The Under-Bed Draft

The first time I noticed the house at 14 Thornfield Lane, I was five, and I was convinced the windows were watching me. Not like a person, but like a patient, curious animal. I told my mother, who laughed and said it was just the reflection of the trees. But I knew better. Even then, I had a sense for things that shouldn’t be there.

When I was six, I began to see a girl in the mirror in my room. She was about my age, with dark hair that hung in front of her face, and she always stood a little too close, so I could see the faint outline of her shoulders. She never moved when I did, and when I turned around, there was no one there. I didn’t tell anyone because I sensed that this was my secret. I called her the Mirror Girl, and I would wave at her before bed, and she would wave back, a beat too late.

By the time I was eight, the Mirror Girl was gone, and the house fell silent. I thought I had outgrown my imagination, and I was almost relieved. Then, the summer I turned eleven, we moved to a smaller house on the edge of a village called Hollowhollow. The house was old, but not ancient, with creaking floorboards and a smell of damp plaster. My room was at the top of the stairs, looking out over the back garden, and it had a peculiar window that faced directly into the branches of a gnarled oak tree.

It was in that oak tree that I saw the first one. A face, old and withered, with hollow eyes and a mouth full of soil, peering through the leaves at dusk. I blinked, and it was gone. I told myself it was a trick of the light, but that night I couldn’t sleep. I kept the curtains closed, but I could feel something just beyond the glass, watching.

Shortly after, the sounds began. A low, rhythmic tapping on the floorboards beneath my bed. At first, I thought it was mice, but the tapping was too deliberate, like a finger tracing a pattern. Then, footsteps coming up the stairs, pausing outside my door, and then retreating, only to repeat every night around 2 a.m. I would lie in my bunk, the desk below me, and I could feel a pressure against the underside of my mattress, as if something was pushing up from below. I would press my hand down, and it would stop, only to start again when my hand withdrew.

One night, I decided to investigate. I slipped out of bed and knelt on the floor, lifting the duvet that hung from my bunk. In the dim light, I saw a shape underneath, not a person, but a dark smudge, like a hole in the air. I reached out, and my fingers brushed against something cold and hard, like damp wood. A whisper came from that darkness, barely audible, but I could feel it in my bones. It said, ‘Move.’

I didn’t sleep for days after that. I begged my mother to let me sleep in her room, but she dismissed my fears as night terrors. So I stayed awake, listening, watching, and the tapping grew louder. It began to form a pattern, a rhythm that I recognized as a heartbeat, but it was not my own. It was slow, heavy, as if it belonged to something immense and ancient.

Then, one afternoon, I found a draft coming from under my bed, even though the window was closed. The draft was cold, and it carried a faint, earthy smell, like freshly turned soil. I followed the draft, tracing it to the corner of my room, where a trapdoor had been concealed under the carpet. I pulled back the rug, and there it was, a wooden door with a rusted iron ring.

I opened the trapdoor, and a staircase descended into blackness, perfectly square, and older than the house itself. I felt a pull, a compulsion to go down, and I did, my bare feet on cold stone steps. The air grew colder, and the heartbeat sound grew stronger. At the bottom, there was a small room, no bigger than a closet, with dirt floor and walls of rough brick. In the center, there was a wooden chair, and on the chair, a small, tarnished music box.

I wound the music box, and it played a lullaby I had never heard before, but it felt familiar, like a memory from before I was born. As the music played, the tapping from my room became a knocking, and the knocking became a pounding, and the pounding was accompanied by a voice, a woman’s voice, singing the same lullaby. And I realized that the heartbeat I had been hearing was not coming from under the bed, but from behind the walls, from within the very foundations of the house.

I fled up the stairs, slamming the trapdoor shut, but the singing did not stop. It followed me, growing louder and louder, until it was a chorus of voices, all singing together, and I knew they were not human. I ran to the window, and I saw the face in the oak tree, and it was smiling, a wide, black grin filled with roots.

I don’t remember much after that. My mother found me in the corner of my room, screaming, my hands over my ears. The next day, we moved out, but I left a piece of myself behind, something I cannot name. Even now, years later, I can still hear that music box, and sometimes, at night, I feel that cold, hard pressure against the bottom of my bed, and I know that somewhere, a trapdoor is opening, and something is waiting for me to come home.