It had been rough for Tom with the divorce, and even tougher when his ex-wife filed for full custody of their eleven year old son, Danny. Thankfully she hadn’t won, but he only had him for the weekends. Tom was happy to have that much, but he worried for his son throughout the weekdays.
Danny had been born completely blind; a rare birth defect. He was perfect in every other way, but his disabilities led to some complications, like a requiring a private, specialized tutor, since he couldn’t go to a normal school.
With the divorce, Danny would get less time with, well, everyone. Tom had a well-paying job, and since his wife, Laura, had been caught cheating, the judge had determined that he not have to pay alimony. Child support was a given, however, and Tom didn’t complain about it, but he worried how much of it would actually get to his son. He’d let her keep the house so Danny wouldn’t be out on the street, but the mortgage was no longer his responsibility.
Without the alimony Laura would have to work out of the house more, and that would leave Danny by himself more and more. Every weekend Tom would question his son as to how things were at home, and Danny always said things were “fine.” It was frustrating but Tom didn’t want to grill his son over details. He hoped Danny would tell him if things got bad.
It was on one of these weekends Tom had discovered Danny had a new hobby: drawing. As unusual as it was for someone without sight to be drawing, what was more perplexing was how good he was at it. The colours were right, dimensions realistic, details were accurate – and this was from a boy who’d never seen any of it with his own eyes. These pictures were not works of art worthy of a museum, but for a blind child they were uncanny.
Take, for example, a drawing of a sparrow. All the colours were spot on, from the orange of its beak and feet to its red chest. How could he know what colours to use? Danny didn’t go to school like a regular child, and actually had contact with only a few people. But even if someone told him, how could a blind person know what the colour orange looked like?
Finally Tom couldn’t restrain himself any longer; he had to ask his son if he had help.
“No,” Danny had said. “I just draw what I see in my head.
“So you mother doesn’t help? Doesn’t talk to you about it at all?”
“Mom doesn’t even know I draw. She works a lot, and…”
Tom picked up his son and held him; no more words needed to be said. Laura just wasn’t around much. Tom knew that was going to be an issue, but what could he do?
As the weeks went on, Tom looked forward to his weekend visits with his son, as he always did. But now more so, to see what new drawings he had made, to bond with Danny in a way his mother didn’t. He became more and more curious as to how Danny was creating these works of art. Was he a child prodigy, or did he have help somehow?
Once again his curiosity got the better of him and Tom asked Danny if he could make him a drawing, anything he wanted, so long as he did it at his house, away from anyone else. Danny agreed.
So Tom left him to it, and when he came back, the drawing sent a chill down his spine. It was a picture of his house. Everything was there; from the green shingled roof, to the numbers beside the door. His blue Buick was in the driveway, which was lined with purple lilac bushes. The shape and placement of the windows, the garage…it was too much.
“Where did…” Tom began. “How did you know all this about my house?” he asked his son.
Danny just shrugged and said, “It’s what I see in my mind.”
Tom was astounded. Was his son special, like having a sixth sense, or extra-sensory perception? Or perhaps his vision was slowly returning and he was keeping it to himself? He tried that theory out for himself but found Danny non-responsive to various visual stimuli.
He decided to keep the pressure on his son and have him make more drawings. The next weekend Danny drew a strange picture. It looked like a tiled pattern of beige blobs and…it was his kitchen. Danny had drawn the pattern of the laminate floor of his kitchen. Now it was getting strange. Tom rarely had visitors, so who could’ve told Danny about…Tom tried to shake it off. He wanted to give his son the benefit of the doubt, to believe in him. So he’d give his son one more chance. One more drawing.
The next weekend at his father’s house, Danny drew a picture of the kitchen floor again, only this time it had been torn apart. Underneath the floor, beneath the house, was a dark grey, square object. When Tom asked Danny what it was, his son told him he didn’t know. He just drew it.
After Danny went back to his mother’s, Tom couldn’t get the image out of his head. Eventually he decided to borrow a metal detector from a friend. When he used it in his kitchen it indeed declared something metallic – something big – below, in the exact spot as in his son’s picture.
Now it was getting spooky. What was down there? The house had no basement; just a solid cement foundation. He called up the realtor through whom he’d bought the house, and got the contact information of the previous owners. But they told him what he feared, that there was no basement and they had no idea what, if anything was down there.
