The mind, like the world, is a house in which our reality lives, and even though the foundation may be sound, there is a crawlspace, between the ground and the floor, often overlooked or forgotten, in which dwell things undreamt of.
-Samuel Bjorn, Auxerre University
#
In the moments just before sleep, a noise could be almost anything, ice-cubes dropping from the automatic ice maker, the wind brushing branches against the exterior, or the creaking of wood as the house settled. This was different though. Whatever it was woke Michael as if it carried some tell-tale sign of an intruder, a quality of non-randomness, a certain sense of deliberateness or intent. He sat there in the dark, his wife curled at his side, listening, and half wondering if it was only a dream. Then he heard it again.
The sound was a sort of scuffling and flopping, like a wet dog shaking and shuffling its feet with excitement. It lasted only a moment, and then silence. He couldn’t tell where it had come from at first. “Deidre,” he whispered, gently touching his wife’s side. “Wake up,” he said, urgency in his hushed voice.
He could see the outlines of her face in the almost complete darkness, illuminated as if by some trace of moonlight that penetrated the closed blinds of their bedroom. The lids of her eyes broke open slightly, but for the darkness he could not see the eyes within, just black pools as if her sockets were empty. Her voice was creaky with sleep. “What is it?”
“I heard something.”
“What?” she said, sleep beginning to leave her voice.
“Listen.” There was silence. Then for a brief moment Michael heard it again, a scuffling sound somewhere in the far reaches of the darkened house. “Did you hear that?”
“I don’t know.” Deidre was fully awake now. “What do you think it is?”
“It sounds like somebody’s in the house.” Deidre sat up and the light revealed her troubled eyes. “I’m sure that’s not it though,” Michael reassured her. “I’ll go check it out.” Michael started to slide out of bed only to be stayed by Deidre’s hand grabbing his wrist.
“Honey, be careful. I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to you.”
“I’ll be okay. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Michael treaded softly down the hallway consciously trying to stay calm in the face of a creeping fear. His heart pounded in the darkness. When he reached the kitchen he flipped the switch and the whole room was flooded with light. It hurt his eyes for a moment, but everything looked normal. It was probably nothing. They had only been there a few weeks after all, and they were still getting used to the sounds of the old house.
Despite his relief, as a matter of course Michael went about checking every room in the house. He turned the light on, looked around, turned the light off and moved on. After checking the front and back door he headed back to the bedroom. As he crossed the living room though, he heard the noise again, this time closer. It was a loud scuffling flopping sound. So suddenly did it break the silence that he shook with fright, and frantically looked around the room for the source of the strange sound.
There was nothing out of place though, no stirring of movement, no sign of a person. The sound continued intermittently. There was something about it that unnerved him. The sound seemed almost repulsive, disgusting. He peered out the window, into the fireplace, and looked everywhere. He listened intently, trying to figure out where the damned thing was coming from. And then standing there it dawned on him as he slowly looked down at the hardwood floor beneath his feet. It was coming from underneath the house. There was something down there in the crawlspace.
Their house sat on a foundation, and between the ground and the sub-floor was what they call a crawlspace. The first time Michael peered into it he immediately understood why. There was about three feet between the bare ground and the underside of the floor. It was just a dirty hole really, a cramped expanse that spread across the entire house, riddled with obstacles, infested with cobwebs, dust, and darkness. Through it ran a maze of water pipes and heating ducts. One look was enough for Michael to know he didn’t ever want to have anything to do with a crawlspace. Being mildly claustrophobic, a tight space like that was bad enough, but add to it dirt, old nails, scraps of fiberglass insulation, as well as spiders and rodents and anything they might have left behind, and there was no way Michael would ever go in there. He left all that to the house inspector, who apparently crawled around down there before giving it the okay.
As he stood in his living room, listening to the strange noises that were coming up through the floor, Michael wondered if the inspector could have missed something. It didn’t sound like anything that could be missed though. An animal must have gotten in there. After a few moments the awful noise died down again. Michael sighed, told himself it must be an animal and headed back to the bedroom to tell Deidre. Tomorrow he would have to call somebody out to take a look. He kept trying to picture what kind of animal it could be. It was definitely bigger than a rat. Maybe a raccoon he thought, but nothing seemed to make sense, nothing seemed to fit with those terrible sounds. He fell into a restless fitful sleep in which he tried to figure it out, but from the darkness of his unconscious, all that came was some indescribable presence, as terrible and formless as the darkness itself.
#
The following day, while Deidre was off to her classes at law school, Michael called Pest Arrest and made arrangements for somebody to come out and take a look under the house. Michael worked out of a home office, writing code for a local software company. One of the advantages to working at home was that it was easy to take care of these things, and Pest Arrest actually had a guy there that afternoon.
