02 Aug The Offering

Part I

Harold Latham had lived alone in the house on Maple Hollow Road for almost twelve years. Since Maggie passed, he’d settled into a rhythm that left little room for surprises. Morning coffee on the porch. A slow walk to the mailbox. A crossword at noon. And most evenings, a worn recliner, a muted television, and a blanket that still carried a trace of his late wife’s perfume. His old spaniel, Archie, usually curled up beside him, snoring softly through syndicated crime shows.

It was during one of those evenings that he first heard the sound.

He was reaching for the remote when it came—a faint scraping beneath the floorboards, not from inside the house, but from under it. At first, he figured it was the wind catching the loose lattice below the porch. He made a note to check in the morning, then let the thought drift as an old episode of Columbo pulled him in.

The next day, while retrieving the newspaper from the gravel path, he remembered. He crouched beside the steps and peered through a gap where the wooden slats had pulled away from the frame. Dry leaves had collected there, packed tight in places. The crawlspace was shallow, maybe two feet high, and stretched the length of the porch. He waited for something to move, but saw no activity. No fur, no glint of eyes. Still, he decided to toss in whatever remained of the previous night’s meatloaf, mostly to shut up the raccoons that skulked about after dusk. It landed with a soft thump on the dirt and rolled out of view.

That afternoon, while rummaging through his desk drawer for a working pen, Harold found a watch he’d assumed had vanished years ago. Not just any watch—his father’s old timepiece, the one with the cracked crystal and the faint engraving on the back. He’d turned that drawer upside down three times since Maggie’s funeral and never seen it once. Now it was just… sitting there.

He wore it for the first time in over a decade that day.

The next morning, he scratched off a lotto ticket from the glovebox, one of the stack he kept around as a harmless distraction, and won a hundred bucks. It wasn’t much, not enough by itself to mean anything, but two coincidences in two days stuck with Harold in a way that bothered him more than it thrilled him.

That night, he opened the fridge and stared at its contents for longer than necessary. The leftovers from Tuesday’s roast were still sitting in foil. He reheated half and took the rest outside, plate and all. The sky was gray and low with an early spring drizzle. He set the dish at the corner of the porch and angled it just under the lattice.

He nudged it deeper with his cane. “Let’s see if you like pork.”

In the morning, the plate was empty. No meat, no drippings, not even a scrap of fat. Just a thin line of dirt along the porcelain edge, as if it had been dragged a few inches before someone—or something—picked it clean.

“You’ve got good taste,” he muttered.

Harold washed the plate, dried it, and told himself raccoons were as fastidious as they were bold.

That week, something shifted. It began with minor things, subtle but noticeable. An unexpected check arrived in the mail from the electric company for an overpayment he couldn’t remember making. The woman at the pharmacy told him his new prescription would cost less than expected due to an insurance fluke. And at night, his right knee, the one that always ached in the rain, stopped hurting altogether.

He never told anyone about the food, not because he feared mockery—though that would’ve come quickly enough from the few neighbors who still remembered him—but because he didn’t yet believe it himself. There was nothing to believe, not yet. A pattern seemed to be emerging, he realized, but all he truly had was a theory.

Over the course of the week, he had made several offerings, each of which had been followed by a small, inexplicable stroke of good fortune. Could it really be a coincidence? He wondered.

Before long, he began looking forward to preparing his offerings. At first, he selected little things—chicken skin, gristle, spoiled fruit, bacon ends—nothing anyone would miss. Sometimes he left the food in a bowl. Other times, he just wrapped it in paper towel. It always vanished by morning.

The scratching sounds returned, too, sometimes at night, when the house was quiet, and other times in the early morning, just before dawn. They were rhythmic and slow, not frantic like a trapped animal. It was as though something were pacing beneath the porch, or pulling itself along the underside, always just out of sight.

One night, after placing a small pile of greasy lamb bones by the slats, he lingered. There was no wind, and the telltale din of insects was strangely absent. All he heard was the low hum of distant traffic. Leaning against the porch wall, he took in the scent of early spring soil and tried to relax. Then, he heard a faint movement in the dark, something shifting beneath the boards.

Harold held his breath. He didn’t see anything, but he felt it, the presence of something waiting until he stepped away before accepting the gift.

Later, as he lay in bed, listening to the creaks of the old farmhouse, he remembered something Maggie once said, which she used to whisper when he was struggling: “You always get what you give.”

The phrase stuck with him until morning, and by then, the bones were gone.

He felt a bit guilty about offering steak to something he hadn’t even seen yet, what with Archie sitting alongside him, begging, but he rationalized it away on account of the benefits he was receiving. By daybreak, as if on cue to further assuage his doubts, he noticed that his hip, which had been giving him grief since Thanksgiving, moved with an ease he hadn’t known in years.

He didn’t tell anyone.

But that night, to show his appreciation to the creature beneath his porch, he offered sirloin.

Part II

Harold began setting the food out with a ritual-like approach. Nothing formal—no prayers or incantations—but there was a rhythm to it, a sense of respect. He made sure to portion things just right, always warm, always fatty, always placed on the same chipped ceramic plate. He set it at the mouth of the crawlspace and gave it a gentle nudge with the tip of his cane.

Then he’d stand for a moment, listening. Most nights, nothing answered, but on others, there’d be a faint disturbance, such as a shiver of movement beneath the porch boards, or a low shuffling, like something dragging itself across the earth. Sometimes it came fast. Sometimes it waited until he was halfway back up the steps. But the food always vanished, and Harold always felt just a little better afterward.

