There’s Nothing in the Attic

The house at the end of the street was for sale and it was a bright day in the town square down the road where the markets were beginning to open their shutters. Children who were off from school for the weekend, took their balls and dolls to play there often. Recently, the rest of the street noticed that the ‘for sale’ sign on that single house at the far end of the street had been crossed out and replaced with ‘sold’. A little girl with brown hair the length of her back, the daughter of the newcomer’s next-door neighbour shuddered lightly to her friend, “don’t you remember what happened there?” But her friend simply shook his head and shrugged it off. “That guy that went missing…Didn’t he live there?” She sounded unsure, as if she couldn’t remember, as if it had even happened in her lifetime.

Her friend blew raspberry and stuck his tongue out at the same time - arrogant and mocking, “don’t be stupid…you don’t really believe that myth do you?” He walked to the swing set at the back of their garden but noticed that the seats were full of water and bugs. Her father was in the shed and came out to greet the child staring down at the mush of dead insects and mud that littered the swing.

“Ha ha…” The shabbily-dressed man started happily, ready only for a clear day of gardening work. “The Doloracmetus…” He picked up a handful of the murky water in the swing and shook it so that only a small bug with flaccid wings was left. “A fun fact about this little bug here, in those tiny antennae is enough anaesthetic to put someone asleep for surgery!” The boy looked at the bug and then up at his friend’s father who was filled with excitement at this discovery. He felt his stomach churn at the sight of the dead insect with its legs splayed out and its wings soaked. “But, this one is as dead as a doornail…” He tossed it on to the floor and began picking out the weeds near the shed. “It’s not that we see one of those every day, Timmy. Count yourself lucky!” But he was already walking up back the garden towards the little girl.

Making a face of disgust, he trundled over to his friend and stopped to look at the house for himself. “Well…” Timmy took his eyes away from the house and scrunched his nose at her mockingly as if to not only say she was stupid, but also to call her father a weirdo for knowing things about bugs.

Feeling silly and bending her head to the floor, the little girl shook her locks violently, her hair flapping about in the wind and coming into her seven-year-old face. It was true that there was a myth made before the two of them were born that once upon a grizzly time fifty or so years’ ago, a man vanished inside that very house. There were random stories that kept popping up in random places. But they were all about the same house. One of the stories had included the man running out into the woods and never returning, another was that he was in the house and someone had come to kill him, the last and probably most famous that the children had heard of was that he made the house angry and so it never let him out again and he starved to death. Time had carried him away and there was no single trace of him left. Be that as it may, the children had no idea when these stories were supposed to have happened, they just knew that amongst the schoolyard, they flew around especially during Halloween. They were told around campfires and once again, each time that house was sold the stories would come back from the dead.

But they were just stories and stories hadn’t stopped adults who couldn’t care less for ghosts and ghouls from buying and selling the house every decade or so. It was a nice house and looked like the rest of the houses on the street. The only thing about it that stood out was an extravagant bird-feeder that sat on the front lawn, filled with water and shaped like one of those koi ponds from Japan, it was a lovely addition to the property and always enticed the ladies to look around inside for more quaint ornaments that the previous seller was leaving behind.

The two children went inside their house for some homemade lemonade from the mother and watched as the moving van turned into the street and stopped just outside the house that had now been sold and was about to be inhabited. Out stepped a man of no distinguishable qualities. He wore a grey suit and carried a large box labelled ‘CDs’. The men in the moving van who started lifting furniture looked relatively stronger than the man in the suit and it was clear the new inhabitant had no want to get to know the neighbours as he went straight inside and, after a few minutes of shifting sofas and tables, shut the door behind him - opening it only to let out the movers.

Inside the house it was clean, crisp and looked newly renovated. He walked around it, pacing on the wooden floors and thought it was a very modern type regardless of how old it looked from the outside. This was something he was told about when buying the house. It had wooden floors put down and new walls put up to make people want to live there. “Nobody wants something Edwardian anymore…not from the inside anyway…” that he knew was true.

He piled up the boxes in what would become his living room and was glad that the men had taken the bed to his room to begin with, he stretched in tiredness and thought he would have an early night in. Picking up his box labelled ‘CDs’ he went for the basement which had a nice little set of spiral steps to it. There were still parts of the house that felt older and were probably left out of the renovation due to their inviting qualities - a historical universe locked in a modern decor. He knew that much and would like to have known more if it was not for what happened next. He went to get the basement door open and found it jammed shut. He went to unlock it again, but it was already unlocked. It simply would not budge. He threw himself at it with all of his might, but might or not - he simply could not get it open.