Michael stood by in the garage where there was access to the crawlspace underneath the stairs that went up to his office above. The guy from Pest Arrest suited up in a pair of coveralls, a face mask and safety glasses. He armed himself with a big flashlight.
In the back of his mind Michael could hear that noise he heard last night. He looked at the flashlight. “Aren’t you going to take a trap or something?”
“I’m just going to take a look first. You said it sounded like a raccoon.”
“I don’t know. It sounded like something was down there. Maybe some kind of animal, I don’t know.”
The guy switched on his flashlight. “I’ll check it out,” he said. Then he stepped into the crawlspace, bent down onto all fours, bellied into the dirt and disappeared head first into the darkness.
Michael waited. He peered into the hole once but he couldn’t see anything but a patch of dirt, and some distant random flickers of the man’s flashlight. He could hear him crawling further and further away. After a few minutes, he called into the hole, “How’s it going down there?” There was no reply. He called louder. “Do you see anything?”
“I still have to check the back,” a voice called back from a distance that seemed too far to be still under his house. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
Michael waited for what seemed like a long time. Suddenly the man’s head popped up from the hole to the crawlspace. “I found kitty,” he said. Then, as if to explain, he lifted his hand and tossed the desiccated carcass of a cat onto the garage floor. It hit the floor with a sickening brittle thud and slid a little on the concrete. It was barely recognizable as a cat at first. All of its fur was gone. The skin was black and shriveled up around its bones like dried leather. The body was intact, laying on its side in the position it must have died in, paws curled, head back, mouth open. It had the appearance of an unraveled mummy, the picture of a drawn out, perpetual moment of death. “Sorry,” the guy said, as if suddenly realizing it might be considered rude to toss dead animals around somebody else’s garage. “I thought you probably wouldn’t want that left under there though.”
“Of course,” Michael said.
“That cat’s been dead for a long time.”
Michael didn’t say anything for a moment; he just stared at the mummified cat. “He probably crawled in there to die,” he said, still lost in his thought. “Cat’s do that. They know when they’re going to die and they go away someplace to be by themselves.” There was a strange compassion in Michael’s voice, a sadness that followed his train of thought. The cat’s shriveled face bared its bone white fangs at him. Its empty sockets seemed to look at him.
“I didn’t find any recent signs of an animal,” the guy said as he marked up a form on his clipboard.
#
It was late that night when Michael finally had a chance to tell Deidre about the exterminator. “All they found was a dead cat.”
“It was a cat?”
“No this cat had been dead for years.”
Deidre thought for a moment. “Well that’s good.”
“What is?”
“It was probably just the pipes or something.”
“It wasn’t the pipes. There was something down there.”
“Well whatever it was it’s gone now, so you can forget about it.”
But Michael couldn’t forget about it. In fact it was all he could think about. He lay awake most of that night, listening, for every bump and sound, his ear trained downward for any noise, and now and again he thought he heard it, fainter than the night before, somewhere beneath the floor of the house. He woke Deidre up once or twice, but she couldn’t hear it. She just mumbled for him to go back to sleep.
The following day Michael didn’t touch his work. Instead, he wandered about the house, searching every place, listening to every wall and floor. He went around the outside of the house, shining a light into the darkness behind every screened vent in the crawlspace, seeing nothing. For hours he searched online, looking for information on every possible pest or animal that could get into a crawlspace. He even looked into plumbing and structural problems, but he found nothing useful.
Finally, he took his flashlight and went into the garage. He removed the boards that covered the hole under the stairs and for a long time he stood there, flashlight hanging uselessly at his side, and stared into the blackness of the hole. After a while he gathered his courage, turned on the flashlight, and bent down to look inside. From there he peered all around, as far as his light would show him. He didn’t know what he expected, but he was surprised to see nothing, just the same dirt and darkness that was there yesterday.
He said nothing to Deidre that night, but the thing in the crawlspace was ever on his mind, growing in his awareness, tickling the drum of his ear, consuming more and more of his thoughts. In the following weeks he fell further and further behind in his work. He called out Guardian Pest Control, and then Kill ‘em Dead, but they found nothing.
Soon Michael was waking Deidre up several times a night. “I can’t sleep,” he would say. “I can hear it,” he would say, sometimes shaking her violently. “Listen, listen,” with urgency, but she could never hear it. His eyes went bloodshot. The sheets grew salty from his sweat. “It’s there,” he would whisper. “There’s something down there.”
Deidre became increasingly irritated at these disruptions in her sleep, especially when she was up late working on assignments and leaving for school early. When she wasn’t irritated she was concerned. Michael was getting almost no sleep at all, and he too became more and more irritable. They began to fight over sleep, over dinner, over Michael’s work, over almost anything, especially over the crawlspace.
