I work for an air conditioning company that mainly handles residential and small commercial work. We do basic maintenance, but our more profitable work—and the work I spend most of my time doing—is installing new HVAC systems. Over the last five years at the job, I’ve seen a few odd requests—custom work or heating and cooling spaces with unique problems. But when I saw the service note that just said “Underneath” and listed an address out in the country, I stopped by the dispatcher’s office on my way out the door.
“Hey, Mar. I know you get busy with calls, but can you give me more info on a new service call than this?” I held up the service note and tapped the word “Underneath”. “I like to be a little prepared before I get there, and I don’t know what this means. Do you remember the call?”
Marisol rolled her eyes away from her monitor, favoring me with a bored look before glancing down at the slip of paper I held. Her eyes widened slightly as she broke into a grin. “Oh yeah. I remember that one. Older lady called it in yesterday. Or she sounded older. I don’t know. Anyway, she said she’s renovating a house. Has a large crawlspace underneath that she wants sealed up and climate controlled.”
I frowned at her. “Wait, what? Are you sure she doesn’t just want duct work replaced or something?”
Marisol glared at me before going back to looking at her computer. “No, Daniel, I asked her that. She was very specific. She wants underneath the house to be heated and cooled too.”
I thought about questioning it further, but I realized there was no point. Poor note taking aside, Marisol did a good job. If she said that’s what was asked for, that was probably what was asked for, though I still guessed the customer had made some kind of mistake, or at the very least, didn’t appreciate how expensive it would be. Well, I thought, I can always find out more when I meet them.
Except I didn’t meet them.
I showed up at the address that afternoon to find a sprawling three-story house that was locked up and empty. No signs of anyone living there or remodeling work being done. I did a circle of the house, and it was as I was completing my circuit that I noticed a large, dark blue envelope taped to the front door. I didn’t know how I’d missed it when I first arrived, its deep indigo hue jumping out from the white door to which it was attached, but I pushed the thought away as unimportant. I saw it now, and it was clearly a note meant for me. Written in large, neat script across the envelope’s front were the words “For the HVAC person”. It’s not uncommon to get notes from customers, but the way this was done, from the thickness and color of the paper to the letter that it held inside…it all carried a strange formality that I didn’t care for. I think it was because it didn’t feel like a reminder or a little instruction from a client.
It felt like an invitation.
Still, it had taken forty-five minutes to get out there, and I needed to get the inspection and estimate done if I could. Maybe the contents of the envelope would explain better than the service note or Marisol had been able to. So I opened it. Found a sheet of thick paper folded neatly inside and covered in the same large and orderly handwriting as the envelope itself.
And this is what it said.
To the service provider:
As I mentioned on the phone, I am remodeling this house before I move in. This property has several unique features, one of which is a spacious crawlspace on top of concrete slab. It stands approximately five feet at all points and I have uses for the space that require cooling and heat, as well as proper ventilation. I need the crawlspace sealed and an HVAC system installed. Please note that this system needs to be wholly separate from the systems for the interior of the house. Within some reason, the cost is of no concern.
Please inspect the property, provide your estimate, and I will confirm it within 24 hours. I will then provide any pre-payment your company requires by the end of the week. Thank you for your time, your expertise, and your discretion.
I still didn’t understand the point of any of it, but I didn’t have to. Yeah, the letter was slightly creepy, but that wasn’t a good reason to turn down a big job, especially with the holidays coming up. I reread the letter to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and then I went back to the truck to get my coveralls.
As it turned out, I didn’t really need them. The crawlspace was big just like the letter had said, but it was also immaculately clean. I mean spotless. No dirt, no dead bugs, no signs of mice or spiders or anything you’d normally find under a house. In fact, except for the low headspace, it was easy to forget that you weren’t in an unfinished floor of a house or a basement.
