Footsteps creak overhead. I stifle ragged gasps.
I saw two things before creeping down the basement stairs:
Ski mask
Knife
My phone – upstairs, useless.
From the ceiling a pipe drips
Drips
Dull moonglow leaks through the defective egress window, illuminating a scrap of paper.
Words appear, etched in water.
Pillowcase
Stairs
My eyes dart to the laundry bins.
The basement door opens.
A glinting knife drowns the horror of phantom words.
I toss a pillowcase onto the stairs, then scuttle back to the shadows.
Footsteps, easing closer. Heavy breathing, anticipating.
A swish of slipping fabric -
A shriek -
Thump
Crack
Silence.
By the stairs, a dark puddle seeps across the floor.
Water, like a fleeting ink, soaks into the paper.
You’re welcome.
Thanks for stopping by this mini-story! I wrote it for a competition in which I was assigned “ghost story” as a genre, but the inspiration came straight from my childhood and our house’s incredibly creepy basement.
We lived in a 100+ year old home with an unfinished basement in which one of the previous owners thought it would be a great idea to install a wine cellar. While that sounds pretty fancy, it was actually just a rocky hole with a deadbolted door that sealed it off from the rest of the house (Say creepy murder hole ten times fast). My siblings and I typically were enthusiastic about adventure and exploration, but we all just kind of…pretended the dark, musty wine cellar hole didn’t exist. For our entire childhood.
It wasn’t until we were adults and my parents sold the house that my dad revealed that the previous owner had committed suicide in the basement (horribly tragic, but also made sense of our reticence to go down there).
It was this eerie, disturbing basement that I saw in my mind’s eye as I was writing this story, along with the long flight of cement steps that - I know from experience - really hurt when you fall down them.
Okay, admittedly, my only injuries were skinned knees and a broken toe, but still.
Thank you for reading!
Things I’ve enjoyed reading:
On Substack: Claire White at the End of the World by EJ Trask
This was a fantastic beginning to an eerie and heartbreakingly relatable sci-fi apocalypse story. I still have some catching up to do with its recent episodes, but I’m very invested in what I’ve read so far!
Off Substack: Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri
This memoir, written in the voice of the author as a 12-year-old refugee, uses a format inspired by Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights to tell the story of Khosrou, who fled Iran with his mother and sister in the 1980s. I laughed, teared up, and was surprised by the number of times the author talked about poop (he’s writing as his 12-year-old self, after all). Highly recommend!