When I was a kid in school there was a boy I knew who disappeared off the face of the earth and to this day no one knows where he went. He was the only child of the Leavitt family. They used to live in this town. Before you moved here. The kid’s name was Eric. We weren’t good friends but we’d said hello a couple times. He didn’t disappear the way you think of people disappearing. He wasn’t kidnapped or stolen or killed. He didn’t run away in the middle of the night. What happened to Eric was stranger than that. It started when he was a boy. His grandmother came to live with the family in their little house. She had grown ill and could no longer care for herself. Her lungs were all wrong. She had to wear tubes in her nose and lug around a big clanking machine that made horrible noises to keep her alive. She meant well. But she was worrying woman. She worried about everything. About things that had happened in the past, and things that could happen in the future. She’d worry that a car might fly off the road and crash through the kitchen wall right now, this instant. She’d worry little Eric hadn’t eaten enough for dinner. Here, have some more honey. He needs to eat. He’s a growing boy. More than anything, she worried about her things. Grandmother Leavitt had so many things. Hundreds of old dolls, faded black and white photographs in rusted metal frames, ceramic statues whose eyes followed you, every birthday card she’d ever received. She kept all of it. She kept things no one would ever in their right mind think to keep. She brought all her things with her into the house until there was hardly any room to walk through the hallways. When you visited, you had to be careful to watch your step or you’d trip over an ancient rocking chair, a mildewy pile of decades-old newspapers, maybe a wood crate full of baby dolls, some of them missing eyes. Every inch of space in the Leavitt home was swallowed by Grandma’s things. But even that that didn’t stop her worrying. The very day she set foot in there, she found something new to worry about. Little Eric Leavitt. The only child of Mr. and Mrs. Leavitt, he became the focal point of his Grandmother’s worry. She couldn’t bear the thought of anything ever happening to her grandson. He had become one of her precious things, one of her dolls, something she had to keep out of the light, out of reach of anything that could leave a scratch. She didn’t let him play outside. She never let him off on his own. Even seeing him get on the bus to school drove her crazy. Think of all the horrid things that could happen to Eric at school, she’d say. She tried everything to keep Eric at home. If the boy let out as little as a sniffle, his Grandmother insisted he needed to spend the day at home, or the week, to get back on his feet. When he stayed home from school, his grandmother fed him cookies and salt water taffy and fried eggs and anything and everything Eric wanted. She’d stuff it down his face like that would keep him safe from the dangers of the outside world. They’d sit together on the sofa and watch old black and white television programs til Eric’s parents returned home from work. And still, Grandmother Leavitt worried. Her worrying grew worse with age. So did her breathing. She let out these long, rattling breaths that sounded like some wild animal, close, circling. Her voice was old and strained, always getting in the way of things. Her smell preceded her by at least two rooms. But what can you do? You can’t kick out family. Where else would she go? But then one day, they woke up, the Leavitt’s, to find her body stiff and dead in her old wood bed. There was a look of disbelief frozen on her wrinkled, bloodless face. Her oxygen tubes must have fallen out of her nose during the night. Her eyes were wide open when it happened. They buried her that very week and carried on. Shortly after the funeral, when she was underground, Eric moved into his grandmother’s old room. In the basement. His parents found him in there before dinner. He told them this was going to be his new room, and they said it would be too cold for him, but Eric didn’t leave. The dark room was stuffed with all of Grandma’s things. And after Eric moved in, he did not leave. A week later, he got a little under the weather himself. He developed a sniffle. A real sniffle. The sniffle became a stuffy nose and the stuffy nose became a sore throat and not long after he was at home in Grandma’s old, wood bed with tubes in his nose. With every breath came a rasping growl. It started soft and grew to a loud, rattling thing by the end of it. He wore the tubes in his nose day and night. It was a good thing they had kept the oxygen machine after Grandmother died. Eric ate cookies in bed. He watched black and white programs on her old television. He did not go out to see his friends. Pretty soon, his friends stopped checking on him. All Eric did was stay in his room. In his bed. Not even dressed. He