Why do the shutters of the Jones Residence clap on windless nights? What hums beneath the floorboards when everyone is asleep, and why does it echo louder near the cellar door? What do neighbors mean when they whisper that the house “adds rooms” for those who overstay? Why are there muddy footprints leading down into the cellar, but none climbing back up?
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“Love is like a brick. You can build a house, or you can sink a dead body.”
― Lady Gaga
Mara had come to the Jones Residence to catalog it for the county. A tidy ground-floor plan—two small bedrooms, an honest living room, a cramped kitchen, and a stairwell that sank into the earth like a throat. Easy work, she told herself. Photograph, measure, leave.
The neighbors had warned her. “Don’t stay past sunset,” Mrs. Wilkes muttered while handing over the spare key. “The cellar wakes up when the lights go out. It wants people who don’t belong.”
She dismissed it as superstition. On her first afternoon she paced the living room, noting how every window faced the cellar door in distorted reflections. The floorboards hummed, faint but constant, and louder whenever she stood near the stairwell railing.
By the second hour she noticed the draft. It came from beneath the door at the base of the stairs, carrying the smell of damp soil and something metallic. In the kitchen she discovered muddy footprints crossing the linoleum, heading toward the cellar. None returned to the doorway.
The third hour brought whispers. They rose through the vents, threading the two bedrooms with the sound of children reciting lists—grocery items, errands, apologies. Whenever she tried to write them down, the words shifted on the page into floor-plan notes she hadn’t taken.
When dusk settled, the living room light refused to stay lit. Each time she flipped the switch, the bulb stuttered and showed her a different arrangement of furniture: a couch facing the wall, a chair atop the coffee table, a dining set she hadn’t seen, as though the house were testing new layouts.
She finally opened the cellar door. The steps were dry, but her boots left wet prints that continued ahead of her on their own, as if something invisible walked just out of sight. Halfway down, she heard footsteps above—measured and calm—crossing from the bedrooms to the kitchen and stopping at the top of the stairs.
The basement should have been unfinished concrete, yet she found rooms that mirrored the floor above, only older. The bedrooms contained cots with indentations. The living room held three chairs circling the base of the stairwell, all facing up. The kitchen down there had a second door that opened onto packed dirt pulsing like a slow heartbeat.
She looked back up the stairs and saw herself. Not a reflection, but a future version standing in the doorway, dust on her coat, eyes hollow from waiting. Behind that figure other faces crowded the hall, people the residence had “added” over the years, each mouthing the same silent plea: stay.
The whispers pressed into her head now, promising that if she stepped fully into the cellar, the house would rearrange to include her—maybe as a new hallway, maybe as another bedroom that no one remembered building. The muddy prints on the kitchen floor darkened, seeping steadily down the stairs.
When the morning crew arrived, Mara’s car was still in the driveway, her equipment lined neatly on the living room rug. The front door stood open. A faint draft drifted up from the cellar, carrying the scent of wet soil and the creak of furniture shifting somewhere below the ground floor.
The Jones Residence remembered. And the stair to the cellar was waiting for the next set of footsteps.
