The Scarlet Door Beneath the Pantry
The instant I brought up the drawing, the kitchen seemed to change around us. Vance’s anger didn’t melt away; it stiffened into something watchful. He had the look of a dog that had stopped barking because it had spotted a threat.
He fixed his eyes on me. The sledgehammer lay by his boots, its head swallowed by the brown floodwater that had spoiled our kitchen overnight. His breathing was rough and uneven.
“What drawing?” he said. The swagger vanished from his voice. What remained sounded distant and thin, as if it had traveled up from somewhere underground.
“You should go, Vance.” My pulse pounded against my ribs. “The police are coming back to examine what’s underneath this house. If you fill a crime scene with cement, you could wind up in prison.”
For several seconds, he stood perfectly still, staring past me at the square opening in the pantry floor. Then he stooped for the hammer’s handle and turned away.
He went out through the back door, saying nothing. Four bags of cement remained behind in the flooded kitchen, their paper sides sagging in the water.
Sarah made a broken sound and hurried into my arms. I held her close; her skin felt cold through her clothes.
“I’m sorry, David,” she said against my shoulder. “I told Patricia about the nightmares. She kept asking why we were so careful about the foundation. I thought it might help her understand.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I murmured, pressing my lips to her hair. “This isn’t on you.”
Still, I felt the world giving way beneath us. Those dreams had followed me for three decades, vivid enough to leave me breathless even after waking.
A man’s voice counting from somewhere above. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. I was always rushing down thirteen steps into the dark, though I could never see what I was escaping.
I only knew that someone was being left behind. A child waited beyond a red door, pleading for me to return. You said you’d come back for me.
Six weeks earlier, Sarah and I had settled into a farmhouse outside Asheville, hoping its quiet would give us a clean beginning. Patricia, the real estate agent, had assured us there was no basement.
“Nothing under the boards but packed earth,” she’d promised with a friendly Southern smile. We believed her. We wanted a place without buried rooms or old ghosts.
Then a storm rolled in the night before.
Rain hammered the roof for hours. At about two in the morning, the kitchen’s ancient pipes ruptured inside the wall, and filthy water spread across the floor.
I went into the pantry to move our food out of the water’s reach. My foot caught on an uneven spot. The linoleum had lifted, exposing a heavy iron latch set into the boards.
I pulled it up. The smell that rose out of the opening was wet soil mixed with the sour scent of old paper. Below it, the darkness waited.
Concrete stairs descended into it.
Every instinct told me to shut the hatch and keep away. Instead, the dream drew me forward. I found a flashlight and started down, counting each step as I went.
One. Two. Three. The numbers sounded too familiar in the narrow stairwell.
I kept going until I reached thirteen.
A thick metal door stood at the foot of the stairs, its surface rusted and painted red.
When I opened it, my flashlight revealed a room that had no business being there: a concrete bunker, perhaps ten feet across and twelve deep. Stale air pressed against my face. The space was not empty.
Two child-sized beds stood against the far wall. Their mattresses had gone bad, and mice had chewed through the blankets. But the marks on the concrete were what brought me down to my knees.
Dates had been cut into the wall, one after another, with something hard enough to score the surface.
October 14, 1996. Then October 14, 1997. Then October 14, 1998.
The same date appeared over and over, a trail of years carved into the room. Every one of them fell on October 14.
My birthday.
Yellowed sheets lay scattered between the beds, covered with children’s crayon pictures: stick figures, simple houses, dark shapes like storm clouds. I sifted through them with trembling fingers.
On the pillow of the bed to the left sat a sheet that looked new, its paper still white and smooth.
Two boys stood hand in hand in front of this very farmhouse. Beneath the picture, careful adult lettering read: They Took You Away. I'm Still Waiting.
In one corner, a date showed that it had been drawn only six months ago.
Tires crackling over the gravel pulled me out of the memory. I tightened my hold on Sarah and looked toward the kitchen window, expecting to see the police returning with their forensic team.
A sleek black SUV had come up the drive instead. Patricia got out, dressed in a sharply fitted beige suit with a bright yellow folder in her hand. She studied the house without giving anything away.
Then she opened the back door and helped a frail old man with a walker out into the mud. He stared at our house with terrified, wide eyes.
