The Climb

After graduating from university, my boyfriend and I started sharing this attic apartment in an old house. Rent wasn't too bad and, while we were a little too far from downtown, at least we had our own bathroom and even a tiny kitchen. Most importantly, the house had its own washing machine and dryer, and since Rafael and I were both tired of dragging our laundry baskets to the nearest laundromat, that actually influenced our decision to move in.

Now, I'll admit that every laundry room is a little bit creepy. They're always in the basement, next to noisy boilers that can make some truly blood-curdling sounds. They are humid, cold, and just generally unpleasant. This laundry room, though, wasn't too bad because the basement had pretty decent lighting and the machines were brand new. If I tell you now that neither my boyfriend nor I liked to go down to the basement, don't think it was because it was a dark and scary place that brought all of our childhood fears to the surface; it was mostly because of the stairs.

Because the house had been split into two separate apartments, plus the attic where we lived, we could only access the basement by going around the house and down a narrow flight of wooden stairs. The steps were a little too short and steep but, other than that, Rafael and I had been impressed with the house. We looked around a little bit, commented on how convenient it would be to have a laundry room at our disposal, then went upstairs again.

I had been so distracted talking to Rafael about signing the lease that I almost didn't notice the creeping feeling until it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

I turned sharply.

Rafael called me from the door right above me, “You okay there, Mark?”

The landlord, a rather pleasant Filipino man in his sixties, gave me a wary look but said nothing when I answered, “Yeah, it's fine,” before throwing the basement one final look, searching for something out of the ordinary. There was nothing.

I couldn't really put it into words at that moment, it happened so fast and so briefly that I just brushed it aside as one of those creepy feelings everyone gets sometimes. It wasn't until later that night, when we started packing, that I told Rafael what had been bothering me.

“I thought there was someone behind me.”

He looked up from the box he'd been filling with textbooks.

“When we were coming out of the basement,” I explained. “I felt like someone was right behind me.”

“You too?” he said, a little surprised.

“You felt it?”

“Yeah. I thought it was you, at first, but then I turned around and you were, like, five steps behind me.”

“Did we make a bad decision signing the lease?” I asked, mostly kidding, but not really. “Would be just our luck to end up in a haunted house.”

“Fuck ghosts,” Rafa said. “If I never have to share a bathroom with five other people, it will be too soon.”

I laughed but couldn't push aside the uneasiness I was feeling. The fact that Rafa didn't look nearly as shook as I felt led me to believe that he hadn't felt exactly the same as I had. When climbing those stairs, I didn't just think there was something behind me; I knew someone was there, trailing in my steps and coming so dangerously close I could almost feel their body against mine, as if I was in a crowd and a stranger was about to collide with me.

“You're probably right,” I ultimately said. In all likelihood, there was nothing to worry about.

I put that out of my mind and didn't think about it until a week after we'd moved into the attic and I had to do the laundry. Despite my initial worry, the memory of being spooked by absolutely nothing had quickly been pushed to the back of my mind as we spent the next couple of weeks packing. I went down to the basement, loaded the washing machine, added the detergent, pressed the button, then started up the stairs wondering what I would do with the next 50 minutes.

My feet had only touched the third step when I felt it again, the certainty – the absolute certainty – that someone was standing right behind me. I stopped to look over my shoulder. There was no one behind me and I felt foolish looking back at the washing machine. Nothing scary here, no one was reaching out with a skeletal hand to pull me back down and take away my soul.

I continued up the stairs, trying to ignore the fact that the feeling didn't go away until I opened the door. Then, like a pair of shackles weighing you down, the sensation was gone.

Isadora, one of the sisters who shared the second floor apartment, was coming back home and she must have seen me shudder because she said, “Spooky, isn't it?”

“What?” I asked, a little lost.

“The stairs,” she said. “It's okay, everyone feels it. We think there's a friendly ghost living down there or something.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. We named him Joe.”

Isadora smiled and I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not.

“Right,” I said. “Well, if there were any violent crimes in this house, I don't want to hear about them.”

It wasn't that I was particularly superstitious or troubled by the idea of a ghost living downstairs. I just couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong and that this was not as harmless as I first thought. If I was forced to examine it closely, I might even consider moving.

We didn't, though. Rent was reasonable and our housemates were pleasant and quiet. Rafael and I continued living there for almost a year but we never got used to the stairs. Isadora and her sister, Elena, clearly had, and they made jokes about it and mentioned their friendly ghost as if it were an invisible pet they were fond of. They speculated on the nature of the haunting with gloomy yet gleeful theories.

