Down in the Crawlspace

We bought a cheap old house in the country, the kind with a dirt crawlspace and creaking floors. I went down there one afternoon to check for a leak, and found a child’s shoe—tiny, leather, from another era—half-buried in the soil. Weird, but I left it alone. That night, something scraped along the underside of the floor beneath our bed. It sounded like fingers dragging through the dirt.

A few days later, my wife said she heard a voice whispering from the vent in the nursery. Something soft and childish, saying, “Come see me down here. I miss the light.” I finally went back into the crawlspace with a flashlight. The shoe was gone. But the soil was still disturbed—like something had crawled further in.