Part of that was the concrete floor. It ran the entire length and width of the house, making me wonder if the builders hadn’t started with a slab foundation and then changed their minds when they decided they wanted a giant crawlspace instead. There was no telling how much extra that had cost, but it did have the side benefit of making my job easier. It took less than thirty minutes for me to get all the measurements I needed and get back to my truck. A few minutes more and I had emailed the office my estimate for them to send out to the customer. The crawlspace was over 3,000 square feet and I estimated it would take about $12,000.00 and two weeks to do the whole job if they sent one of the newer guys to help me. Despite what the letter said, I had a feeling cost would be a concern when they saw that figure, and I thought I probably would never hear from this potential client again.
I was wrong. By the end of that week, everything was agreed upon and half-paid up front, and by the following Tuesday, I was out there reviewing everything I would need to start the work the following day. Most of that was just walking around the house and making a supply and tool checklist, but as I worked, I kept getting sidetracked by the weirdness of it all. Not just the job or never talking directly with the owner, but the house itself.
Looking through the windows, I could see polished floors of light wood and walls that looked clean and freshly painted. No furniture, but all that meant was that the woman hadn’t moved in yet. Still, it struck me as strange that there was nothing in the house. No trash or cleaning supplies, no forgotten water bottle or fast-food bag. No signs of anyone having been inside the house at all.
It reminded me of Santa’s Elf Village.
When I was seven, my parents took me to the mall to see Santa. Not just any mall Santa, but the Santa at the huge new mall just over the state line. The Santa who travelled with his own magical elf village. It had taken us two hours to get there, and when I was smaller, my parents likely wouldn’t have bothered going that far just for me to see a fancier mall Santa.
But that was before my little sister, Kennedy, had gone missing in a grocery store two years earlier. She had been with my mother at the time, perched in the shopping cart’s toddler seat while Mom was turned away looking for bread or peas or something. And when Mom turned back, Kennedy was gone. She started yelling right away, but neither my sister or whoever snatched her were found, and the investigation that followed turned up nothing. There were no witnesses, no security footage, no suspects.
Just an empty hole in our family where my little sister used to be.
That first year after she was gone had been terrible. My parents cried and argued all the time, and even at six I had wondered if they were going to stay together. But around the time that Kennedy had been gone a year, I caught pneumonia and had to be in the hospital for a couple of days. I don’t know what it was, but something brought them back together. Maybe their shared terror of losing their other child made them realize they still had things worth living for.
Either way, from that point on, they seemed to focus all their energy on spending time with me and making me happy. Spoiling me, really. I wasn’t a bad kid—I don’t think I turned into a brat or anything—and it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the extra toys and special treats, as well as getting more attention from parents that had always seemed a bit distracted and distant when I was younger. I definitely did appreciate it, at least in theory.
The problem was that when they spent time with me or carried me somewhere fun, there was always this quiet desperation on their faces. Some weird, hungry look that said they needed me to have fun, to be happy, to stay safe. That they needed to atone for what happened to my sister, and the only thing they could come up with was to try and make my childhood as good as possible. That’s how we wound up at a distant mall, my parents alternating between giving me brittle smiles and passing frantic looks between themselves. That is how I wound up seeing Santa’s Elf Village.
It dominated the center of the mall, with lines of kids and parents waiting to see the man himself, an area to the near left for pictures, and a small kiosk to the far left where you could pick up a photo of your child talking to Santa in an overpriced plastic frame. But to the right was the Elf Village. It wasn’t much of a village, really—just three small houses made out of plaster or something, the color rubbed off the edges of the roofs and corners by the corrosive effects of time and rough use.
Still, there was a sign that said you could look through a peephole into one of the elf’s homes. I don’t remember everything from that day, but I remember being excited as I got up to the elf’s door and put my eye against the peephole. I knew it was all pretend, but it was still fun to see whatever they might want to show me.
