Excerpt from “Hole House”
Guy took a deep breath. He wanted to hold it as long as he could, to avoid breathing the air down there as much as possible. He wished Luther was here with some masks or air quality testing gadgets. There could be some mix of brimstone and human souls hanging in the air. That was marginally worse than asbestos.
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He started down the stairs. Mae hesitated briefly on the edge, then followed close behind him, using him as a bulwark against whatever might come surging at them.
After a few steps, he realized that he was running his hand along the smooth curve of the wall as he went. He always did that because there wasn’t a railing, and his natural instinct was to hold onto something. But he pulled his hand away this time because the wall was wet with condensation where the warm air from above met the colder air coming up the stairs. And it didn’t just feel wet. It was sticky, too, like the water didn’t want to come off of his fingers. Like it was mixed with petroleum jelly. He had to wipe his hand on his pant leg to get rid of it.
That was bad. That would need a scrub. And if it kept doing that, the drywall wouldn’t hold up for long. His mental calculator spat out a few more inches of receipt paper.
As they neared the bottom of the stairs, he could see that the light was still on. That was a good sign. At least it wouldn’t be total devastation down there. But the temperature seemed to drop another degree for every step he went down, and that was less encouraging. And there was a sound now. The first sound he’d heard anywhere near the house.
A moan, low and sorrowful, filled the basement and drifted up the stairs to where they crept.
And while he knew it had to be just moving air, he couldn’t quite convince himself it wasn’t coming from something alive. It carried with it the desperate, pleading cry of something that had spent centuries miserably alone.
He didn’t want to keep going down. But he did.