Meanwhile, Archie had stopped sniffing around the porch after the first few nights. Harold noticed that now, instead of following him outside, Archie would linger near the screen door, tail still, ears low. He never barked. He just watched, as if he’d come to understand, in his own quiet way, that whatever Harold was feeding wasn’t meant to be disturbed.

One Thursday morning, he nearly slipped on a patch of moss by the side gate. His heel came out from under him, and for a split second, he envisioned himself landing wrong—hip shattered, head split open on the paving stone. But instead, he pitched forward, rather miraculously and painlessly, into a squat position. With a deep grunt and following a string of muttered obscenities, he took stock of the situation and realized how fortunate he was that he hadn’t been injured more seriously.

He brought an extra serving of sausage that night and left a note under the plate, with the word “Thanks” scrawled on a torn bit of paper towel.

In the morning, the plate was clean and the note was gone.

From then on, he started talking to it. Not in a madman’s way—he told himself—but in the way someone talks to a dog or a garden, starting with small, murmured observations. “Hope you like gravy.” “Cold one tonight, huh?” “Might have some liver tomorrow, if I don’t forget to thaw it.”

The thing under the porch didn’t answer, but he liked the company. It had been months since he’d spoken aloud to anyone who wasn’t on the phone, and years since his last meaningful in-person conversation. Those types of talks had become increasingly rare as the last of his old work friends had either moved away or died, one by one.

Whatever was under there—whatever it was—seemed to listen. Maybe even to understand.

One afternoon, Harold heard the mail truck and stepped out to collect the usual bundle of circulars and bills. Nestled between a postcard and a heating invoice was a letter from the county treasurer’s office. His property taxes, which had been overdue since spring, had been “adjusted retroactively” due to an audit. The balance was cleared.

Harold stared at the page so long that the paper went limp in his hand.

That night, he opened a can of corned beef hash and fried it up with a few onions. He put the whole panful on the plate with another “thank you” note.

That night, overwhelmed with curiosity and anticipation, he didn’t sleep well. He kept thinking about what might live under there. He knew it wasn’t a dog, and by then he had ruled out raccoons. Its weight was more substantial. He’d heard it shifting and shuffling around, and could feel the porch flex ever so slightly when it moved.

He considered setting up a camera, then immediately rejected the idea. Something told him it wouldn’t be a good idea to try to see it. It felt ungrateful, somehow, like inviting someone to dinner and then spying on them with binoculars. He didn’t need to see it, not yet. It took what he gave, and it always gave something back, and he had no intention of ruining a good thing.

* * * * * *

Days passed.

He found his blood pressure lower at his next checkup. The doctor, a bored young man who barely looked up from his tablet, seemed more surprised than Harold was. “Whatever you’re doing,” the doctor said, “keep it up.”

So he did. He started planning his meals with the thing beneath his porch in mind. He bought extra ground beef and extra chicken thighs, and stocked up on deli scraps, cold cuts, and tinned fish. His shopping lists grew longer and more varied as he experimented with different offers and their results. He also bought vitamins for himself, more out of habit than necessity. The aches and stiffness that had defined his mornings for years now rarely made an appearance. The cane was still useful, though it was now more companion than crutch.

Not everything was splendid, however. One day, for example, he noticed the squirrels were avoiding his yard. There were no birds at the feeder, either, and no tracks in the dust near the crawlspace, just the food, always disappearing without a trace.

He stopped putting out the usual seeds and crusts and let the feeder rust. In his mind, there was only one mouth other than his own worth feeding now.

Neighbors began to take notice, not of the offerings, but of Harold himself. He was livelier, trimmed his beard, and started wearing a hat again when he went into town. He even laughed once at a clerk’s joke about the price of eggs. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed.

He never mentioned what had changed. How could he?

Some days, he caught himself humming joyfully.

One morning, while cleaning out the fridge, he found a package of lamb kidneys that had passed its sell-by date. The smell was sharp, but otherwise, they looked to be in good condition.

Although he had no intention of eating them himself, he didn’t want to waste the food, and so he left the kidneys under the porch that night as his latest offering.

They were gone before dawn.

Part III

It was bound to happen.

It wasn’t out of malice or laziness, but due to the kind of forgetfulness that slips in like fog when a man gets too comfortable with a routine. One Tuesday evening, Harold fell asleep in his chair after dinner, casserole still warm on his plate, the sun barely gone from the sky.

By the time he woke, the room had gone cold, the TV had gone to static, and his neck ached from the crooked angle. And outside, the porch light buzzed above a black, empty yard.

He shuffled to the kitchen to wash the dishes and nearly opened the fridge before stopping cold.

The food.

He’d meant to leave a drumstick and half a baked yam as an offering that night, and had even wrapped it in foil. But the parcel still sat on the counter, untouched.

Harold glanced at the clock. It was 12:47 a.m. He was too late.

He stood there for a long while, knuckles gripping the edge of the sink, staring at the forgotten bundle. Something crawled at the edge of his thoughts, something old and superstitious. He told himself it was nonsense and actively questioned what difference it would make.

Still, he slept poorly that night.

* * * * * *

When he woke, the house was colder than usual. He bundled into his jacket before he stepped outside to collect the morning paper.

The stairs were slick from frost formed overnight. He took one cautious step, then another—and his foot skated out from under him. The cane slipped, the rail was just out of reach, and he went down hard. He heard something crack. A moment later, pain exploded in his ribcage.

