He Isn’t Going Anywhere

Mitchell just moved.

It was … abrupt. He decided quickly he was done with his old city, his old friends, his old behaviors; he broke his lease and found a new one to sign the same week in a neighboring state 300 miles away he only knew through the threads he perused on Reddit.

Mitchell got into trouble; he had become a person he sometimes didn’t like, but to him, it was the circumstances, the environment, the people. He was going to be better now. He’d moved forward, past that toxic place. It wasn’t him.

As Mitchell walked through the space with the real estate agent during his move-in inspection, he blindly signed and failed to peer closer, though virtually everything under the ‘Condition’ header on the clipboard was noted ‘Excellent.’

As he and his cat, Ren, got settled, the imperfections came to light: one of the stove knobs constantly fell off, and the screen covering attached to the window was loose. There was a discolored patch in the wood flooring of the main room.

There was also a creaky pipe under the sink. Mitchell didn’t actually hear it the first four weeks. It was 3:00 a.m., and he awoke to a just-loud-enough bang, followed by a long, subdued groan. There was nothing in the cabinet but a little water on the floor. He got a couple of paper towels to clean up and sent a pointed email to his property manager before going back to bed.

After that night, he heard it the next, and every night after. At 3:00 a.m., a bang, followed by the strange, drawn-out groan from under the sink, but only for about five seconds, then a puddle of water to clean. The plumber came on day four.

“I don’t see anything here—I came out here right before you moved in to check, and it’s the same.”

“There’s a leak. I clean up the water. And not that I was expecting to again, but I’ve lived with bad plumbing. Can you make this stop?”

Mitchell noticed the edge in his speech.

“Look, just, c’mon. Help me out here.”

“I have to go across town. There’s nothing more to do here. Sorry.”

The following evening, Mitchell heard nothing. He didn’t wake up to any sound at 3 a.m. He arose the next morning pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t until a half hour later when he was fully awake that he recognized his new space was missing Ren.

He looked under the bed, behind his loveseat, in the cabinets, in the kitchen cabinet under the sink. He stopped. On the floor under the sink, Mitchell noticed missing wood, as if something punched or pushed up through the foundation. He saw traces of fur, water, some blood.

He stepped back in shock. Tears welled up in his eyes, horrified thinking about what might have snatched his cat, grief beginning to sink in. He called into work that day, called his property manager, and laid in bed most of the day.

He realized there was still an open hole later in the day and proceeded to remove everything from under the sink before the cabinet shut.

The property manager returned the call from his voicemail later that afternoon.

“So, wait—what happened?”

“I told you what happened. I can’t find my cat, and something got it through the bottom of the sink. I just had a plumber come out because I thought you had sh*tty pipes here, but seems like you have some kind of infestation, too!”

Mitchell knew he sounded like an assh*le, but he didn’t care.

“I’m sorry about your cat getting out. There is no infestation. I’ll submit a work order to look, but if you damaged the apartment, you will need to repair it.”

Mitchell scoffed and hung up the phone. He put on a crappy movie and chased the evening with a Tylenol PM and two shooters of whiskey he guzzled down his throat with contempt, shortly after falling asleep on the loveseat in a contorted position.

At 3:00 a.m., the same noise from before, and the same groan, greeted Mitchell, though he did not respond. He rarely used sleep-aids, hadn’t drank since he moved, and was still virtually unmoved from when he began sleeping. About two minutes later, what woke Mitchell was the cabinet doors slamming open and the duct tape tearing from the middle.

His body shot up vertically, and he stood, frozen. His night vision wasn’t strong. He stood still as a small figure moved toward him on the ground. It looked like Ren. She had patches of missing hair and parts of her coat had dried blood crusted over it.

Mitchell reached out, and Ren pounced on his left calf, sinking her teeth into his flesh. His frozen stance quickly changed, as he jolted his leg up. She sunk in her teeth further, and Mitchell cried out in pain. He grabbed the scruff of her neck and could see in the slight light from outside Ren’s eyes were a ruby red. No irises, no pupils, no whites.

His heart skipped a beat as he kicked his leg against the wall with Ren still on it. Ren let out a low, guttural screech before jolting back under the sink. Mitchell shoved a chair up against the cabinet temporarily to tend to his wounds.

Mitchell touched his skin and immediately registered abundant swelling. He went over to his kitchen cabinet to grab some Neosporin and a handful of band aids. He stood over the discolored patch of wood as he dabbed ointment onto the bite wounds.

Mitchell only had time to briefly register the sound and feeling of the rumble under his feet. Right under him, the discolored wood severed, and a bloated hand busted through the floor, yanking on Mitchell’s right ankle. To the left, another hand emerged from the floor and gripped Mitchell on his wounded leg. Mitchell was pulled to the floor, screaming out and looking behind him after hearing a third bang from the ground.

Behind him, grabbing onto his limbs, was a figure that mirrored Mitchell’s appearance. It had discolored skin with dark circles under its ruby-red eyes. It smirked as it dug its fingers into Mitchell’s bite wounds. He scrambled his arms backward to grab a kitchen utensil.

The figure anticipated Mitchell’s upper-body movement backward and, still gripping his legs, shoved its body backward, further opening the hole in the ground and bringing Mitchell down with it. Despite the red, pupil-less eyes, Mitchell could still feel it looking right at him.

“I’m not going away. I’m not going anywhere,” it hissed.

Mitchell felt its grip becoming tighter and tighter as they sunk deeper into the ground, the floorboard shifting and closing over him, what now looked like 20 or 30 feet above. The pressure overtook Mitchell’s body, and he couldn’t see or feel anything.

He woke up, soaked in sweat in his bed. Ren perked up at the end of his bed. He caught his breath, coming back to reality, stood up, and went to his bathroom.

He soaked his face with cold water, splashing it into his face and rubbing it into his eyes before looking up into the mirror. He was greeted by the figure looking back, the same pupil-less, ruby red eyes, vacant smirk, slowly reaching up to relay a gentle wave of the hand.