Chapter 41 - The Knock in the Night
It was precisely three o'clock in the morning when the sound tore through the silence of the house.
It was not the wind. It was not the settling of old timbers.
It was a heavy, deliberate, rhythmic knocking against the thick oak panels of the kitchen cellar door—the door that led down into the deep, sealed masonry of the lowest crypts beneath the foundation.
*Thump. Thump. Thump.*
I sat bolt upright in bed, my heart hammering fiercely against my ribs. The room was plunged in thick, ink-black darkness.
*Thump. Thump. Thump.*
The sound was coming from inside the house, deep below where the old foundation met the bedrock. But the cellar was locked, and the only exterior hatch had been covered with reinforced concrete sixty years ago after the fire.
I slid out of bed, gripping my walking cane tightly. My breath came in short, cold puffs.
I walked out into the upper hallway. The grandfather clock was still ticking, but beneath its steady beat, the thumping continued, slower now, more deliberate.
I descended the stairs, step by step, my knuckles white upon the railing. When I reached the ground floor, I noticed a strange, acrid smell lingering in the air—the unmistakable, sharp scent of fresh kerosene and wood smoke.
I moved toward the kitchen. The cellar door stood at the end of the pantry corridor. Beneath the base of the door, where the wood met the floorboards, a faint, flickering red glow was seeping out into the dark.
And then, from behind the heavy iron bolt of the cellar door, a voice rasped—not Tyler’s, not Richard’s, but an ancient, gravelly voice that sounded as though it had clawed its way out from beneath seventy years of scorched earth:
May you like
*"Evelyn... open the door. Thomas didn't tell you about the other child."*
My hand froze inches from the light switch as the heavy iron bolt on the door began to slide slowly, inexorably, from the inside.