He lay there a moment, breath shallow and seeing stars, grimacing through a haze of white pain. Eventually, he crawled to his feet and hobbled back inside, gasping as he leaned against the table.

Archie trailed him anxiously through the house, his toenails tapping behind him on the linoleum. The dog paced while Harold cleaned the blood from his elbow, then sat by the back door with his ears pinned flat and his eyes fixed on the porch.

The doctor at urgent care said he was lucky. He escaped the ordeal with just one cracked rib. Nothing had been broken, and he had no internal bleeding.

But Harold knew better. Luck had nothing to do with it. He’d failed to make an offering, and he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this was his punishment.

He sat on the porch that afternoon, bandaged and sore, staring at the spot beneath the lattice where he always set the plate.

Then, slowly and deliberately, he went inside and made a roast beef sandwich with Swiss cheese and mustard, toasted just enough to bring out the smell. He wrapped it in wax paper and limped back outside, each breath bringing with it a stabbing sensation, and apologized.

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud as he knelt stiffly. “It won’t happen again.”

Reverently, he set the sandwich beneath the porch.

In the morning, it was gone.

That same day, the furnace, which had coughed and wheezed through the last two winters, kicked on like new. Gone was the lag and the now-familiar metallic shriek, replaced by a deep hum and consistent heat. Despite himself, Harold grinned.

Later, he received a voicemail from a man he didn’t know at the township office, informing him that a paperwork error had resulted in a refund on an old zoning fee. A check was on its way.

Harold stood in his front room, hand pressed to the aching bruise on his side, and stared out through the frost-lined window, shaking his head in disbelief.

* * * * * *

That night, he waited again on the porch, not to leave food, but to listen.

The wind had died, and the night was still. The moon was hidden behind clouds that seemed as if they hadn’t moved in hours.

And then he heard it, a wet, muffled purring sound, coming from directly beneath his feet. Harold swallowed and sat down slowly in the porch rocker as the boards beneath him vibrated ever so slightly, gripping the arms until his knuckles went white. He didn’t dare move.

After a while, the sound stopped.

The next day, he found an envelope, without postage or a return address, in his mailbox. It hadn’t been there an hour earlier. Inside was a crumpled photograph, depicting him during his younger years, at the local apple festival, with Maggie at his side. In the image, she had her arms wrapped around his waist, and he was smiling in a way he hadn’t in years. He didn’t remember anyone ever taking it.

There was no note or explanation.

He stared at the image for a long time at the kitchen sink, the photo trembling slightly in his hand.

It wasn’t a gift. It was a reminder. The thing under the porch didn’t just know where he lived or what he offered—it knew him. What he loved. What he missed. And now it wanted him to understand something: what was given could just as easily be taken. The photo was a dramatic way of making that clear.

He folded the photo in half, then again, pressing the creases sharply, and slid it into the drawer beside his checkbook, locking it without a word.

From that day forward, Harold never forgot to feed the thing under his porch.

Part IV

By April, the creature’s tastes had evolved.

At first, Harold thought it might be the cut of meat. He’d left half a pork chop—lean and lightly salted—and found it untouched the next morning. He squatted stiffly at the edge of the porch, reached under the lattice with his cane, and pulled the plate out. The meat was still there, cold and undisturbed. A few flies hovered nearby, bold enough now to return.

He blinked at the untouched offering, unsure whether to feel insulted or afraid.

That evening, he tried again, offering up a helping of freshly sautéed chicken livers, glistening with pan drippings. He laid them on the plate, and as always, knelt and slid it under the porch, this time whispering, “Something special tonight.”

By dawn, it was still there, not only untouched, but nudged forward, as if pushed back to him. Rejected.

Harold didn’t eat that morning. Instead, he sat in his rocker long after the sun crested the trees, replaying every detail of the last week. He hadn’t missed a night or changed the routine. He hadn’t disrespected the thing, as far as he could tell. So why wasn’t it eating?

Even Archie seemed unsettled. The spaniel had taken to sleeping at the foot of the stairs instead of in Harold’s room, and he’d growl when the porch creaked at night. Once or twice, Harold caught him watching the lattice slats with a cautious stare, tail rigid, as if expecting something to crawl out.

Harold tried again that evening to appease the beast beneath his porch. This time, he offered bacon, crisped just short of burnt, the way he used to make it for Maggie. As before, the plate remained untouched.

The next morning, not only was the plate full, but it was scratched, with four deep gouges through the enamel, angled outward as if something had tried to drag it, then changed its mind.

That’s when the anxiety set in.

He rifled through the fridge, freezer, and pantry. Too many things he’d grown used to offering—canned stew, frozen drumsticks, corned beef hash—now seemed beneath it. He stood with the fridge door hanging open and muttered, “What do you want?”

That afternoon, as he took the trash to the curb, Harold spotted a freshly killed squirrel’s carcass in the road. There was no bloating or stiffening yet. A small trail of blood led from the shoulder to the gravel, already drying. He hesitated for only a moment before collecting it with a pair of gardening gloves and wrapping it in plastic. That night, in desperation, and perhaps a bit out of curiosity, he placed the bundle on the dish and slid it beneath the porch.

In the morning, every scrap of it was gone. And Harold smiled.

That same day, a letter arrived from the county revenue office. His outstanding property taxes, which had previously only been adjusted, were now shown as overpaid. A refund check was enclosed. Harold stood at the mailbox holding the envelope, lightheaded.

When he returned inside, he set the check on the table and poured himself a drink he hadn’t enjoyed since before Maggie’s funeral.

