The man she buried is back—and knocking.

Ella-Nova froze.

The sound came not from the door, but from beneath it—from the earth below her floorboards. A slow, deliberate rapping, like knuckles on rotting wood.

She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

Because she had buried that man.

Six years ago.

No name. No family. No one who’d come looking.

She never even asked him who he was.

After what he did in her basement, she only wanted him gone.

She’d dug the hole herself, deep in the woods.

She remembered how heavy his body was.

She remembered the way the soil clung to her hands like it wanted him.

She remembered how, when she walked away, the wind stopped.

Now, the house was cold.

Too cold.

And the digital clock blinked, stuck on 00:05.

She approached the hallway slowly, the boards groaning under her weight. Something had changed. The lights hummed but didn’t work. Her breath fogged in the air. And then she saw it:

Footprints.

Muddy. Bare. Leading from the back door to the cellar.

The very place she thought she’d sealed for good.

The door was ajar. The lock snapped. A trail of dirt, blood, and something else—a thick, black sludge—ran from the threshold down the stairs.

Her flashlight flickered as she descended.

Each step groaned like it was being stepped on twice.

When she reached the basement, she nearly dropped the light.

The concrete floor had caved in.

A pit opened where the body had once been.

And beside it stood him.

The man she buried.

Only he wasn’t just a man anymore.

His skin hung in strips, soaked in gravewater. Roots and bones jutted from his torso like antlers. His mouth was sewn shut with barbed wire, but it twitched with hunger. His eyes were pits of earth crawling with beetles.

He raised one hand—decomposed, fingers missing tips—and pointed at her.

From the shadows, others emerged. Women, men, children—all things that didn’t belong above ground. Their faces twisted with agony, mouths slack, black soil pouring from them like ash.

Ella-Nova screamed and turned to run—but the stairs weren’t there anymore.

The wood had rotted away in seconds.

She spun back. The man was closer. Smiling now, wire tearing through his cheeks.

“You buried me,” his voice came from inside her head, not his mouth. “But you forgot the deal.”

“What deal?” she sobbed, stumbling back, slipping on blood. “I didn’t make any deal!”

“You killed me,” he said. “That is the deal.”

He lunged.

Hands of the dead wrapped around her ankles, wrists, neck. Dozens. Then hundreds. They dragged her toward the pit, screaming, thrashing, nails tearing at the ground, her flashlight skittering away.

“No—no—please—NO!”

But the man waited at the edge.

Smiling.

Welcoming.

And as she was dragged to the lip of the grave, her eyes met his. For a brief moment, he looked human again.

Then he whispered, through soil-filled breath:

“Now we both stay buried.”

And pulled her in.

Her scream was swallowed by the dirt.

The pit closed.

The clock upstairs blinked one last time.

00:06.

Then shattered.

And the house went still.

Forever.

Shynelle

@Five5

Shynelle has not written a story.