Chapter 5 - What Lies Beneath the Floorboards
The drawing-room was exactly as I remembered it from the rare glimpses I caught as a child—yet entirely different. The furniture was draped in heavy, white dust sheets, giving them the appearance of ghosts standing in the dim light. The heavy velvet curtains were drawn tight, blocking out the daylight.
And there, in the exact center of the room, was the massive Persian rug.
It was beautiful, dyed in deep shades of crimson and indigo, but as I stepped closer, the smell hit me. It was the same smell Lily had described through her terror, the same smell from my own suppressed memories: copper, damp earth, and something old and sweet.
I grabbed the corner of the heavy rug and pulled. It was incredibly heavy, the thick wool dragging against the hardwood floor with a dull scraping sound. I poured all my strength into it, throwing my weight backward until the rug peeled away, exposing the floorboards beneath.
The wood in the center of the room was different from the rest of the floor. While the perimeter was made of polished, seamless oak, a five-by-five-foot section in the middle consisted of rough-hewn, unvarnished pine boards.
In the center of these pine boards was a recessed iron ring, completely flush with the wood. It was a trapdoor.
I knelt down, the dust swirling around me in the dim light, and gripped the iron ring. It was freezing cold to the touch. I pulled upward, bracing my feet against the solid oak floor.
With a loud, protesting groan of rusted hinges, the trapdoor lifted.
A wave of freezing, stagnant air rushed up from the darkness, carrying a stench so foul I had to cover my mouth to keep from gagging. It was a mix of mildew, old paper, and something unmistakably chemical—like bleach and old medicine.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and switched on the flashlight, shining the beam down into the void.
A steep, narrow flight of wooden stairs led straight down into a subterranean room. The walls weren't made of regular concrete or stone like the rest of the house’s foundation; they were lined with thick, soundproofing foam panels, now rotting and covered in green mold.
At the bottom of the stairs, the flashlight beam caught a small, wooden chair bolted directly to the floor. Next to it was a small metal table holding rusted medical instruments, old glass vials, and a heavy, wooden box with a leather strap—the exact "box" Lily had mentioned in her sleep.
But the most horrifying detail was the color of the room.
The soundproofing foam, the floor, the base of the walls—everything had been painted a dull, sickening shade of dark red.
As I stared down into that nightmare chamber, my mind finally cracked the wall of my suppressed memories. A flood of images rushed back with the force of a tidal wave.
May you like
I saw myself at six years old, tied to that exact chair. I saw my mother standing over me, holding that heavy wooden box—an old electroshock therapy machine or some twisted pseudo-medical device. I remembered the blinding pain in my head, the smell of my own burning hair, and my mother’s cold, unyielding voice telling me I was "broken" and needed to be "fixed" because I was too headstrong, just like my father.
My mother hadn’t just hurt Lily. She had been running a private, horrific chamber of abuse in this house for decades. And thirty years ago, I had been her first patient.
