I still remember catching the faintest traces of an off-smell when we first stepped foot in the new house. It wasn’t particularly of note at the time, mostly blending into the base notes of ancient wood, dry, chipped paint, and a general “old house” aroma. And the scent wasn’t just for show either, as the house had been built in the early 1900’s, its completion arising just a couple of years before America was struck in the backhand by the Great Depression.
Those little history tidbits were the main things on my mind as Sharon and I looked over the living space from the open front door on that first day at the house in May. Yet, I still took note of the off-smell, packing the memory away for a later date, even if for the briefest of moments. It would be a long time still before I would recall that first instance, that half second where I felt something was off, felt unease. It would be longer still before I would come to know the origin of the scent and pray to God every night thereafter that I could erase it from my mind, along with the memories it conjures. But it’s a hard miracle to truly erase the smell of death.
Our new home used to be a farmhouse, set up in one of West Virginia’s rural valleys straddling the edge of the Appalachians. I’d received a new job opportunity with a much higher pay rate, and in addition, it would be a remote position allowing me to work from anywhere I wanted. Of course, it ended up being where Sharon wanted, which was up east where her family was situated. That didn’t bother me, I can’t stand my family so the further away from them the better. All that being said, the main reason for taking the job wasn’t the freedom I’d gain, or the scenic views, but rather was primarily due to us being due. Our first child was well on the way, and we found out only a couple of weeks before the job offer made its way to me.
Seemed a smart decision to get a pay raise and be able to pick whatever environment I wanted to raise a kid in. What kid wouldn’t want to grow up on a farm? Granted, this place wasn’t really a farm, not anymore. A lot of the farmland had been sectioned off and sold as separate properties since the plot’s heyday, leaving a space that was more of a glorified backyard than anything. But I still had to admit that it was pretty cool to be right on the edge of the valley, planted at the base of one of the larger peaks surrounding the nearby town, Dreary. The locals called it Mount Echo, but most maps don’t name it, and the place has apparently had its share of folklore attributed it, though I’m not much one for reading folklore. Much less believing in it.
We settled in pretty fast, Sharon, Steve, and I, and it didn’t even take too long to acclimate to the altitude. Steve, our orange tabby, threw up once or twice in the first couple days, but he has a tendency to overeat, so it could’ve just been that. Having moved in towards the beginning of summer, the weather was pretty much all you could ask for, and nothing like the humid southwestern heat I was accustomed to. It was due in part to the warmer weather that it would be some time before I’d start to notice the stranger things about the house again, that my memory of the off-smell would arise, and I would be made uneasy again.
Sharon was due in January and was showing strong by mid fall. It had started to get cold outside, especially at night, and like the summer’s mild temperatures, this chill was not what I was accustomed to. The last thing I wanted was for my wife and unborn child to freeze to death, but as it turned out, the home didn’t have the most functional modern heating system. I would have to go into town and purchase firewood, as the primary heater source in the one-story home was the fireplace situated in the main living room. It was an odd fireplace, which didn’t occur to me in full until I stood before it, an armful of oak in my grasp.
Firstly, the fireplace wasn’t against a wall, but rather jutted out from the center of the floor. It was like a brick-and-mortar support column in the middle of the room, that just so happened to have a stove at the bottom. In fact, the chamber was odd enough in and of itself. For one, it was much smaller than most fireplaces I’d seen, especially for the time period it was built. But for two, it was generally crude in make, the more so when compared to the craftsmanship of the rest of the house. Not to say that the place was a mansion, or to say that either the fireplace or the house were inherently terrible looking when accounting for their age. It was more that they just felt different, incompatible, and if some other home had lost a fire-pit and misplaced it in this one.
Not that this would stop me from burning the oak logs, the faintest beginnings of the weird tingling feeling of unease creeping in as I lowered myself towards it. That was another thing, the lowering. The fireplace was rather small, and close to the ground, requiring me to lean over in order to open the door to the chamber. Doing so resulted in a metallic creak which I couldn’t be sure if I should attribute to my back or the chamber door. That thought subsided quickly as I froze.
The off-smell shot through my nose clear as day, clearer than on that first day when the other scents masked it so effectively. It was like I’d opened the floodgates, and I came to the quick realization that it was not a pleasant smell. I dropped one of the logs trying to reach up and cover part of my nose with a mitten wrapped hand. The odor had taken me by surprise, and I couldn’t place what it was. It didn’t smell like any wood or ash I’d ever seen burned. Sitting the oak pile off to the side, I leaned forwards to the open door.
