House and Hole

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text= What lives above.
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He stared at the door that had never been there. "This is impossible."

"Pretty standard impossibility." She pulled the amulet chain over her head, and replaced the whole thing in its steel case. "Would have been an impressive piece of thaumaturgy in its day, but now? One mass-produced pentacle and a chant from the manual, even a normie like me can dispel it."

The door he'd never seen before was simple slat wood, painted with chipping white. Faint remnants of red belied the magic circle that had once been imprinted there. She'd wiped it off after the chant. "What's down there?"

"A bit of old shame, if I judge this right." She handed him a printout: a very outdated-looking file, redactions galore. "We've been looking for this one a long time. Blackboxes made it impossible to track down, since the big fire at 11 took out all the basic research."

"You're saying..." He shook his head. "What //are// you saying? There's been an anomaly under my house this whole time, and someone hid it from us?"

"Not someone. The Foundation." She shook the case at him meaningfully as she slipped it back into her bag. The pentacle rattled inside, like prayer beads or scrying bones. "This sealing spell was one of ours. Hermetic, as in the Order of Hermes. Keeping whatever's down there from getting out."

The mystery portal now seemed even more sinister. "And why are we disturbing it today?"

"Because the files that didn't burn said it would probably be fine by the 90s. We're way behind schedule."

"Probably fine," he repeated.

"Yup!" Apparently not parsing his meaning, she pulled the cast iron handle and opened the door.

The steps were rickety, and painted white as the door had been. He hadn't seen painted steps like that for a long time. The air was close and musty, and the head clearance low -- one of the staircases linking the upper and lower floors of the house passed directly above them.

//Meaning every time I left the kitchen for the washroom, I was stepping over this space.// He didn't much like the thought of that.

Halfway down the stairs, she reached into her bag again and withdrew a drone. Just a little thing, shiny black with yellow rotors. She tossed into the air, and it snapped to life just before it would have struck the dark grey concrete below.

"You're going to map the basement?"

"Not quite." Now she was holding a tiny control panel with a pair of joysticks and readout. She deftly piloted the drone down the remaining steps, then dropped it toward the floor.

It kept dropping.

In the orange incandescence below, he now realized there was a hole. Not a wide hole, just a little bigger than he could make between his thumb and index finger. It was just beyond the base of the stairs, and it was absolutely pitch black. It seemed to devour the light. The drone fell through it, and was devoured as well.

They stood there, halfway descended, for twenty minutes. A few minutes in, he went upstairs to grab a Coke from the fridge. A few minutes later, the urge to take out his phone was almost overpowering. But he didn't do it.

//I'm such a good little scientist.//

Finally, when he was beginning to think they were going to stay there all afternoon, she made a soft clucking sound of satisfaction and tapped the controls sharply. It took a few more minutes, but eventually the sound of the rotors returned and the drone popped out of the hole.

"All clear," she remarked brightly, and hopped the rest of the way to the basement floor. The stairs creaked like old men protesting.

He followed her.

The basement was filled with rubble, gravel, dust and dirt. There was seepage in some of the cobbled stone walls, some plastered repairs in the foundation, and the floor was that kind of concrete they didn't make anymore, the kind that suggested Romans might have been involved in its mixing. //There were no Romans on this continent,// he reminded himself, but that didn't make anything better. It was dark, and somehow ominous; he found himself treading more roughly in his work boots, as though he could tamp down the implied threat.

She knelt in front of the hole, and hummed thoughtfully to herself.

"What is it?" he asked. "It's a drainage hole, right?"

"Might have been, once. Then some kind of monster that sucked people in."

He froze. "What people?"

"A family of three, a police detective, and two researchers." She paused. "Couple animals."

"And it was under my house?" He did a double take. "No, wait. And you brought us both down here?!"

She stood again, smiling brightly at him. "That drone has every kind of life and energy sensor we know of. Whatever lived in that hole, it's dead. Been dead for years."

He shook his head, anger and confusion fighting for control. "I spent half of my life in the same house as a monster. //We// did. My parents and I. And more than a couple of animals, too."

She nodded. "Were there any warning signs? Retrospectively?"

"No. Not at all. My mom always said this house protected us."

She raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment. "Home life?"

He didn't even need to consider. "Terrific parents. Great childhood. A happy family." He knew it was a rarity, but it was the truth.

"Huh."

"What?"

"The people who lived here before you definitely weren't happy."

"No?"

"No. That detective was already looking in on them before anyone went missing."

He stared at the hole. The ancient light fixtures weren't as efficient as fluorescents, but it should have been brighter than it was. Something about that yawning gullet seemed to draw in the light, but not let much of it back out... "Why do you think that is? They didn't have the benefit of the sealing spell?"

She shook her head. "No, the spell just kept you from noticing the door. Could be it just starved to death, not having anyone to eat."

He sensed there was something more. "Or?"

Again, she smiled. "Or maybe you had it backward just now."

It took him a minute to do the mental math, but when he'd figured it out, he found he was smiling as well. "The people before weren't happy."

"Definitely not."

"But we were."

"So you say."

"And it starved to death."

"Those are the facts in evidence." She wrinkled her nose, almost sneezing. His own dust allergy was giving him hell. "How you want to put them together is your business, but that's the interpretation I like best."

"Does it hold with what you know?" She was, after all, an expert in cursed locales.

She picked up her drone, then headed back to the stairs. The bottom step wobbled as she stepped on it. "I've seen a lot of haunted houses," she mused as she ascended, "and a few happy homes. Haven't seen very many happy haunted houses."

He thought about that for a moment, and decided he liked how it sounded. But there was something more...

He trowelled a bit of the grey dirt and stones over to the [[[scp-8975 | hole]]] with his boot, and pushed it all in.

//__We__ haunt our houses,// he silently appended.

When he heard the stones hit bottom, he followed her back up to the kitchen.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/harry-blank-10/hole.jpg]]

[[=]]
[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]]
[[<]]
> **Filename:** hole.jpg
> **Author:** [[*user HarryBlank]]
> **License:** CC BY-SA 3.0
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[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]
[[/=]]

House and Hole

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