So it was up to him. Not being able to sleep at night with an unknown object buried under his house, Tom began carefully excavate his kitchen. First the linoleum was gently peeled back, exposing the plywood underneath. Using a circle saw he cut a large square in it, matching the location of his son’s drawing. Once it was pried up, he found the brick foundation. Tom tried the metal detector again to confirm that something was still down there, before taking a sledge hammer and smashing through the concrete blocks.
It took a while, but Tom eventually broke through. After a foot of concrete he found a cavity approximately four feet square and two feet deep. Within the cavity was a metal door set in the ground. It was heavily secured, with a padlock on every side. Tom was speechless; he didn’t know what to think. He wanted to bust open the locks, but was actually frightened about what might be inside. It was hard to have come so far and stop, but he had to put the floorboards back and wait to see his son again.
Tom no longer doubted his son’s gift. In fact, he needed it now. He’d lived in this house for only a few months, and realized he knew nothing about it. But he was going to get to the bottom of the mystery. His son might be the key.
“You were right,” he told Danny on the weekend, when he had care of him again. “About what was under the kitchen floor.”
“What do you mean?” Danny asked. “I don’t remember anything under the kitchen floor.”
“Your drawing,” Tom told him. “Don’t you remember? You drew it for me last week, a door under the kitchen.”
Danny shook his head and said, “I don’t know about that. Where does the door go?”
This shook Tom to his core. “You don’t remember drawing that?”
“I remember drawing, but Dad, I’m blind. I have no idea what I’m drawing. I just make it up. Whatever I see in my mind. What was behind the door?”
Tom had to think about this…he was a little spooked. Where was his son seeing these images from? He didn’t even know what they were. How could he possibly have known there was a door down there? Was someone or something communicating with his son?
“Nothing,” he finally said. “I mean, I didn’t open it. Do you think you can draw another picture? Just…whatever you see?”
Danny shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
Tom left Danny alone, even closing the door of his room to give him some privacy, but could barely wait to see what his son drew next. He went downstairs to put on some coffee and watch TV. His mind, however, refused to relax.
Soon he heard Danny’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and he ran to him, eager to see the next piece of the puzzle. He practically tore the sheet of paper out of Danny’s hands to look at it.
It showed the door under the kitchen floor with all the locks broken off, and the door ajar. It was like a lid, similar to a manhole cover, only square and partially off. Beneath it was what looked like a set of stairs, leading down into darkness.
Tom sighed. This was another piece of the puzzle but he wanted more. It was frustrating having to wait every week. He needed to know what was down there, and why the door was locked. He pressed his son for more pictures but Danny didn’t want to make any more. Tom understood and didn’t want to take advantage of is son, nor worrying him with incessant nagging. Besides, the door could wait. It had been there all this time and could wait a little longer.
But Tom was haunted all week by thoughts of the door, and it showed in his work. He was getting less and less sleep, making him irritable. Finally he couldn’t take it anymore. At four in the morning he found himself prying off the locks on the door and shoving off the heavy lid. He was met with a burst of warm, stale air, almost as if it had been waiting an eternity to escape. He grabbed a flashlight and shone it into the doorway seeing the stone stairs in his son’s picture. They went down maybe ten feet then followed a corridor to a corner. Weak light seemed to be coming from beyond it. Curiosity still getting the better of him, he stepped onto the stairs, and stopped.
They weren’t cold. Usually the basement is a cool, damp place, being underground. The stones should have been a couple degrees above freezing; instead you could almost say they were warm. The linoleum floor in his kitchen was colder. What was down here that was causing the stairs to be warm? He couldn’t urge himself any further, so he closed everything back up and tried to get some sleep. It didn’t come easy.
When Danny came for his visit the next day, Tom immediately tasked him with drawing. But Danny didn’t want to.
“You opened the door, didn’t you?” he asked his father
Tom was taken aback. “How did you know that?”
“I felt it,” Danny replied. “I mean…I don’t know. I draw things that I see. But now it won’t stop; I keep seeing things. I can’t sleep.” He opened his backpack and pulled out a few pages – drawings. “I’ve been drawing all night.”
Taking the pages gingerly out of his son’s hand, Tom was eager to see, yet afraid to look at the pictures. He was more concerned about his son now.
