Who's That In The Basement

The Miller house had been watching them the whole walk over. Kelsey Delmonico was sure of it.

The old place sat at the far end of Birch Creek Road like something the town had tried to forget, its shutters hanging crooked, its porch sagging in the middle. Dead kudzu climbed the siding and strangled the gutters. Every kid in town knew two things about the Miller house: nobody had lived there in years, and something terrible had happened inside it.

Kelsey knew both of those things. She walked straight toward the front door anyway.

"Tell me again why we're doing this," Josselyn said from two steps behind her. Her athletic skort swished with every step, and she had her arms crossed like that would somehow protect her.

"Because we're not scared," Kelsey said.

"I didn't say I was scared. I said I was questioning the decision-making process."

"Same thing." Kelsey clicked on her flashlight and pushed the front door open. It groaned on its hinges, low and long, like it was warning them. She stepped inside.

The air hit her first. It was heavy and stale, the kind of air that hadn't moved in a long time. Dust motes swirled through her flashlight beam as she swept it across the front room. Peeling wallpaper. A fireplace choked with ash. A couch that had caved in on itself. The whole place looked like time had quit caring about it.

Josselyn clicked on her own flashlight and came up beside her. "Okay, this is officially disgusting."

"Officially interesting," Kelsey corrected. She spotted the door at the back of the hallway, the one that led down. "Come on."

The basement stairs were narrow and steep, and they creaked under every step. Kelsey kept her flashlight aimed at the bottom and moved carefully, gripping the wooden railing even though part of her didn't trust it. The smell got worse the lower they went. Rot and damp and something that reminded her of old library books left in a puddle.

The basement itself was small and unfinished, with stone walls and a dirt floor that had gone hard as concrete. Broken shelves lined one wall. A rusted water heater crouched in the corner like a sleeping animal. Kelsey's flashlight moved across every inch of it, and then she stopped.

One of the stones in the far wall looked different. Slightly off-color, set a little farther back than the ones around it.

"Joss." She crossed the room and ran her fingers along the edges of the stone. It shifted under her hand, just slightly, like something behind it had given it permission to move. She pressed harder, and it scraped outward with a sound like a cough.

Behind the stone was a gap in the wall, wider than it looked, opening into a small hidden room. The air that came out of it was even colder than the basement. Kelsey shined her light inside and felt her stomach drop.

Old newspapers were stacked against the walls in neat, deliberate piles. A heavy wooden trunk sat in the center of the floor, its brass latch dark with age. And all of it had been sealed away from the world, hidden behind that single stone, waiting.

"That's not supposed to be here," Josselyn said quietly.

"No," Kelsey agreed. "It's really not."

She squeezed through the gap and knelt in front of the trunk. The latch took some work, stiff and rusted, but it gave. The lid was heavy. She lifted it with both hands.

Inside, wrapped loosely in a piece of old canvas cloth, was a knife. Long-bladed, wooden-handled, and covered in a layer of rust that wasn't entirely rust. The dark staining on the blade was uneven and old and wrong in a way that Kelsey felt in her chest rather than understood in her head. She didn't touch it. She just stared at it.

"Kelsey." Josselyn's voice was flat and careful. She had picked up one of the newspapers from the pile and was scanning it with her flashlight, her brow furrowed. "All of these are from the same week. Look at the dates."

Kelsey leaned over. The paper was yellowed and fragile at the edges, but the date was clear: twenty years ago. Every paper in the pile was from that same seven-day stretch. Someone had saved them all, deliberately, and hidden them down here with a knife that had no business being in a trunk.

This is real, she thought. This is actually real.

She wrapped her hand in the hem of her shirt and carefully, carefully picked up the knife by the handle. She was not going to leave it here. Whatever this was, it was evidence, and evidence didn't belong rotting in a hidden room in a house nobody remembered to check on.

Then the sound came from above them. A single heavy thud, right through the floorboards. Then another. Slow and deliberate, like footsteps crossing the room overhead.

Josselyn grabbed Kelsey's arm so fast she nearly dropped the flashlight. "Someone is in this house."

Kelsey didn't argue. She tucked the knife under her arm, squeezed back through the gap in the wall, and they ran. Up the basement stairs, two at a time, down the hallway, through the front door, and out into the gray afternoon light without once looking back. They didn't stop running until they were two full blocks away, breathing hard, the Miller house shrinking behind them.

Later, sitting on Kelsey's bedroom floor with the door locked, they laid the knife on a folded towel between them and stared at it. The dark stains on the blade looked even worse in the light of her desk lamp.

"We found a murder weapon," Josselyn said. She wasn't asking.

Kelsey looked at the knife, then at the newspapers spread around them, then back at her best friend. "We found a murder mystery," she said. "And we're going to figure it out."

Outside, the wind picked up and rattled her window. Neither of them moved to check what was there.