I live in the National Radio Quiet Zone. Last night, my cellphone rang.

I’ve been living deep in the National Radio Quiet Zone for almost a year now. For those unfamiliar, the NRQZ is a thirteen thousand mile cube of land in West Virginia where the usage of radio frequency is extremely limited to protect the sensitive equipment of the observatory and military intelligence facilities located within. Now I know what you’re probably thinking. This guy’s a farmer right? Nope, I work in data analysis. Call center reporting specifically, and yes that is exactly as boring as it sounds. A common misconception is that the area is off the grid, but really it’s just a cellular dead zone. No signal or radio broadcasts for miles and miles. Most of the permanent residents don’t even have cell phones, though I held onto mine.  With the launch of starlink, I got good enough speeds for my company to greenlight my remote position when I moved. 

Uprooting my life in the city to live in the sticks hadn’t been planned. I was going about my day to day routine and one day I came home to a certified letter informing me I was the beneficiary of my great aunt’s estate. If I’m being honest with you guys, I had forgotten I had a great aunt. I had only met Edna a handful of times as a kid, but whenever we went to visit, my Grandpa always told her how smart I was…and how I would need money for college one day.  Grandpa wasn’t very subtle.  We had always assumed Edna just ignored his requests, but I guess she took them to heart. Turns out Grandpa was right on both accounts, I was smart enough for college, sure enough, but not for a full ride and I had accrued a good bit of that dreaded student debt that plagues my generation.

 Initially, I had thought to just sell the property, but after looking over the whole seven hundred feet of studio apartment that I was paying  around thirteen hundred dollars a month for to call my own, I gave it a second thought. Edna had lived alone on a sprawling farm that her husband had run before passing away. The house itself was two stories with a basement, and there was also a garage and a couple of barns on the property. It was more space than I could ever fill. The more I turned the idea in my head, the more appealing it became. No more storage unit fees, no more rush hour traffic, no more battling for parking. I would save a ton of money that could be put towards my student loans and have a space that was actually mine.  After confirming that the area was suitable for my remote work, I packed my bags. 

Rural life wasn’t completely foreign to me. I had spent my time in college and the first few years of my career in the city, sure, but I spent my childhood living on the outskirts of a small town with my grandparents. Grandpa wasn’t a farmer, per se, but after he had retired, he raised chickens and gardened to help subsidize food costs and I had learned the basics of self sufficiency. I had always helped him water the garden and chop firewood growing up, which was good, because the baseboard heat in aunt Edna’s house was shot. I wasn’t going in blind, but living this far out in the country, well it definitely took some getting used to. 

Walking back into Edna’s house for the first time in over a decade was like cracking open a time capsule. Each room was filled haphazardly with styles from across the decades. The living room furniture was an array of Victorian style carved walnut with deep maroon cloth. The type of stuff you expect to see when you walk into an antique store. Meanwhile the kitchen was a bi-polar smattering of frontier times and the sixties. Linoleum flooring and a laminate aluminum dining set shared space with a full blown cast iron, wood powered cooking range. I sacrificed a lot of good bacon to that thing before I got the heat management fully figured out.

Once I got my own stuff fully unpacked and started to make the space my own, I began to settle in and the place started to feel like home. Sure, I may have been in the middle of nowhere now, but my daily routine barely changed. Every morning I made myself a fresh pot of coffee and fed my cat, Sadie, then logged into work for the day and pretended I was listening during the morning meeting. I did my reporting until the late afternoon and signed off to make dinner and relax for the evening. Sometimes I would go on walks, other nights I would stay in to play Xbox with my buddies, just like I did in the city. Having the internet really reduced the system shock from the move. 

Now we start to get into the heart of why I’m writing this. Things have been going along quite well overall, but when you start to spend all your time alone, you slowly begin to become hyper aware of your surroundings. The little bits of strangeness that you would normally write off start to stick out more and more and eat away at your thoughts. For me, that little bit of strangeness was the sour smell emanating from the basement. 

