Chapter 6 - The Crawlspace Below
Panic overrode guilt. Ryan lunged to his right, grabbing the iron fire poker off the floor, and smashed the heavy metal tip against the glass pane of the front hallway window.
CRASH!
Glass shattered outward into the rainy night. Ryan didn't hesitate; he reached out, grabbed the wooden frame, and tried to drag himself up onto the sill to escape into the yard.
A cold, wet hand clamped around his left ankle.
The grip was agonizingly tight, feeling less like human fingers and more like a steel vise coated in ice. Ryan screamed as he was yanked backward off the windowsill, his chest slamming hard against the floorboards.
He turned on his back, kicking wildly with his free right boot.
Sticking out from a newly broken floorboard beneath the coat closet was a rotting, skeletal arm wrapped in blue fabric—the remains of Lily’s burial dress. The arm was dragging Ryan slowly, relentlessly, toward the gaping black hole in the floorboards.
"Sarah! Help me!" Ryan shrieked, clawing at the dark oak floor, his fingernails snapping as he tried to find a handhold.
Sarah snapped out of her trance. She grabbed the heavy brass flashlight off the floor, raised it high above her head, and brought it down with all her strength onto the rotting arm attached to Ryan’s ankle.
THWACK!
The impact shattered the brittle, dry bone of the wrist. The skeletal hand released its grip, collapsing into a heap of dirt and grey powder.
Ryan scrambled to his feet, gasping for air, grabbing Sarah’s arm. "The cellar!" he yelled, his voice hoarse and raw. "The cellar door in the kitchen leads to the exterior bulkhead! We can get out through the storm doors!"
They bolted back down the hallway, sprinting past the dark living room toward the kitchen.
Behind them, the sound of splintering wood echoed through the house as floorboards across the entire ground floor began to buckle, burst, and shatter outward from below, as if something massive was crawling through the subfloor, expanding to fill the entire structural foundation of the house.
May you like
They reached the kitchen. Ryan threw open the heavy wooden basement door beside the pantry, revealing a steep flight of wooden stairs leading down into the pitch-black cellar.
Without waiting, Ryan, Sarah, and Toby rushed down the steps into the basement, slamming the heavy door shut behind them and throwing the iron slide bolt into place.
