Coda Found on a Dusty Cell Phone

Our mother told us she bought the house because it was the sort she had always wanted and could finally afford after the legal settlement. She’d always loved old things. She wanted a great deal of space, and the house is indeed larger than anything we could have imagined living in. We continued to find hidden rooms fairly constantly, every few weeks or so.

She waited a while to tell us about the chewers of foam. That was why she got the house so cheap. There was that hidden catch. She knew they existed in the basement when she bought the house. “The stairs rotted away long ago,” she told us. She had a worried expression on her face when she told us that, but she spoke in a manner that was clearly meant to reassure us. “So there is no reason to worry,” she finished. “As long as we always feed them. That’s all we have to do.”

So, Christ, of course after hearing that, we worried a great deal.

It wasn’t so bad until we had to feed them ourselves, to open that black painted basement door on a black void and drop the foam down into the darkness. Mother got tired of it, you see. She said it made her feel light-headed. It must be a long way down, because even our flashlights wouldn’t penetrate the darkness. Yet we would hear the sound of them chewing after a while. I say “them,” because we figured it had to be a large number by the way the echoing sounds floated up from many directions at once. What sort of creatures live in total darkness and get nutrition from Styrofoam? “I think they eat something else,” Annie said one day, quite rationally. “I think they just enjoy chewing on the foam.”

There were strange whoops of satisfaction that drifted up from below every time we broke up pieces of white polystyrene and dropped them. Down they fluttered into the darkness. It made me dizzy to watch. And then mom traveled to Ireland to see dying uncle Edwin and you know how that ended. After mother’s death, we all felt miserable and we just stopped feeding them. We kept the basement door locked. The youngest of us found some plans of the house someone had scanned and posted online. Maybe they were genuine. There were supposed to be tunnels down there. They had been built in the 1860s. Some sort of doomsday cult. “Maybe they’re still there?” we wondered. “Breeding in total darkness? And eating…what, exactly?” Rae giggled. Nothing would grow down there. “Zero sum population game,” Josh said darkly.

We heard the first thuds on the other side of the basement door Friday night. They increased in intensity by early Saturday morning. It would stop and start again, but it got louder each time. We knew by the sounds that many of them were right there on the other side. “What the hell did they use to climb?” one of us asked.“Maybe each other,” Rae said. “Or maybe they float?” Annie speculated. “Burn the house down,” insisted Josh. You see, the problem was that by then we couldn’t open the door to feed them. We had the styrofoam. But we no longer had the nerve.

The door was shaking constantly by Saturday afternoon. We’d nailed boards over it and set an armoire against it. But we knew by then that it was just a matter of an hour or so. Lily, perhaps the brightest of us, opined we should cut a small hole in the center of the door and start pushing styrofoam through. We all nodded furiously. But just as Josh came running back into the kitchen, hole saw in hand, the door went dead silent.

Monsoon, our black cat, froze while staring at the armoire set against the basement door. He had his back arched and his tail bushed out, but he was more still than I have ever seen him in this life. And then he let out a yowl that rose like an air raid siren. That’s when the two other doors in the kitchen where we all stood slammed shut and locked themselves. Just after that, the floor began sinking beneath our feet. And that’s when we realized that actually the whole room was sinking, that we were in an elevator, and that we were going down. Way, way down.

Dad, we’re all hoping you’ll somehow get this message, that you’ll know what to do, and how to find us. I’ve lost reception, we all have, and I’m using this note-taking app to record everything exactly as it happened. So far the “elevator” is still closed. Two of the doors open on black rock faces. The third, the basement door, well, none of us has gone near it. We’ve armed ourselves as best as we could with kitchen implements. It’s been silent for hours since we hit bottom. That’s why I decided to make this record of events. I’d better go though. Because just now we all heard the strangest sound.

For the first time, there was a knock on the other side of the basement door. We have a little styrofoam left. A little wampum of styrofoam. For when the door opens. And then what? And there’s a sound of something much heavier beating the door. We are all preparing now for the moment when the door gives away. The armoire is useless. I’m just going to set this phone down for a moment. I will continue shortly, Dad. I hated this house from the first day, you know that? The first day. I’ll be right back. I will. I know I will. I will, I will, I will. Oh Christ, that’s not a hand…is it…is it?…what the hell do you call that?…

(Here the recording abruptly ends.)