Although it was a small space, I could just barely fit part of my head inside the chamber. The smell was the strongest I’d ever noticed it in here. It was then that I noticed a much more bizarre oddity of the fireplace. It wasn’t on the ground. The base of the chamber wasn’t concrete or steel or iron, but rather was some sort of shaft. It was covered by a metal grate with holes big enough to stick a finger through, but sturdy enough to hold a pile of logs. The chimney in our house went down, down into darkness. My instinct would have been that it was some sort of tray or disposal for the ashes from the fire, but this was far too deep for that to make sense.
Reaching into the pile, I snapped off a wood chip, dropping it down through one of the holes in the grate. After a moment in the void, I heard it hit the bottom. The shaft had to be almost fifteen feet down.
skuuuurr-RUUUKT!
I jerked back at the much louder sound coming from below, smacking the back of my head on the edge of the chamber as I stumbled back onto the ground next to my firewood. I just laid there for a moment, allowing my head to spin. Maybe there was an old basement down there or something. Maybe a squirrel had fallen down there or something. Maybe… maybe I didn’t want to think about any more something’s that could be down there. I packed up my oak and tossed it onto the grate from a safe distance and flicked a match over it. The fire did its job.
By the time night rolled around, Sharon and I were nice and warm, caressed by the heat as we watched some low budget thriller before bed, Steve taking turns between our laps. When time came to retire for the evening, I’d mostly forgotten about the strange sound and the bottomless fireplace, even when the hints of that off-smell mingled with the puff of smoke spawned from putting out the fire. I still felt uneasy when I laid in bed across from Sharon that night, but I chalked it up to cheap pizza and the fact we’d just watched a two-hour movie about some guy who ate people.
The next morning I’d toss out the old wood, toss in the new, and I would even stick my sore head into the chamber for a whiff. At least that was my plan. It wasn’t quite how things actually went.
Since it was a weekend, I wasn’t too concerned with waking up early, so it was nearly ten before I slunk out of bed, making my way into the living room. I put on a pot of coffee one of Sharon’s aunts had gifted me for my birthday the month before, the shuffled towards the fireplace, hoping I’d have the caffeine ready by the time I was done disposing of the oak. I leaned down, rubbing my eyes with one hand as I reached out mid yawn to open the chamber door with the other. But after the yawn completed, my mouth still hung slightly ajar.
The fireplace was empty. No wood to be seen, just a thin layer of white ash dusting the top of the grate. Certainly Sharon hadn’t gotten up and taken it out, I seriously doubted she’d be able to lean down in order reach in and remove the log at her current size. And yet, it was gone. After staring a moment, I stuck my hand into the chamber, gripped the grate by my fingers, and pulled up slightly. It popped cleanly out of place. Rather than being secured in any meaningful way, the iron simply rested on a quarter inch protrusion of brick running around the edge of the chimney.
Surely it didn’t dislodge itself as the burnt logs crackled and broke, did it? I couldn’t imagine the grate having come loose enough to both allow the oak to slip through without the grate itself shuddering down the chamber as well. Not to mention that the crash would’ve awoken at least one of us, and maybe the cat. The tendrils of the off-smell hit me and I quickly put the grate back onto the ledge and stepped away.
At least the coffee smelled good.
I didn’t say anything to Sharon about the fireplace or the wood disappearing, as she was typically more spooked by stuff like that than I would be. Better not to let her know, especially with the stress of the baby. She was all in on the panic mode preparations throughout the fall. When I’d wake up in the middle of the night with bad dreams about the endless chasm beneath our new house, and the hints of rotten off-smell penetrating through our bedroom door, she was awoken with nightmares about strollers, diapers, and what color to paint the baby’s room. I chalked my own nerves up to the fears associated with being a new father. I was using my unease about the house to mask my confrontation with what I was actually afraid of, becoming like my parents.
It was something I needed to face, and it’d hit me at random times, so I’d use random things to mask it. I convinced myself of the sounds in the fireplace on at least two other occasions. Maybe it was in my head, maybe it wasn’t. I still didn’t tell Sharon. A couple of weeks went by, and we were browsing for the baby’s room at a hardware store, trying to find the right lighting. I discreetly threw some bolt screws and new driver for them in with the rest of the haul.
When Sharon was out of the house grabbing dinner, I moved to the fireplace, drilling the grate down into the ledge. I tested it with my fingers, and the hold was solid. If there was a something down there, squirrel, raccoon, bird, you name it, that thing was staying down there. Along with my fears about parenthood. Sealed up, locked away, key discarded.