I noticed it a couple of days ago, while I was making myself breakfast. The pleasing aroma of the coffee I had just poured was disrupted by a wafting scent of spoiled milk. I crinkled my nose, sniffing and looking around for the source when I noticed that the basement door was cracked. I hadn’t been in the basement since I moved into the house. It had been months and I had been unconsciously avoiding it. Catching that whiff of fetid air and seeing the door cracked a mental dam I had put up in my head and an unwanted memory came pouring back in.

—-

It was the second trip we took to visit Aunt Edna, I believe I was eight at the time, just the right age to be excited about the trip. I had just been five last time we visited, and barely remembered anything about the trip. This time though, the big house and rolling farmland presented itself as a huge maze waiting to be explored. I loved creeping through the rooms, opening all the cabinets and drawers I probably wasn’t supposed to mess in, but the one room I hated was the side room leading down to the basement. The little room was on the edge of the kitchen and it acted as the ground floor bathroom. It was an awkward setup really. You stepped through the thin wooden door and a barebones toilet and sink hung to your right, while to your left a set of rugged wooden stairs led into the dark stone of the unfinished basement. There was no door or anything separating the area. I always felt like something lurking behind me watching me when I had to pee, plus the room stunk to high heaven. I hated it. I remember asking my Grandma about the smell.

“Aunt Edna does things a little different out here.” She had told me. “If she asks you if you want to try some butter milk, tell her no thank you.”

I wasn’t sure what butter milk was at that age, but if it had anything to do with the smell, I needed no further persuasion. After a few uncomfortable bathroom breaks, I just started peeing upstairs or outside, electing to keep my distance from the basement. My plan worked for a day or two but then one evening Aunt Edna was getting ready to cook supper and I happened to run through the kitchen at the wrong moment. 

“Joseph, could you run down to the cellar and get me a can of tomatoes? Your legs are younger than mine.”

“Um…I…guess so” I stuttered, trying to think of an excuse, but my eight year old brain came up short. 

At the top of the staircase, I looked down into the darkness below. I was caught in the horrible position of not wanting to look scared while being, yep, you guessed it, utterly afraid. Reluctantly, I bit down my fear and descended the wooden stairs. The only light came from a tiny pull string bulb that hung at the edge of the staircase, the sparse illumination it provided did little to alleviate my fears. The room was more cavern or dungeon than basement. The walls weren’t even cinderblock but were old stone masonry and the floor was an array of stonework, plywood, and in some places, just plain dirt. Exposed pipes and ductwork and an old oil tank sat in the room and the rest of the space was lined with a maze of rickety wooden shelves that Aunt Edna had filled to the brim with jar after jar of canned vegetables from her gardens. The room felt moist and the sour stench was stronger than ever. 

I scanned the room as quickly as my frightened little mind allowed until I spotted a group of jars on the far shelves filled with red pulp that I hoped were the right tomatoes. I grabbed the jar and was about to book it back up the stairs when I paused, my fear giving way to curiosity for a brief moment. There was something odd about the shelves at the back of the room. Most of the jars were stacked a couple of rows deep, but I happened to grab the last one off of that portion of the shelf. Instead of a wall, there was more basement in the opening left behind by the jar. The wall of shelving wasn’t the end of the space, but I couldn’t tell what was back there because of the dim light.

 After a moment I gave up and started to walk away when I heard some of the jars rattle behind me. I turned to look at the back of the room again and my breath caught in my throat. My little heart began to pound in my chest as I saw movement behind the shelves. Glimpses of a crimson figure peaked out of the shadows looking at me through the jars and shelving like an inmate peering through prison bars. It slowly crept along at a hunch, unable to rise to its full height pawing its way along the shelves until it reached where I had removed the jar. A set of pale milky eyes briefly appeared in the opening and then a long arm of blackened sinew reached through. The air filled with a strange gentle coo-ing sound as a spindly finger curled at me in a come hither motion. 

