The staircase was gone.
In its place was more stone and plaster wall, faced with yet another shelf bearing the weight of those same mason jars, their contents long since clouded and obscured. In a growing panic, we all spun about, out lights playing across the rest of the room, all of us assuming we must have gotten turned around and disoriented, but it took only a moment to confirm the impossible; the room was different now than it had been only moments before.
It was then we realized that other things had changed as well. In addition to our flashlights and Nick’s camera-mounted light, oil lamps hung from hooks scattered around the room, providing a dim and flickering illumination of the shelves and their contents. The pages that had previously been scattered across the small desk were instead now arranged in a neat pattern across its surface, lit by four guttering red candles, one at each corner of the table like silent sentries.
“What the hell?” Nick exclaimed in shock, and I felt my world shake for a moment, as if my brain was trying to process what was happening and was failing horribly.
I staggered and reached out to his shoulder for support, focusing on my breathing for a long moment until my pounding heart began to settle and my vision cleared.
“What… what just happened?” I said, my voice shaking and coming as a hoarse whisper.
My eyes alighted in that moment on something else that had changed in that dark cellar. One of the shelves had been swung away from the wall, exposing a roughly excavated tunnel entrance in the plaster and stone. Our lights showed us that the stygian darkness beyond looked to be a sort of natural cave, winding inward and downward into the heart of the hillside.
I looked over to Sarah, who stood now back at the table, studying the papers intently. Her face was twisted in a frown, but I didn’t think it was the sudden shift in reality that was her focus now.
“Sarah?” I asked carefully, not sure if the shock of the moment had perhaps been too much for her to accept. I couldn’t understand why she would have turned back to the desk when faced with the impossibility that stood before us now.
She answered without looking up from the pages. “The whole thing is backwards,” she said, flipping the page and continuing her study of the next. “I don’t think Abigail Greer turned to witchcraft after her father died. Listen to this:
“… I fear that my father’s loss last season was too great a burden for mother to bear. She has turned back to the old ways of her Celtic ancestry, to that black knowledge that she swore to abandon when they first wed. For fifteen years she kept that promise, bringing me and my brother into this world under God’s holy light. But I have found the entrance she has unearthed in the dark of the cellar. I have seen, to my horror, the ancient scrawling that cover every inch of this place, and the madness of the signs that she has constructed. My mind rebels and I have prayed for the Lord’s guidance, but I have heard nothing. I no longer feel His light in this place.
“I am afraid that mother’s descent into this madness and evil has shadowed my family and removed us from God’s grace. We are alone now. I have heard terrible sounds from the entrance to the pit and we have not seen mother in nearly a week. Elias has taken ill, and I fear that he may follow my father to the grave if he does not soon recover from his malaise.”
She paused and looked at me, still holding the page.
I frowned. “I thought you weren’t able to read them?”
Sarah shrugged and shook her head in confusion. “I don’t know how to explain it, but these pages are written in colonial English, not much different than what we speak now. Definitely not that gibberish we saw before.”
“Well, that’s the least of it,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. Nick had moved closer to the rough opening in the cellar wall, shining his camera light into the tunnel.
I raised my voice. “Nick? Don’t wander, yeah?”
He just spared a quick glance at me and gave a vague nod and half-hearted wave before turning back to the tunnel.
“What else does it say? Anything about spontaneous redecorating of the cellar?” I tried to force a little humor into my voice, to lighten the tone, but even before the words left my mouth, I knew they’d fallen flat.
Sarah picked up another sheet from the table. “This one must be from later. There aren’t any dates, but listen:
“I saw mother today. Elias has only grown worse. His skin is hot to the touch, and he cannot keep down broth or bread. My brother is wasting before my eyes! I ventured down to the cellar, which I had been avoiding for a week or more and called for mother in that dark and black tunnel. I pleaded with her to come help Elias and eventually she emerged.
