Black Creek Crossing

you go down into the basement. Just opening the door at the top of the stairs doesn’t do any good at all.”

“M-Maybe there’s a window open,” Angel said, not realizing that her voice had dropped to little more than a whisper. “That’s probably how Houdini got in.”

“Or maybe it’s something else,” Seth replied, his own voice dropping as low as Angel’s. “I read once where it gets real cold when…” His words died on his lips as the chill suddenly evaporated. When he looked at Angel, he could tell that she felt the sudden change too. “It’s gone,” he breathed.

Angel once again peered down into the darkness below. “Houdini?” she called. “Come on, Houdini! Come out of there!”

The cat appeared at the bottom of the stairs, its eyes glowing in the light spilling down from the kitchen, but it did not come up. Instead it meowed again.

“Come on!” Angel said. “You’ll get filthy down there.”

The cat meowed once more, then disappeared.

“Houdini!” Angel said. She groped for the cellar light switch, found it and turned it on. A bare bulb in the center of the cellar ceiling went on, but its dim glow revealed no sign of the cat.

Then it meowed again, louder.

“What’s going on with him?” Seth asked. “It’s like he wants us to come down—” He fell silent as he gazed at the cellar stairs. “What if we were looking under the wrong stairs?”

Angel stared at Seth. “He’s a cat, Seth! What—”

As quickly as it had vanished, the cat reappeared at the bottom of the steps, meowed loudly, then bounded up most of the stairs. But before it reached the top, it veered off to the right, bounding off the step and dropping to the floor below.

And meowed one more time.

“Let’s go down and see,” Seth said.

Angel said nothing, but when Seth took the first step down the steep flight of stairs, she hung back. “Maybe we shouldn’t go down there,” she said as Seth looked back at her.

“Or maybe we should,” Seth countered, putting just enough emphasis on the word so Angel knew exactly what he meant.

She felt the challenge hanging in the air, and gazed down into the shadows below. As she peered into the gloom, the memories of the last few nights flicked through her mind.

The girl in the closet, surrounded by flames.

The smell of smoke still lingering in the morning.

The presence in her room the night before last, when someone had loomed over her in the darkness, reaching out to her, wanting to touch her.

The sound of the piggy bank crashing to the floor.

And then, the scrawled image on the mirror that she had scrubbed away until there was no trace of it left at all.

A smudge like blood.

The blood of the girl who’d died in the room in which she now slept?

No! It wasn’t blood — it was only lipstick, and it had washed away. Everything she’d seen had only been dreams, and there weren’t any such things as ghosts.

“All right,” she said, trying not to let any of her fears creep into her voice. “Let’s go down and see.”

Without waiting for Angel to reply, Seth headed down the stairs, and a second or two later Angel followed.

“There’s another light at the bottom,” she whispered when they were halfway down. “You have to pull a string.”

As they came to the last step, Seth reached up, grabbed the string, and pulled. A dim light came on, washing most of the darkness away, but leaving the far recesses of the cellar lost in shadows. They found Houdini under the stairs, which were made of thick oak slabs about the size of the mantel upstairs, mounted on even bigger oak beams, laid in a steep slant with notches cut in them to support the steps. The upper surfaces of the steps were worn smooth — and somewhat concave — from the generations of feet that had tramped up and down them. But on the underside there were still the marks of the hand tools that had hewn and shaped them so long ago.

Houdini was standing on his hind legs, his forepaws propped against the fourth step, his head stretched high, but his nose still falling short of the fifth step.

As Angel and Seth crouched down to gaze at him, he looked at them, meowed, then stretched upward once again.

“What’s he doing?” Angel asked. “What’s he want?”

Angel and Seth moved around behind the stairs, then looked up at them from below. Except for a few places where light showed through the tiny gaps between the treads, they saw only darkness.

“Have you got a flashlight?” Seth asked.

“In the kitchen drawer,” Angel replied. She hurried up to the kitchen, and opened the top drawer at the end of the counter, where only two days ago she herself had put the contents from the catchall drawer in Eastbury. The flashlight was at the front, exactly where she’d put it.

Back in the cellar, she found Seth crouched down next to the cat, which was still standing on its hind legs, stretching toward the stair that was just out of reach while mewing insistently. As Angel crouched beside Seth and shined the light up at the underside of the stairs, Seth rapped sharply on the three steps nearest the cat.

Twice, they heard nothing but the faint thump of solid wood.

Then he rapped on the fifth step from the bottom.

As his knuckles came in contact with the wood, the sound was much louder, with a resonance to it that made Angel’s heart begin to pound.

It sounded hollow!

Seth looked at her, then knocked on the tread once more.

The same sound.

And the cat, apparently now satisfied, moved out from under the stairs, sat down, and began grooming itself.

Seth knocked on the tread above and the tread below, and each time they heard only the same solid sound they’d heard on the rest of the stairs.

Seth went back to the fifth one and began rapping along its entire length.

At each end, it sounded as solid as the adjoining treads. But for six or eight inches in both directions off the center, it had that hollow sound that told them that this tread, at least, was not solid all the way through.

Angel held the flashlight closer while Seth examined the step more carefully. At first he saw nothing, but then, as he looked closer, something didn’t look quite right at the point where the tread sat upon the supporting beams. Taking the flashlight from Angel, he held it even closer to the joint, then shifted it first to the one above, then the one below. Though the fits were almost perfect, he was sure he could make out a tiny horizontal gap between the treads and the beams, where the treads were sitting on the notches cut out of the beams to act as risers. But in the fifth step it looked as if the joint went up, as if somehow the tread were suspended between the main beams instead of being supported by the notches.

Moving out from under the steps, he examined the end of the fifth tread. From the outside it appeared to be seated atop the notches in the two slanting beams, exactly like all the rest. Frowning, he tapped on the surface of the riser.

It sounded like solid wood.

“What is it?” Angel asked. “Is it hollow or not?”

“It’s weird,” Seth told her. “It doesn’t sound the same from underneath, and it doesn’t look the same either.”

“Let me see.”

With both of them crouching under the stairs now, Seth showed Angel the strange joints. Reaching up, Angel gently rapped on the underside of the tread and heard the same hollow sound Seth had. She frowned, trying to figure out why the joints would look different from below than from the end, and a moment later the answer came to her. “Hold the flashlight,” she told Seth. He took it from her, and she pressed the palms of both