“Hi…” He said down the phone as he walked up and down the spiral staircase, confused. “Yes, my basement door, it won’t open. Could you come and have a look at it please?” The person on the other end of the phone agreed and that evening, was out at his house.

“Yes, the basement is just this way…” Leading the doorman down the spiral staircase, he kept talking about how he couldn’t get the door open even though it was unlocked and assumed there must have been something wrong with the-. That’s when they both saw it. The basement door was wide open. It wasn’t just opened, it was wide open. The doorman went over to it, shut the door and opened it again.

“There seems to be no problem anymore.” He tipped his hat and scratched his head. “It could’ve just been the wind holding the door shut. Nobody’s been here in about three years. It happens.” The doorman went back up the stairs and left without charge. The man stood there and, walking back over, he shut the basement door quietly and went to bed.

It was a colder night than usual and he got he got his bedsheets ready in the empty room alongside a portable heater. He hadn’t had time to heat up the room and the shivering rising up from his ankles was making him regret it. He threw on the bedsheets, switched on the heater and put on a pair a fluffy white socks to keep his feet warm. Climbing into bed, he turned off the bedside lamp and lay down. He had he heard a shuffling but thought that it must have been the trees outside his window, brushing against one another as the rain began to come down in folds.

He awoke the next morning to find that the rain had not yet stopped. He got dressed for his job as an accountant at a firm run by his next-door neighbour. Looking out of the window, he saw his neighbour pick up a little girl, put her in the back seat of their car and drive off down the street. She wore a waterproof coat meaning that he already knew it was going to rain for a while yet. Looking in the mirror then, he adjusted his tie. That was when he saw it. He stared down at his hands with a pale white look on his face as if something or someone somewhere had just died in a horribly violent way and he couldn’t bare to see the body.

He stared down, his jaw falling slightly open and turned his hands so that his watch face was looking straight at him. No, he wasn’t late for work and nor was he even cold anymore, though his blood sure felt like it. No - instead it was his little finger on his right hand. The nail had not broken and he was sure he did not feel a single thing. But in fact, the entire nail itself was completely missing. There was no bleeding, there was no sign of a cut or a tear. It was just gone. The whole nail had disappeared, leaving his little finger almost naked in the morning rain. He quickly grabbed a plaster out of his suitcase and bandaged the thing up so that nobody would ask him what happened. It would be one embarrassment to make up a story as his were normally convoluted messes of narratives woven together over weeks at a time - you could see straight through them. It was an entirely different thing to become injured and then claim you have no idea how it happened. To look like one of those drunks who misses entire days and weeks at a time could cost him his job. He kept it quiet under a flesh-coloured plaster and would claim it was a simple paper cut. Nobody could see beneath the plaster and that is all that mattered.

Looking back at his watch, he realised he was still on time and, after dealing with the missing nail, he walked down the stairs, along the corridor and passed the basement and was going towards the front door when he thought he heard a shuffling sound again. This was exactly the same noise he had heard when in his room. He knew now that it was not, no it could not have been the trees. It wouldn’t still sound like this if it was. He had only heard it for a split second but ultimately had no time to think about what it was. It was just dumb luck that he hadn’t even noticed that the basement door was wide open once again.

Walking out on to his front lawn, he saw the bird-feeder and grabbed the hose to fill up the little pond in the middle with some new, fresh water. He enjoyed the breeze and the rain was stopping a little - the whole street was quiet in the early morning and the sun had risen a little to reveal a fresh orange glow over the horizon. And then something slammed. He knew it was a door and so ran back inside his house, fearing that something, somewhere had moved. The basement door was shut, but he didn’t notice, thinking he had shut it the previous night. Walking around his house he saw nothing and so, made his way to work that day.

When he got home that night, he changed the bandage on his little finger. This time, the naked finger had turned a reddish colour and he could tell that the blood was at least, still inside and not protruding out of an unknown wound. He used a cloth bandage this time for comfort and tied it up lightly with a small bow. He spent the evening setting up the television in his bedroom so that he may have something to watch as he falls asleep and was happier when he turned on the news as it brought some noise to the lifeless, empty, silent house he now inhabited alone. As he drifted into sleep, he thought about his finger and how it came to be that way. But it was too much for midnight and, listening to the pattering of the rain on the window, his eyes closed, only to open late the next morning on what would be his first day off in a while.

He woke up the next morning a few hours later than usual and, making no attempt to rush, put his slippers on lightly and went to brush his teeth. Upon gathering the supplies required for the task he noticed that on the side of his head, patches of his hair were missing. Thinking they must have fallen out whilst he slept, he ran back into his bedroom and frantically checked the bed for hair. There was none. Not a single strand of his hair lay on that bed and, looking back and forth from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again, he could hardly explain himself - as if there were anyone to explain this to. He looked back into the bathroom mirror upon approaching and saw that the hairs had not fallen out, but looked as if they had been cut in a haphazard way. Some were a tiny bit longer and some were completely gone, but the patch itself was very visible. “A nail and my hair gone…” he thought to himself as he dialled the number for his local doctor.