Around Christmas was when we lost Steve. That changed things. We just couldn’t find him, and we spent two days searching the property with no traces, which was odd. Steve wasn’t a wandering cat, he was getting on up there in age, and his favorite activities primarily consisted of sitting, sleeping, and laying in the sun. Sharon was pretty broken up about it, which I didn’t need. It was her who had insisted on adopting the old geezer while we were dating, and she was all worried that it was a reflection on how well we’d do in January, and imagine if that happened with the baby and blah, blah, blah. I needed her to zip up that wound fast because my stitches weren’t going to hold long under the scrutiny of her emotional response. I needed to find the cat dead or alive, give her some kind of closure. Otherwise, I’d have to admit I was scared shitless about being a dad too.
That was what led me back to the chimney. Once the thought cropped up, I just had to know, had to be sure. I knelt down by the chamber door and swung it open. There was nothing there of course, save ash. But as I began to swing the door shut, I noticed. The bolts had been removed from the grate. I reached in and pulled it out, staring down into the abyss, before shifting my eyes upward to the patch of dark red stain on the sides of the brick, right below where the grate sat. Dried blood, no question about it.
I pulled back and stood in front of the fireplace, grate still in my grip. Nothing could convince me the blood stain wasn’t from Steve. I wanted to say he somehow found a way to get through on his own, slipped maybe. An accident. But no, I knew that wasn’t it, there was no way past the grate. Then I noticed. On the mantle above the chamber. There were the four screws, lined up like little soldiers in a neat row. Threads stripped smooth, bits of torn metal hanging loose from their sides. But no wear on the top outside of from the initial installation. They hadn’t been removed by a tool; they had been ripped out. By hand. The hand that took Steve. But it was Christmas, and the baby would be here in a month.
I still didn’t tell Sharon about the chimney.
Some collected fur scraps from Steve’s old bed and a bit of rehydrated blood that I “found” out back was convincing enough. We put a little cross in the yard for him, a grave with no body. Our family of two celebrated Christmas alone. Without Sharon’s knowledge I gave the real estate office a call, inquiring about some curiosities with our floor plan. My hope was to learn a little about the history of the place, primarily the chimney, and I got more than I initially bargained for. During the depression, a family of three lived in the house.
At the time, it was a two-story occupied by a father, mother, and their daughter, who was only a toddler. Near the end of the 20’s, a landslide occurred on the valley side of Mount Echo, one of the worst in state history. The first floor of the house was completely engulfed, and mostly collapsed. Buried under rock, dirt, and wood. It took over a week before the terrain was safe enough to get to the house from town. It took longer before anybody even started looking. Most people assumed the family was inside. At least that’s what people said, there was no way to get into the first floor save blowing a hole in the second, and anybody down there would’ve been dead by the time any fool had bothered to check on them.
No bodies were ever recovered, but the family wasn’t seen or heard from again after that. Eventually the land got bought, and the caved in stairwell was sealed up, the chimney opened up on the second floor and given a fireplace, and the house was renovated and sold. Supposedly the property had some history with the town folklore after that point, but the real estate agent wasn’t clear on the details. I’d heard enough, so I went home, wishing I’d heard less, and consigned to try and forget most of it.
In January, I became a father.
Only two days off schedule. A beautiful baby girl, we named Astrid after one Sharon’s relatives who helped us out financially early on. She was one of the few, as my parents were too busy disapproving of my life. It was hard to look in Astrid’s eyes, imagining she could think the same thing about me one day, if I wasn’t careful. After all, I was already picking up my own father’s habit of lies and secrecy.
The chimney, the fireplace, the grate, the cat, the folklore, all of it was weighing on my shoulders like this load I couldn’t shake. None of it had I told Sharon, and yet she was starting to notice anyway. Notice that something was wrong with me, in the way I’d turn away, or half smile, or go these long periods without talking. She probably thought after the baby came it’d go away, that it was just nerves. But no, it was worse.
I didn’t feel as much joy as I should have from taking care of Astrid. I was filled only with dread. Dread that in the night that dark black hand would reach out from the chasm beneath the chimney and snatch me up, pulling me down into the depths, only to find that the monster was myself, the failed father I was destined to become. It was just genetics. Inevitability.