The rules were shifting. He knew that now. What had started as a simple exchange—scraps for luck—was becoming something else. The thing beneath his house didn’t just want food anymore. It demanded a sacrifice.

Over the next week, Harold experimented. Roadkill was always accepted, as were the occasional butcher discards he could get from the shop out in Carver’s Fork—the kind of backwoods place that didn’t ask what someone needed a bucket of marrow trimmings for.

But some nights, even those were returned.

On a desperate impulse, Harold stood over the sink, needle in hand, and pricked his index finger. The blood beaded, running down into the drain. He stared at the drop on his fingertip for a long moment, then dabbed it onto a torn paper napkin and folded it carefully. That night, he left it on the dish alongside a strip of salted pork and a single chicken bone.

In the morning, the meat was gone, along with the napkin. What remained were three small gouges in the dirt, concentric and uneven, too wide to belong to any animal he knew.

The next day, the pain in his rib had completely disappeared.

Harold kept a ledger after that, a yellow legal pad in which he logged each offering by date and type. Beside each entry, he listed the result.

The more he recorded, the clearer the pattern became. Spoiled food got no reaction. Canned meats were rejected. Raw flesh—especially fresh—was a guaranteed success. Offal worked best. Carrion, when unspoiled, was preferred, for whatever reason. And whenever he added something personal—an old photograph, a clipped strand of hair, a sliver of fingernail—the results were amplified. He tried not to dwell on what that meant.

Instead, he made daily trips to rural roads, driving slowly with his hazards on, scanning the shoulders for anything still warm. Sometimes he found a possum, sometimes birds. Once, he discovered the remains of a red fox. That night, he left it whole, curled like it was sleeping, just beneath the porch.

The next day, the offering had vanished, and he found a check in the mailbox from a class action suit he didn’t recall joining. The amount was more than enough to cover the cost of a new furnace, if he’d needed one.

Harold didn’t cash it. He slid the check into the drawer next to the photo of Maggie, still folded, for safekeeping.

Somehow, he knew the price was going up.

The thing beneath the porch was only getting hungrier.

Part V

The storm rolled in without warning—thick, low clouds pressing over the fields, lightning stitching across the horizon in angry bursts. Harold didn’t sleep when the thunder started. He sat at the kitchen table with the ledger open and his hands folded in front of him like a priest awaiting confession.

He had nothing left in the house. No meat. No scraps. Not even canned tuna.

The squirrel he’d set aside earlier that week had already been used, and the butcher in Carver’s Fork had closed up early on account of the weather. He’d called and left a message, but got no reply.

By the time the rain started slashing sideways against the windows, he knew he’d missed his chance.

He watched the storm from the porch, though he didn’t sit down. The dish sat empty by the lattice slats, waiting. His apology was already rehearsed.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he murmured, barely audible beneath the wind. “Tomorrow. First thing.”

There was no reply, but something shifted beneath the floorboards.

He went inside and locked every door.

The next morning, the dish hadn’t moved.

Harold waited for the letter carrier, hoping for a check, a form, anything to reassure him that the matter had been forgiven, but no mail came. The power flickered twice before noon and finally went out by late afternoon. The backup generator refused to turn over.

By evening, the storm had passed, but the house felt more frigid than it should have, colder than it ever had since winter broke.

He called for Archie out of habit and got no response. He checked the back steps, the barn, even whistled down the lane, but there were no paw prints in the mud other than his own, tracking deeper each time.

The food plate was still empty. Harold shuddered. No offering, he realized, meant no gift.

But something would be taken, and he was afraid he already knew what that would be.

* * * * * *

He found Archie’s collar lying beside the porch. The tag was still attached, faintly scratched and warm to the touch, as if it had only just been dropped. The leather reeked of damp fur and something metallic and bitter.

Harold didn’t cry, not right away. He just sat on the steps and stared into the gap behind the lattice, the dish beside him.

The yard was silent, the lack of birds conspicuous. The grass held no footprints but his own.

It was then that he decided he needed answers before things got any worse. He reached for his cane and stood, determined to make sense of it all.

* * * * * *

Crawling under the porch wasn’t easy. He had to lie flat and drag himself forward, elbow to elbow, shoulders scraping against dry joists that smelled of rot and earth. The light from his old Maglite trembled with every movement, casting long streaks that bent at awkward angles between the support beams.

The air was warm beneath the house, more so than it should have been, like a furnace had been running without ventilation, and it smelled faintly of iron.

He pushed deeper, past the posts, past the bulkhead stones where spiders nested. The crawlspace wasn’t supposed to go this far, he realized. And yet it did. 

The ground dipped just beyond the midline of the porch, sloping into a shallow depression Harold didn’t remember being there. The dirt had been scraped into a basin, and at its center, a hollow remained. And inside that hollow—

He froze.

It was a man.

Or, rather, it had been.

At first, Harold thought he was looking at a statue, or a misshapen wax figure laid carefully into the earth. The limbs were human-shaped, but wrong in proportion, longer at the joints and stretched tight under skin like parchment. The head was tilted back, the mouth agape in a silent scream that bent at both corners into something vaguely resembling a smile. Its lidless eyes were open, little more than two milky orbs shimmering faintly in the beam of his flashlight. Just when Harold was about to wonder whether it was still alive, its chest rose. Barely, but enough.

Harold couldn’t breathe.

The thing’s skin gave off a low glow, like a lantern nearly out of oil. Its hands twitched when the light passed over them. He noticed one of its fingers had been gnawed to the second knuckle.

