My Dad Died 3 Months Ago but My Mom Talks to Him in the Basement

At this time, my dad had been dead for three weeks. A guy named Randy never showed up for supervision at the factory where he and my dad both worked. My dad, a stubborn man who’d rather die than ask for help, did just that. He worked at a company called Invisteel Pressing, a mill that pressed metal together to make buckets, cans, anything that was round and metal. 
Randy was their new supervisor and not a great one at that; I remember my dad always complaining about how he’d never show up or would be too scared to work in the mill, called him Scardy Randy. 

My dad was the one who’d put the steel on a press, which would then be clamped together and sent off to be bent and molded. A stray coil of steel rolled off a forklift and hit his back, pushing him onto the clamp press, and without Randy there to signal it off, the guys on the other side of the press did their job. My dad died in that accident, and because he technically wasn't there, Randy was let go without legal trouble. This angered my mom the most. She wanted him behind bars and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t. Hell, I did too. 
Soon after my dad’s funeral, my mom started cleaning out his stuff in the basement and moving it to the rest of his belongings in the garage. I started to notice her spending a little too much time in the basement as time went on. Since school was out for the summer, I normally stayed in my room with our cat Milo. 

The night I started to notice my mom’s lingering obsession in the basement was when it started to smell after every time she came back up from it. Like she was leaving something down there, which she was. The warm smell of reheated leftovers crawled underneath the basement door. Where my room was in the house was just adjacent to the basement. Take a left out of my room, around the corner, and that’s the basement. Milo started to claw and scratch the basement door to try and get to the food. 

When I had asked her about the smell in the basement, she denied any suggestion I threw her way. “It’s probably just the cat food we keep in storage.” She would tell me. My mom was a grieving widow at the start. I’d put my headphones on at night to drown out her wails and wallows. She was a 6th-grade teacher at my old middle school in town, and classes had just ended for the summer when my dad passed in the mill. He and I were never close, and I’ve always had a hard time grieving. Since his passing, I’ve been expecting a breakdown, a scream that empties my lungs, but nothing. Maybe it’d come one day, I thought; I hoped it had come sooner. 

I got around for bed one night and was trying to find Milo. He usually slept in my bed and hadn’t really left my room unless he had to consult his litter box in the garage. That’s when I heard stomping coming from the living room. I left my room and poked my head out to see my mom chasing Milo around the coffee table. Her reasoning was, “I just wanted to sleep with him tonight.” Which didn’t make sense because she was never a pet person and never paid mind to Milo. I had to convince her to get him for the family years ago, and since then, I don’t think she’s touched him once. I’d always have trouble sleeping, and during these last few weeks, it was especially difficult. Maybe this was my body’s way of grieving. Mom had taken the cat again, and I discovered my old sleeping meds. The first and only night I took them, I slept the hardest I have ever slept since school was out, since my dad died, since my life changed, except for waking up only once to the sound of panting on my chest. I figured Milo had escaped my mom’s grasp and came to lie back with me.

Days turned to weeks, and my mom started to get her spark back. She stopped crying at night, at least so loudly, and started having her friends over more. I remember it was Sunday and my mom had her friend Jen over to go through my dad’s clothes. The baskets my mom gathered from the garage were being hauled down to the basement. I didn’t think anything of it, she’s practically lived down there for weeks. Maybe my parents had a special place in the basement, I thought; maybe she sits down there with a glass of wine and flips through his old journals and smells his old clothes. Maybe that’s what grieving is, embracing every aspect of someone who’s not here, exposure therapy. At least that’s what I thought until she started talking to herself.

I had come home late one night after a night out with friends. My phone died so I couldn’t text my mom when I’d be on my way home like I always do. When I got in the house and kicked my shoes off, every room had its lights off. Every room except the basement. I shrugged it off, figured mom was down there with her glass of wine, maybe looking at some old pictures of my dad. That is until I was halfway to my room and heard voices coming from the basement. Not just my mom’s, a softer, more mechanical voice, like it was being played through her phone.

I leaned into the door and pressed my ear up against the wood to hear closer. “Clothes”, the unfamiliar voice seemed to inhale as it spoke to my mom. It seemed like it spoke through a corrupted megaphone. “Feline”, it rasped robotically. Silence rang out after, and I heard shuffling across the basement. The noise startled me, and I choked on my breath, which led to the scurrying in the basement to stomp abnormally quick up the stairs and stop on the last wooden stair right in front of the door I was breathing on. There was a strong presence behind the door, and I could hear panting as it stood there. I felt like it was staring at me through the door. “Son”, the voice echoed through the door like it was talking to me. It was too much for me, and I didn’t quite understand it, so I backed away and locked myself in my room. Maybe it was one of Mom’s friends, abnormally quick and drunk friends at that. 

