Shadows Beneath Northfield

Northfield, Massachusetts, was the kind of town that didn’t make the news unless someone lived to be a hundred or a tree fell on Main Street. One gas station, a library that still stamped books, and a diner where people talked like they were afraid of running out of words. It was small, proud, and cradled in autumn hills that flamed orange and gold each October.

Eli Mercer moved there because it was cheap. After years of contract IT work in Boston and a string of temporary relationships, he wanted a place where he could vanish into routine. A basement to tinker with old computers. A coffee shop where the barista knew his order. Somewhere the noise of the world couldn’t reach him.

He rented a ramshackle farmhouse at the edge of a disused cranberry bog. The land was sunken and sullen, choked with vines and cattails. The realtor said the bog hadn’t been worked in decades, not since "the incident," then changed the subject.

Eli didn’t ask questions. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in power surges and bandwidth throttling, in sleepless nights debugging rogue code. Ghosts were just lag in the human brain.

But something about the bog bothered him.

It wasn’t the smell, though there was one—a faint, loamy rot, like wet bark left too long in the dark. It wasn’t the lack of wildlife, though he never saw birds perch on the gnarled branches that rose like fingers from the murk. It was the sound, or the lack of it. A silence so deep it felt like the bog swallowed echoes.

He mentioned it to June at the coffee shop one morning.

"Things don’t echo out there," he said, stirring sugar into his mug. "It’s like the air just... eats noise."

June didn’t laugh. She didn’t blink.

"You ought to come to church on Sunday," she said, and walked away.

He didn’t go to church.

That night, the silence followed him indoors. Not metaphorically. It felt real. Tangible. His computer fan spun down. His phone wouldn’t play music. He spoke aloud, and his own voice sounded muffled, like someone had shoved cotton in his ears.

He stood on the back porch, looking out over the bog. Fog pressed close to the trees. The wind was still. And then he heard it:

A single knock. From the ground.

Not the porch. Not the door. From below.

He froze, rationalizing. An animal. A branch falling. A root shifting. But none of those things knocked in a slow, deliberate rhythm.

The next day, he opened the crawlspace.

Dust and cobwebs greeted him, and a cold draft like something exhaling. The space was too shallow for anyone to stand, and yet... in the far corner, half-buried in dirt, he found a piece of wood that looked oddly deliberate. A square panel. Hand-hewn.

He unearthed it, revealing a trapdoor.

It took hours to convince himself to open it. He waited until morning, when light pooled like gold through the kitchen windows, and grabbed his flashlight.

The trapdoor opened with a groan that sounded like a warning. Beneath it: stairs. Dry, old, packed earth on all sides. The air reeked of minerals and mold.

He descended.

The space below was larger than expected—a root cellar, maybe, but strange. Too deep. The floor was smooth clay. At the far end stood a wall etched with symbols: spirals, eyes, and stick-figures with flared hands.

At the center was a depression in the dirt. Like a nest.

Inside it: bones. Not human, not quite animal. Curved, delicate, and wrong.

He backed out slowly. Covered the trapdoor. Locked it. Didn’t sleep.

The silence grew heavier.

Over the next week, the ground thumped at night. Always the same rhythm. Knock. Knock. Knock. As if calling out a name it didn’t yet know.

Eli tried to leave. Packed his car, turned the key.

Nothing.

Battery fine. Tank full. But the engine refused to turn. Same with his phone. Dead pixels bloomed across the screen like frostbite.

He walked into town, but the roads all bent subtly back toward the bog. It took him three hours to realize he'd circled the same grove three times.

He went to the library. Old newspaper clippings told of a girl lost in the bog in 1963. "Elizabeth Arlen, age 9. Last seen chasing fireflies near dusk." Another clipping a week later: "Minister Claims Child 'Taken' by Hollow Earth Spirits."

No body was ever found.

He showed the clipping to June. She tore it from his hands.

"You need to stop digging," she whispered. "You woke something. We’d kept it quiet. Dormant. It feeds on attention. On memory."

"What is it?"

"We don’t know. It was here before us. Maybe before anything. We buried it and left it to sleep. Then you came. With your questions. With your light."

That night, the bog was glowing.

A faint green shimmer hovered over the surface. Shapes moved beneath it, rippling like dancers behind a veil. The air was thick with murmurs. Eli couldn’t understand the words, but they spoke to him. Knew his name. His memories. His fears.

He tried to board the trapdoor shut. But it opened on its own. Not violently. Just... open, as though it had never been closed.

The next morning, the house was filled with fog.

Eli was gone.

---

When the next tenant moved into the farmhouse, the realtor said nothing about the bog. Just that the last guy was a drifter. Probably found work in Albany.

But some nights, when the wind dies and the leaves hush, there’s a knock beneath the floorboards. Gentle. Polite.

And in the bog, when the moon is thin and the mist clings to the reeds, you can see a shape watching from just beneath the surface.

Waiting for someone to remember.