“When first I laid eyes upon her, I barely recognized her for who she was. It seemed almost that she had gone nearly feral, so wild were her eyes. Her great fall of bright red hair, which had always been a source of pride for her and her Celtic ancestry, now rose around her head in a tangle, making her seem more beast than woman! Her dress was disheveled and torn in places, but it was the crimson stains splashed across the breast that drew my attention in that instant. I thought I would flee at that moment, but thoughts of my brother emboldened me, and I spoke to her.
“I pleaded with her to come help him, but it seemed there was barely any recognition in her eyes when she set them upon me. After a long while, she pushed past me, nearly sending me toppling to the ground, and gained the staircase to the house above, all the while murmuring in a tongue foreign to me, which I assume was that of her homeland. I ran after her, but when I reached the sitting room, where I had been attempting to nurse Elias, I found she had taken him in her arms and was returning to the cellar. I moved to follow her, but she set upon me a gaze so cold and inhuman and lacking any sort of recognition, that I froze and could not proceed. When I recovered my wits, I ran to the cellar doorway, but was met with such horrid and tortured sounds from below that I could not bring myself to descend. I have seen neither of them since.”
I looked back over my shoulder and saw Nick had taken a step inside the entrance to the tunnel. He was crouched a bit and peering into it intently, using the powerful camera light to try to dispel the gloom.
“Nick,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “Nick!” At that, he straightened as much as the low tunnel would allow and looked back at me with questioning eyes, not responding.
“Stay close to us. Don’t go wandering off,” I told him, shaking my head and turning back to Sarah.
She’d set the papers down and picked up the last one.
“It has been two days since I saw mother or Elias. I fear that she has called forth something foul and unclean from the pit in the madness that fell upon her after my father’s death. I remember some of the things that my maternal grandmother told me when we were still in Boston. She used to tell us stories about the old world and the witchery that festered there, before my father put an end to it. I remember that salt spread across a threshold is said to bar a witch’s passage and keep the blackness at bay, so I have done this at the entrance to the cellar. I am more terrified in this moment than I have ever been in my life, but I cannot abandon Elias. He is all I have left of my father now. Tonight, I will take my rosery and lamp and venture into the cellar tunnel in search of my brother. May God hear my prayers and protect me with his light. – Abigail Greer.”
“Jesus,” I said. “If that’s true-“ I stopped mid-thought, realizing that Nick was now nowhere to be seen. I ran to the mouth of the tunnel and shone my flashlight beam into it, calling out for our companion.
Sarah was at my side in an instant. “He didn’t go in there, did he?” she said, eyes wide.
I gave a quick nod and stepped into the rough-hewn tunnel, my flashlight held before me to guide our way. The air within was much colder than that in the cellar, and that stench from earlier grew more pungent and tenacious than before, rolling my stomach with each step.
There was something wrong with the air here, something beyond the drop in temperature or the foul stench that assailed our progress.
It felt bad. Spoiled.
I don’t know any other way to describe it – it was as if the air itself had turned against us, protesting our intrusion. I pulled the neck of my shirt up to cover my mouth and nose, but it didn’t help much.
The tunnel fell before us in a gentle descent that wound left and right like the tracks of a serpent. I called out to Nick a few times but received no reply in the thick darkness. Onward and downward we trailed for what felt like hundreds of feet. I thought we must be well under the hill at this point and couldn’t begin to guess how deep our travel had taken us.
It was then that we rounded another in the long series of the left-and-right meandering of the tunnel and froze in our tracks, our eyes fixing instantly on the discarded camera. It had been smashed; its pieces strewn violently across the rough floor of the cave before us.
I raised my light again and called out for Nick. Again, I was met without a response, but now I feared for my friend even more; I wasn’t sure whether he’d brought a flashlight, and with his camera now reduced to bits of plastic, metal, and glass on the bedrock floor, he’d be traveling blind in the abyssal darkness. With no idea what may lie ahead – whether it was a solid wall or sheer cliff falling into the bowels of the earth – continuing his walk would have been lunacy.
What was going on?
“Nick!” I shouted again, but this time my ears caught the hint of a reply, echoing from the distance.