The following night, I left my room to get a glass of water in the kitchen across the living room and pass the basement door. Mom said she was out for the night with a couple of her friends and she “won’t be back until I’m asleep,” she said.  Milo had normally run up to my legs by now, but all I could hear was his faint meow echoing across the house. Somewhere near my bedroom but further, somewhere in the basement.

So I crept and crept until the basement door took up my entire vision. I reached my hand out to the doorknob like a handshake with a gross man. The door screeched as it swung open, revealing a staircase that bled into the shadows of the basement. A soft crunching sound stopped as the door hit the wall. Milo had just finished eating out of his stored food, it sounded like. I remember thinking my mom must’ve accidentally left Milo down here while she was going through my dad’s old stuff. The basement stairs were wooden, hard, and eerily too long. As the stairs became concrete and the smell of stale, old basement air withered away, a much stronger aroma replaced it.

When I was around the age of the students my mom taught, our neighbor left for a cruise around the Caribbean, so my mom offered that I would house-sit her cat in exchange for money. The neighbor's cat preferred to stay outside for most of the time, so it became harder to find it and “easier” to take care of. I was young, and it annoyed me, so after a few days I pretended to go over there and feed it. I’d come back and make up stories of how well-behaved the cat was to sell my lie further. A week or so into lying, I was walking back to my house, already conjuring up another story to impress my parents, when an opossum found its way into our backyard. For the first time in days, I had found the neighbor's cat at the end of the opossum's mouth, and it was being torn open, with its intestines laid on the grass like a still life drawing. The neighbor’s cat released a smell that I didn’t know could exist, and I thought I would never smell it again until I stepped foot in the basement. 

The light switch at the bottom of the stairs was a long string that attached to a small chain next to the light bulb on the ceiling. After one quick tug, the lights clicked on, and what I saw, to this day, still keeps me up at night. A man - or what resembled one - on all fours, hovering over Milo’s degloved body, staring up at me like how a deer does when it hears a twig break in the distance. It was long and pale, and its mouth seemed to cover its entire face. Its breathing was the same as the voice behind the door last night, fast and rhythmic panting. There were eyes, but just a little too small and piercingly black. A slimy substance ran off of it as if it had just been spat out by a much larger creature. Milo’s blood dripped from its mouth and onto the concrete, which I imagine stained forever. Behind it was a hole in the basement wall, which couldn’t have been any bigger than a foot all around. It was awkwardly wearing clothes, as if someone else put them on it. In fact, it was wearing an Invisteel Press employee uniform with an embroidered name tag that read ‘Thomas’, the same as my father's. 

After what felt like an eternity, I lifted my foot to start inching backwards, and without skipping a beat, it scurried into the hole in the wall just a little too fast to be human. The slime oozing off of it helped the creature slide right into the hole with ease, leaving behind my cat’s chewed-up corpse on the basement floor. I ran and stomped up every stair, even skipping a few, to keep distance from whatever that thing was. As I opened the basement door, I was met with the first person I needed at that moment: my mom. 

Collapsing into her arms as she caressed my hair, I pleaded and sobbed to her about Milo and the thing in the basement wearing dad’s clothes. She lifted her head in confusion and stared at me as if I was speaking a different language. The words that escaped her mouth were uncanny and incomprehensible. She replied, “You mean your dad?” 

I broke free from her hold and backed away. That was not my dad; my dad was dead and had been dead for a month. This had to have been a prank, that was one of Mom's friends, I thought. She took my hand and motioned me to come downstairs back in the basement with her. “Do you mind grabbing that bag?” She pointed at a black garbage bag she had left in the kitchen. My eyes were red and watery, and it made me so confused with her sudden calmness that it started to frustrate me. I suppose I froze because my mom marched into the kitchen and dragged the trash bag behind her with both of her hands, proving it to be much heavier than I had thought. 

Every step of the stair on its way to the basement made the trash bag groan and cry in pain. My mom was dragging around a trash bag with someone inside it. I cried out to her, but it was as if she put cotton balls in her ears, there was no talking to her. As she descended the stairs to the basement, I couldn’t think about anything. So much had happened so fast, and it made me angry. She tore open the bag at the bottom of the stairs, and I don’t know what was more unsettling. The fact that my mom knew about the creature in the basement or that she had been dragging around Randy in a trash bag. 