The first drawing was of the corridor with the light at the end. The second was a large rectangular block of…wood? The third a block of stone, larger than the wooden one, if that’s what it was. Another picture showed knives or other tools hanging on the wall. Then the last one showed the stone block from a different angle, possibly above. It was round, with a large hole in the middle. It wasn’t a stone block; it was a well.
Why would there be a well under his house?
“What were they?” Danny asked. “The pictures. What did I draw this time?”
Tom didn’t have the heart to tell him. “It’s just pictures of the basement. Old rusty stuff. Junk.” He felt bad for lying but what good would come of telling his son the truth? He didn’t want to scare the boy.
Danny knew something was wrong, could tell it in his father’s voice, but didn’t argue. He didn’t want to be a problem, and he was tired from the lack of sleep. He went up to his room to rest.
Unlike his son, Tom was more relieved by these pictures; they were of mundane things. He could almost believe what he’d told his son – and it was possible he hadn’t really told a lie at all. He didn’t feel as nervous when he snuck back down there after Danny was asleep for the night.
Armed with his flashlight, Tom pried up the floorboards again, and opened the door, and headed down into the basement, if that’s what you’d call it. Halfway down the stairs he found a few keys lying on the steps. He brought them back up and found they matched the locks he’d broken off earlier. Whoever put the locks on had tossed the keys in first, intending for them never to be found, the door permanently sealed.
This was disturbing, but there was no turning back now. Tom returned down the stairs and crept along the narrow hallway, the stone under his feet feeling more like a sidewalk outside rather than something underground. The air smelled old, dusty. He approached the corner; a dim orange glow was coming from something out of view. Danny’s pictures hadn’t shown any lights.
Tom rounded the corner and found himself in a room. Dirt lined every side of it, floor and ceiling included. Old tools hung from the walls, far more sinister than his son’s drawings suggested. A wooden table stood alone on the far side of the room; not so much a table as a wooden slab – the block of wood Danny had drawn.
The well stood in the center of the room. It was maybe three or four feet across. No bucket and rope was attached to it, indicating that it didn’t contain water, but something inside smelled foul. An orange circular glow was cast upon the ceiling above it, lighting up the room, but was not coming from within the well. Tom looked down inside; it was deep and his flashlight didn’t reach the bottom.
He looked down the well for a long time before finally snatching a rusty hook off the wall and dropping it in. He shone his light after it, watching it fall until it disappeared. But there didn’t seem to be a bottom. No sound, no echo, nothing. After a minute of waiting, Tom felt a little unnerved. The knife couldn’t still be falling? Perhaps it landed in something soft, making barely a sound.
Then he heard it. Not the knife he’d tossed in, but something else. Whispers came up from the depths of the well. Tom thought he was imagining it, tried to ignore it. But it came again, distinct yet unintelligible. He peered into the darkness, trying to fathom what he hearing.
It took him a moment to realize the darkness was stirring. He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him – how could he see anything down there? – but the shadows did seem to be moving. More whispers reached his ears along with a scraping sound, like claws on rocks.
Something was climbing up the well.
Tom ran out of the room, down the corridor and up the stairs. He hastily replaced the door in its place and put everything back as securely as he could. He woke Danny, urging him to hurry and get dressed, and they went to a motel for the night. He tried to explain that it was ‘just for fun; to do something different for a change,’ but Danny had drifted off to sleep.
The next day Tom went to a hardware store to buy some heavy duty locks, leaving Danny at the motel. He returned to his house and found everything quiet, normal. It took every ounce of courage he had to expose the door and place a lock on every side, all the while terrified that at any moment whatever came up the well would make itself known. But he had no such incident.
When everything was back in its place and firmly secure, Tom went back to the motel. He wasn’t sure what to do about his house, but felt better with the hidden door being locked again. He’d figure out what to do about it later. Right now he just wanted to try to forget about the previous night and spend time with his son. He didn’t even ask for more pictures.
But while Tom was out Danny had drawn another picture. He said his hand burned as he drew it. His father took one look at the drawing; his face paled, and he eyes stung, and he felt a warmth running down his legs.
It was a picture of the thing that was climbing out of the well.
Tom put the picture in the sink and set in on fire. The next day he put his house up for sale the next day and never stepped foot inside it again.
The Chris Effect 