Sarah looked at me and, without a word, we rushed into motion, moving as quickly as the dancing flashlights would allow in the narrow tunnel.
After a short time, we burst from the tunnel into a wide chamber and skidded to a halt. My injured ankle threatened to betray me, and I only stayed upright by sheer luck.
We had emerged from the darkness into a surreal nightmare, which even now I have trouble describing.
The chamber was wide – perhaps thirty feet across – and roughly dome-shaped. The flickering orange light from hundreds of tapers positioned about the relatively smooth floor gave a hellish glow to the room, dim enough to preclude plain sight, but cursedly bright enough to see the macabre tableau laid out before us.
A great white symbol was etched into the stone floor of the cave, looking to my untrained eyes very much like the one we’d seen in the cellar. As with the other, this appeared to be constructed of hundreds and thousands of smaller symbols and glyphs, all of which were foreign to me. Unlike the former, this one had been scratched into the stone itself with some sharp instrument.
The air in this chamber was not stale or chill, as we had experienced previously, but was instead warm and flowing, weaving in and out of the multitude of other tunnels that I realized intersected with this chamber. Despite the constant airflow, the candle flames appeared indifferent and continued their slow consumption of the crimson-colored wax.
I realize only now that it was my mind that chose to first catalogue each of these relatively mundane characteristics of the chamber in order to protect itself – a sort of safety mechanism to prevent the shock of the scene from flooding in all at once, overwhelming my sanity and leaving me a gibbering mess, curled up sobbing on the floor in a pool of my own waste.
Sarah was quicker to process everything, though, and her horrified scream drew my eyes to the unholy abomination that lay before us, snapping me back to the present jarringly.
Iron forged-link chains from a bygone age hung from the ceiling at the edges of the great circular symbol, and from them were suspended the corpses of three people, hung by their wrists, all dressed in colonial puritan garb and all looking as fresh as if they were only sleeping. My eyes darted from one to the next, disbelieving what I was seeing, and I felt my mind lose a little more of its grip at that moment. The first was an older man, clean-shaven and gray-haired. He was tall and wore a simple carved wooden cross around his neck, which I noted was bent at a grotesque angle and allowed his head to rest unnaturally low against his chest. The second was a young boy, perhaps ten years old, with pallid skin slicked with perspiration and deep sunken eyes rimmed in dark red circles. The third was a blond girl in her mid-teens, wearing a rosary around her neck.
I don’t know how long we stood there, staring at this impossible sight. These people were more than two hundred years dead, yet looked as if they might open their eyes at any moment. Then my sight fell to the great red stains that started at the ghastly and ragged incisions across their bellies and painted everything below in that nightmare hue. The blood had splashed across the outer edges of the great circular seal, obscuring some of the glyphs and runes etched there. Impossibly, it still glistened wet in the flickering candlelight.
I turned away before my stomach had the chance to rebel and spill my lunch all over the cavern floor.
“The Greers…” Sarah whispered in astonishment, taking an unconscious step forward.
“All except for one,” I croaked in a hoarse voice. “Where is Fiona, the mother?”
A moment later, I found the answer to my question. As I stepped carefully around the horrifying scene, the body of Fiona Greer came into view. The woman lay rigid on her back, arms outstretched to either side, and hands splayed wide and clawing in eternal agony at the stone floor. Her dress was slashed and torn and singed in places, exposing pale and scarred skin beneath, and her hair formed a maniacal halo around her freckled face. An intricate pattern drawn in electric blue paint adorned her chin and neck, as well as across her brow. Her face was the worst of it, however. Her eye sockets were blackened and empty, and her mouth stretched open impossibly wide in an eternal scream of unimaginable torture and suffering. The skin around her mouth was blistered raw and cracked, and her tongue and teeth were soot-black, as if she had been exposed to some great blast furnace from within.
Her feet rested in the center of a smaller circle, perhaps four feet in diameter, and similar in design to the larger one. It almost looked like she had been standing within the circle before she died, but as to its purpose or what might have happened to her, I had no clue. Positioned around the symbol’s edges were the remarkably preserved remnants of herbs and plants, arranged in careful patterns. A bright yellow flower stood out in my vision, creating an obscene mixture of beauty and horror in this nightmare chamber.
