Chapter 1 - Somebody Under the Floor
I was in the kitchen when I heard Emma scream.
It wasn't the kind of scream kids make when they scrape a knee.
It was high and thin and it kept going, like she couldn't stop it once it started.
I dropped the coffee mug in the sink and ran.
She was on the living room floor, kneeling on the hardwood by the big windows, and her whole body was shaking.
Her hands were pressed flat against the boards, tracing a long seam that ran between two rows of the oak.
I'd walked over that seam a thousand times.
I'd never once looked at it.
"Baby, what the hell happened?"
I said.
"Why are you crying?
What's wrong with the floor?"
She grabbed my forearm with both hands and pulled me down toward her.
Her face was soaked.
Her eyes were red and swollen and she was looking at me like I was the only person left in the world.
"Daddy, please," she said.
"I'm not making this up.
There's somebody under the floor."
I looked at the seam.
It was maybe four feet long, perfectly straight, and it didn't match the rest of the floorboards.
The grain ran the wrong way.
"I heard someone down there," Emma said.
"Please, Daddy, open it.
I'm so scared."
Rachel was standing by the kitchen island with a dish towel in her hand.
She hadn't moved.
She was watching us the way you watch a car accident on the other side of the highway.
"Rachel," I said.
"Come here."
She didn't come.
I put my fingers into the gap.
It was wider than it should have been, wide enough to catch a fingernail, and the wood lifted a quarter inch before it caught on something.
I got both hands under it and pulled.
The panel was heavy.
Much heavier than a floorboard has any right to be.
I braced my feet, bent forward, and hauled upward, and it came free with a sound like a bone breaking.
Underneath was black.
Not shadow.
Not a crawlspace with light leaking in from somewhere.
Just a rectangular hole cut clean through the floor of my living room, with splintered edges and rough timber framing, and nothing but dark below it.
"What the fuck," I said.
"This isn't a normal floorboard.
Somebody built a damn trapdoor down here."
Emma was crying harder now, but she didn't move away.
She stayed right beside me, staring into the hole.
I leaned over the opening.
The air coming up was cold and smelled like dirt and old sweat.
"Holy shit," I muttered.
"What the hell is this?
Who the fuck put something like this in my house?"
Rachel finally took a step toward us.
Her mouth was open.
Her face had gone the color of the walls.
Then I heard it.
A scrape.
Soft.
Slow.
Like something dragging across concrete.
"There's somebody down here," I shouted into the hole.
"Who's there?"
Nothing answered.
But I saw movement.
A shape shifting in the dark, low to the ground, and then an arm came up toward the light.
A hand.
Pale.
Thin.
Trembling.
It rose out of the blackness with the palm turned up, fingers spread, reaching for me like it had been waiting a very long time for someone to open that door.
Emma screamed and buried her face in my side, but I didn't pull back.
I reached down and grabbed the hand.
It was cold.
So cold.
And so light.
I got my other arm under a shoulder and pulled, and the person came up out of the floor like something being born, thin and shaking and blinking against the daylight.
He was filthy.
His hair was matted.
His clothes were stiff with grime.
He couldn't stand on his own, so I held him against my chest while his legs gave out underneath him.
Then he lifted his head.
And I stopped breathing.
I knew that face.
I knew it from twenty years ago, from a funeral I'd sat through in a church in Michigan, from a coffin I'd watched get lowered into the ground next to my mother.
"Oh my God," I said.
"Marcus?"
He looked up at me with wet eyes and tried to speak, and what came out was barely a whisper.
"Danny," he said.
"You have to get me out of this house."