When they made up afterwards, they talked about how much stress they were under, about how things would be better in the summer. But the thing in the crawlspace never let Michael forget. In fact, he began to hear it more frequently. Sometimes as Deidre slept he would slip from her arms and wander the house, listening, following its movement. He heard it beneath the living room first, then the kitchen, then the spare room, then his office, and finally the bedroom too, sometimes right beneath their bed. Soon he began to notice a smell also. Wherever it was, a pungent, nauseating smell seeped up through the floor.
When Deidre awoke one night, she found Michael in the living room crawling around with his ear to floor. She watched him for a moment, not knowing whether to be confused, sad, or angry, but it was three in the morning, she had to be up at six, and she had just about had it. She just shook her head. “Did you not want to move here? Is that it?”
Michael looked up, startled, as if he hadn’t even realized she was there. “What are you talking about?”
“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to mess things up for me. Every time I have a lot of work to do something comes up, some problem with the house.”
Michael got up off the floor. “It’s not the house,” he said as if desperately trying to make her understand. “It’s the crawlspace. There’s something in there. I can feel it.”
“What Michael? What’s in there for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t know.”
“Michael, I’m scared. I feel like this is really a problem.”
“I know. I fear it’s something horrible.”
“No Michael. The problem isn’t the crawlspace. It’s your obsession with it. Listen, maybe you should see somebody.”
Michael backed away from her. “You want me to forget. You would like that wouldn’t you, if I forgot all about it?”
“Yes,” Deidre said flatly. “I would.”
Then Michael looked at her as if he were seeing something he had never seen before, as if some deep realization dawned upon his addled brain. “It’s you. Somehow it’s gotten to you,” he said.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but I can’t take this any more. I love you Michael but I can’t take this. This weekend I’m going to that conference, and when I get back you’re either going to stop this nonsense or you’re going to see a therapist.”
#
Michael found himself standing beside the bed in the darkness. It was as if he had awoken there from some dreamless sleep from which he had no memory. He had no idea how long he had stood there or what he was doing. Had he been sleepwalking? Then he remembered. He had been listening, listening to the thing in the crawlspace. With his ear pressed against the floorboards he could hear it, mere inches away, as if pressed against the opposite side of a pane of glass. There had been something more than the horrible scuffling, something more than the putrid stench that seeped up between the cracks. As those things faded into the background of his mind, there was a voice, a whisper in the darkness. Even now it seemed to whisper from the black recesses of his memory.
When had he first heard this whisper? Was it just this night, or was it some nights or weeks ago? He couldn’t remember. His gaze fell upon Deidre, sleeping soundly in the bed, her peaceful face illuminated by a pale ambient light of indeterminate origin. There was such a perfect grace in her repose that looking upon her Michael felt overwhelmed with love. There was almost a palpable sense in his heart, a sort of pulling ache, an unquenchable longing to draw ever close to her, to bask in the beauty of her presence. He felt on the verge of epiphany, as if rising above the confusing morass that was his mind of late, into the midst of at least a moment of utter clarity.
His gaze fell down then, and he followed it, all the way down to his right hand, which hung at his side at the end of a limp arm, loosely grasping the handle of a .38 caliber revolver. Michael had never owned a gun, and this one felt a million miles away, completely disconnected from his body. Yet there it was in his right hand. Slowly, as if the neurons of his brain were trying to play catch-up, he began to feel the solid, metallic, horrible weight of this strange object. Then, as if from the fog of insignificant memories he vaguely recalled going into Sport One and purchasing the gun some two weeks ago. How could he have forgotten such a thing? He could only assume that he had bought the gun to protect them from whatever was in the crawlspace, but what was he doing standing here with it?
As Michael looked from the gun to his sleeping wife, he imagined something much more horrible. It’s not her, he realized then. It hadn’t gotten to Deidre at all. It’s me, he thought, my God, it’s me. And with this realization came another kind of clarity in which Michael knew exactly what he had to do. Whatever happened, he could never let Deidre come to harm. She was leaving for the weekend Friday. It was now 3:30am on Thursday. The first thing he had to do was stay awake.
Michael didn’t sleep at all, and for two days he tried to show Deidre that things had taken a turn for the better. He didn’t talk about the crawlspace, or the noises he still heard down there in the night. In the dark while she slept he lay awake with cotton stuffed in his ears to ward off any voices beneath him. Even as the bags beneath his eyes grew and his face became gaunt and his body hollow, he told Deidre that he was feeling better. “I think everything’s going to be fine,” he said. “I’ll catch-up on some work this weekend.”
Perhaps she hadn’t noticed how tired he had begun to look, or perhaps she was just happy to hear that he was doing better, or relieved not to hear about the crawlspace. When she left she touched Michael’s face, her eyes filled with a loving warmth. “Get some rest Michael,” was all she said.
“I love you,” Michael said.
