What Lives Beneath the Floorboards

The first sound was a scratch. Light, almost playful, as though a mouse was exploring the joists beneath my bedroom. But it came again the next night, louder, more insistent. By the third, it was a steady rhythm, like fingernails dragging across wood. Something was beneath the floorboards, and it wanted me to know.

I told myself it was vermin. Rats, perhaps. But the sound was too deliberate. Too patient. And then the whispering began.

The Voice Below

Late one night, as the scratching ceased, I heard a faint murmur. Words, though blurred by distance, seeping upward through the cracks. I pressed my ear to the floor and froze. The voice wasn’t speaking in any language I knew, yet I understood it all the same. It spoke of hunger. Of waiting. Of how long it had been since anyone listened.

I recoiled, heart hammering, but curiosity gnawed at me. The next night, I placed a glass against the boards, listening like a child to a forbidden secret. The voice grew clearer. It knew my name. It knew the taste of my breath, the rhythm of my heartbeat. And it promised me things—things I should not have wanted. Freedom from grief. Freedom from loneliness. Freedom from myself.

The Offer

Soon, I began leaving scraps of food between the gaps in the planks. Bread, fruit, whatever I could spare. I never saw a hand reach up to take them, but each morning the offerings were gone, and the voice thanked me in that same low murmur, like a lover speaking into my skin.

One night, it asked for more. Not food this time. It asked for something living. Something warm. I told myself it was mad, that I was inventing it all. Yet when I placed a trapped bird beneath the loose panel, the voice sighed in pleasure as the wood grew wet with blood. I should have run. But instead, I listened harder.

The Growing Hollow

The floorboards began to change. They creaked when I stood upon them, not from age, but from something shifting just below. The boards bulged upward slightly, as if swollen. At night, I felt the faint vibration of movement beneath me, like a heartbeat pulsing in the house itself.

The voice grew stronger, no longer muffled. It spoke as though rising closer to the surface. It told me I had been chosen—that all who had lived here before had heard it too, and each had fed it in turn. Some resisted. They were gone now, absorbed into the dark beneath. But I… I could help it grow.

The Breach

Last night, I woke to find the boards splitting. A thin crack stretched across the room, exhaling damp, hot air that smelled of earth and iron. I knelt beside it, trembling, and saw eyes staring up at me. Dozens of them. All human, yet wrong—unblinking, glistening, packed so closely they seemed to share sockets.

The voice no longer whispered. It sang. A chorus of all those who had ever listened, their mouths chanting from the dark, their words weaving into mine until I couldn’t tell where my thoughts ended and theirs began.

I know now what lives beneath the floorboards. It is not rat or ghost or demon. It is a hunger shaped like a home, feeding on every family foolish enough to dwell above it. And tonight, the boards will not hold.

I can already hear the nails tearing free. The wood buckling. The voice calling me down, down, into the dark where all things are remembered and nothing is ever lost.

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