On the surface, it was simply a shabby presentation of a small and cozy elf house. There was a little kitchen area and a small chair sitting in front of a tiny stone fireplace. A tea kettle sat on a nearby table atop a yellowing lace doily. It was probably meant to be cute—something that was probably meant to match a child’s idea of an elf’s house and instead came across as a cheap knockoff version of the kind of place a hobbit might live.
And I didn’t find it cute. I didn’t find it funny. I felt my breath quicken as I looked at it, my eyes combing over every detail, trying to find something comforting that could make the wrongness of it less wrong.
It wasn’t that it was disturbing in any obvious way. But there was this artificiality to it, a worrying lifelessness that made it clear that this wasn’t just make believe. It was a lie. A trick.
I’d backed away from the elf house quickly after that. I still hadn’t seen Santa, which was the whole point of the long trek to the mall, but when I said I wanted to go, my parents passed another look between each other and then quickly agreed. I kept waiting for them to complain, to question why I suddenly got scared, but they never did. Instead they took me for ice cream and we never talked about it again.
Four years later, my father was leaving his office late one night when a car came around the corner and ran him down at the edge of the lot where he’d parked. I’ve never seen it, but apparently there was grainy video from a nearby bank security camera that showed the car’s headlights for a moment, but the driver didn’t stop and they never learned who it was or why it happened.
When I was thirteen, my best friend Andy Murphy went to the hospital to get his appendix out. He died on the operating table when someone messed up his anesthesia. I remember his dad drunkenly telling me that the doctor had said it was a freak accident. That there was like a 1 in 100,000 chance of something like that happening.
By that point, I wasn’t so sure.
I had just started college when my mother was murdered. Someone broke in on her. The police told me that they didn’t seem to take anything or do anything other that tie my mother up, cut her a little, and then set her on fire. As with everything else that had happened in my life, there was never any real explanation, never a face or name to which I could assign blame. No one was ever caught, and after a few months, everyone stopped looking or caring.
But I still care. I care about all of it. And it may sound stupid, but I know that I’m cursed somehow. Nothing much ever happens to me personally, but to the people around me? The people I’m really close to? Something always gets them, and there’s only one common denominator.
Me.
So I don’t make close friends any more. I do my work, I act polite, and I go home and keep to myself. No friends, no significant others, no new victims for the meat grinder that seems to have followed patiently behind me all the days of my life.
And while it’s a lonely life, it’s not a terrible one. I enjoy my work and I’m good at it. Bigger jobs like this, I have to have physical help, but I make sure to not get too friendly with anyone they send, and if I start getting too used to someone in particular helping me, I ask the company to swap them out for someone new. It sucks, but it’s safer that way.
After backing away from the windows of the empty house, I headed back into the crawlspace to make sure I didn’t need to do any cleaning prep before I starting sealing the following morning. The thought of whether I should request someone new to help me with the ductwork and unit installation or stick to the guy I’d used the last few times was preoccupying me, but just behind it was a line of guilty thoughts and bad memories stretching back to that elf village and beyond. I was usually good in not dwelling on my childhood, and I’d come to accept the limitations of my life if I didn’t want to risk someone else getting hurt by whatever had marked me. But it was still hard. It was all so damn hard, and I didn’t know what I had done to deserve…
Where had that crack come from?
The concrete slab that served as the floor of the crawlspace wasn’t one giant, seamless piece. It was made up of several smaller squares that joined at the seams between the pieces of concrete. There was a small gap between each of them, which was normal to allow for expansion and contraction during hot or cold months. The acrylic spray sealer I was going to use the next day could bridge those small gaps without too much problem, and I’d made sure during my first visit that there weren’t any obvious problems with the floor that would require some kind of fix for the sealant to hold. No big or irregular gaps between pieces of concrete, in other words.
But now…now there was a large space, more than six inches wide, between two of the slabs. Crouch-walking over to it, I felt the first stirrings of confused fear. It wasn’t just a gap. It was an opening. There was empty air underneath, almost like there was an open space down there below the concrete.
