Horror

The Aldren house had been on the market for sixteen months when Callum and his daughter moved into it, which the estate agent attributed to the state of the economy and which Callum, after the first week, began to attribute to something else. The house was quiet in the way that old houses are sometimes quiet — with the active, attentive quality of something that is not making noise on purpose.

His daughter, who was seven and had recently decided that she found most things more interesting than frightening, informed him on day three that the upstairs bathroom mirror showed the hallway differently at night. Callum checked. It did. He told himself this was a trick of the light, the particular angle of the streetlamp, the way old glass warped with temperature. He told himself this with some conviction for approximately ten days.

On the eleventh night, the mirror showed a hallway that did not match the house's current floor plan. It showed a hallway with a door at the end of it. There was no door there. There were no marks on the floor suggesting a door had ever been there. His daughter stood beside him, studying the reflection, and said quietly: "I think it's showing us what it remembers."

The door in the mirror was not the only door. This became clear after Callum spent three days measuring the house and comparing the measurements to the original architectural plans he had obtained from the estate agent's records. The plans showed a basement. The house did not have a basement — not any basement he could find — but the measurements were off in ways that could not be accounted for by wall thickness or structural variance. Something was below the ground floor, with approximately the dimensions of a room.

He found the entrance on the tenth day of looking, behind the shelving unit in the utility room. Not a hatch, not a trapdoor — a door, flush with the plaster, hinged on the left, with a handle that was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. He told his daughter it was a storage cupboard he was checking. She looked at him in the way that seven-year-olds look at adults who are not being entirely honest and said: "You should take the torch. It doesn't like the dark."

He went down. The stairs were old wood, firm under his weight. The room at the bottom was empty except for one thing: a chair facing the wall, positioned with the deliberate precision of someone who had placed it there to look at something specific. On the wall the chair faced was a square of plaster lighter than the rest, where something had hung for a very long time.