It didn’t move or make a sound, but Harold knew it was watching him.

Harold dropped the flashlight. The beam spun, bounced, and settled against the dirt. In that shifting circle of light, he saw something behind the figure—a long, wet line trailing into the dust. He didn’t wait to find out what it was or what it led to, but feared the worst. He scrambled backward, scraping his elbows raw on the joists, legs kicking for traction. A sob escaped him, more animal than man. His hip caught on a root, and he flailed and twisted for a moment before finally dragging himself out from under the porch with a groan.

Back out in the open, the sky was clear and the world was bright again, but inside, Harold felt the terms of his arrangement with the creature had changed, and not for the better.

For a moment, he knelt there in the grass, trembling. Then he crawled to the kitchen and found what little he had left in the freezer—a package of beef marrow, a frozen fish fillet, and an old cut of ham. He didn’t cook or season them. He just piled them on the plate and pushed it beneath the porch.

Then he sat and waited, not for a reward, but for forgiveness.

Part VI

Harold fed it every night after that.

There were no more missed offerings, experiments, or questions. He no longer kept track of what he gave. He didn’t look for patterns or play with the idea of balance. He fed it what it seemed to want, and nothing more, and in return, it let him live. But only just.

The good luck kept coming, in subtle ways. His bank called to inform him that three overdrawn checks from years ago had never actually posted. A loudmouth neighbor he’d long resented moved away suddenly. Even his doctor, confused but optimistic, told him that a previously identified mass on his kidney had simply vanished between scans.

But Harold saw no cause for celebration. He now felt obligated, under penalty of punishment, or worse, to satisfy the beast’s increasingly grotesque cravings.

His body began to fail in stranger ways. He dropped weight despite eating more. His hands trembled when he wasn’t thinking about them. His eyes developed a pink rim around the edges that no drop or salve could relieve. He stopped shaving and no longer bathed regularly. The bathroom mirror fogged over even when the water ran cold. And most of all, he missed Archie’s companionship. He loved the spaniel, but hadn’t realized how much the dog truly meant to him until he was gone.

Worse yet, the floorboards sometimes creaked when he was sitting perfectly still, or ahead of him in the hall while he was walking, as if whatever was below him was tracking his movements and anticipating his next steps. This continued unabated for days, until at last Harold thought he might go mad.

It wasn’t long after that when the neighbors started commenting. Mrs. Randall from two doors down left a note on his front stoop: “Harold, please call me. I’m worried about you.” He didn’t. Instead, he fed the creature two rabbit carcasses that night, hoping to stay in its good graces one more day.

It wasn’t enough, apparently.

The next morning, Mrs. Randall’s cat went missing, as was her note. Soon thereafter, she stopped trying to reach him altogether.

Harold started keeping the curtains drawn, let the grass grow long, and stopped picking up the phone. The doorbell rang twice in early June—once his niece, once a pair of church volunteers—but he ignored both. He couldn’t explain what was happening without sounding insane, and he didn’t want anyone else involved, as much for their safety as for his own. But people came anyway.

One Friday afternoon, his niece Lila showed up uninvited. She was a sharp-eyed woman in her forties, with a reputation for trying to make decisions for people who didn’t ask for help.

Harold opened the door half an inch and told her he was busy. She told him she didn’t give a damn.

Inside, she wrinkled her nose almost immediately. “It smells like something died in here,” she said, and began opening windows. “When’s the last time you changed your clothes?”

“I’ve been busy,” Harold muttered, retreating toward the kitchen. “Got a schedule.”

She trailed behind him, flinching as she stepped over a bag of bird feed he’d left in the hall. “Busy with what, exactly? You’re not answering the phone. You’re not coming to the store. Uncle Hal, what’s going on?”

Harold said nothing.

She followed him out to the porch, where he sat with a plate of his latest offering in his lap, raw meat already beginning to sweat in the evening heat.

“What is that for?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

Her eyes followed his gaze to the gap in the lattice, and she crouched beside the steps. “Is that what smells so bad? Jesus, what’s under there? A raccoon? Uncle Hal, are you—?”

The porch trembled. Something beneath it had moved, seemingly in response to the conversation. It was listening. Harold shuddered at the thought, and his eyes went wide.

“Go home, Lila,” he said grimly. “Right now.”

She rose. “Not until you tell me what the hell’s going on! You need help.”

“I said go!” he shouted.

She stepped backward off the porch, stunned by the sudden shift in his tone.

“You’re scaring me, Uncle Hal,” she said.

“You should be scared,” he said. “You don’t understand what you’re risking just by being here.”

She stood there a moment longer, eyes narrowed, then shook her head and stormed off to her car.

The next morning, she called from the hospital. A deer had run in front of her car on the way home. She’d swerved, clipped a tree, and fractured her wrist. Luckily, it wasn’t anything worse—just a few stitches and a lot of bruising, but she was shaken all the same.

Harold made an excuse to end the call early and hung his head in shame.

That night, he offered the largest cut he could find, a fresh cow tongue, and something more: a torn piece of his shirt, stained from the scrape he’d taken beneath the porch weeks earlier.

In the morning, his grass had grown a full inch overnight, and a gopher infestation that had plagued his backyard for three years was gone.

He checked his voicemail to discover a message from his niece, with good news: “They say I’m healing faster than expected. I’ll be out in two days. Weird, huh?”

He just shook his head incredulously. He never called back.