My heart was starting to beat faster as I reached out and touched the slab that seemed out of place. The beating turned to hammering as the slab slid further at the slightest force, gliding out of the way through some unseen and silent mechanism. It wasn’t a slab at all. It was a hidden door. I shined my flashlight down into the dark below, wincing as lights began to flare to life beneath me.
Blood was beating in my ears as my eyes adjusted and I saw steps going down into a small, subterranean hallway. It was some kind of hidden basement, bare except for the stairs, a door at the far end, and a small table containing what looked like a photograph and another dark blue envelope. I was terrified—this was some kind of intentional trap or I’d accidently stumbled into some creepy secret basement, and either way, I needed to get out of there and call the office.
But then I realized I recognized the picture on the table. It was a photo of Kennedy, taken just a few weeks before she disappeared.
I sat frozen for a few seconds, tensed and terrified as I looked back and forth between the room below and the shadowy corners of the crawlspace. How was any of this possible? And if it was real, did that mean whoever took her was now messing with me? If so, that was all the more reason I should call for help, right?
I dug into my pocket and got out my cellphone to call 911 even as I remembered that I had no service this far out. I tried to call anyway, but after the third time I stuffed the phone back into my pocket and looked back down at the photo. It was a little far away, but I could see it well enough. It was her. It was impossible, but it was her.
So I went down. The stairs were metal and seemed sturdy as I walked down them slowly, repeatedly telling myself I would be ready to run at the first sign of trouble. I reached the small wooden table and picked up the photo with a trembling hand. I hadn’t seen this photo since…
Since my mother had been buried with it. As far as I knew, that was the only copy, and I’d buried it with her charred remains when the state investigators gave me her body back for the funeral. Shaking my head slightly, I sat the photo down and picked up the envelope. It was addressed to me, though more specifically this time.
To Daniel
It took me three tries to steady my hands enough to open it, and when I did I found another single thick sheet of paper inside. This one simply said:
To better understand, you must go deeper in.
Underneath that, as though to clarify the point, there was a rough drawing of a door just like the one at the end of the hall. The door was uneven somehow—it seemed perceptibly narrower at the top than at the bottom, and there was a mark near the top that I’d never seen before and didn’t understand, but which was crudely replicated on the drawing as well. Whoever was behind this, they wanted me to go inside.
I felt sure it was a trap at this point. Certain that if I did anything but try to run, I would only get trapped down here in some serial killer’s dungeon. And I was definitely scared by the thought. But I was also angry and confused, and I could feel my need for answers overriding my fear for the moment. Could see my body moving toward the door rather than the stairs. And when the door opened easily, I went into the second room.
It was largely the same as the first—there was a door at the far end and a table in the middle. The table contained two more photos and another envelope. The first photo was a smiling, nondescript photo of my father I’d never seen before. It almost looked like a driver’s license photo, but I couldn’t say that for sure. He looked to be slightly younger than what I remembered when he died, but it was clearly him. The second photo was harder to identify.
It was a burned up body. Twisted and blackened by the flames, it looked like it had only recently stopped burning. Though the picture wasn’t the best quality, I thought I could even seen a thin thread of grey smoke trailing up from what had once been an arm. I knew who it was, of course. Who else could it be? I felt tears springing up in my eyes as I looked away from the body to the distant corner of the picture. I recognized the room. It was my mother’s living room. The place she’d been burned alive.
I dropped the photo as I doubled over, retching. Nothing came up after several heaves, and after a few seconds I managed to stand back up slowly, my hand landing on the envelope as I touched the table for support. Fighting the urge to tear the envelope into little pieces unread, I instead made myself open it gently. This could all be evidence. I needed to try and not disturb it more than I could help. A dim voice told me I should go and get help now, let the police deal with all this, but I ignored it. I was in this now. I needed to see it through. I needed to know.
I have always been with you. I have watched and shaped your life since you were born.