I stared in shocked silence for a long while, unable to wrest myself back to sane thought and action, until Sarah snatched at the shoulder of my jacket, pulling me away from the gruesome sight.
“Bánánach,” she hissed, jabbing her finger at a symbol on the floor just outside the smaller circle. “Stupid woman! I know what happened here,” she said, pulling me towards the cave we had entered from. “Jason, we need to leave now!”
I hesitated. “But Nick…” I said, the words feeling flat and feeble in my mouth.
She pulled my face down to meet hers, locking eyes with me. “He’s gone. We need to get out of here now or we’re going to end up like her!”
I hesitated another moment, something instinctual preventing me from leaving my friend behind in this chamber of horrors. Then, a ghostly howling, simultaneously mournful and predatory and hungry, reached us, sweeping over us from somewhere in one of the myriad of tunnels adjoining this chamber, making the decision for me.
Sarah shoved me hard in the direction of the exit with a fierce grunt and set me running, her footsteps close behind. I ran as hard as I could, leaving that chamber behind and navigating through the rocky tunnel. I can’t tell you how many times I missed a turn during our flight and slammed heavily into the jagged rockface, but by the time we finally emerged into the cellar once again, I was bleeding from a dozen cuts on my arms and face.
I collapsed hard to the dusty floor of the cellar, knocking the wind from myself in the process. Sarah stepped over me without a word and rushed to the corner of the room, where the long-since deteriorated sacks had spilled their contents over the floor. I frowned, not understanding what she was doing.
“Sarah, what-,” I started, but froze at the sound of something racing frantically through the narrow tunnel, growing closer with each breath. I could hear rocks dislodged and fall with its passing, and I wondered at what could do such a thing. The next moment, a howling scream of some otherworldly terror rattled from the shadows, reverberating in my skull and ringing my ears.
“Jason, help me!” she cried, carrying two handfuls of the yellow granules back and spreading them across the threshold of the tunnel entrance. She rushed back and brought back more, but I could only sit there, paralyzed with terror, as I stared into the depths of that black cave, from where the sounds of movement rapidly grew louder. “Jason!” she screamed again.
I looked at her and realized that there was no way she was going to complete her task in time. She’d made three trips already and the line was barely a third of the way across the entrance of the cave, that gaping maw of blackness that had claimed our friend.
I cursed, but in that moment, I saw that the cellar was once again in the state in which we first found it, including the staircase!
“Sarah! The stairs!” I shouted, scrambling to my feet.
She looked over at the stairs with astonishment and hesitated. The briefest moment of indecision crossed her eyes as she glanced down at the salt in her hands and then to the pitiful progress she’d made with the barrier. A moment later, she slung the salt aside and launched herself behind me, making for the stone stairs at a dead run.
I had just turned the corner and was taking the steps two at a time when I heard whatever pursued us finally reach the cellar. The crashing and splintering of the shelves rang out loudly in the still air, but I kept my eyes on the rectangle of light ahead of me that promised salvation. I heard her footsteps close on my heels, and for a moment, I thought the staircase seemed much longer than it had when we first descended it.
Still, I pushed harder, my breath ragged in my chest. Finally, I threw myself over the last few steps, landing hard on the warped floorboards and slamming my shoulder into the opposite wall. My head spun and my vision blurred for a moment, but then I was looking back at the open doorway, willing Sarah to hurry. She was farther behind me than I had thought, and I still couldn’t understand why it had taken us so long to climb the steps – there couldn’t have been more than twenty of them, I was sure.
I could see her silhouette racing up the stone steps towards me and I reached out to her, ready to snatch her out of the stairwell as soon as she was within reach.
But then I also saw the twisted, distorted form racing behind her, impossibly fast and impossibly close. I heard a hissing howl as it chased her, mixed somehow with the faint and distant screams of the damned, and then glowing embers of its eyes fixed upon me and I thought I could sense a cold smile of triumph on its unseen face.