All beaten and bruised with cuts on his forehead, Randy glanced at me at the top of the stairs and begged me to help him. He showed his bound hands and tied feet to me like he was showing me new jewelry. Adding onto another layer of horrific confusion, I froze in place. Embarrassingly admitting to be standing in a puddle of my own piss. My mom dragged him away from the stairs and further into the basement where I could no longer see Randy. I’ll never understand what made me go down those stairs that night instead of running out the front door, but my paralysis turned into hypnotization, and I walked aimlessly forward into the basement. 

We all stared at the hole in the wall, expecting it to crawl its slimy way out. Just like my mother to me, Randy had been shouting and cussing at me, which fell upon deaf ears. It was as if I had cotton balls pressed into my ears, and for the first time since Randy’s shouting, noises started to flood back into my hearing. A low rumble emitted from the hole in the wall, getting increasingly louder until it stopped. Right at the wall, tiny black eyes and a pale, sharp face peered its way into the light of the basement. “Oh right, turn around sweety, he doesn’t like it when people look at him.” My mom’s voice reassured us as she happily spun around and held her hands up to her chest in excitement. Randy’s incoherent shouting turned into pleas and apologies. Mom put a hand on my back and motioned for me to turn around, but all I could stare at was Milo’s body in front of the dead eyes in the hole. 

I slowly turned around and shut my eyes until tears slipped through, falling onto my shirt. Even through all of this, I was the most upset about Milo and how unfair this was for him. Squirming and wet squelches leaked out of the opening in the wall and hit the floor hard. At this moment, the room was silent, not quiet, silent. The type of silence that makes your ears ring. Squelches turned to stampering that went straight past Randy and stopped where my heels were. It was in the room now, and I could feel its presence where the hairs on my neck stood. My staggered breathing competed against its panting, and I grew unfathomably impatient. The smell of warm air leaving its mouth reminded me of the neighbor's cat. Instinctively turning around, coming face to face with the name tag ‘Thomas’, this was when I realized this thing stood at least 3 feet taller than me. I followed my dad’s jacket up to the neck that was met with a long, beautifully hairless, and pale string of flesh. It was so tall it had to bend down to prevent hitting its head on the ceiling, and because it was bending its long and slimy neck, our faces met within inches of each other. 

Trembling in a fear only children could think, I was face to face with a nightmare. It had turned away from me and snapped down on all fours to get on the same level as Randy. He cowled and violently shut his eyes to the point where I’m sure he saw those little white dots in his vision. The only sound in the room was the creature's panting. It was almost comforting the way it echoed through my body. The creature forced a yelp out of Randy’s mouth, which made the panting stop, and it changed all focus onto where the sound was made. 
Seconds felt like hours, and time became a concept. We were the only source of nutrients in this creature's world, and it was hungry. Its mouth opened just a little too wide, and with one serrated bite, half of Randy’s face, from his neck to his forehead, had been bitten off. The word ‘blood’ was an understatement; what came out of that man was a tsunami, a fountain of never-ending liquid that took over the basement. 

The creature fell to the floor and writhed in agony. Screeching as if it wanted the moon to hear it. Limbs smacked the concrete repeatedly, and it felt like it shook the ground. I grabbed my ears as I watched my mom cheer and jump with joy, she ran over to the creature's squirming body and held its head. I watched her lips move as if she was saying words, but I couldn’t make out entirely what she was saying. The vibrating knocked buckets and cans off shelves and shook Randy’s corpse until, just like how it started, it ended abruptly. As I opened my eyes, the last person I’d ever expect to see took its place on the ground and spoke out to me. “Son”, a voice I hadn’t heard in what felt like a lifetime ago spoke to me, and it was the softest and gentlest word I'd ever heard my father say. 

My parents locked eyes once again, and I saw a light come back to my moms for the first time in a month. She began laughing in utter relief as she grabbed my dad's chest and hugged him for the first time in what seemed like a time longer than he had been dead. The two shared a smile as if they weren’t surrounded by two corpses and their only son, covered in the man that killed my father’s blood. 

