The Crawlspace

When I was about eight years old, my father changed jobs and we had to move.  They bought a house that was much larger than our old one.  I didn't want to move and leave my friends, but we did.  The new neighborhood seemed very dark to me, and the people weren't as friendly.  I told my parents this, but they said I just needed to stop comparing it to our old neighborhood, and that I should try to be nicer to people.  I tried but when I smiled at our new neighbors, they never smiled back.

The new house was another problem.  At night, the variety of squeaks, scratches and thumps that came from the crawlspace kept me awake.  I asked my father why the house made so many strange noises.
He said, "It's just the house settling."
I asked him how old the house was.
"About fifty years old, I guess," he answered.
I asked why it was taking so long for the house to settle.
He told me to go out and play.

Laying in my bed at night, I had nothing to do but study the sounds the old house made.  My habit of reading horror comics before bed didn't help matters.  My overactive imagination imbued every sound with sinister origins.  Was the house haunted?  Were creatures living in the crawlspace?  The walls?  Would they find me when I was sleeping?

As anyone living near an airport knows, the mind has a way of blocking out unpleasant noises.  So it was that I learned to live with the sounds the old house made, and after a few months, my sleep was peaceful.  One night, however, I was awakened by a very loud thump under the house, and then another.  It was the loudest sound the house had ever made.  I tried to get back to sleep but as I lay in the darkness, I heard something else.  Voices and laughter, then a strange moaning, like a woman crying.  This sound frightened me more than any other I had heard.  I curled up into a ball and pulled the covers up to my chin.  It was quiet for a minute and I prayed the crying wouldn't start again, but it did.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.  I got out of bed and ran into my parents' room.  I jumped on the bed and got between them.  They woke up and asked me what was wrong.  I told them there was a lady crying under my room.  My father got upset and told me I couldn't read scary comic books anymore.  My mother took my hand and went back into my room.  She sat with me for a few minutes.  I hoped the sound would come back so she could hear it, too, but it didn't.  Finally, she tucked me back into bed, kissed my forehead, and told me it was probably just a dream.  But I knew it wasn't.

The next day, I was riding my skateboard along the sidewalk on my way to school.  There was a large hedge on my left side.  A man came out of a walkway between the hedge and I crashed into him and fell down.  I looked up at him, expecting him to be as unfriendly as everyone else in this neighborhood, but he smiled, extended his hand to me, and said, "Oh, I'm sorry!  Are you alright?"

I took his hand and stood up.  He brushed me off and said, "My name is Mr. Knight.  What's yours?"
"Mark," I answered.
"Well, it's nice to meet you, Mark!"

He walked off to his car and drove away.  I was glad there was at least one nice person on my street.

The noises under the house stopped for a while, or I was sleeping too deeply to hear them.  I'm not sure which.  But they started again one night with a vengeance.  I got too scared again to lay in bed alone.  I ran into my parents' room to get in bed with them, but they weren't there.  I looked at the digital clock on the table by their bed.  It was three in the morning.  Where could they be?  It didn't make any sense.  I searched every room in the house but there was no sign of them anywhere.

I told myself that they had just gone out to the store.  Maybe they were feeling sick and needed medicine.  They would be back soon.  I was cold so I got into their bed.  As I lay there waiting for them to come home, the room got colder and colder.  I turned over, trying to stay warm, and noticed that their bedroom window was wide open.  I got up to shut it and saw that the screen had been destroyed, sliced to pieces.  My heart froze.  Something had happened to my parents.  My God.  Something had happened to them.

I ran to the phone to call the police.  The line was dead.  I ran outside, my panic and fear making me oblivious to the cold.  I ran to the house next door and banged on the door.  Nobody came.  I kicked and banged the door again and again but still no one answered.  I ran to the next house, and the next, and the next, but everyone seemed to have vanished.  Not one light was on in any of the houses on my block.  I started to cry.  I didn't know what else to do but walk back to my house.