“Maybe some guy killed himself and his ghost is trapped in there.”

“Or maybe there are bodies in the walls, or under the stairs.”

I didn't think there were bodies hiding anywhere. The floors were made of concrete, the wallpaper hadn't been changed since the 1950s, and the stairs had open steps. The only thing underneath it was a pile of junk the landlord and his wife had accumulated over the years.

Rafael and I were not horror junkies and took no pleasure talking about the ghost in the basement. Rafael commented on how much he hated those stairs every time he had to go down there and said he was glad at least the rest of the house was peaceful, which was the strangest thing once I thought about it. Nowhere else in the house could we feel a presence, not even a little bit. Nothing ever changed places, no weird noises could be heard in the middle of the night, no shadows or strange reflections ever caught us off guard. It was only those damn stairs.

About six months in, Rafael offered to do all other chores as long as he didn't have to do laundry anymore.

“I don't care what it is, I can even do the dishes every day if you want me to, but I'm not going back there,” he told me. He was white as a sheet and I could tell he was barely holding it together.

“What happened? Did you see anything?”

“It touched me.”

He spoke so softly that I had a difficult time hearing him at first.

“What do you mean, it touched you?”

“I felt it touch me, Mark. Not like before, it wasn't behind me it... it brushed past me. I swear I could feel their knuckles against the back of my hand.”

I tried to tell Rafael that the girls had probably gotten into his head and he had only imagined someone touching him. I told him about how our brain sometimes fills the gaps of what it cannot explain with unreasonable facts. Basically, I repeated out loud everything I had been telling myself for six months in order to keep my sanity.

Rafael told me to go fuck myself with my psychology degree.

“You know there's something weird, Mark. You know it, so don't be stubborn.”

It wasn't a long fight, we made up fairly quickly. After that, I took laundry duties upon myself and nothing out of the ordinary happened for a while. Some days, the certainty that someone was following me outside was nothing but a whisper in the back of my mind; other days, it was so strong I actually walked up the stairs backward to keep an eye on the basement. There was never anyone behind me, but I swear I could still feel it standing in front of me, its pace matching mine, its invisible body undeniable even if I couldn't see it. If I closed my eyes and put some effort into it, I'm sure I would have been able to picture its face in my mind, but I never did.

I just walked faster, taking the stairs two or three steps at a time, not giving whatever it was that lived in the basement the chance to catch up. That was until two months ago when two full loads of laundry meant I was slowed down considerably. As I slugged up the stairs, I could recognize the feeling when it crept up on me, but I told myself it would vanish once I opened the door, it always did. I guess our friendly ghost didn't like going outside.

It came up to me, one step after another. I could tell that its feet dragged at the same pace as mine, as if it, too, were dragging something heavy. It would vanish in a moment, I told myself. It would vanish as soon as I-

Something leaned into my ear. I thought of Rafael and how he'd said he could feel the knuckles of this... person, thing, I don't know, he could feel it touching his skin and, god, now I could feel their fucking lips touching the back of my ear and its icy breath as it whispered, “Thank you.”

I dropped the clothes I was carrying and they tumbled down the steps as I ran for the door. I don't think I'd ever been so scared in my life. I don't even think it was because of the incorporeal voice whispering in my ear; rather, it was its tone. It sounded almost like a mockery of what gratitude was supposed to sound like, as if it had heard those words in the lips of others several times before and it had learned it with the sole purpose to scare me with it.

I asked Elena to go fetch my laundry and then told Rafael that I'd rather use the laundromat two blocks down from that moment on. He didn't fight me on it.

The girls asked me about the ghost, dying for some first-hand experience. I answered their questions for five minutes, then told them to never mention it again. It hadn't been funny; it had been fucking terrifying and I didn't want to know what kind of thing had a voice like that. More to the point, I didn't want to know what it was thanking me for. Ignorance was bliss and I wish I could have stayed that way.

Last week, our landlord let us know that he would be renovating the basement. He said it was time because the boiler was too old and the place hadn't really gotten a fresh coat of paint in decades. I think, though he never confirmed it, that he thought changing things around, perhaps getting rid of the clutter and the peeling wallpaper, would make a difference. Maybe once the renovations were done, we could all go downstairs again and realize this whole ordeal had been nothing but a figment of our imagination.