A low rhythmic wailing outside echoed in the basement walls, a sound only to be described as police sirens. Apparently Randy’s screaming and shouting were enough to have the cops called on us. I wouldn’t even know what to say to them: “Sorry officers, my mom fed the man who was responsible for my father’s death to the creature in the basement, which magically turned into my dad.” I didn’t have enough time to think before my dad started to jolt and contort in pain, the same way the creature did before him. My mom cried and shouted in anger, “No! This is NOT how this was supposed to happen!” I never really did understand what my mom meant by that, and before long, screeches pierced the air and prevented me from having open ears. I grabbed my head until the pain stopped, forcing myself to believe that I’m asleep and that this is only just a horrifying nightmare. I took my sleeping meds like I did the night before. I’m back in my room with Milo panting on my chest as I lay asleep, except Milo never panted. I knew what panted, the same thing behind the basement door, the same thing on my neck, and the same thing that hovered over me on all fours and watched as I slept that night. Before long, I opened my eyes and was met with the same thing that I’ve been imagining in my head. The creature sprawled on all fours, supporting its stretched and bony body, with its beady eyes centered on me. 

Sirens blared the loudest, now being stationed in the driveway. Hard knocks on the front door followed by the occasional loud introduction of the police. The continuous knocking made the creature wince, not in pain, but in the same way a dog does when you blow air at it. My mother was broken once again; she fell to her knees and sobbed into her hands. The light in her eyes was stolen once more, and she had reverted to wailing like the nights before. Raps on the front door stopped- I hadn’t even noticed- and made me question if the police and sirens were ever truly there. Even then, I was too terrified to make a run for it. Besides, the creature seemed to know every move I’d make before I made it. I was helplessly stuck to the floor like my feet were encased in cement. 

Glass broke upstairs, I assumed the police had broken the door window to unlock it from the outside. I wasn’t too sure about that theory until they introduced themselves as they stormed into the house. “Sounds like crying,” one officer informed the other, “basement”, the other replied. I couldn’t understand the murmurs coming from upstairs, but the radios seemed to disturb the creature the most. With each hiccup from the radio on the officers upstairs, it would wince, but this time in pain. 

I was closest to the stairs since I didn’t walk that far into the basement, so the police were first to see me. They held their guns up until I slowly put my hands more into view. Step by step, I put one finger over my mouth and took a step closer to the stairs. The creature, who had its eyes on me, seemed to notice, and it did not appreciate me moving. I shut my eyes slowly and listened to panting scurry up next to me. Its head pressed up against my pant leg as if it were smelling me, smelling my piss-soaked pajama pants. I attempted to pay no mind as I opened my eyes once more to motion back to the police men up the stairs, who were just out of view of my body and could only see my hands and head. 

With my fingers, I pressed them together like I’m turning on a radio. Trying to play charades with the officers upstairs while ignoring the creature frantically smelling my pant leg. I stared in the direction of the stairs and just prayed they understood my movements. My mom still lay on the ground and held my dad's clothes while sobbing to herself, unaware of the noise she’d been making, Randy’s half-eaten face, Milo, and the police. But so was the creature, and as it began to lose interest in smelling, its long neck curled back up at me. Before it could do anything else, the officers put their radios together, which projected tornado siren feedback and sent the creature spiraling. It ran from me, scurried past my mom, and screeched into the hole in the basement wall, but not before grabbing the rest of Randy’s body and forcing it into the hole it crawled into. Leaving nothing but a trail of slime from where I stood all the way into the wall. All without my mother even opening her eyes. 

This was two months ago, I’ve been sent to psychiatric hospitals and tramua-response therapists across the state. That night, after my mother lost her husband for the second time, hasn’t stopped crying. She’s, well I don’t even know where she is now. The last place they told me she was in Acute Inpatient Hospitalization in some ward in Nebraska. I live with my grandparents in Wisconsin, far from that house and what happened in it. I still think about my dad, talked through it more in therapy, same with mom. It’s hard coming to the realization that you’re grieving your cat more than your own father, but I can’t get the image out of my head. The image of that thing violently shaking and screeching on the cold concrete basement, Scardy Randy’s head being licked off in one bite, or that thing pretending to be my dad. It’s cold, stretched pale, skin scurrying across the basement floor, the words it spoke behind the door, the way it stared back at me like an animal pretending to be an animal. Guys in suits asked me questions about that night too, but if I didn’t know any better, they seemed like they were targeting mom. I’ve been getting the help I need, especially now being on release from the hospitals and regularly seeing my therapists. There’s just one thing that keeps me up at night when the silence fills my bedroom. Sometimes, as the cars on the highway pass by the house, I can still hear its panting in the basement.