“It could be a vitamin deficiency, you know…” The doctor at the other end of the phone was an elderly gentleman and it was clear he had seen nearly everything before. “You could come in and we could run a couple of tests to see if that’s what it is…” The man found this nearly impossible as before he moved in, he already had his bloods taken and there was no deficiency of any kind to be found. Nothing was wrong with him and that had been passed on to his new doctor when he moved house. Be that as it may, he went in to see the doctor later that day.

It was just his luck. Tests were running whilst he spoke to the doctor and he must have been sitting there in the office for just over two hours - “some day off” he thought to himself as he continuously muttered about how he woke up one day without a nail but neither the nail nor the hair were anywhere to be found. It was just his luck that every single test showed that there was nothing wrong with him. He was perfectly healthy in every way. He went home a little deflated, hoping that there had been something wrong with him as to explain this missing hair and that missing nail.

He shut his front door and moved his sofa into the centre of the living room, putting the coffee table in front of it he slumped down upon the sofa and stuck his feet on the table, wobbling the glass atop of it. He thought about the way he had “quite frankly nothing wrong” with him, as the elderly doctor said, pushing his glasses up his nose and his mind drifted to what could have been wrong therefore. His mind came up with nothing. He made his way up to his bedroom and sat on his bed to watch television. It wasn’t even evening and he hadn’t had any dinner, but he didn’t feel too much like eating anyway. He had lost his appetite because his mind kept turning around all the things that might be wrong with him. As the hours moved on, he continued to become lost in his own thoughts of possibly having something that the doctors hadn’t thought of and slowly, drifted off into sleep, knowing that he would call in sick to work tomorrow just in case something came up.

The next day he woke up to the slight sunrise and the first thing he did was leave a message on the answering machine that was at work. He told them he wasn’t feeling too well and that he’d call on the morning he would be back in again, saving him time on phoning in every day to tell them he was sick. He ran his fingers through his hair and immediately noticed something strange. Something was off. It was as if he didn’t feel quite himself and he automatically thought about how lucky he was to have decided to call in sick as he felt as though he was going to throw up anyway.

He took another look at his hands, lowering them over his eye-line slowly to see if anything had changed about them from the previous night. The nail on his little finger was no longer missing but, he turned pale at the sight of the entire finger being completely gone with a small, red stump left at the base of where it once was. It was as though his finger had been completely bitten off and whatever had done it had done it so cleanly that blood was not dripping from his hand at all. He searched for any possible sighting of the finger in the bedsheets and tried his best not to leap out of bed screaming and shrieking the place down. He heard something slam at the bottom of the stairs and ran down to see what it was.

“The spiral staircase…” He thought. He noticed it this time - the basement door was closed. He opened it slightly and ran back up the stairs and there is was. The noise happened again, a slamming sound. The basement door was closed once more and he knew he had his intruder cornered in the little basement at the bottom of that out-of-place staircase.

He chose to leave it closed for the time being because he would be opening it again to put things into his basement, choosing to do that today since he wasn’t at work. Picking up boxes labelled ‘CDs’ and more labelled ‘DVDs’, he decided to pile them up for now on the far end of the basement wall so that if he were to buy a shelf to put them on, he could easily reach everything that was in the same place. Meticulous organisation in the basement often led to him sitting there for hours shifting through stuff he had from decades before, back in his college days when he was studying to be an accountant. He felt a strange air hit him a little, as if he had been sprayed. He saw that there was a small leak on the other side of the room from a pipe. “It couldn’t have been from here, it would reach that far…” But this house had already played a trick on him with the door so he wasn’t completely averted from believing in the magic of the water pipe spray. He came out of the basement and wiped himself off only to realise that it wasn’t water at all. In fact, it was a strange thicker substance, still the colour of water, but it had hardened pretty quickly like paint that was slightly translucent.

It was a nice day outside and so, instead of being freaked out by his basement all day, he shut the door and locked it tight and, carrying a bottle of beer into his garden, sat on a deck chair he opened and looked out over the grass. “Beautiful day, right?” A man walked up to the fence dressed in clothes that were permitted only for gardening.

