twitched noticeably in his trembling grasp.
Following suit, Scott loaded his gun as well, placing his finger atop the safety button several times to make sure he knew exactly where it was so that he could press it in just a split second and begin firing when the time came. It felt heavy in his grasp.
“How do you want to do this?” Scott whispered, standing beside Harry as he stared through the doorway into the kitchen.
“We need to try to seize the element of surprise. We’re only going to get one shot at this.”
Scott cocked his head and winced as he peered towards the kitchen. There was a thin breeze, as cold as ice, blowing straight towards them from the gap beneath the door leading to the basement. It was barely enough the stir the piled and balled dust that littered the kitchen, blowing it like miniature tumbleweeds across the plywood floor, but it stabbed straight into his flesh, cutting deeply within to the very core of his being. It resonated in his bones with an expanding throbbing that felt as though it would snap the brittle calcifications like icicles.
“He already knows we’re here,” Scott rasped in barely more than a whisper.
Harry, who he could see was visibly chilled as well, nodded in silent agreement, his breath bursting from his lips in damp pillars of steam.
The two stood there in silence, both fighting the urge to turn tail and flee as the bitter wind rolled across the floor and up their flesh to their faces where the tips of their noses chapped, turning red and threatening to snap right off of their chilled faces. Beneath the door, in that thin crack merely more than a half inch tall, they could see the darkness. It called to them and pushed them away all at the same time. It had a life of its own as the blackness seemed to move, swirling and exploding on the arctic air that gusted from beneath the door.
“I think we need to set up down there,” Harry said, his voice dry from the growing lump in his throat.
Scott just stared beneath the door at the darkness. Somehow, he knew that Harry was right, but he also knew that going through that doorway was going to be like stepping straight through the gates of hell.
With a will of their own, his legs started for the door. His mind tripped over itself as it tried frantically to stir him to head the other direction, to go anywhere else in the world other than towards that cellar door. But in the end, it settled for forcing his finger to release the safety on the shotgun and slip his finger beneath the trigger guard and atop the cold steel trigger.
Gripping the chipped brass doorknob in his hand, the rust rubbing off in the palm of his hand, Harry twisted it until it disengaged. With a quiet click, the door popped open. Glancing back over his shoulder to Scott, who clutched his shotgun in his white knuckled grasp, his pale white face fixed in a look of extreme tension, he opened the door to the cellar.
The overwhelming scent of damp earth and mildew gusted up from the darkness, swelling all around them. There was something else buried beneath that scent. It was nothing that either of them could put their finger on, but it was something of a muffled combination of copper and sulfur, just the merest hint of their presence clinging to the backs of their tongues as they could taste it more than smell it.
Stepping from the edge of the plywood board over the peeled edge of linoleum that was still pinned to the top of the stairs, Harry led the descent down into the cellar. The air grew increasingly cold around them with each successive step down the wobbly, rotting wooden stairs. Freeing a hand from their shotguns, both grabbed hold of the thin railing that ran down the wall, shuddering in its loose brackets as they placed weight upon it.
Scott heard the hard scrape of gravel being ground atop stone as Harry stepped from the last stair onto the small cement landing.
There was a sharp sting in the knuckle of his left forefinger as it snagged something along the railing. Fighting the urge to shout his frustration, he rubbed at the peeled flap of skin, resealing it to the wound with the fresh blood that seeped from beneath. Running his fingertips along the wall, he grasped hold of the object that had torn his flesh, yanking at it until he freed it from where it had been pinned between the wall and the railing.
It had a long, thin wooden handle nearly a foot in length. Atop the handle was an oblong, heavy wooden cylinder, almost like the head of a mallet, but either end was capped with a metal surface covered with jagged, sharp pyramids of metal. Turning it over in his hand just once, he replaced it between the railing and the wall and crept down the rickety stairs to the floor.
There was but the smallest line of light that trickled into the room on a thin beam from the side of the boarded window, a pinpoint of light resting on the dirt floor. Harry stood beside it, his form a shadow barely standing out from the darkness, the light reflecting from the polished steel surface of the barrel of his gun.
“Can you feel it?” Harry whispered. “It’s all around us.”
“Feel what?” Scott answered as the words tore at the parched membranes in this throat.
“Evil.”
Scott fidgeted as the cold wave of darkness embraced him from all sides at once.
“It’s all around us,” Harry whispered in a thin, cracked voice. “It’s in the walls and the floor and the air, so thick I can hardly breathe.”
“All I can feel is the cold.”
“The cold is just the start. It feels like it’s crawling across my skin, shoving daggers through the flesh as it fights to take hold of me from the outside. And it’s tangible, like you could just reach out and grab a handful of the air as it crawls towards you.”
“Then this is where we need to set up,” Scott said through the dryness in his mouth as he stared at the thin line of light as it slowly dissipated. “And we’d better do so quickly because we’re running out of time.”
XIX
Wednesday, November 16th
9 p.m.
Time meant nothing as Scott crouched in the blackened corner of the frigid cellar. The moist earth was covered with a thin layer of crystallized frost, hardening it and melting beneath his knee, soaking into his jeans. His eyes had struggled to acclimate to the darkness, but all he could see was the diffuse outline of the hot water heater and the furnace against the earthen wall beyond. His own breath moistened his chapped and stinging face as he fought with his weary eyelids, knowing that closing his eyes even long enough to blink could spell his demise.
His heart pounded somewhere between his chest and the enormous lump in his throat, his trembling finger poised atop the trigger of the shotgun that rested atop his right thigh. His back pressed against the crumbling wall behind him, chunks of earth fragmenting into small cascades of sand and scraping down the surface of his jacket at sporadic intervals. His whole body trembled from the combination of the intense cold and the nearly crippling fear that raced up and down every inch of his skin, the goose bumps painfully erected along his flesh. And while he was uncertain which of the two factors caused the waves of shakes that seized hold of his body every few minutes, he knew that it helped to keep him attentive, helped to keep his focus on the nothingness upon which he gazed.
Harry was in the corner of the room completely opposite his own position. He was sitting on the ground to the right of the hot water heater; his back wedged into the corner. He had to know that. He had to know exactly where Harry was as the last thing he wanted to do was to raise his gun to fire and end up blowing a hole in Harry’s chest. And Harry needed to know the same thing.
Over the light whistle of the breeze through the seam of the window, he could hear Harry breathing, the cold rattling in his lungs from his hiding place in the darkness. And that sound was comforting, for he knew as long as he heard that he was not alone down there in that cellar. That was something that right now was worth its weight in gold as the smell of the rotting earth and the wisps of death that rolled through the darkness across the frozen floor seemed to sap the life from him. All he could do was sit there, trying to peel back the blackness with his eyes and listen to the barely audible wheeze from across the room: his only connection to life.
Occasionally, the floorboards overhead would creak as though from the weight of unseen footsteps, but that would pass. Initially, they had both bolted up the staircase, which nearly crumbled each and every time beneath their weight. They would burst into the kitchen, the muzzles of their glistening weapons flashing in every direction as they sought to line up the final shot, but there had never been anything there. After the fourth trip to the top of the stairs, they had been forced to reckon with the fact that it was nothing more than the settling of the house. And that what sounded like footsteps was nothing more than the house itself as it continued on the long and
