Chapter 7 - The Soil and the Foundation
The cellar was cold, damp, and smelled heavily of earth, concrete, and ancient decay. The sound of rain lashing against the house above was muffled here, replaced by the deep, rhythmic groan of the home's stone foundation holding up the weight of the structure.
Ryan clicked on the brass flashlight, sweeping its beam across the basement floor.
The room was unfinished—dirt floors surrounded by fieldstone walls built in the late nineteenth century. In the far corner sat an old oil furnace, its rusty pipes stretching up into the floor joists like the blackened intestines of a dead beast.
"Over there!" Ryan pointed the light toward a pair of heavy wooden storm doors set into the stone wall on the far side of the cellar. "That leads up to the backyard."
They hurried across the uneven dirt floor, their footfalls soft against the packed earth.
When they reached the storm doors, Ryan grabbed the rusted iron latch and lifted it. The doors groaned, but they opened three inches before jamming against something heavy resting on the outside doors from the yard.
Ryan shoved his shoulder against the wood, peering through the three-inch gap into the darkness outside.
The backyard was gone.
Protruding through the gap in the storm doors was a solid wall of wet, black, packed earth—filled with earthworms, rotting roots, and fragments of decaying wood. The entire house hadn't just been locked; it had been submerged. The blackwood soil had swallowed the house whole, burying it deep beneath the surface of the earth.
"We're underground," Sarah whispered, her eyes wide with a quiet, hollow despair as she stared at the wall of dirt. "Ryan... we're inside a grave."
Above them, the ceiling joists began to creak violently.
TAP. TAP. TAP.
Directly above their heads, the kitchen floorboards groaned. Then, a small, white circle of metal cut through the floor joists—the air vent from the kitchen had been pushed down through the ceiling, hanging suspended in the air above the basement dirt floor.
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From the hanging metal cylinder, two thin, pale legs in soil-stained white socks dangled into the basement air, swinging back and forth like a child sitting on a playground swing.
"Daddy..." the voice floated down, soft, sweet, and terrifyingly close. "You can't go outside. It's raining."
