The Corpse Under the Floorboards

The first time I heard the floorboards creak in the old Victorian, I dismissed it as settling. Houses breathe, I told myself. Especially ones built in 1887.

I'd purchased the place for a song—foreclosure, neglect, and whispered rumors had driven down the price to something my teacher's salary could almost afford. The real estate agent's relief was palpable when I signed the papers. She'd practically sprinted from the closing.

"You got yourself a project," my father said when he visited, eyeing the peeling wallpaper and water-stained ceilings.

"I got myself a home," I corrected him.

The creaking started my third night. Just past midnight—a rhythmic groan beneath my bedroom floor. Creak... creak... creak. Like someone pacing. I told myself it was temperature changes, wood expanding and contracting as the autumn chill set in.

But it continued, night after night, always in the same spot. Always at midnight.

By the second week, I'd grown accustomed to it, even comforted. The house had its quirks, and this was just one of them. I named the creaky floorboard Edgar, after Poe, and sometimes greeted it when I passed over that spot during the day.

It was while refinishing the floors that I found it. I'd decided to start with my bedroom—the heart of my sanctuary—pulling up the worn carpet to reveal the original hardwood beneath. When I reached the corner where Edgar resided, I noticed the boards didn't match the others. Newer. Different grain.

I ran my fingers along the seam. No nails. Just... fitted.

Curiosity seized me. I worked the edge of my pry bar beneath one board, levered upward, and heard a crack as it came free.

The smell hit me first. Earthy. Chemical. Wrong.

Beneath the floorboard lay darkness. I shined my phone's flashlight into the cavity and immediately wished I hadn't.

Sunken eye sockets stared back at me. A jaw, hanging askew in a silent scream. Tatters of fabric clung to the remains, and a gold watch glinted on what had once been a wrist.

I scrambled backward, heart thundering against my ribs. My phone clattered to the floor, its beam still illuminating the hollow grave beneath my bedroom.

At the police station, they told me the house had belonged to a Judge Harrison Blackwood, who'd mysteriously disappeared in 1992. His wife had reported him missing after he failed to return from a business trip. The case had gone cold decades ago.

"The watch confirms it," Detective Mercer said, sliding a photo across the table. "Family heirloom. His grandfather's."

I stared at the inscription on the back of the timepiece: Time reveals all truths. HWB Sr. to HWB Jr., 1945.

"We're questioning his widow now," Mercer continued. "She remarried five years after he was declared dead. Moved to Florida. Sold the house to a young couple who lasted eight months before divorcing and selling it at a loss. It's changed hands six times since then. No owner has stayed longer than a year."

That night, I sat in my car outside the Victorian, staring up at my bedroom window. The police had cleared me to return, assuring me they'd collected all the evidence they needed. The remains were gone, the cavity filled with fresh concrete, and yet...

I knew the creaking would continue. Not because of the judge's bones—those were at the medical examiner's office now—but because houses remember. This one remembered the snap of floorboards being pried up in the night. The weight of a body being lowered into darkness. The careful replacement of wood, the sound of a hammer driving nails.

I thought about the judge's widow, remarried in Florida. About the inscription on the watch. Time reveals all truths.

I didn't sell the house. I stayed. I owed it that much—to be the one who didn't run, who faced its dark history head-on. I still live there today, three years later. The creaking continues, always at midnight, always in that corner.

Sometimes, on the anniversary of the day I found him, I sit beside that spot in the floor and whisper, "I know what happened to you. And soon, everyone else will too."

Because there's one thing Detective Mercer didn't tell me that day at the station—something I read later in the newspaper. Judge Blackwood's last case before his disappearance? The trial of his wife's lover for fraud.

The case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. Three months later, the judge vanished. Two years after that, his widow married the defendant.

Time reveals all truths. Indeed it does.

Sometimes, in the darkest hours of night, I swear I hear the floorboards respond.