I had left the front door wide open.  I went inside and shut it, again telling myself that there was nothing wrong, that they would be home soon.  I got back into their bed.  The scent of my mother's perfume in the sheets made me cry again with fear that something had happened to her.  Then, for the first time, I heard the noises beneath their room.  Heavy thumps, a long scratching sound, squeaking like a rusty wheel, then the noise I was praying not to hear - a woman's voice moaning.  I sobbed deeply and shook with terror.  But there was something different about this voice.  The one I had heard before didn't sound at all familiar, but this one did.  It suddenly dawned on me why - it was my mother's voice.

I shot out of bed to find her.  She was somewhere in this house, but where?  I searched every closet, the pantry, under the kitchen sink, horrible images running through my mind all the while about why she would be in any of those places.  I turned the house inside out but couldn't find her, but the crying continued.  It dawned on me then that there was one place I had never looked in.  The crawlspace.  The thought of exploring it had crossed my mind several times before.  I even looked through the wood slats blocking the entrance in the backyard once, but it was too dark to see anything and the idea of going inside scared me too much.  Now I had no choice.  It was the only place she could be.

I got a flashlight out of the kitchen drawer and went outside.  I ran around to the crawlspace entry and was about to shine the flashlight inside when I saw an orange glow flickering on the side wall.  Shadows of human figures danced on the wall.  I could hear all the same noises that I had heard every night - the squeaking, scratching, the muted voices, and the awful, awful moaning - only the sounds were louder now.  It hadn't been the house settling at all.

The house was L-shaped so I couldn't see the source of the orange light.  There was no way to see it except to go inside and look around the corner of a cement wall.  Driven by my desperation to find my mother and father, I pulled on the wooden slats.  The nails holding them in place were rusty so they came off easier than I expected them to.  I pulled them all off until there was a hole large enough for me to enter through.  I went inside and was surprised at how high the ceiling, or the underside of my floor, was.  I could almost stand up.  I walked slowly toward the source of the light, not knowing what to expect, but something told me to stay quiet, that something terrible was happening.

I finally came to the edge of the wall.  I hid behind a supporting post and gradually looked around the wall's edge.  First, I saw flames licking at the cold air.  Then there was an old woman eating some kind of meat out of her hand.  As I moved around further, I saw a man, and then another.  They were eating, too.  I was afraid they would notice me, but the light of the fire seemed to be blinding them to the darkness I was standing in, so I became more bold.  I slowly tip-toed further in, and saw that there were at least six more people, and they were all wearing black.  A very large man was blocking the center of the fire.  Another was standing to his side, holding a handle and turning something over the fire.  That was the squeaking sound I had been hearing.  It was a rotisserie!

I wanted to see what they were cooking.  A pig?  A turkey or chicken?  I moved further to the right but knocked over a bottle.  It landed on a rock and made a loud clinking sound.  They all turned and looked in my direction.  The old woman, her face illuminated by the fire and juices from the meat dripping from her wrinkled lips, yelled, "It's the boy!  He has seen us!"

The large man turned and as he did, I saw his face.  It was Mr. Knight!  I could also see what was on the fire.  A leg.  A human leg!  It was suspended on a metal pole.  It was big, definitely a man's.  The sickening realization then washed through me that it was my father's.  I tried to scream but no sound came.  My horror was too immense.  Mr. Knight ran toward me.  I tried to run toward the crawlspace opening but he blocked my path.  I had no choice but to run the other way, into the darkest corner of the crawlspace.  As I did, I tripped and fell.  My face hit the dirt, and I found myself looking into my mother's eyes.  She was lying on the floor, bound and gagged.  She had watched them eat my father!  She screamed through the gag, her eyes wide with horror.  I heard Mr. Knight running toward me so I instinctively jumped up and ran away again.  How would I save my mother?  The others had joined in the chase and were spreading out to keep me from getting to the opening.  There was nothing I could do.  I had to get outside and bring help back.

