The phone slipped from my sweaty palm, clattering against the center console of my newly leased Mercedes. I stared at the dashboard clock. It was broad daylight. Things didn’t scream from underneath floorboards in the middle of a Tuesday.<\/p>\n
I scrambled to pick the phone back up, forcing a harsh, dismissive laugh. “Listen, Miller, if this is a shakedown for a hazard pay bonus, it’s a bad joke. Squatters probably dug a storm cellar. Call the local sheriff, drag the junkies out, and pour the damn concrete.”<\/p>\n
“You don’t understand,” Miller whispered. The usual roar of heavy excavators and diesel engines was completely absent. It was eerily quiet on his end. “It\u2019s not human. It sounds like a dozen people screaming your brother’s name at once, but with one pair of lungs. My crew just walked off the job. I\u2019m leaving too. Keep your money.”<\/p>\n
The line went dead.<\/p>\n
I cursed, throwing the car into gear. The drive up the winding mountain road to the old property took an hour, my anger slowly giving way to an icy, irrational dread the higher into the pines I went. Elias and I had spent our childhood summers at that cabin. He was always obsessed with the basement we weren’t allowed to enter, spinning tall tales to scare me. I thought he’d just never grown out of his campfire ghost stories.<\/p>\n
When I pulled up to the clearing, the site was entirely abandoned. Half-eaten sandwiches sat on the hoods of bulldozers. The cabin was gone, reduced to a massive pile of splintered pine and shattered glass. But in the center of the bulldozed earth, the soil had been scraped away to reveal a slab of poured concrete, older than the cabin itself.<\/p>\n
Set into the center of the concrete was a heavy, rusted steel hatch.<\/p>\n
I stepped out of the car. The silence of the woods was absolute\u2014no birds, no wind. Then, I heard it.<\/p>\n
\u201cELIAS… ELIAS… WHERE ARE YOU, ELIAS?\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a voice. It was a vibration that rattled my teeth, a metallic, screeching sound that perfectly mimicked a human throat being shredded. It slammed against the steel hatch from the inside. Boom. Boom. Boom. The heavy padlock holding the wheel-valve shut strained against the violent impacts.<\/p>\n
My chest tightened. I stumbled backward, my million-dollar bravado evaporating in the cold mountain air. I pulled out my phone and dialed the one number I had sworn I\u2019d never call again.<\/p>\n
It rang four times before Elias picked up. He didn’t say hello.<\/p>\n
“The salt lines are broken, aren’t they?” Elias’s voice was hollow, devoid of the frantic energy he\u2019d had six months ago.<\/p>\n
“Elias,” I choked out, unable to tear my eyes away from the buckling metal. “What is down there? What the hell did you keep down there?”<\/p>\n
“I didn’t keep it down there. Granddad did. And his dad before him,” Elias replied, his voice terrifyingly calm. “The cabin wasn’t a vacation home. It was a blind. A weight. We are the wardens, little brother. It only knows my name because I was the one who went down every month to bleed on the lock. To keep the pact. To keep it sleeping.”<\/p>\n
A massive dent suddenly bowed the steel hatch upward. The screaming shifted. The voice stopped chanting Elias’s name and inhaled sharply, a wet, rattling sound that echoed up through the vent pipe.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot Elias…\u201d the voice hissed, no longer screaming, but whispering in a tone that sounded sickeningly like our dead mother. \u201cFresh blood. New warden. Let me out, sweetheart.\u201d<\/p>\n
“Elias, you have to come up here,” I begged, tears blurring my vision. “You have to fix this!”<\/p>\n
“I can’t,” Elias said softly. “The land belongs to the developers now. The bloodline’s claim to the soil is severed. You sold the prison, and you voided the lease.”<\/p>\n
“What does that mean?!” I screamed.<\/p>\n
“It means I’m packing my bags, and you have about two minutes to run.”<\/p>\n
The call disconnected just as the heavy iron padlock snapped with a deafening crack. The rusted wheel of the hatch began to turn, squealing in the dead silence of the forest. I had a million dollars sitting comfortably in my bank account, but as pale, multi-jointed fingers curled over the lip of the opening steel door, I realized there wasn’t a currency on Earth that could buy my way out of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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