Eventually, a few weeks after we took Astrid home, Sharon decided it would be a good time to talk to me about it. Granted, she didn’t actually know what it was she was trying to talk to me about at first, but I’m sure she had her suspicions. I thought I’d be able to play it off, keep her off the trail of my fears. But then she just had to fracture the thin veil that was keeping me at bay, reaching out to place a hand on my shoulder which I promptly refused.
“David. Come on. You don’t… you aren’t going to be like them.”
I broke.
“How do you know?!”
We fought. Went to bed on opposite sides, quiet and indignant. I couldn’t keep myself under control. The black hand of dread had already snatched me up, and it had done so long before, when I wasn’t paying attention. Now I was stuck, toying with the hooks it had set in me, ripping flesh out with them. I cried silently and alone as Sharon slept.
Eventually I sat up in bed, unable to sleep with myself, or with the knowledge that I was bringing the very fear of dysfunction that had kept me up in nights past, to life, simply through the worry of their existence. I nearly vomited into the floor. Sick to my stomach. Needed to calm my nerves. But then I realized, it wasn’t the nerves that were bringing on my nausea. I stood beside the bedframe, suddenly alert. It wasn’t the nerves at all.
It was the smell.
I wasn’t sure why, but I instinctively grabbed the only firearm we owned, a Mossberg 590A1 pump shotgun, and marched toward Astrid’s room. The off-smell grew in intensity the closer I got. My entire body froze a few paces away. The smell was stronger than I’d ever encountered it to be, and I could barely keep my senses in order, but that wasn’t what stopped me. I could hear Astrid. Giggling. And there was something else. A second voice. Or something like a voice. It was low, hard to make out, and indecipherable. I pumped the shotgun.
Taking short, careful steps, I narrowed the gap between myself and the shut bedroom door. I found myself filled with fear. The black hand of my future self gripping me by the throat. I reached out, ready to take a peek through the door. She was probably just in her crib, maybe hungry. What would Sharon think if she saw me here with this gun? Maybe she’d think I really was like my dad. Maybe she always thought that, and just never said. I turned the door handle.
Before I could think, the door slammed open towards me, busting off its hinges. Hit square in the face, I was thrown back onto the ground, my head banging into the hardwood as the splintered door fell against the opposite wall. My mind was spinning, warm blood gushing out of my nose, the taste of iron filling my mouth as the stream dipped between my lips and teeth. Opening my eyes, I saw one of the hinge screws roll across the floor a few inches from my face. The threads were stripped. I bolted up straight, just in time to see it.
Thin, blackened, dirty, and long, I only caught a glimpse of the thing’s legs as it turned the hallway corner into the living room. The giggling went with it. It was like a man on all fours. But it was not a man. I stood, dizzy, and ran as best as I could towards the living room. My knees were hurting. I looked down to see a thin piece of wood from the door jutting out of my lower thigh. No time. I turned the corner into the living area to see the iron grate fly across the room and into the couch. My head flicked in the direction of the chimney.
The black hands of dread were pulling my daughter into the fireplace. She was enjoying the ride, but she was just a baby. I drew the gun as she reached for me. There wasn’t a shot. I’d hit her. Astrid and the creature disappeared over the ledge, vanishing in the chasm beneath the fireplace.
“Astrid!” I screamed in anguish, head still pounding from being hit by a door. What was I supposed to do? The door to the master bedroom slammed open. Sharon walked out half asleep.
“David? David what the fuck are you doing!? Why do you have the gun?!”
I wanted to sit and explain it to her like I should have before. I should have told her everything. The chimney, the grate, the cat, the dread. She deserved to know about the fear, about the destiny, and I decided right then and there that she would. But first, I needed to make sure that destiny didn’t come true. Aiming at the floor, I began blowing holes in the hardwood with the Mossberg. This prompted Sharon to scream. She begged me to stop, that I wasn’t thinking straight. I was thinking straight for the first time in a while. Stopping my volley, I turned to face her.
“Honey, I need you to trust m-”
Then the floor caved in, and I fell into the dark. I landed awkwardly, rolling onto my back, and struggling to stand as Sharon called my name through the holes in the ceiling. There was flashlight on the end of the Mossberg, which I clicked to life. Broken boards, shattered glass, piles of dirt, rocks and debris. I was standing on the building’s original first floor. The walls splintered, caving inwards. It was barely navigable. Behind me came a sound that could only be Astrid’s. I moved through the debris, making my way through the broken home towards the sounds. Rounding a corner, I found myself in what must’ve been the original master bedroom, except the bed was now rotten, and covered in dirt and muck.