“Yeah. I guess.” He sipped his beer. “The weather is weird around here, just the other day it was raining…”

“It tends to rain at night…” The gardener started. “In this season anyway…”

He realised that this guy was married to his boss, the father of the little girl he saw being put into the back seat of the car the day after he moved in. He sipped his beer once more and the gardener spoke. “Why aren’t you at work?” The man said nothing but held up his hand, claiming it was an accident he had with machinery. The gardener winced in sympathy. “Ouch…” The missing finger had blackened a bit at the edge, the man hadn’t noticed that before. “You had that seen by a doctor?” But the man just shook his head, lying that he would go tomorrow but instead he just thought about how useless it was that he went before - he knew there was nothing wrong with his blood or vitamins or minerals or anything else for that matter. The gardener looked down at his feet, feeling a little ashamed that he had asked such a private question to a man he’d only just met. His face of shame quickly turned to one of excitement. “Hey! Would you look at that! Twice in a week!” He bent over and scooped up a leaf on to his hand. “And this one’s alive!” The muffled shout of joy came from the other side of the man’s fence. The gardener lifted up slowly as to not scare the leaf on his hand and opened it to the man.

“What is that?” The man asked as the leaf opened to reveal a small bug with flaccid wings. It was an electric blue colour and had beady eyes, there must have been six of them. The man didn’t get up from his deck chair, but instead looked as if he were disappearing into it. “That’s disgusting.” He was clearly scared of the creature but the gardener looked on with awe. The wings of the creature spread and they began buzzing though the creature itself didn’t move. It let out it’s sharp tongue and ate a hole in the leaf.

“The antennae on these things…” The gardener looked from the creature to the man. “They can be used to extract anaesthetic to put people asleep for surgery.” He put the leaf atop the fence so the creature had somewhere to roam. “It’s far safer than the medicinal and chemical stuff. It’s also more powerful…” The creature perched on top of the fence and stopped there. “This is the second one I have seen this week and the first one I have seen alive…”

“Why are you so excited about that though?” The man asked, again moving away from the little creature with the flaccid wings that kept buzzing and buzzing, annoying him whilst he tried to enjoy his beer.

“Most people don’t even see one in their lifetime around here.” The gardener replied. “They live deep in the rainforest and more than often feast on dead bodies of animals. But there is a rumour that they can put animals to sleep with their antennae and eat them that way too. Of course, something this small could never do that. You would need like a million of them…” And he waved his hands to represent the size of the container that the man planned on drowning them all in as he watched the little creature eat the leaf he sat on previously in a manner only befitting something demonic. It sucked and sucked, like a vampire, until the leaf was no more. It flew off and away into some distance and the man felt sorry for whatever animal had to encounter that thing next. He sighed a relief that he never had to see it again though.

“They call her the Doloracmetus…” said the gardener.

“You know what….” The man started, getting up from his deckchair. “If you find any in my garden, you can keep them…” The gardener looked at him in excitement and nodded his head in agreement. “I need to go inside and finish cleaning my basement.” And with that, he shut his back door knowing that the gardening man would eventually pick off all those little demonic creatures from his garden and keep them somewhere lest he himself grab a blowtorch and kill them all.

He said he was going to get back to cleaning his basement, but instead he made himself as sandwich, noticing his missing finger, he was finding it difficult to become accustomed to this new way of life. He thought he should tell the police but how was he ever going to explain himself? He ran this over again and again in his mind and then finally chose to completely ignore the issue, though it made him fearful for his life. He ate his cheese sandwich sitting in bed though eating in bed was something he swore he would never do. He was left with little choice, it was either in his living room where the screen door sat without curtains or blinds, meaning his neighbour could see him clearly not cleaning his basement, or his bedroom where at least he felt like he could get some privacy. After that, he promised to put up the blinds in the living room, throwing a strange and uncomfortable darkness over the place that felt cold with the wooden floor beneath his slippered feet.

That night there was no rain, though the gardener said there would be some. Though the man had only moved to the other side of town, he felt as though he might as well have been on the other side of the world. Everything was so different here, not to mention that he was now missing a finger. Before he went to bed though, he sifted through all of his boxes, thinking he might be able to outsmart whatever weird thing lay in the darkness and possibly get back his missing finger. Choosing not to give up, he searched avidly for his security cameras he had brought from his old home. He had set them up initially in parts of the house where there were valuables such as his dead mother’s wedding ring that was buried in a crystal-lined box under the floor of his old dining room - he knew nobody was going to bother to look there but the ring itself was worth thousands of pounds and to him, was priceless. He found the two cameras, setting one up by his basement to see if there was anyone moving the night possibly hiding down there and setting the other up in his bedroom to see what was going on whilst he was asleep. He felt paranoid as he did this, wondering if anyone was watching him and thinking he was crazy for doing this. The gardener had gone inside for the night and the moon shone through his bedroom window, he saw nobody outside.

