The Visitors Beneath the Floorboard

The Visitors Beneath the Floorboard

“You’re late, Reese. They’re already here.”

The younger version of me—the girl with the inked arms—stood by the window with her head tilted just enough to catch the moonlight. Her hair hung in tangled coils down her back, but her face… it was mine. Not how I remembered it, but how it might’ve looked if fear had been carved into the bone.

I stepped farther into the replica of my childhood bedroom. The wood creaked under my boots, a sound too alive, too reactive—like the floorboards were listening. My pulse thundered. I wanted to speak, to ask her what she meant, but the words twisted in my throat like a swallowed scream.

“They’ve been waiting,” she said, pointing to the closet door.

The same door I’d hidden behind the night my father vanished.

The closet handle slowly turned.

I backed away. “Who’s here?”

The girl didn’t answer. She just stepped to the side, leaving the moonlight to fall on the door. Her ink shimmered like it was alive, slithering across her skin in patterns that pulsed with memory.

The door creaked open.

Inside, there was no closet. No shelves. No shoes. Just darkness—a deep, pulsing absence that exhaled a low, rattling sound like breath filtered through teeth. My fingers instinctively reached for the ink on my own arms. It was hot again. Not burning. Not hurting. But alive. Like it recognized whatever was breathing in that void.

“They know your name now,” the girl whispered. “They remembered it. That’s why they let you in.”

“I didn’t ask to be here.”

“You did, a long time ago. You just don’t remember. Not yet.”

Then she walked into the closet.

“Wait—”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t even turn back. The darkness swallowed her whole, like it had been waiting just for her. And then, with a breath like a dying wind, the closet door began to close.

I lunged.

The darkness hit me like cold static—weightless but suffocating. My ears rang, and the room behind me vanished. It wasn’t walking through a door. It was falling into a memory you weren’t supposed to access. The kind you bury in wet earth and salt and never name again.

I landed on tile—wet, cracked, glowing faintly under a sterile, blue light.

A hospital?

The air smelled like iodine and mildew.

Footsteps echoed behind me.

I turned. The girl was gone. But someone else was there—thin, long shadows moving along the walls, out of step with the sound. My legs screamed to run, but my body wouldn’t listen.

Then a figure stepped out from the flickering hallway ahead.

It was the woman from the photograph. The one I was supposedly standing over.

But now she was alive.

Her skin was pale and marbled with the same ink as mine, only hers moved faster, like it was trying to escape. Her eyes locked with mine, and she whispered something I couldn’t hear—but my ink flared in response.

“You took my name,” she rasped.

“What?”

“You wore it like a coat. But it wasn’t yours to take.”

The tile floor split beneath her feet. Cracks veined outward like something ancient was clawing its way up from beneath the earth. The light pulsed and died, and for a moment, everything was silent.

Then I heard the voices.

Hundreds of them.

Screaming.

Whispering.

Laughing.

They poured through the cracks like mist, each carrying words in forgotten dialects—languages my mind didn’t recognize, but my ink did. My body shook violently, a seizure of memory trying to sync with reality. I dropped to my knees, holding my head as the voices bled into one:

“She is not complete.”

A hand touched my shoulder.

I flinched, ready to fight—but it was him.

Caleb.

He was dressed in the same coat from the first night, but his face looked… wrong. Blurred at the edges, like it had been painted and then smudged by a shaking hand.

“I followed you through,” he said quietly. “But we’re not alone.”

“No shit.”

His gaze flicked to the woman across from us, who had begun to levitate slightly off the ground. The ink on her arms writhed like snakes.

“She’s not alive, Reese. She’s a vessel. Like you.”

I blinked. “What the hell does that mean?”

Caleb knelt beside me, his hand resting over the place on my arm where the ink burned hottest. “Every time someone dies with this ink, it remembers. It stores. It grows. You didn’t find this tattoo—you inherited it. You’re part of something older than you. Than me.”

“I never asked for this.”

“No. But you answered it.”

The ground shook. The cracks widened. The woman’s mouth opened, and from it came a deep, guttural voice—one that didn’t match her body.

“She wears our skin. But she does not belong.”

Caleb pulled me up. “We have to leave.”

“How? There’s no door!”

He looked behind us—where the closet had been—and pointed. “There.”

The hallway.

I could see it again now, barely illuminated by flickering bulbs, warped and trembling like a reflection on disturbed water. We ran.

The shadows followed, crawling along the ceiling and walls like vines made of smoke. I heard my name screamed behind me—not in Caleb’s voice, but the girl’s. The inked child.

“Don’t leave me again, Reese!”

But I didn’t stop.

We burst through the hallway and into—

A classroom.

Desks overturned.

Blood on the walls.

I knew this place.

“Holy hell,” I whispered. “This is my high school.”

Only it wasn’t.

Not exactly.

The walls were covered in paper—pages torn from notebooks, each with my name written over and over again in different handwriting. Some were childish. Some neat and cursive. One of them looked like my father’s.

“They’ve been tracking you,” Caleb murmured. “Or maybe you’ve been tracking yourself.”

I turned, heart hammering. “What are you talking about?”

He looked at me, eyes darker than I remembered. “The ink doesn’t just record memories, Reese. It rewrites them. Merges timelines. Realities. Versions of you that should’ve never met are bleeding into each other.”

“What do you mean versions of me?”

The classroom door slammed shut behind us.

Locking.

From the corner, something stirred.

Not the girl.

Not the woman.

Someone else.

Sitting in the teach
er’s chair, their face hidden behind a curtain of black hair. A voice like rust and old books rasped:

“Let’s begin.”

And the desk in front of me burst into flame.