Inadvertently, I choked, and found that stomach acid was spilling from my mouth and onto the ground. I threw up. The off-smell was dizzying in this room. It was like nothing I’d ever smelled. As I wiped the spit and vomit from my lips, I pulled up the Mossberg to realize where the origin of the smell was. Embedded deep within the rotting and stained fibers of the bed sheets, were the remains of two people, nearly unrecognizable as something that could’ve been human. What clothes were left on them were clearly from another time period and decayed beyond belief. The bodies themselves had practically melted, though far meatier than one would expect bodies from the 20’s to be, likely due to lack of air flow. But more than all that, there were chunks missing, some as though they’d been almost surgically cut off, others, as if they were bitten.
My jaw was agape when I heard the noise again. The one that sounded something like a man but wasn’t. It came from the direction of what I assumed was once a closet. Pumping the shotgun, no longer certain of how many shots I had left, I approached the closet doorway. There would be no hesitation this time. I spun around the corner to see that the room had been hollowed out. It was much bigger now than it ever been as a closet. Something had clawed away at the walls, hollowing out an enclave in the dirt behind it, almost like a small cave or tunnel. Astrid giggled. I aimed down to see her laying there in the floor.
Relief flushed through me, as she appeared to be alright. Dropping down instantly and setting aside the shotgun, I scooped her up, tears welling. I wasn’t going to lose her. I wasn’t going to be any less than the father I always wanted. I could be more than my dread. For her and for Sharon. I had to be. Pulling her close to my chest with one arm, I grabbed the Mossberg in the other and stood.
skuuuurr-RUUUKT!
I pointed the barrel up to see a half glimpse of it’s face before I pulled the trigger. It was monstrously thin, with broken teeth, frayed hair, and eyes like little black dots sunken abysmally far into its head. And on top, a decayed piece of clothing, almost like a… bonnet?
The blast erupted from the gun, throwing my arm back. The creature hissed and hollered in searing pain. Reeling from the kickback of firing a shotgun single handed while holding a baby, my grip slipped, and I lost the gun in the shadows. Astrid stopped giggling as I ran. She must not have liked the sound a Mossberg going off a few inches from her face. Her cries rang out through the collapsed building as I attempted to navigate through the dark. I had to get her out.
At some point I started to realize that I was no longer on the first floor. The creature had dug tunnels out of the house, clawing a whole system into the dirt beneath the property. I prayed to God that there was a way out. Then I prayed that the man-thing not catch up to us before we found it. My mind wandered as my legs grew tired. I’d forgotten about the piece of door still jutting from one of them. I remembered a photo the real estate agent had shown me in an old newspaper clipping. Of the family that died.
I started to limp. I could hear water running up ahead. Was the daughter wearing a bonnet? I couldn’t catch my breath. Could we end up like them? I needed to make it to the water. We won’t end up like them.
We burst into the moonlight, straddling up to the edge of a creek where the tunnel let out. The thing from the chimney must’ve used it as a water source. It was still pretty dark, and my legs were all but useless, but I walked anyway. By the time we got back to the house, it was almost dawn. It felt like ages since I’d dropped through the floor, but in actuality it was barely twenty minutes.
Sharon had called the police, but they hadn’t arrived yet. She was pissed, threatening to divorce me, to turn me in, but it was just nerves. I sat her down, and I cried, and I tore the veil. I told her everything. The chimney, the grate, the cat, the real estate agent, the tunnels, and the bonnet. Half of it she believed. Half of it she didn’t. but she knew that I didn’t try to hurt Astrid. She knew that I believed it. And she knew my dread was real, even if the monster in our basement wasn’t.
When the police did pull up to the house, we told them I’d just fallen through a bit of structurally unsound floor, but that I got out on my own and everything was okay now. They thought that was odd, but they shrugged and helped me patch up my leg. One asked about the de-hinged door on the way out. I told him we were doing renovations.
Sharon and I talked for a long time that day. About things that we hadn’t openly discussed in a long time. We talked a lot the next day too, and many times in the weeks that would come. We started taking steps towards the parents we wanted to be. One of those steps was renting an apartment in Dreary while we renovated the floor and sold the farmhouse. We needed a second fresh start. One not driven by a desire to run away from the past, but rather by the desire to forge a better future. And maybe a house that didn’t have any secret rooms or basements. I guess I started to believe in a bit of folklore after all. Mainly because there is some truth to most legends, it’s just that what they don’t tell you is that the true parts are the ones you make true for yourself. I know that now.
I’m more than my dread.
Most of us are.