“Maybe you’re just picking up me,” suggested Mike.
“Nope,” said Gary, after a pause. “This is definitely not you.”
“Is it constant? Are you amplifying at all?” asked Mike.
“No to both,” said Gary. “It doesn’t seem to sustain at all without you there, and we’re not adding any energy.”
“Hit it with the signal we gave before, and call it out over the radio,” suggested Mike.
He was answered with a long pause, but Gary’s voice came back before he could issue the order again. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said Mike. “Just go slow and look for the threshold. I’ll stay near the stairs.”
“Wouldn’t it be … ” said Gary.
Mike waited through another long pause before interrupting—“You guys having a secret conference out there? Just give it some juice, but go slow.”
“Okay,” said Gary. “You ready?”
“Any time,” Mike said, impatient.
He heard the click of the radio and then Gary’s voice filled the silence—“Zero point one.”
Mike leaned back against the railing of the stairs; this process would take a while.
“Zero point two,” said Gary.
After a few more readings, Katie checked in too. “Still tracking linear,” she said. “Any activity?”
“Nope,” said Mike, but he wasn’t being completely honest with Katie or himself. When he scanned the flashlight around the dusty cellar, he felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He was only really comfortable when his light pointed at the center of the cellar’s dirt floor. Not having that area lit up made him feel like he was snorkeling amongst sharks.
“One point zero,” Gary announced eventually.
“Wait a second,” Mike broke in between Gary’s readings. “When you said the energy was tracking linearly, what about the delta from me being down here.”
“Yeah, um,” said Katie, “I meant it was linear including the delta from you.”
“Do you remember the maximum reading when I would get close to the center of the room?” Mike asked.
“Sure, I’ve got it written down,” answered Katie.
“Great,” said Mike. “Tell me if this delta is the same,” He took a deep breath and then strode to the center of the room. Gravity seemed to be working extra hard here. He felt pulled into the dirt.
“The delta is significantly higher,” said Katie.
“So you have a non-linear response?”
“Yes,” said Katie.
“Good,” said Mike. “I’m going back to the stairwell. Please resume when I get there.” He felt better—predicting and then observing a result made him feel in control of the situation.
“One point one,” said Gary.
Mike smiled. It suddenly dawned on him that his anxious feelings were perfectly normal. He was standing in a room with elevated electro-magnetic fields. Plenty of studies showed that those fields could make a person feel paranoid, fearful, or anxious. He was having a perfectly normal reaction to his environment.
His new hypothesis was bolstered by the heightened sense of fear he had felt in the center of the room: that was the nexus of the fields his van projected.
“Three point four,” said Gary.
“What happened to the twos?” asked Mike.
“Pardon?” asked Gary.
“Didn’t you just skip a bunch of numbers?”
“Nope,” said Gary. “I read each one. Problem with the walkie?”
“I don’t think so,” answered MIke. “I didn’t hear an extra long delay or anything.”
“Maybe you should come back,” suggested Gary.
“I’m fine,” said Mike.
Am I really? Mike asked himself.
“Keep going,” Mike ordered.
“Three point five,” said Gary. Then, after a short pause—“three point six.”
“Non-linear,” Katie interjected, nearly frantic. “Non-linear. Dial it back Gary. Mike, I think we’ve hit a threshold.”
“How much did it decrease?”
“Almost twice as much,” said Katie. “We can’t see the stairs, Mike. Did you move at all?”
“No,” said Mike. A wave of shivers rolled over him.
“I backed it off,” said Gary. “But the response is holding steady Mike. Can you see anything?”
“Nope,” said Mike, but he kept his thumb down on the send button because before he could finish the short word, he did see something. “Wait,” he whispered.
In the van, Gary and Katie heard only the quiet static of the open transmission, but Mike heard something different. Mike heard the slow avalanche of a sandy hole collapsing in on itself. He imagined he would hear nearly the same sound if were trapped in an abandoned coffin while the grave walls eroded and caved in.
In the center of his beam of light, which was still trained on the middle of the cellar floor, Mike saw a small cone-shaped hole begin to form, as if a whirlpool were sucking it down and away.
“I think there’s something down there,” he whispered into the radio. He let go of the button.
“Mike? Mike?” yelled Gary.
At the sound of Gary’s voice, the three-inch hole stopped growing.
“Mike?” Gary asked again.
The small indentation shifted a foot towards Mike, leaving a trough of missing sand in its place. Without taking his eyes off the floor, Mike reached up with his flashlight-hand and turned off the radio to silence Gary’s voice. The hole began to grow again; its diameter widening to five inches and then six, while Mike stood paralyzed and entranced. The sand filtering down reminded Mike of a giant ant trap dug by a crafty spider.
Mike leaned forward, trying to see the center of the hole without moving any closer. He stood on his toes and reached out with his light. The center of the hole was two long strides away, but the edge crept closer every second as the hole grew and sandy dirt disappeared into the center.
A brown lump appeared at the bottom of the hole. The dirt stopped swirling. Mike watched as it formed a short column, and then another emerged adjacent to the first. Mike didn’t recognize the form until the second knuckle uncovered itself, and then it was difficult deny: he was watching the bones of a human hand materializing from the cellar floor of the old farmhouse.
Mike’s legs ached; he had no choice but to settle back on his heels before they gave out. The dirt shifted again as the rest of the fingers emerged. Once the bones of the wrist were free from the dirt, the hand bent and pawed lightly at the walls of the hole. Mike sucked in a shallow, trembling breath. The hand snapped up, with the fingers cupped in Mike’s direction.
The hand returned to pawing at the dirt, but moved faster with each swipe. When the elbow emerged, Mike realized that another small lump was poking through the side of the hole a few inches away from the arm. That lump lead to another set of fingers and soon Mike watched two skeletal arms struggling to break free from the dirt floor.
An egg shape, dirty brown like the arms, emerged next. The large shape resolved into a dome. Mike recognized the skull before the eye-sockets became visible. A few seconds later, when the head of the skeleton had shaken itself free from the dirt, the head swiveled, its empty eye sockets staring directly into Mike’s flashlight beam.
Mike leaned heavily on the bannister, trying to catch his breath. The naked jawbone of the entity began to clap, slamming its fossilized teeth into the upper jaw of the skull. The chattering accelerated to an impossible pace as the skull tilted left and right, as if regarding Mike.
The collar bones appeared quickly, now that the creature could reach the edges of the hold and press itself upwards. Mike heard a low moan and wondered why it sounded so close before he realized that it came from his own mouth.