It started in the fuse box.
I woke up to my mother frantically screaming up the stairs, I thought to myself, what is it now? As I went down, I already saw a small amount of smoke flowing out of the fuse box. The thing was located in a small cupboard in front of the stairs, right next to our front door. My father had fashioned it himself so that he’d have a place to put all the electrical stuff for our home, like phone cables, a router and ofcourse fuses.
As I got close, I immediately recoiled from the godawful stench of burnt plastic and a hint of rotten egg. I staggered backwards into the hallway and got my phone to call 112, our version of 911 here in Europe. As the robotic assistant was rattling our adress back to us, the smoke started coming out like a tidal wave and I heard a popping sound, like light bulbs exploding and fire bursting out of the plastic casing.
Half an hour later the firemen had arrived and were hosing the place down. As soon as the fire broke out I had rushed my mother and our cat out of the house, before quickly jumping back in through the back door to grab her medicine. That’s when I caught something from the corner of my eye. Just for a second I looked from our kitchen, through the glass door, into the living room bordering the hall. Smoke was pouring out from the seams between the wall an the ceiling. For that split second that I looked, I saw what six, shiny ebony cresent moons pushing their way through the slit.
People were gathering in our street, filming and reacting in awe to our home burning. Only when the cops shoo’ed them away, could the firetruck reach our home. When the flames and the smoke finally subsided, the salvage team went in to check the damage and safety of the building. They swept the place for gasses and loose ceilings, and told us nothing could really be done before the insurance company sent someone over, so we should maneuver around the debris to get some clothes to wash for two days. Luckily a neighbor took us in whilst we waited endlessly through queues and reconnections with the insurance company.
“Fuck”: My mother exclaimed. Before she noticed the smoke, she had been refilling her usual pill box and didn’t get to her epilepsy medicine yet. It was still in the basement. Without it, she could be on the floor within hours. I grabbed a flashlight and sprinted down to our house, since it had already gotten dark outside. As I opened the back door, a noxious mix of smoke, plastic and again rotten eggs poured out. I slowly scanned the ceiling for danger as I paced through the remnants of our living room. I aproached the hall and saw the black, charred wall. Wires that had hastily been cut off and insulated were dangling out of the wall and there was a gaping hole beneath, through which the basement was visible. I opened the basement door and the smells intensified tenfold. The salvage crew had listed all the rooms they checked for dangerous gasses, but I didn’t recall them mentioning a basement.
I pulled my shirt up to my nose and figured they had mistaken the door for a closet. After I went down the steps, my flashlight had started getting hotter. The basement was located right beneath the electrical cupboard and was completely covered in a black layer of dust, ash and molten rubber. I grabbed the pill jar, which was miraculously undamaged, appart from being filthy.
As I turned around, something odd caught my eye. In the upper corner that had been exactly beneath the fuses, where there should have been the hole up, was a black nothingness where the hall should have been. In the middle, a small ebony colored Cresent moon appeared to float. I got closer an noticed a small draft comming from it. I finally placed the egg smell, it had to be Sulphur. I remembered it smelling like rotten eggs from third grade chemistry. I blinked and realized the shiny, sharp moon had become, two?
Another one and another one appeared, until there were about six of them and they appeared to be growing. They went from the size of needle tops to nails. As they grew, I also started hearing the noise of nails, scratching on concrete. At that point the bulb in the flashlight I had been holding shattered, and the only thing illuminating the basement was a dim moonlight from a small barred window. Only when the scratching noise turned into a nails draging across a concrete wall noise, I realized nothing was growing. “It” was just getting closer, and I froze.
The claws reached where the basement wall should have been and moved like something was pulling itself out. The flashlight had burst into a small fire and lit some nearby boxes. The fire showed me that the claws were connected to a mess of blackened wires, best described as a complete living, charred and burned set of human blood vessels, with two black, milky orbs where the eyes should have been.
I unfroze and jolted up the basement stairs. When I reached the top, a screech like crackling electricity came from the hole in the floor next to me. All at once every light bulb in the house jumped to life and exploded into a rain of glass. I made a break for the back door as I heard wires slithering behind me, across the ceiling. I jumped over our fence outside and ran over to my neighbors house. I got them to remove a couple of small pieces of glass from my back and told them a bulb had burst from some “rogue electricity”. The salvage crew had booked me and my mother a hotel and I wanted to get there asap so I’d visit the doctor tomorrow.
At the hotel I was planning on writing this off as a hallucination induced by unchecked gasses and sleeping it off. But something about the impossibly explainable sulphuric smell and black nothingness hole where the hallway should have been visible are keeping me up. I tried turning the lights off to go to sleep, but now they won’t turn back on. And since I’ve started hearing a slithering, scratching noise in the corridor outside my room and my phone is getting incredibly hot, I’ve decided to write it down here.
Just in case..