“I love you too,” Deidre said, kissed him, and then got out of the car. She looked back once as she passed through the doors of the airport terminal. Her smile and her brief wave were full of hope.
#
The thing in the crawlspace didn’t seem to awake before 10pm. Michael waited. He sat at the dining room table, drank coffee, rubbed his eyes and waited. More than once he was startled by some twitching movement from the corner of his eye. He attributed this to lack of sleep. His thoughts were lucid, but sluggish, as if they had joined some slow pantomime parade. The gun and a flashlight were on the table in front of him. He planned to take care of this thing once and for all.
As the hour grew late a familiar haunting sound returned beneath his feet. He could not say at what moment it began that night; only that around the hour of eleven it was there, scuffling in the dirt below with some sort of monstrous appendages that would occasionally flop and thud against the underside of the subfloor. For Michael, who had already resolved upon his actions, there was nothing to be done but to carry out his plan before it was too late, before something stopped him from doing so, before he fell asleep, before that thing took control of him forever.
He noted where the sound of the thing was loudest, then took the gun and flashlight and went into the garage. His breath became rapid and heavy as he cast aside the boards that covered the opening to the crawlspace. With his right hand he pointed the gun down into the hole, and with his left he aimed the flashlight. A small patch of featureless dirt was illuminated in the beam, beyond whose radiance lay utter darkness. He leaned in toward the hole and tentatively craned his head down for a better look around. The crawlspace was a cave-like fissure between ground and house. From the entrance he couldn’t see very far into the darkness, but what he did see was only dry dirt and floorboard as far as his light would allow. He took a deep breath to suppress the claustrophobic panic that began to tighten his chest.
With some effort, Michael lowered himself through the hole in the floorboards, crouched, bent, and crawled into the narrow dark space. The gun felt solid in his hand, more solid than anything, even the ground beneath him. He gripped it tightly, aimed the barrel down the shaft of light that his flashlight cut in the darkness. It was an old house, and here you could see the tangle of water and gas lines, air ducts, and wires that had been added on and cobbled together over the years. Parts of the floor were covered with dilapidated plastic, but most of it was bare dry dirt. Pipes angled and crisscrossed the space just below the joists that held up the floor. All between those joists hung an endless array of cobwebs like some lacy three dimensional net.
Despite the preponderance of webs, however, Michael saw not a single spider, nor any other living thing, so that the space itself looked somehow abandoned, desert-like and accursed. Somewhere off to his left at the back of the house was the dining room where he heard the thing loudest. His light, shaking now in his trembling hand, illuminated nothing now but greater darkness. There was an almost physical pain that arose from the thought of going further into that hole, and an unnatural, terrifying fear at what he might discover there. After a few moments, however, Michael gritted his teeth and began to crawl.
Soon the feeble light that had drifted in through the entrance began to dwindle and he found himself in the midst of a darkness greater than any he had ever known. It was a long journey across the crawlspace, seemingly longer than possible. With every foot he pointed the gun around him, shining the shaking light in every direction. Unsettled dust clouded the air, his eyes, his mouth, and his lungs. He carefully bellied under pipes and air ducts when necessary, edging ever further into the depths of the crawlspace, but he did not hear or smell or see the thing that had finally driven him to this place.
As he reached the back of the house and all was still silent he almost thought that it was over, that it had been in his head, and that everything was going to be okay. For a moment he could imagine making the return journey and emerging into the light a whole person. It only lasted a moment though, for just as these thoughts came to him, a putrid smell began to invade his nostrils. He heard a loud scuffling behind him, and a flopping as if a multitude of inhuman limbs were whipping to and fro against the ground below and the boards above. Michael froze. His eyes grew wide with an unearthly fear, in which he forgot everything, the light, the gun, his entire purpose. Then, unaware of even controlling his own muscles, feeling almost as if it were against his will, he turned and lifted his light, feeling the full doom of destiny upon him, and at last, in the darkness he saw it: a horror beyond his imagination.
#
Michael Hastings was found dead in the crawlspace beneath his house. His eyes had been eaten out by an unidentified animal, so that only empty sockets stared out from a face twisted and frozen in a silenced scream of terror. The flashlight by his left hand was still switched on, but the battery had run out. By his right hand was a .38 caliber revolver from which no shots had ever been fired. An autopsy revealed the cause of death as cardiac arrest.
Just why he had crawled under the house with a gun, or what had caused a healthy man to suddenly die, no expert or authority could fully explain. Only Deidre knew what had really happened, and it haunted her day and night. She dropped out of law school, sold the house and moved back home to live with her parents. And although she tried desperately to put her life back together, she could never forget. She could never stop thinking about the thing in the crawlspace.
_____
Copyright (c) 2009 Matthew Lowes
First Published in S&M Horror, June 2009