“Sarah! Come on! I’ve got you!” I screamed, my voice breaking.
She was going to make it; she was so close I could almost feel her warmth on my skin. She finally reached the top of the steps and launched herself toward my outstretched hands, the huge shadow looming directly behind her. Her eyes were wide with terror and her mouth gaped open with the exertion of her flight. Sarah’s fingers brushed mine, and then a sudden darkness, blacker than coal, filled the doorway and enveloped her in an instant.
And then she was gone. The shadowed darkness faded into wisps and tendrils of sooty smoke that swirled in eddies with her passing and dissipated until none were left.
The stairwell was empty, silence once again returning to the house, save for the steady hiss of the rain outside upon the frozen ground.
I was alone.
I sat there for a long while, unfocused eyes fixed upon the empty cellar doorway. I might have been in shock, but I don’t think it was anything so clinical. My co-workers, my friends, were gone, and I had no way to explain what had happened. I didn’t dare return to the cellar, and I knew the only thing that was keeping that thing confined, the only thing that had likely saved my life, was the salt that Abigail Greer had spread across the threshold two hundred years before.
Wearily, I eventually hoisted myself to my feet and grabbed my backpack from where it lay near the open front door. Wind had blown the rain in and covered it with a freezing mist, but I barely noticed.
*
That was two months ago. I eventually made my way back to the van and called the police, telling them that I’d woken up that morning at our motel to scout a location, but both of my co-workers had disappeared sometime in the night.
It was a weak cover, but I didn’t know what else to tell them. The truth would only land me in the nuthouse, or worse, implicated in the murders of Nick and Sarah.
Bánánach. Sarah had used that word in the chamber. It was the only clue I had at first, and it wasn’t much of one, but after a few days of research through some areas of the internet I’ll never traverse again, I think I know what she meant.
She was always the smart one. I’ve never seen anyone so versed in as many obscure bits of information surrounding the paranormal as her. I also knew she’d always had an interest in the history of witchcraft and the black arts, so it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that she had pieced it all together so quickly, while I had been just barely holding onto my sanity.
She would have known.
Sarah knew that Fiona Greer had been raised in Ireland, and her mother had taught her the ways of Celtic witchcraft. She would have spent weeks researching in preparation for this location scouting. She would have known that Fiona was versed enough to ensure she was protected from the demons she was trying to summon to avenge her husband’s death, even if it had meant the grisly blood sacrifice of her own children. But it had been a long fifteen years since she had last been familiar with the ways of mysticism, and her madness had driven her to recklessness.
The yellow flowers were what stuck out in my mind. In Ireland, they would have been Colt’s Foot, but that flower didn’t exist in Massachusetts in the 1800s, so she had used the closest substitute she could find – daisies. But the tomes of witchcraft were very specific, I learned, and each component intended for its own particular purpose. In this case, Colt’s Foot was intended to protect the witch from the demon they summoned – the Bánánach. I can only surmise that, when the summoning was finished, Fiona Greer was left with nothing to protect her from the horrifying entity she had raised and had paid dearly for her mistake.
I quit my job after that and have been living off my meager and rapidly dwindling savings since then. I’ve been haunted by terrifying visions every night since that day, and rarely sleep more than a couple hours at a time anymore.
Last night, I awoke with a start, covered in sweat and wide-eyed, the phantom howl of some unremembered dream still fading in my ears. My unconscious mind had wandered back to that day and turned everything over, reliving every hellish moment. And it was then that the mental image flashed into my awareness like a freeze-frame, draining the blood from my face and sweeping over me with the cold wash of nausea at the sudden, horrifying, realization.
It was the image of the yellowed granules spread carefully across the cellar threshold; the neat, unbroken line of salt placed there by Abigail Greer as a ward against the darkness she knew her mother had summoned. It was the memory of how I had broken that barrier with the careless and ignorant scuffing of my boot before we three had started our descent to the cellar on that stormy November day.