Timmy’s Descent

Timmy Dower stood at the precipice of the basement stairs, his scrawny arms wrapped around himself like a straitjacket. The house creaked and settled around him, as if digesting its last meal. Mom called it a “fixer-upper with character,” but Timmy knew better. This house had history, it had an appetite, and it was always hungry.

“What’s the matter, bed wetter? Scared of the dark?” Jack’s voice drifted from the backdoor, thick with that specific cruelty only an older brother possesses. “Do I need to get Dad’s toolbox myself? Do you need a real man to do it for you?”

Timmy’s cheeks burned with anger. He was a man. He was eight, for Christ’s sake. “I can do it,” he said, his voice cracking despite his best efforts to sound tough. “I’m not a baby.”

“Could’ve fooled me. Better hurry. Or do you need Mommy to hold your hand?”

But as Timmy peered down into the gloom, his imagination conjured images that would make H. P. Lovecraft wet his pants: tentacles writhing in the darkness, eyes bulging with alien hunger, mouths full of teeth where mouths had no business being.

“I’m not…baby,” Timmy repeated, mostly to himself, in a voice as thin and unconvincing as tissue paper. He took a deep breath and tasted mold and something else — something older and far less natural, like the smell of rain in a world where water burned.

The first step creaked under his weight, a long, agonized scream that seemed to say, “Turn back, you fool!” But he pressed on.

With every step, he felt a growing dread centered on his exposed ankles. The gaps between the stairs yawned like hungry mouths, each one a window into an abyss that exhaled and inhaled with malevolent life. His ankles tingled, not with the pins-and-needles you get from sitting on the floor playing games for too long, but with the primal shock of a prey sensing a predator’s gaze.

Something whispered through the darkness beneath him. Was it the house settling as his parents always said old houses did? Or was it something else? He pictured bony fingers reaching out, their nails yellowed and cracked, ready to slice his Achilles tendons. Or maybe it would be tentacles that got him all slimy and strong, wrapping around his legs to yank him into whatever the hell waited below.

A feather-light touch brushed against his right ankle. He nearly screamed, jerking his foot away with such force he almost lost his balance. It had felt soft, like the kiss of a feather, but too cold, too deliberate to be innocent.

Heart doing backflips in his chest, he forced himself to keep moving. But now, with each step, he could swear he saw movement in the edges of his vision. A flash of scales here, the hint of something skittering there, always just out of clear sight.

The darkness on both sides of the steps deepened, if that was even possible. It was as if the blackness itself could reach out with inky tendrils for the exposed flesh of eight-year-old boys. He imagined them slithering up his legs, seeping into his pores, filling him from the inside out like a balloon until they burst through his skin and he became just another shadow in this godforsaken basement.

By the time his sneakers finally touched concrete, cold sweat drenched his back and his legs trembled from the effort of not breaking into a panicked run back to safety. He had made it down in one piece. But the relief was short-lived. For now, he stood fully in the domain of whatever dwelled here.

His fingers found the chain for the light, and he pulled it. The lone bulb suddenly flickered to life. Its jaundiced light showed a basement cluttered with the detritus of suburban life: cardboard boxes, shelves of old board games, an ancient washing machine, and there — in the far corner — the toolbox.

He lunged for it, his fingers closing around the thin handle. The metal was ice-cold and he could have sworn it bucked in his touch, like a heart beating its last.

That’s when the light behind him gave up the ghost with a soft pop and plunged him into a darkness so total he felt it compressing his eyes.

He turned for the rectangle of light at the top of the stairs, but what he saw instead made his bladder give up.

Someone — something — stood there, silhouetted against the warm glow of the sanctuary above. It wasn’t Jack. No. It was too tall. It wasn’t dad. Its proportions were all wrong, like someone who’d been stretched on a rack with gangling limbs and an elongated torso.

“J-Jack?” his voice cracked like thin ice on a deep pond. “This isn’t f-funny. Turn the light back on!”

The figure didn’t move. Th figure didn’t speak. Instead, a sound filled the basement. A low, rumbling growl that came from everywhere and yet nowhere. It vibrated in his bones, in his teeth, in the pit of his stomach where terror made its home.

Before he could scream, the door above slammed shut like a coffin lid. All Timmy could do was clutch the toolbox to his chest like a shield.

The growl came again, moving now, down the stairs, each thud punctuated by the scrape of claws on wood.

What had Jack always said about monsters? They’re not real, dummy. Grow up. But as the sound of the claws reached the concrete, he knew Jack had been wrong.

Monsters are real.

And then, like the lightning bolt that split the oak out front last summer, understanding crashed through Timmy’s fragile little mind. It wasn’t the understanding any eight-year-old should ever have; it was the understanding of midnight philosophies and mid-life crises hitting him all at once like a sledgehammer to his baby teeth.

His world, once as wide and innocent as summer vacation by the pool, shrank to the dank, dark inevitability of what approached him over the basement floor. In that one, horrible, stretched-out moment, Timmy Dower understood a truth as old and cold as the grave: Childhood ends not with a number, but with the moment you realize the monsters are real. And Timmy’s childhood was ending right here, right now, in the most horrifying way possible.

Fingers — so many fingers — closed around his arms and pried them almost lovingly apart. The toolbox, his only shield between his heart and whatever this thing was, crashed to the floor like a death sentence.

As he opened his mouth to scream, he realized that the darkness wasn’t empty at all. It was full. Full of writhing things, of teeth, of eyes that had never known sunlight.

The last thing he heard before the shadows descended upon him was his own heartbeat, drumming out a dirge against his ribs. A rhythm that seemed to say: You should have listened to Jack. You should have stayed upstairs.

…you should have…

…you should have…

…it should have been him and not me…

_____

Moments later, the basement door creaked open. Light spilled down the stairs onto nothing but scattered tools and an old red toolbox.

“Timmy?” Jack’s voice called down, tinged with annoyed concern, as he descended a few steps. “You taking a shit down here or something? Dad’s getting pissy. Need a man to step in for y — ?”

The door slammed shut, cutting off Jack’s words.

And in the darkness, something that was no longer Timmy smiled with too many teeth.