After the drawings, I couldn’t look at the basement the same again.
Every time I passed the door, I felt that subtle pull — like the air around it was denser, thicker. It whispered to me without sound, a quiet hum beneath the rhythm of the house.
The furnace creaked differently now. The floorboards moaned deeper at night.
And the smell — that faint, metallic tang — had crept up through the vents, lingering even after I burned candles.
But I couldn’t talk to Steve about it. Not yet.
He’d just tell me I was letting “pregnancy paranoia” take the wheel.
So, I talked to someone else.
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Her name was Mrs. Langley, the woman who lived across the street.
A silver-haired widow who spent her mornings gardening and her afternoons watching the neighborhood through lace curtains. The kind of