* * * * * *

By the end of June, Harold looked ten years older than he had in March. The lines in his face were deeper, and he wore gloves even in the heat, partly to hide the way his fingernails had gone thick and yellow, and partly to keep himself from scratching the sudden rash blooming across his wrists.

He stopped going into town entirely.

The only light that stayed on in the house was the one over the kitchen sink. He slept in the recliner now, wrapped in blankets, waking at the same hour every night to listen for the shuffling beneath the porch.

He fed the beast with unblinking obedience. Anything it wanted, he found, even if it meant driving an hour to a bait shop in another county or calling in favors from old hunting contacts who thought he’d lost his mind. Sometimes, he thought he very well might have.

But at least he hadn’t lost anything else.

Not yet, anyway.

Part VII

The smell was the final straw.

It had begun subtly, with an acrid sweetness in the grass by the porch and a coppery tang in the air after rain. But by midsummer, it had ripened into something unmistakable, the thick, oily scent of meat left out too long, or of rot barely masked by dry earth. Flies congregated by the hundreds near the lattice slats, forming slow-moving clouds that clung to the crawlspace like smoke, buzzing in uneven waves.

As for Harold, he could still walk, but his gait had become more of a shuffle. His knees ached, his breath came shorter each morning, and his skin hung looser on his bones. Yet he still made the trek to the porch every evening, clutching a dish wrapped in butcher paper and muttering half-formed apologies to the thing beneath.

Neighbors stopped waving when they passed his house.

* * * * * *

Finally, days later, without his knowledge or consent, someone made a call to a local pest control company, reporting issues at Harold’s property that were affecting his neighbors.

The logo-covered van arrived late on a Tuesday. When it did, two men climbed out—one older, one barely thirty—wearing matching coveralls and casual smirks that told Harold they didn’t believe a word of the work order.

“You Mr. Latham?” the older one asked.

Harold nodded slowly. “That’s me.”

“We got a report of something living under your porch. Possum maybe. Bad smell. Aggressive animal activity. That ring a bell?”

Harold hesitated. He could lie and say he’d already handled it, or that the smell was coming from a compost bin, or that he’d taken up tanning leather. But the look in the younger man’s eyes made the words shrivel before they formed.

He nodded again and stepped aside.

The older tech clicked on a flashlight while the younger pulled gloves from his pocket.

They didn’t ask permission, but Harold didn’t stop them, nor did he watch or warn them as they went under the porch. Instead, he turned and went inside, sat down at the kitchen table with the porch light off and the curtains drawn, and waited. He counted the seconds, then the minutes. He listened for shouting, footsteps, or laughter. For anything at all.

After about twelve minutes, the younger one screamed. It was shrill and stuttering, followed by a loud crash beneath the porch. Then came the scrambling. He heard something heavy trying to move quickly, but uncoordinated.

The older tech’s voice followed, guttural and panicked, but Harold couldn’t make out the words.

Then there was nothing. Everything went still.

He stayed seated for nearly an hour.

When he finally opened the door, the van was still there, with the driver’s side door still open and the headlights still on. There was no one in sight.

He waited until the batteries died.

* * * * * *

The police came the next day, after the van had been reported abandoned.

Two officers, including Deputy Farris and a younger patrolman with a clipboard and too much cologne, knocked on his door late that afternoon. Farris spoke with the tone of someone trying to sound friendly while watching for sudden movements.

“Mr. Latham, we’ve got a bit of a situation. Couple of workers came out to your place Tuesday, and they haven’t been seen since.”

Harold rubbed his hands together. They felt numb. “That right?” he asked.

The young one spoke up. “Their van’s out front. No sign of them inside or around the property. That’s pretty unusual, wouldn’t you say?”

Harold looked past them at the porch. “I didn’t see where they went,” he said. “They showed up, said they’d check it out, and that was that.”

“You let them under the porch?”

He didn’t answer.

Farris nodded toward the crawlspace. “Mind if we take a look?”

Harold didn’t protest.

The radio static started less than a minute after the deputy dropped to his hands and knees. Harold heard it through the open squad car window. It was just fuzz at first, then harsh, popping sounds, followed by abject silence.

Moments later, the younger officer went after him. Beneath the porch, opposite the officer, Harold heard something shifting its weight.

Ten minutes passed, and, finally, Deputy Farris came out alone. He was pale and sweating profusely, his eyes red around the rims and bloodshot. He said nothing and sat on the lawn, rocking slightly, until the medics arrived.

The younger one never came out. They searched the crawlspace with cameras, fiber optics, and dogs. They found no sign of struggle, no bodies, and no footprints. The only thing anyone found was the dish Harold had set out earlier, now empty and wiped clean.

* * * * * *

The next morning, Harold was taken into custody, but not in cuffs—not at first. But the questions came fast, and when his answers didn’t satisfy them, the gloves came off.

He wasn’t totally dishonest. When they asked if he had seen them and if he had known they were under the porch, he replied in the affirmative.  However, he denied feeding anything under the porch or having gone under there himself.

They didn’t believe him.

He sat for hours in the interview room, hands folded in his lap, sweat collecting beneath his collar. He didn’t ask for a lawyer or for a phone call, and kept glancing at the clock, doing silent math in his head.

All the while, he hadn’t made an offering. Not that day, and not the day before.

They locked him in a holding cell while the search continued. Unsurprisingly, no one came to his defense or posted bail.

That night, as they booked him, Harold turned once to look back through the sally port doors. Between two shrubs near the edge of the lot, low to the ground, he spotted something unmistakably human-shaped, yet not quite right, moving in the underbrush, watching him. Its pale skin glinted faintly in the moonlight, and though it didn’t advance, it also did nothing to conceal its presence.

