Demon in the Basement

Mark Bilsborough

At first I thought we had rats again. I could barely see them in the dark: thin, washed out red eyes darting this way and that, but then whatever it was scuttled forward and if there had been rats down in the basement, the demon emerging from the gloom would have scared them right off.

“Hello”, it said, as it came into view. It was small, maybe three foot tall, though I couldn’t really tell back then because it crouched low, shaking. It had thick, dark matted hair and I caught a stench of fetid breath, making me recoil. It was flabby, too, as though it had spent too much time in the basement and lived life large off the scraps pouring down the food disposal chute. It had an earring on its left ear with small, whitish things dangling on it. Teeth? I could only see it from the hall light seeping through the trapdoor, so it looked washed out and sickly. I took a step back, up the bottom step, and held tight to the stair rail.

I turned and fled, slamming down the trapdoor. I slumped on the floor, leaning on a wall, shaking. I could hear it shuffling around now. A demon. There was a demon in the basement.

I grabbed a broom, the sturdiest weapon I could find. I cursed and wished I was in any way religious so that I could have taken a cross down with me to shine in its face. Or that I played baseball, so that I could knock its brains out. Instead I’d be reduced to sweeping it away, or killing it with my acid wit.

I could just call the cops, but what would I tell them? That there’s a demon in my basement? Best way to get them to hang up in a hurry. I should have called the cops, told them there was an intruder. That was true, sort of. But instead I went back down with the broom.

It hunched in the corner. “Hello,” it said again. When do demons talk? And even if they did, whoever heard of one saying ‘hello’?

I waved the broom at it. “What you doing here?”

“Hello,” it said again, so I jabbed it with the broom head. With the benefit of hindsight, that probably tickled more than anything else but it scurried back into the darkness.

“You gotta go,” I yelled. For some reason the demon wasn’t acting in any way demon-like, which both freaked me out and made me stupidly overconfident.

“Can’t,” it said. “Trapped.”

“What?” The demon was making no sense. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and fumbled for the torch function. It recoiled from the light, then turned. Seemed like the light was getting brighter and at first I thought my eyes were adjusting, but then I realised it really was getting brighter, but it wasn’t the phone any more. There was a glow behind the demon, and it reached towards it.

“No you don’t” I said and lunged. The demon half disappeared before I grabbed hold, but it was stronger than it looked, and it dragged me through the light before shrugging me off. I staggered, disorientated, and by the time I’d cleared my head the demon had escaped.

The light vanished and I looked around. I was in a dark, stone chamber which smelled of mildew and old paint. Shafts of illumination chinked though cracks in the ceiling. I heard muttering overhead.

“There’s a demon in the basement,” something said.

I cowered in the corner and waited.