Time seemed to stop as I stood paralyzed watching the finger beckon to me. At some point my bladder loosed and I looked down at my soiled pants. When I looked back up I realized I had moved a couple of feet closer to the arm. I dropped the jar in surprise and the shattering glass snapped me out of it. I ran back up the stairs bawling about the monster in the basement. 

—-

I don’t remember what my grandparents had done to calm me down, but I know I never went near that basement door again.  Even the couple of times we visited when I was older, I stayed far away. Now, looking at the cracked door, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I stared at it transfixed. How had the door opened? I hadn’t touched it since I moved in. Where was that sour smell coming from? My resolve steeled, I wasn’t eight anymore I was a grown man. I grabbed a flashlight and headed downstairs.

The basement was just as I had remembered it, minus Aunt Edna’s vast supply of canned vegetables. They had been cleaned out after she passed away and the shelves now stood bare. Unease was washing over me as I looked around. The smell had dissipated as I descended the stairs but the room still creeped me out. Shining my light over those bare shelves, I could see that I had been right all those years ago. The room expanded past the barricade of shelving, but it wasn’t really part of the basement at all. The space hidden away was just a dugout pit. The first few feet followed along at the full height of the basement, but slowly rounded off and shrunk lower and lower until it petered out somewhere off in the darkness. My flashlight wasn’t very strong and it was hard to see. It looked like at some point Edna, or maybe her husband had started to expand the basement but gave up on the project. Relief washed over me, the dirt pit was weird but there was no childhood monster waiting for me and I went about my day as usual. 

Last night, I woke up to the jaunty tune of my iphone’s ringtone. It nearly gave me a heart attack. The phone hadn’t rung since I moved here. It couldn’t ring. There was absolutely no signal for miles. I only still had the thing for when I went into town and in case of emergencies.  It kept ringing, but displayed no number on the screen. I stared at it a moment, my heart still racing in my chest, then answered.

“Hello?” I mumbled groggily.

An array of static and clicks met me on the other end of the line. I could hear tiny bits of a voice mixed in, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

“Hello?” I asked again. “I can’t hear you.”

More static. I was about to hang up when the line suddenly went clear. A whisper of a voice spoke.

“They’ve found their way back inside. Don’t follow them.”  

The line went dead.

Below me, I heard the protestations of the wooden floors as something slowly meandered about the bottom level of my home. I sat frozen in my bed, telling myself it was just the house settling. This house was almost a century old, if you breathed on it, it made a noise. The creaking continued and I mentally noted the sound as moved. The kitchen, the living room, the sun room, the living room again…the foot of the staircase. 

Thump. The bottom steps.

Thump. The middle.

Thump. My second floor.

The footsteps continued, making their way down the hall until they stopped right outside of my door. I couldn’t see anything in the black, but from the foot of my bed Sadie stirred. Her hairs stood on end and she let out an ungodly yowl. 

Thump Thump Thump Thump Thump.

The hidden presence thundered its way down the hallway and the stairs, disappearing back into the floor below. I didn’t move until morning. When daylight finally broke, I ventured out of my room and slowly crept down the stairs. I had a dinky little .22 revolver that my grandpa had taught me to shoot with clutched in my hands. It wasn’t much, but was better than nothing. I checked throughout the house, bravery returning with the daylight, finding nothing out of place until I made my way to the kitchen.  

The door to the basement hung wide open.

I took Sadie and drove into town and booked a few nights at the hotel that I’m currently writing from. I don’t know if I’m going to go back to the house. I guess I have to, eventually, at least to collect my things if nothing else. I might check around to see if anybody knows anything about the property or my great Aunt that might shed some light on whatever’s going on, but honestly I don’t know where to start. I’ll keep you guys updated if I find anything or go back to the house. This journal of events is really functioning as a sanity check. Stay safe out there.