I ran straight toward them, then slipped to the side the way I did when I played football at school.  Mr. Knight grabbed for me but I ducked out of the way and ran around him.  I made it to the crawlspace and was almost completely out when I felt a hand grab my foot.  My slipper came off so I was able to break free.  I kicked off the other one and ran bare-footed down the driveway.  I had nowhere to go, so I just ran and ran through empty streets for what seemed like an hour until I was out of the neighborhood.  I already knew there was no point in knocking on doors.  Nobody would answer.  I also knew that it hadn't been my imagination that there was something wrong with the people on this street.

I found myself in the area my mother had always called "downtown".  I prayed that I would find another person, or that a car would pass, but it was four in the morning by this time and the whole world seemed deserted.  Finally, a police car stopped and an officer jumped out and grabbed me.

"What are you doin', kid?" he asked.
I can't remember what I told him.  Stuttering from the cold and the utter terror of what I had seen, I only babbled incoherently.
The cop said, "Whoa, hold on a minute!  Slow down."
He wrapped a blanket around me, put me in the police car, and told me to tell him what happened again.  I told him the whole story but he just laughed.  Why wouldn't he?  I had just told him that witches were eating my parents.  Even I knew how crazy it sounded.  I felt like I was living in one of my own comic books.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "I'm sure it was just a dream.  Do you know where your house is?"  I told him I did.  I had run straight down the street away from my neighborhood.  All we had to do was go back up.  He said, "I'll take you home and you'll see.  Your parents are probably worried sick about you."

But I knew what I had seen, and I knew they weren't worrying about anything anymore.  I hoped they had let my mother live, but they had eaten my father and were about to eat her.  Why would they have mercy now, or leave someone to tell what they had done?  My heart was aching thinking about what must have happened to her.

We arrived at the house.  The front door was still open.
"Hmm, that's weird," the cop said.
He got out of the car and walked around to my door.
"Come on, kid.  Let's go inside."
I shook my head no.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
He could see that there was no way I was going back into the house, so he said, "Okay, you stay here.  I'll be back in a minute with your folks."

He shut the door and walked to the front porch.  He looked back at me for a second and smiled, but when he walked into the dark house, I saw him draw his gun.  He reached for the light switch but the lights were still out.  He turned on his flashlight and walked deeper into the house.  About fifteen minutes later, he came back and opened the car door.

"There's nobody home.  They must be out looking for you."
I asked him if he looked under the house.
He said, "Yeah, I did.  There was nothing down there.  Nothing at all.  See, it was just your imagination."  But I knew it wasn't.

The sun was just starting to rise.  I closed my eyes and prayed that my parents would come out of the front door, but they didn't.  I started to cry again.

The next thing I knew, someone had their hands on my shoulders, shaking me.  I opened my eyes.  It was my mother.  It was Saturday and I was lying in my bed.  It had all been a dream!

"Oh, thank you, God!" I thought, "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
I sat up and hugged my mother harder than ever before.
"Well!  What's gotten into you?" she asked.
I cried with relief as I buried my face in the soft skin of her neck.
"What's wrong, sweetheart?" she asked.  "Did you have a bad dream?"
"The worst," I answered.
"Well, come into the kitchen," she said.  "You can tell us all about it over breakfast."

My parents laughed at my dream and I laughed myself, but with relief that it wasn't true.  It had all seemed so real.  After breakfast, I went into my room, collected every horror comic I owned, and threw them into the trashcan.  My favorite cartoon was about to start so I went into the front room and turned on the television.  Outside, I saw Mr. Knight walking by.

Still brimming with relief that it had just been a dream, and that he wasn't actually the head warlock, I opened the window and yelled, "Hi, Mr. Knight!"

He stopped and looked over slowly.  My heart froze as his eyes fixed on me, filled with a horrible, unearthly darkness.