Harold didn’t speak or point it out. He only lowered his gaze and allowed the deputy to lead him inside.

Part VIII

The cell was small, sterile, and remarkably bland. Harold sat on the cot with his back against the concrete wall, knees drawn up like a child, trying not to be noticed.

The jailers didn’t speak to him much. They logged his meals and vitals, and asked him routine questions with the detachment of clerks. He answered when he had to, and ate only enough to avoid attention. He slept when he could, which wasn’t often.

The sounds were different in lock-up. There was no porch or floorboards, but there were pipes and vents, and many of them. The hollow spaces in the walls carried noise too well, and at night, long after lights-out, Harold sometimes heard movement from the far end of the block. It was not the echo of the distant voices of guards or prisoners, that much he knew. It was something else entirely, the wet, slow sound of moist, bare feet dragging.

The first time he heard it, he sat bolt upright and pressed himself to the back wall until it stopped.

A few nights later, it returned, closer than ever, always stopping just before it reached his door.

He began saving food. It wasn’t difficult. The portions were small and tasteless, and no one noticed when he wrapped bits of meatloaf or cornbread in napkins and later slid the contraband under the frame of the cell door. The concrete floor sloped just enough that he could push the makeshift offering into the hall where the light didn’t quite reach.

The first night, nothing happened.

The second night, the napkin disappeared.

He asked the guard about it at breakfast, feigning confusion. The man shrugged and said the cleaning crew came through around 3 a.m. But Harold had been awake at 3. He’d heard the guards’ boots. The carts. The static. The food had vanished before they came.

He kept offering. A sliver of chicken. A boiled carrot. A slice of bruised apple. He always placed them gently just outside his reach, and every time they were accepted by something that never showed itself, but left the scent of damp stone and turned earth in its wake.

His appetite dwindled further, and his skin began to itch in new places—behind the knees, under the arms, in the crease where his neck met his shoulder. A rash spread across his ribs.

Still, he kept feeding it. And still, it kept coming.

One night, the prisoner in the cell across from him began to scream.

Harold sat motionless on the edge of the cot, eyes fixed on the door, listening as the cries climbed into something high and panicked, then cut off mid-breath.

The silence afterward felt endless.

Eventually, footsteps arrived—boots, hurried voices, radios clicking. Keys turned. Doors slammed. The air smelled faintly of blood and bleach.

The next morning, the man was gone. No one explained why. The other prisoners didn’t talk about it. The guards, however, began moving more slowly.

Harold offered his entire tray that night. It disappeared within minutes.

* * * * * *

Two nights later, his cell door clicked open. When he peeked outside, he saw that no one was there. The latch had simply slid free, or so it seemed.

Harold sat back down on his cot, his hands resting palm-up in his lap, and stared at the cell’s handle.

The incident triggered no alarms or calls to lockdown. No buzzing came from the control room window.

Again, he stepped forward, this time more cautiously, and reached for the door.

He stopped briefly. Beyond the bars, the hallway was dimly lit and quiet still, but there were tracks, faint smears of something dark leading from the center of the floor to just outside his cell.

He knelt and touched the edge of one. It was dry and thick. His stomach turned.

He gathered the remaining crust of bread from his mattress and laid it just inside the doorway. Then he sat back on the cot and waited.

It was gone by morning. By then, the lock had re-engaged.

No one mentioned it, not the guard with the clipboard, the medic who checked his weight and frowned, or the new prisoner who moved into the cell across the hall the next day.

Only Harold understood. It had followed him.

Even behind steel and concrete, the deal still stood.

* * * * * *

Later that week, a guard with a clipboard came by with news: his arraignment had been delayed indefinitely. The public defender assigned to his case had gone missing on a hiking trip in a neighboring county. They were seeking alternate counsel.

Harold only nodded.

They asked if he wanted to make a call. He said no.

That night, he waited at the edge of his cot until lights-out, then crept to the door and laid his dinner roll outside the cell.

Before it could settle, something took it. The sound it made—wet, soft, and eager—haunted him for hours.

He dreamed of a mouth that smiled too wide, and of a porch collapsing under a weight no one could see.

He woke with a headache and a dry, dusty taste lingering in his throat.

Part IX

The morning shift guard found the empty tray first, clean and still warm. It sat just outside the bars of Harold’s cell, angled as if placed deliberately.

The guard frowned, checked his clipboard, and tapped twice on the bars.

“Latham?”

Harold didn’t respond.

He stepped back, glanced through the narrow window, and tried again.

“Harold?”

Still nothing.

He keyed the latch and swung the cell door open. The bed was made, the cot sheet was stretched tight, tucked at the corners, and the pillow was fluffed. There was nothing on the mattress. All trace of Harold’s clothing, shoes, and personal effects was gone.

Harold had escaped.

The guard’s hand twitched as he reached for the radio.

* * * * * *

The cameras didn’t help.

They showed Harold asleep in his cot around 11:47 p.m., barely moving beneath the thin blanket. A guard passed by during the 1 a.m. sweep, which was normal and uneventful. At 2:08 a.m., the footage became grainy, blurring and losing focus, as if something was warping the lens from the inside.

When the picture cleared at 2:19, the cot was empty. There was no sign of entry or exit, not a shadow out of place.  Harold was simply gone.

The tech who reviewed the footage later described a faint shimmer in the air, like heat rising from pavement, but couldn’t isolate it. Another said she saw the vague shape of someone, in the frame, just before the distortion began, crouched low beside the bunk, its face too close to the camera to make out clearly.

