We didn't know our house had a cellar until the floor in the kitchen started to collapse. The official verdict was the sink leaking over the course of the building's fifty-odd years slowly eating away at everything around it. If that was true then we would have noticed it far sooner but it was clear that nobody but us felt comfortable in that place.
Whether it was the oppressive air or the curtains that always twitched in the corners of your eyes or the way you'd catch glimpses of hands retreating around the edges of doors - there was always something else nearby and we'd grown numb to it all.
The same can't be said for the countless repairmen we tried to get to help us seal the cellar again. Everything was so much worse when it had a direct route to our living space. What was formerly just light hauntings and scares from a distance soon became physical.
It wasn't unusual to wake up next to some unnameable lump sharing the bed, chittering and snarling in its sleep. We learnt to move like ghosts - silent and aware of every inch we occupied. Even a single centimeter felt like miles to much.
Sooner or later it'll come out of the cellar entirely and we'll end up like the shadows and many-clawed creatures it send to terrify us. I wonder where it will go first when it's freed - to the next house, the next town, the next city or country.
Wherever it goes it will take us with it.
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