It would be a few hours before he had finally set them up and it was getting close to midnight. He was sleepy and so, taking a cup of tea with him, went to bed without drinking it. He knew that the next day he would have whoever was distressing him and, of all things, stealing his limbs, caught on tape to show to the police.

He didn’t sleep very well, thought he slept for a few hours in and out. He was too excitable to watch the tape but, getting up the next day he realised that where the finger had been missing the previous night - the whole hand was now gone. His face went white and he dropped to the ground, groping around the bed and its headboard to get up again, the sound of his body hitting the floor echoing in the emptiness of the house was heard from the garden where his only friend in the town was watering plants. The gardener rushed over to the house and frantically knocked on the back door after jumping the fence, thinking something had gone horribly wrong. The gardener looked the house up and down but saw nothing and the man, still sitting on the floor and unable to get up, crawled over to the nearest bin he had put out and was immediately sick. Vomiting into the bin, he saw the clean cut that had been made just above the wrist, it was as sharp as a butcher’s knife and as clean as a pair of scissors gliding across wrapping paper. The gardener was still standing outside, unsure of what was going on. He ran back into his house and immediately called the police, scared that his friend was hurt or worse.

The police came by only ten to fifteen minutes later and by that time, the man had got himself up and bandaged up his hand in a way that he still looked like he had one. He had been scared half to death by the sight of his missing limb but reassured that he had it all on tape and would watch it later on, possibly giving the footage to the police if he felt he couldn’t get rid of the weird squatter himself. There was a knock at the door and so, he went to open it with his bandaged hand. The police asked him if he was alright and he nodded his head, the gardener waiting in his front garden. “I heard a drop and I thought it sounded like someone falling over…” He began. “I knew you had a machine accident with your hand and so, I thought maybe you felt faint and needed some help. I knocked but you didn’t reply…” With each sentence, the gardener became more frantic. “I thought something bad had happened…”

“Well, I’m grateful…” The man replied, looking back and forth from the gardener and then the officers. “But, I am definitely alright. I just had a nasty slip and concussed myself. I’m still getting used to the wooden floors. I’m very used to carpet…” He stopped himself before he invented some convoluted story he wouldn’t be able to remember for next time. The police nodded heads, wished him well and left. The man turned to the gardener and thanked him. “I could’ve been badly hurt. Just know, if you ever need anything - I am right here…” They shook hands over the fence and both of them went back into their respective houses.

He was about to watch the video when a phone call came for him. It was the doctor and he was in a bit of a panicked breath. “What’s wrong now? Finally decided that I was right in the end? Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” He just kept asking the doctor questions, not giving him any time to breathe between.

“Have you lost any blood?” The doctor finally spoke. The man at the other end stifled a laugh, he’d lost a lot more than just blood. He looked at his right hand and then spoke down the phone with a low tone, acting as if he didn’t want to hear anything the doctor had to say anymore.

“Uh-uh…” He lied. “I haven’t lost any blood at all…” Scared he was sounding too sarcastic, he backed off, but the doctor put the phone down before he could finish his joke. As it turns out, the doctor was out of breath because he was trying to make his way to the man’s house, hearing that he may have had a nasty concussion, but was stopped by the gardener as they were both now safe in their own houses. He could see the doctor from his bedroom window, but the doctor himself had already turned to leave and didn’t even look up at the open pane to give a wave. He just left. The man felt a bit deflated and simply shut the window, turned around and sat on the bed - ready to watch that godforsaken tape.

He opened up the tape player carefully as if it were a rare grimoire and he were an apprentice to a wizard. He stared at it for some time and thought how wrong it must be to spy on himself or, whatever else may be living with him. It was not wrong to say he was apprehensive, like making a voice recording of when you sleep to check if you’re snoring and then hearing something untoward on the tape - there was just certain information he would prefer not to have. It might mess up his sleep for good. Once he had plugged in the tape player, he grabbed the tapes from the cameras and stuck them right in. He took several deep breaths and in between thought long and hard about what he would rather not know and what he had to find out right away. It was a tough choice and so, he flipped a coin, covered his eyes with his stump where his hand used to be and ultimately pressed play with his free hand.

As he watched, his face became whiter and whiter with fear. He looked as if he might stay that way for the rest of his life, unable to move and unable to scream. He felt as though his voice had turned to ash in his lungs and his eyes were about to fall from his skull and roll on the floor until they were eaten by scampering mice. His senses were lost on him and his only working hand hovered over the ‘stop’ button but he simply could not bring himself to press it. The sound of the gardener’s voice echoed in his ear though the man himself was nowhere to be found in life or on tape. “They call her the Doloracmetus…” - rang in his mind over and over again like a foghorn. He fell to his back and propped himself up on his elbows to finish the tape. Once it was over, he pulled it out of the tape player and smashed it upon the ground as if casting it into hell. He did not know what to think other than that he should probably be more afraid now than he had ever been at any other time in his entire life.

