The Yellow Tape

It started with a house I’d never seen before, a house that smelled of dust and stale decisions. My friend, Marlene, was a bundle of frayed nerves, her eyes darting between the half-packed boxes and the clock. Her husband, Roy, and their seventeen-year-old son, Brandon, were set to leave at dawn for a week in the northern woods. The only thing left undone was the cat, a fluffy Persian named Biscuit, who regarded me with the disdain of a sovereign who had just discovered a peasant in their throne room.

Marlene gave me a whirlwind tour. The living room was a graveyard of furniture in plastic shrouds, the kitchen counters lined with cans of soup and dusty spice racks. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ she said, waving a hand at the chaos. ‘We’re staging it for sale. The realtor says neutral and sparse sells faster.’ The upstairs had two rooms. The first was a child’s bedroom, frozen in time—torn posters of long-dead bands, a single bed with a thin mattress, and a closet that rattled when the wind blew. I paused, my hand resting on the doorframe, and felt a cold draft snake up my arm. ‘That’s the spare room,’ Marlene said from behind me. ‘We don’t use it much.’ She led me to the second room, which was her and Roy’s, cluttered with luggage and stacks of clothes.

I never saw the basement door, not that night. Marlene said Brandon was down there ‘working on something’ and that I shouldn’t disturb him. I thought nothing of it. Cats are weird, houses are weirder, and people are the strangest of all.

The next day, Marlene texted me a list of instructions. ‘Biscuit eats twice a day. Fresh water. Clean the litter box every other day. Oh, and don’t go in the basement. It’s a mess, and Brandon left a project down there. He’s super protective of it. Thanks again!’ I read the message twice, a prickle of unease at ‘don’t go in the basement,’ but I shrugged it off. People have their quirks.

First evening: I fed Biscuit, who sniffed the food and walked away. I sat on the couch, watching the light fade outside, and listened to the house settle. It groaned like an old ship, and I tried to convince myself it was just the wind. But there was a rhythm to it, a pulse. At 9:47 PM, I heard the faintest sound from below—a low, rhythmic scraping, like something heavy being dragged across concrete. It stopped when I stood up. I chalked it up to pipes.

Night one: I slept in the guest room, the one with the cold draft. I didn’t want to sleep in Marlene’s bed—too intimate—so I made a nest of blankets on the floor. Biscuit curled up on the mattress, purring like a motor. I had just drifted off when I was jolted awake by a crash from downstairs. My heart hammered. I tiptoed to the top of the stairs, listening. Silence. I checked the kitchen, the living room. Nothing out of place. But the basement door was ajar, a sliver of blackness behind it. I know I had closed it tight. I slammed it shut and ran back to bed, pulling the covers over my head like a child.

The days settled into a routine. I’d feed Biscuit, work from my laptop, and avoid the basement. But the house seemed to breathe with secrets. I heard the scraping again, and once, a soft, childlike giggle from behind the basement door. That made my blood run cold. I told myself it was the house settling, the wind, anything but the truth.

On the fourth day, curiosity got the better of me. Marlene had said not to go down there, but I reasoned that I was a responsible adult, and maybe I should check for leaks or something. The door was locked with a small padlock, the key hanging on a hook in the kitchen, almost hidden behind a spice jar. I hesitated, but the scraping had become almost constant, like fingernails on chalkboard. I unlocked it and descended.

The staircase was narrow, the steps concrete and gritty. The air grew colder with each step, and the smell—something like rotting meat and bleach—made me gag. At the bottom, a single bare bulb cast a sickly yellow glow over a space that was nothing like a typical basement. There were no boxes, no water heater. Instead, the walls were lined with childlike drawings, hundreds of them, taped up crookedly. They showed stick figures in a forest, a standing stone, and a small house with a red door. In the center of the room stood a colander, filled with salt, and on the floor, a pile of yellow electrical tape arranged in a circle.

At the far end of the room, in the corner, I saw a hole in the concrete floor, roughly two feet wide, rimmed with black soil. And from that hole came the scraping—soft, deliberate, like something carving. I took a step closer, and a voice, thin and reedy, whispered, ‘Did you bring the tape?’ I spun around, but no one was there. The drawings seemed to flutter, and Biscuit was suddenly at my feet, staring at the hole, her tail puffed.

I ran. I didn’t care if I was being silly. I grabbed my things, locked the padlock, and drove to a motel, leaving a voicemail for Marlene that I’d had a family emergency. I couldn’t stop thinking about that hole, that voice, the yellow tape. I called my therapist, who told me I was likely experiencing stress-induced hallucinations. But I know what I heard.

I never went back to that house. Marlene and her family moved out two weeks later, and I never told them what I saw. But sometimes, late at night, I hear that scraping sound under my own floor, and I remember the words of the voice: ‘Did you bring the tape?’ I always whisper back, ‘No,’ and pray that it stays in the ground.