Since our landlord and his wife were in their late sixties and not in the best of shapes, the girls offered to move all of the junk they had accumulated in the basement upstairs. I can only assume that they wanted to explore the space in more detail, maybe contact the dead while they still had the chance.

Rafael and I made the decision to stay away while they moved things around; if they did find a body in an old suitcase, we wanted no part in it. However, that afternoon, Elena knocked on our door. She didn't look disturbed, only a little confused.

“Hey, sorry to bother you guys, but can you come downstairs for a moment? We found something a little weird and we thought-”

“Yeah, we're really not interested in examining demon-possessed dolls or whatever you've found,” Rafael said, only half-joking.

Elena giggled. “No, no, it's not that. It's just a bunch of old junk, nothing creepy. But we think there might be some sort of wild animal living in the basement. Could you just take a look?”

We decided there was no harm in that and followed Elena to the basement. They had moved a large collection of old chests, cardboard boxes, and assorted knickknacks to the middle of the basement, clearing the space under the stairs.

Turns out the girls had gotten one thing right in their speculation: there had been something under the stairs all along, just not what they'd expected. Right behind a heavy chest, next to the wall, there was a hole big enough for a small person to squeeze out of. I took a closer look, trying to see how far it went, but I couldn't tell. It was very dark, so I can only assume it was very deep. Around it, we could see deep scratch marks, as if a wild animal with particularly sharp talons had clawed its way out of the hole several times.

“What kind of animal can dig a hole in concrete?” Elena asked.

I shrugged. “I have no idea.” I was a little relieved, to be honest. Sure, it was a little creepy, but if that hole led outside, then maybe we had all been the victims of a harmless draft and let our imagination get the best of us.

Elena said, “Think it can be a raccoon or...”

Rafael said, “Animals don't make holes like that.”

I looked at him. He had his eyes on the hole but he didn't look curious or interested in it. Rather, he looked as if he were putting numbers together, trying to reach the solution to a problem.

“How deep do you think it-” Erin started, but Rafael interrupted her.

“Where is Isadora?”

Erin looked at him, then around the basement for a moment, as if realizing for the first time that her sister was not here. “You know what, I'm not sure. I guess she might have gone to the washroom when I went to get-”

“We're going upstairs now,” he said, then grabbed me by the hand and forced me up the stairs. When I felt something brushing against my back, I picked up the pace.

The landlord had no idea there was a hole in the basement. The house had been his father's and the basement had stayed relatively untouched for the past thirty years. Rafael insisted that he go downstairs to check but refused to go along with him.

He shuddered when he walked back out a moment later, followed by Elena, who still didn't seem bothered by her findings, nor by the fact that her sister seemed to have vanished into thin air.

“Yeah, that's a... big hole,” he said, looking worried. “It's gonna cost an arm and a leg to fix it.”

“Mark and I are moving out,” Rafa said, firmly.

The landlord stared at him. I did the same.

“We are very sorry for the short notice, but we can't stay here anymore.”

I tried to speak. He ignored me and went on, “We understand that we're breaking the terms of our lease and you can keep our deposit, but we are moving out as soon as we find another place.” He paused. “Honestly, I think you should do the same.”

There was some discussion. Our landlord was actually a pretty nice guy and he liked us because we always pay on time. He also didn't want to have to find other tenants on such short notice, but Rafael was adamant about it. I was too stunned for words.

The moment we got to our apartment, I exploded, “What the hell, Rafa? We can't just move-”

“We're packing.”

Again, I couldn't do much more than just stare at him. “Excuse me?”

“We're packing, we're staying at my parents until we find someplace else.”

His parents still referred to me as “that boy who's your roommate”. Spending an undetermined amount of time in their house was not my idea of fun.

“Rafa, don't you think you're overreacting to a hole in the floor?”

“No.”

I watched as he bent down to pick our suitcases from under the bed.

“Okay,” I said, feeling my patience run thin, “I know that the stairs are creepy and that there were a couple of incidents that we couldn't explain, but listen, that hole actually explains a lot. Maybe the girls are right and there are wild animals living in the-”

“Mark, nothing lives in that hole,” he told me, pausing what he was doing to look me in the eye. “I hadn't thought about it, I don't know why because it seems rather obvious in retrospect but, I don't know, I just never realized.”

“Realized what?”

“Nothing ever follows us back down.”

I went quiet.

“I don't care what's in that hole, Mark,” he said, “but whatever they are, I think we've been leading them out.”