The floorboards creaked while Angela tiptoed through the abandoned house. There were decayed shelving units built into the walls casting shadows that danced on the edge of her vision. She didn’t use her cell phone to light her way for fear of drawing too much attention to herself, so she made her way towards the kitchen with only the glow of the moonlight to guide her through the house. Each footfall was accompanied by the moan of the floorboards and the dust floating into her nose.

Her face crinkled as she almost coughed. She stopped, collected herself, pinched her nose, and resisted the oncoming sneeze. After she was sure that there would be no errant evacuation of dust particles from her nostrils, she continued through the house towards the kitchen. A tingle went up her arm as she brushed up against a spider web. She could feel the strands on her arm like tiny bugs crawling on her skin.

There was an abandoned oak table in the dining room adjacent to the living room. Its chairs had disappeared in ages past leaving the table to stay abandoned and forgotten. It had an ornate pattern on the trim that was faded and scratched with age. The remnants of a chandelier hovered over the table like shards locked in a fall from a crumbling tower. She carefully made her way around the table towards the kitchen.

Angela was in the science club at Roosevelt High school. Since she dressed like a pseudo punk pop star with platinum wavy blonde hair, every guy in the science club sputtered like cretins around her. However, she didn’t care about boys, at least not in the way they cared about her. People thought that she cared more about science and school than everyone else. Which was true in some context. She’d rather dive into the source code of a robot that she had been constructing than talk with some drooling boy any day. When she had a goal in mind, she was singularly focused and didn’t stop until she achieved that goal.

That’s why when she crossed the threshold of the dining room to the kitchen, she didn’t let what she saw stop her. The kitchen was old with appliances that looked like they hadn’t been used since the fifties. The decrepit popcorn painted ceiling had a large black grease spot directly over the ancient stove. It had coil burners and big clunky knobs. A dusty pack of matches stood as a reminder that igniters didn’t always come with the stove.

There were bones on the floor. Most were gnawed T-bones that looked like the previous owner left each bone to rot after giving it to their dog. A fridge with a round top stood in the corner with a smell emanating from it that made Angela cringe. The kitchen was filthy with stains from who knows what marking the counter tops. Angela quickly made her way through the mess to the door at the other end, the door to the basement.

She opened the door. The hinges cried from neglect. The stairs disappeared into an abyss. She wanted desperately to use her phone to light the way, but she knew that she couldn’t. Angela sucked in her breath and looked back towards the dining room. The shadows danced around the table seeming to warn her “go back.” She turned to the darkness awaiting below.

Angela breathed out a long slow sigh and stepped into the basement, one footfall at a time.

*****************

Angela stepped into the darkness of the basement. The floor creaked, and she could feel it bend under her weight as if it would snap under the pressure. The next step was equally as perilous. The darkness closed in around her as she went further and further down. She thought about her media arts instructor. He was an older man with wild Einstein-like hair. He always wore a tweed suit like he was a stuffy professor at an aging institution that was a relic of the past. Instead, Mr. Harrison, was a media arts teacher at a local high school that hired him because he decided to retire from his thirty-year career at the local television news station to pursue a “nobler” profession.

He would stand at the front of the class with an ancient slide projector. Her high school was probably the only one left in America that used physical slides. After the school installed a state of the art computer and projection system into every classroom, Mr. Harrison would still dust off the slide projector and use that instead. The new machine had a layer of dust on the keyboard. Her teacher would click between slides, mostly from his personal collection and explain some aging media concept. That’s when Angela realized that he probably didn’t retire from TV but was probably forced out when the television stations were required to upgrade to HD. He never adapted to the future.

Earlier that day, she was falling asleep to the cha-chink noise that emitted from the machine in between slides when an interesting image appeared on the screen. It was a picture of the stairs she was walking down this very moment. At the bottom where the concrete basement floor gave way to darkness, there was a ghostly figure staring at the photographer. It was huddled on the floor with its neck craned to stare at the intruder at the top of the steps. It was an eerie sight.

“You’ll notice,” Mr. Harrison said in his nasal, dry tone. “The image here displays a pretty convincing picture of the supposedly haunted Wellington house down on east end. This photograph was submitted to the station as proof of the haunting.”

The students all knew the stories. Most of the class road past the house on bikes when they were kids. They would peddle faster until the house was a safe distance behind them when they got near. A few people here and there claimed to have entered the house and had all sorts of tales of bleeding walls and unearthly spirits. However, it was also well-known bullshit.