That bug, the size of a football had crawled out of the basement and up to his room. The sound of shuffling was unmistakable on the film. The basement door was left open as from what he saw, the creature fed on his limbs after giving him a dose of that anaesthetic the gardener was so fascinated by. It was the size of an average ball and was at least 50, maybe even 500 times the size of the ones he had seen in the garden. “It’s why I never woke up…” He thought. He was not actually asleep, but instead was anaesthetised whilst the creature took what it wanted. Then came that infernal sucking, like a vampire, it sucked the limb dry of blood and then with fanged mouth proceeded to eat the remainder of the flesh. Once this had been completed, the creature disappeared back into the depths, the door shutting behind it and the shuffling coming to a sudden and horrifying stop.

Fear ripped through the man’s body and he knew that this thing would return again when he was asleep. So that night, he locked his door and chose to stay very much awake. The creature could not return if he were to lock his door. But as the night drew on, he could not help himself - his eyes became heavy with midnight and his heart ached with the longing for his bed as he sat on the floor between himself and the television. Ultimately, he gave up and resolved that whilst the lock was on, the creature could not get inside his room.

The next morning he awoke with a small feeling of triumph building in his stomach. The day was warm and the air had a breeze to it. As the sun shone through his bedroom window, he went to change his socks and found that it was far trickier when you only had one hand. It was also far trickier when you no longer had any toes on one foot. The creature had been, had fed and had left without notifying him at all. To think that he knew exactly what was happening at night made him rush for the bathroom to throw up. He knew exactly what the creature was doing but wished that he didn’t. It was sustaining itself by devouring parts of him - not eating the whole thing in order to keep itself alive for as long as physically possible. Eating only enough.

He put a bandage around the toes that were now just stumps and looked at the door, which he knew had been locked when he had gone to sleep the previous night. The lock looked as if it had been chewed and ripped from its source, the door with a strange half-bite mark by where the latch would fall into the wall. The handle was no more - it had not just been completely ripped off but it was also missing. It was hopeless to try this again and so, for the rest of the day, the man spent his time moving all of his things into the guest room of his house. But in order to trick the creature, he thought, leave the television and some clothes in this room. He would shut both doors before he went to sleep that night, locking the one that was still able to lock and leaving the other one with a sheet lodged in the bottom. He would pull it with his non-stumped foot, wriggling his toes to pull the sheet on to the other side and thus, jamming it under the bedroom door to make the creature think he was still inside.

Of course, a creature that has been within these walls all this time may not be so stupid, he pondered to himself, getting into the guest room and locking the door behind him. He unravelled the bandage on his foot to reveal the stumps of where his toes should have been and, with a flask of coffee - he managed to stay up that night.

First, he heard the shuffling. It was the same shuffling sound that he thought must have been trees and to think, the creature was moving somewhere around him without his knowledge - it made him sick to his stomach. He was sure that at that moment, it had seen him but he had not seen it. He then heard the slow creaking of the stairs as it made its way through the house. The shuffling beneath it becoming more pronounced as it got closer to him and the bedrooms on the next floor of his home. When it reached the landing, it seemed to have stopped still since the shuffling was no more. For moments, his heart raced, thinking that the creature had probably found out about his stupid plan and was about to bite off the lock of the door on the guest room. But he was wrong. Instead, when the creature started moving again it was not a slow shuffle as it was before. There was an unusual buzzing sound, like the hiss of a kettle steaming with water but also probably broken. He couldn’t see it, but he was sure that this buzzing sound meant that it was flying. He quickly went for the keyhole and stuck his face up against it. He pressed his eye to the keyhole to see if it was true, to see whether this thing, this monster, could really fly.

And there it was.

It was hovering above the ground. He could only make out bits and pieces of the image due to the size of the keyhole but it was not just the flying that alarmed him. It was also the fact that the creature seemed slightly larger than before. When he last saw it, it measured the size of a football and now, it was at least a beach ball, maybe even bigger than that. He put this down to his perspective but couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe this thing was eating him in order to grow.

It was then that it was inside the room. It had managed to open whatever makeshift lock he had put into place beneath the door. Realising he wasn’t there, the creature let out a terrifying screech of agony and defeat. It was deafening and the man stumbled back on himself, careful not to make a single sound. But he knew that as he crashed against the bedpost, it was fruitless and most probably too late. To his shock though, the creature moved around the room and went back downstairs. He heard the basement door close some moments later. He went downstairs the next morning and beat the door to the basement to check a theory he had the night before. He was right: the creature was deaf.

