’ he said, ‘I have to show you something.’ He made me come down, made me look into the hole. And in the darkness, I saw it again, the face, but now it was older, more decayed, and it was not alone. There were more of them, gray shapes, pressing up against the underside of the earth. ‘They’re waiting,’ my father said. ‘They’ve been waiting since we built the house. The land is cursed. It was their land first.’

I don’t know what he meant. But that night, the whispering was louder than ever, and it was not just in the cellar. It was in the walls, in the floor, in my bedroom. It formed words: ‘We are patient.’ ‘We are hunger.’ ‘We will be free.’ I grabbed a shovel and went into the garden, the one place I hadn’t checked. The ground was soft, too soft. I dug a foot down, and I hit something. It was a bone, not from an animal, but from a child. And then another, and another. The bones were arranged in a pattern, a spiral that kept going deeper, as if the earth itself was alive and growing something. I’ve stopped digging. I’m writing this on my phone, sitting in the front room, my father is in his armchair, staring at nothing. The cellar door is open. The murmur is rising. They know I know. And I think tonight, they’re going to come up.