Cha-chink. The next slide was a close up on the ghost itself. A decaying man appeared to be crying out in pain.

“You’ll see the ghostly image is clearly a picture of a real person, perhaps a leper, that was made ‘transparent’ by lightening the…”

And Mr. Harrison then began to describe a long, labor-intensive process that could be done in seconds with photoshop and a laptop. Two objects that Mr. Harrison probably made a point never to own. The class tuned out and fell asleep while he described dark room and film techniques that had a place in a museum more than a classroom. But there was something that interested Angela about the photo. It was something that drew her focus almost immediately. It was so interesting that she had to make up a bullshit excuse after class to see the ghost photo again.

Her eyes had not deceived her. There was a mark on the beam of the basement ceiling above the creature. It was a crisscross of scratches that the paranormal community had called “witch marks.” Those who believed in the legitimacy of the photo explained that the marks were designed to keep the evil trapped in the basement. For those who claimed the photo was a fraud, they explained carvings were designed to make the situation more spooky.

Angela knew that any theory about the origin of the marks was wrong. She knew exactly who carved them. It was her brother, and he had disappeared three years ago.

*****************

The inky blackness enveloped Angela as she continued down the stairs. She could hear the groan of the wood as she stepped further into the darkness of the basement. She clutched the rail as she stepped down. The creak of her footfalls seemed to echo into the nothingness around her. After she was sure that she was no longer at street level. She brought out her phone and flipped a switch on her flashlight app.

The house on Wellington was watched by the police. If they saw flashlights coming from the house, they would burst inside and arrest the trespassers. Since the house was a hotbed for ghost hunters, thrill seekers, and the occasional drug addict or two, the sheriff decided to press charges first and ask questions later. Angela needed to take the risk of using her phone. She had to see the witch marks for herself.

When the flash on her phone lit up the basement with a bright white light, she was startled by an old octopus furnace that looked like a being with tentacles lurking outside her vision. Once she was satisfied that it was just a normal object in a forgotten basement, she turned the light up towards the ceiling. There was a beam that ran across the ceiling from the landing to the depths beyond the furnace. A crisscross pattern etched into the beam was visible near the landing.

The crisscross would look like a random pattern to most people, but Angela had seen it many times before. Hidden in the overall pattern were the letters, k, y, l, and e. It was her brother Kyle’s tag that he created to identify his work. He was a graffiti artist. The angular lines were distinctive of his style. The signature was carved into the wood like many witch marks, so Angela could understand why no one noticed the word Kyle hidden in the markings.

The weird part was that the photograph Mr. Harrison showed the class was from the late seventies. Well before either Kyle or Angela were even born. In order for Kyle’s signature to appear etched in wood to later appear in a fraudulent photograph, he would have carved it himself, which was impossible. The other more likely possibility was that Kyle saw this carving and adopted it for himself. Regardless of how the carving came about, Angela knew that the key to his disappearance was in this house.

Angela took a few photographs of the markings for herself. She was about to turn back when she heard the whine of a rusty hinge from upstairs. Then she heard footfalls on the creaking floorboards of the living room. Angela ducked down near the furnace and turned off the light on her phone.

The blackness of the basement enshrouded her. She could only hear the sound of her shallow, tight, breath. Her imagination ran wild with the lights off, and she did everything in her power to remain calm. She pulled her thoughts from what could be lurking in the darkness to thoughts of her brother.

She remembered sitting under a tree during a sunny summer day. She was in a park with a concrete storm ditch that ran the length of the green space. The tree was right up against the side of the waterway. She was eleven-years-old. Her brother, who was sixteen at the time, was in the ditch with his hoodie pulled over his head. He was spray painting a clunky drawing that he would soon perfect in subsequent years.

“Can I come down now?” Angela poked her head over the side.

“No,” Kyle said. “You’re supposed to be the lookout. Now sit against the tree.”

“But no one is coming! I want to help.”

“Fine, come on. Hurry, before someone sees you.”

Angela remembered Kyle helping her into the ditch. He taught her all about graffiti, the lines, the form, and the technique. His skill wasn’t quite there yet, but it was better than the blob she had made. It was one of the best days she could remember, just her and her brother. She tried to hold on to the memory, so she wouldn’t think about the dark basement around her.

The footfalls upstairs came closer and pulled her from her memory. She could hear each step. Each thud was followed by cracks from the aging wood. They came closer and closer. Angela held her breath and sat perfectly still. The darkness closed in around her. It squeezed her insides. Her lungs felt like they were burning. The hinges squeaked as the door at the top of the steps opened.