produced the strangest noises from behind the closed door. Don’t even ask about the smell. His parents brought him breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a tin tray. They’d leave the tray at the base of the door and take a few steps back from it, holding their breath. They’d hear him coming from several feet away. The door would open a crack and a pair of pale hands, hands that hadn’t seen sun in who knows how long, would snatch the tray and yank it into the darkness of that room. Then the door would close again. His parents could hear him from the dining room table which sat squarely on the patch of floor above Eric’s chamber in the basement. Ghastly noises. Growling, sniffling, the shuffling of furniture. Heavy things being moved across the floor. What was he doing down there? And always that rasping cough they could not get away from. He kept the lights off in that room so neither of them knew when he was awake or asleep. Months and years of sickness changed his voice. Anyone’s guess how or where he was going to the bathroom. In the mornings, Mr. and Mrs. Leavitt woke to find the refrigerator raided, empty sometimes, nothing but scraps left behind by whatever beast could have done this. Every night, the noises. The Leavitts couldn’t sleep. The sound traveled up and always seemed to find them. They tried a white noise machine. Ear plugs. Piling pillows over the sides of their heads. But they could not get away from the coughing, hacking, rasping. The floorboards of the basement room bumping up and down. Nails being hammered. Loud, deep creaking from the bowels of the house, their home itself beginning to cough. It was all they could do to hold each other tight til the sun came up. One night, Mr. Leavitt got out of bed and said Enough, and he went downstairs to the basement with his tool bag. He carried down heavy wooden clapboards and nailed them over the door. As if that might conceal the noise. They didn’t care about the things they’d left inside the room. They just wanted to try and forget about it. Carry on. But at night they heard it still. There was no escaping the noise. The Leavitts themselves stopped showing their faces at neighborhood parties. They stayed at home. They ate dinner, the two of them, and tried to ignore the sounds from below. They cleared the table. One day on his way home from work, Mr. Leavitt missed a turn and drove his car clean off the edge of a sheer cliff face. He died in the resulting crash. Mrs. Leavitt mourned privately. After the funeral, she left everything in the house exactly as it was. She left the clapboards nailed to the basement room door. Mrs. Leavitt was left alone with the noise. Not just coughing now. Other things. The distant whine of old television programs. The shattering of plates. The deep, intestinal groan of a capsized ship. Was the house sinking into the earth? There were also smells. Every night she could sense the odors of food she hadn’t cooked in years. Mrs. Leavitt learned to ignore these things. She learned to live like this. Time went on. She grew to be an old woman herself. And it was many more years later, you see, before Mrs. Leavitt finally ventured down into the depths of her own home to face what she’d chosen to forget. It was her son’s birthday. The day she went down there. He would have been how old now. She was a very old woman and not so steady on her feet. She did not know why she was doing this. But she brought a treat with her. A cupcake with a candle in it. Something special. She used her late husband’s hammer to pry off the nails of the clapboards on the door. In that room, that long dark room, everything lay exactly as it was. Nothing had changed. Except for all the things. Grandma’s things. They were all gone. Where had they gone? From the doorway, Mrs. Leavitt could see a square of pitch black beneath the old wooden bed. She crept up to it and pushed the bed aside to look at what it was. A big gaping hole that went way, way down into the earth. A spiral staircase winding down into the black. Each step made of mud and twigs and twisted hair. It went down so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. Mrs. Leavitt took a breath. She put her slippered foot on the first step, and then the next, and down she went into that hole in the floor, into the place she had left behind. How long she had to climb down into the depths no one knows. But long after she could no longer see her own two hands in front of her, Mrs. Leavitt saw a light at the bottom. A spark, something. It was the faint yellow light from one of Grandmother Leavitt’s old lamps. She descended the mud steps faster now to get closer to that light. There were sounds. Sounds that got louder as she stepped into the faint light.Scurrying feet, the frantic scratching of bare skin on wet earth. Hushed noises of some creature she could not yet see. It was when she reached the bottom that she saw what had been waiting for her all this