This obviously meant that the other senses were tuned almost perfectly, especially sight. He knew that this probably also meant that there was no way that the creature didn’t see him - or at least, feel that he was there. He stayed in the guest room the next day and planned to get the television from the main bedroom. This was only to discover that it had been destroyed in the act of rage and defeat put out by the creature the night before. He went back into his room and sighed. It was a hopeless endeavour to fight this beast and, though he might have wasted a lot of money trying to live here, he could not possibly stay. But he also knew it was his duty to warn other people about what is actually inhabiting the basement. He thought about it for a while, grabbed some noodles for dinner and then went off to bed again. As night fell, he was unsure of whether to stay awake or go to sleep. However, it didn’t matter as within only hours of contemplation his eyes had become too heavy to keep open anyway.

As the night before the last meant that the creature had not fed, he knew it was probably hungry by the time he woke up the next morning. He knew it was probably waiting outside the door for a long while into the night to see whether he was fully asleep. Just as he had thought, the creature had bitten the lock open and come into the room. It had taken with it the toes of his other foot and a big chunk out of his leg. This was not like the cartoon bite mark which shows the teeth that had chomped out the space between. Instead, this looked like he had been cut cleanly with a kitchen knife. The space around the bite had turned black with discolouration already, which meant that he had fallen asleep a little too early. The bite was roughly the size of two tennis balls and the same shape as the crescent moon. He could feel himself weigh down on one side as he got out of bed, looked at his bite mark in the mirror and began to weep. This was not a man who was terrified, but a man who was tired. This thing would not leave him alone.

The creature knew the layout of the house all too well, the man knew this and so instead of trying for another bedroom, he searched around for a place he believed the creature could not get to. Searching places like the garden, the kitchen and the living room were of little use - all of these were open plan and very accessible. He went back upstairs and then he had the greatest idea of his life: the attic. He would bring down the ladder that eld up to the attic and stay there. The creature could not fly that well, it only hovered because of its weight. The creature could not look up, from what he knew and had seen. The creature could also, terrifyingly enough, not fit through the doorway in the ceiling that led to the attic. This would be the perfect hiding spot, that he knew. He could move his stuff up there in time, but for tonight he would only take some bedsheets, a pillow, a book and a flask of coffee.

He slept quite well that night until he was awoken by the creature screeching even louder than before. He smiled, knowing that he had won in some small way. He knew to all degrees of possibility, there was no way the creature was going to find him in the attic. The wound on his leg was deep and caused him quite a bit of pain. He drank some of the coffee and went back to sleep for the night with a heavy ache in his side. The feeling of pain though did not overwhelm the feeling of accomplishment. He was still smiling as he fell asleep again. The basement door closed and as he drifted off, it opened again. He didn’t hear it and he didn’t care to. He had won and that was all that mattered.

It was difficult to tell when morning was because the attic didn’t have a window and he hadn’t brought his alarm clock up with him. Instead, he attempted to climb out of the attic and the feeling of accomplishment rushed out of him like a stab wound to the brain. His entire body became limp and he had not even gotten up from his bed, so there was no need to slump to the ground. He looked over to where the attic door was and there was clear signs of breakage. The wooden flooring around the door had been cracked and bent, some of it had been snapped off completely and the ladder was completely gone so there was no way for him to get back down. Even if the ladder was there, moving was pretty pointless as the creature had now taken both of his feet. It was hungry. It hadn’t fed in so long. It wanted more than just a few fingers or a bite the size of a few tennis balls. It had been and it had left his legs bloodied and footless. He could not stand and so dragged himself around on his knees, crawling like a baby might do. Against the wooden floor, his knees ached and pained with a sharp jolting feeling that messed up his entire body. He could not possibly live like this. As he fought back against the feeling, he found the strangest thing. It was a set of human teeth.

He picked up the small teeth from the floor and realised what must have happened here. Someone else had done pretty much exactly what he had done and failed. Is that how it knew I was here? He thought to himself as he placed the teeth back on the floor. Knowing there was no possible escape apart from jumping from the attic which would, by all means, break his bones so badly the thing would eat him anyway - he waited and thought about a means to escape. There was no window to smash so he couldn’t call for help, there was no phone so he could not phone anyone. The only hope he had was shouting at the top of his lungs and hoping that gardener from next door heard him. And here he had a problem. He simply didn’t have the energy to conjure that kind of scream.