I crumpled the letter without thinking, and then, disgusted with myself, I sat the wad of paper gently back on the table before striding toward the next door. The last room was just that—the last room. There was no other door leading away from it, and again, its only furnishing was a small table identical to the others. On that table was another picture, this time of me as I am now, though I don’t remember the photo and I have no idea how it could have been taken without me knowing given the distance and the angle. But more disturbing than the mystery of the photo itself was how it was presented. It was in a frame.
A frame from Santa’s Elf Village.
I felt the world swim around me for a moment. How could that be right? How would I even remember a cheap frame I saw at a distance when I was seven? Sure, it said “Santa’s Elf Village” on it, but how could I be sure it was the same one?
And yet I was. I reached for the final envelope from its place next to the photo, careful to avoid touching the frame as I did so. Ripping it open, I tried to read the lines written on the page it contained, but I was shaking too badly now. I finally sat the paper back on the table and read it from there, my breath coming in shallow, wheezing gasps as I tried to understand.
You have been prepared and I still have so much to show you. Are you ready to begin?
I was reading it a fourth time when I heard a high, delicate sound like a small bell chiming. It was coming from behind me, from the direction of the far wall where there had been no next door. Except now, when I looked back, I saw that there was.
And it was starting to open.
I ran. I ran through the second room, the first room, up the stairs into the crawlspace and outside into the too-bright noonday sun. I didn’t stop running until I got in my truck and then I was flooring it down the driveway, fishtailing onto the gravel road and barely avoiding winding up in the ditch as I overcorrected. I somehow managed to get back to the highway, and once I had a few miles distance and found a safe place to park, I tried my phone again. I got 911 right away this time, and I told them a sobbing, incoherent story about having found something bad at a house I was working at. That they needed to come and investigate. I finally managed to give them the address and then I just sat there for a while, shaking and crying as I tried to decide what to do.
I debated just going home or heading back to the office. Explaining to my boss what had happened, or at least some version that would make sense to him while making it clear we weren’t doing that job. But I kept going back to the idea of returning to the house. Of explaining to the cops the significance of what was down there. Sure, they’d taken my information and would probably talk to me later, but what if they missed something or didn’t try as hard without knowing what they were looking for? I decided I couldn’t risk it. Wiping my face, I turned around and started heading back to the house.
I could see the lights through the trees before I reached the driveway, setting off a flood of relief that loosened the tension in my chest. At least they were out here looking into it. I started to turn down the driveway when I realized it wasn’t just patrol cars I was seeing, but fire trucks.
Because the house was on fire.
They wouldn’t let me get close, but when I told them that I was the one that had called 911, and that it hadn’t been for a house fire, the deputy nodded and told me to wait in my car until one of the investigators arrived. When she did, I gave her pretty much the same account I’ve written here, except for the door that appeared at the end of that final hall.
They suspect me of arson, but of course they have no proof. But even if they believed me, they have no proof of what I’m saying either. They tell me they do see signs of what they’re calling “a detached sub-basement”, but anything that might have been there is either gone or destroyed by the flames. When I ask them how the fire would have gotten through multiple metal doors, they just stare at me as though they are trying to be polite. Trying to not call me a lunatic firebug to my face.
I don’t think anyone can help me. I’ve created a life without real attachments. With no one who trusts me or who I can trust. With no one who cares. Almost completely alone.
But just almost. Because I’m never really alone. I always have this constant companion, this corrosive angel, eating away at anything good in my life. The thought of this unseen curse, this invisible stalker, has always terrified me, even more so now that I know that it’s real. But even that confirmation isn’t the worst part.
No, the worst part is what might come next. The day when I see something out of the corner of my eye or hear the crystal ringing of a small bell, and when I turn to look, I see a door that shouldn’t be there. A shape that doesn’t belong. A voice that reaches across the distance to burn away what little I have left with five small words.
Are you ready to begin?
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Credits
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