His legs were aching and parts of them were still bleeding a little. It looked like the creature had bitten through bone, leaving a jagged edge of it on his right leg. He had no bandages on him and so, whatever blood was there was left soaking through the wood. He didn’t know exactly where it was going, all he hoped is that there wasn’t something on the other side drinking it. He was hungry and tired by the end of the day as he couldn’t get down from that damned attic. He had resorted into looking through whatever was left up here before and the more he saw, the more terrified he became.

In the boxes of random rubbish that was inside this attic was a blanket, a pillow, an alarm clock that no longer worked and a half-eaten mouldy packet of noodles. Whoever was up here before him sure was better prepared, they had brought equipment. He also found a phone from the 1930s that had its wires cut. It seemed strange to him because there would have been nowhere to plug the phone in up in the attic. The phone's wire had been cut right at the end where the plug would have been. This is when he let out an anguished sigh of terror. He knew how the creature had found him because he had done just what the guy before him had done. Only he didn’t have to plug a phone in outside of the attic. The closest socket was in the guest room. The wire could have reached all the way down. The creature obviously followed the wire after cutting it from the socket. God damn it! He thought to himself as it shouting at the person who had been here before him. You gave away our hiding space because you wanted to make a phone call!

Through all of that though, it proved that someone had been here before him. He picked up the teeth once more and wondered about what might have happened to him. He felt a short breeze come from the attic’s exit, where the door should have been but had since been dismembered by the beast that awaited. He knew that he couldn’t stay here but there was simply no way out. Should I risk the fall? But he ultimately thought against it and that was mainly because of the pain he was in at that moment. The stumps on his legs meaning he had to crawl everywhere left him in horrible pain whenever he moved. The creature must have known he could not escape as when he went to look down upon the landing, he saw it waiting there.

He saw it waiting there.

This time it was no longer slightly bigger than a beach ball. It must have been the size of a small car at least. He was sure it could not fit through the space it had made before but he wasn’t sure that it couldn’t see him. He pulled his head back into the attic, hoping to god it didn’t come up for him. He would much rather this happened whilst he was sleeping so that at least then, he was anaesthetised and couldn’t see the creature. It was as he panicked that he heard the buzzing sound of hovering again. Shit. He thought as he frantically crawled across the floor and backed up against the attic walls. The buzzing became louder. He thought it couldn’t fly but then, its hovering was all it needed now. It was so large it didn’t need to fly to fill that strange and unlawful distance between them. It pushed through the space where the attic door once was, where it had previously broken through. The wooden bent, cracked and shook with its weight and size, swelling as if it were breathing. The beam that once held the ladder snapped and broke as the creature, now in the attic space, used its several legs to push the wood back on to the hole - leaving no room for escape whatsoever.

On his knees, the man begged to god to spare him. He saw the creature’s eyes look at him hungrily as he stopped praying - and then came the screaming. He screamed and he screamed in terror as the creature approached him with open mouth. He fell on to his back and propped himself on to his elbows to try to get away. Pushing himself back he kept screaming for help until his voice started to give way. His face covered in tears and anguish, he knew that no help was coming but still, in abject terror, refused to accept it and screamed again as the creature bit through a chunk of his legs. This time, the creature used no anaesthetic from its biology and the man screeched in pain as his legs, coated in blood began to soak the wood. The creature lapped up all the blood until there was little left and then bit through the man’s torso - eating at his organs as he screamed at the top of his broken, punctured lungs. It was little after 3pm when everything went black.

“Yes, that’s right.” The gardener spoke down the phone to the police. “All I can hear is screaming. He sounds like he needs urgent help, please come quickly.” The gardener put the phone down, took a trowel and smacked it against the lock of the man’s front door. He kept smacking at it until the door was nothing but a wreckage and a pile of wood and plastic. He had cuts on his arms from doing so but it didn’t matter. The police arrived and they all ran into the house together, frantically searching for the owner. The gardener called out but there was no reply. Running around the house in a panicked state, the police told him to sit down and wait - that they would do the searching.

“There’s something in the attic, boss…” One of the officers said to his superior. “I mean, the attic has clearly been broken into. Check it out…” They shone their torches on to the space where the attic door had been and kept their guns where they could see them. One nodded to the other.

“Alright, we’ve got you surrounded. Come out with your hands on your head. We are armed police officers…” But nothing happened. The gardener brought in his ladder to help the officers climb up to see what the hell had happened in this horrifying space of broken, snapped, bent and tortured wood. The superior officer went up first to look around and told his other men to stay below in case anything should happen. After around ten minutes of searching and pondering, the officer came back down the ladder to meet with his men.

“What happened, sir?” A few officers spoke in unison as their superior looked disdained.

“We’re going to have to keep searching…” He started. “There’s nothing in the attic.”