Neither one reported it officially.

By noon, the facility was locked down. Local police were called in first, then the state. K-9 units swept the grounds, but the bloodhounds picked up nothing. The door logs showed no breaches. There had been no visitors and no transports. Harold Latham had simply ceased to exist within the facility sometime between lights-out and sunrise.

One detective suggested a staged disappearance. Another floated the idea of suicide, or an accomplice on the inside. But no one could explain how a seventy-two-year-old man with no known living relatives, no escape tools, and no motive, with fragile health, had walked out of a secured building without touching a door or being identified on camera.

Worse still, no one could explain the hallway outside his cell.

The concrete there was different. It was now faintly discolored, warped, and overly smooth, like water had passed over it and eroded its surface. A damp, briny odor hung in the air even hours after cleaners scrubbed the walls.

One janitor quit on the spot after opening the floor drain. She never said what she saw, just walked out mid-shift and never returned.

In the days that followed, rumors bloomed like rot. Some said the old man had made a deal with something he shouldn’t have, that he’d been feeding it, protecting it, even worshipping it. Others claimed he’d found a way to vanish on purpose, or that he wasn’t human at all, just a shell or a skin, a thing wearing the face of a man for seventy years before it finally crawled back to wherever it had come from. In those stories, Harold hadn’t served a monster. He was the monster.

A few guards whispered about the other inmates. How some had stopped sleeping after Harold disappeared, or carved “IT COMES WHEN HUNGRY” into the wall of his cell in jagged letters. The prisoner refused to speak afterward. From that point on, he refused food. All he would do is stare at the door. He demanded to be placed in solitary confinement, in the dark.

They obliged.

He screamed for hours the first night.

After that, he stopped making noise altogether.

* * * * * *

An article appeared in the paper two weeks later: “Missing Man Sparks Questions at State Facility.” It mentioned Harold’s name and age, and went into detail about the unresolved pest control disappearances. It ran alongside a blurb about a local hardware store closing due to a structural collapse—specifically, foundation failure, the report stated. Something about old footings giving way beneath a historic home on Maple Hollow Road.

The reporter never made the connection. But someone else did.

A retired building inspector saw the photo of the house—buckled and leaning, its corner beams split wide—and remembered filing a report there five years earlier. Back then, the porch had already been sagging. Wood had rotted clean through beneath the steps. But what stuck with him most wasn’t the condition. It was the heat.

He’d stood at the edge of the crawlspace with his measuring rod and felt warmth radiating from below, like something baking beneath the boards. When he’d informed Harold, the owner, he had just smiled and nodded.

The inspector hadn’t gone under.

And now, there was nothing left to go under.

The house collapsed three days after Harold vanished. And two days later, fire broke out, cause unknown, and wiped out whatever was left. No bodies were recovered.

When all was said and done, little more than ash, brick, and a patch of blackened soil remained where the porch had once been. And in the center of that patch, half-buried in soot and splinters, was a ceramic plate, chipped at the edge and clean at the center.

Part X

By autumn, the land on Maple Hollow Road had already changed hands. The lot was purchased by a developer who specialized in upscale modular homes—quick builds with wide porches and polished floor plans. A temporary sign had gone up in front of the property, which read: “Future Site of Clearview Estates.” Beneath it, a smaller one added: “Phase 1: Now Breaking Ground.”

Although no one openly admitted to being superstitious, locals avoided the area.

When the excavator arrived, the operator sat in the cab for over an hour without starting the engine, saying his radio wouldn’t stop picking up static. He claimed the dirt “looked wrong.” It was “too soft,” he said, “too dark and too flat.” No one quite knew what he meant at the time.

They broke ground anyway. Concrete was poured. Foundations were cured.

By the end of October, the first frame had gone up. It was a single-story model with a wraparound porch, vinyl siding, and pre-hung gutters. The foreman, a man named Darrell Kinsey, lived in a neighboring county and drove in early each morning to check on the progress. He was in his fifties, practical-minded, and proud to say he’d never missed a deadline. But his wife had been sick for months, long enough that the specialists had stopped offering options. On the morning they began laying down the porch beams, she couldn’t get out of bed. Darrell had kissed her forehead and promised he’d be home early.

He was inspecting the area near the foundation to locate a level patch when he spotted something poking from the soil—white ceramic, cracked along one edge. The edge of a plate.

It came free easily.

Darrell turned it over in his hand. It was smooth in the center and quite clean. Immaculate, really. He didn’t tell anyone about it, just set it aside in the shade beneath the porch joists, thinking he’d toss it later.

At lunch, one of the electricians joked about sacrificial bowls and cursed antiques. Darrell laughed along. But when no one was looking, he pulled a Snickers from his glovebox and walked back to the slab. He crouched beside the plate, unwrapped the candy bar, and placed it carefully in the center.

Not because he believed in any of the stories he’d heard about the previous owner, but because he felt compelled to.

That night, his wife got out of bed. She made it to the kitchen on her own and cooked herself eggs, smiling for the first time in months.

Darrell never mentioned the plate to her.

The next morning, the candy bar was gone, wrapper and all. All that remained was the plate, polished clean and warm to the touch.

He left half a sandwich the next day, and the next, and the next.

The other workers noticed him lingering at the porch after hours, watching as he stopped just short of the new lattice and tilted his head, as if listening. They didn’t say anything. They were being paid on time, and the job was going smoothly, so conversation was kept to a minimum.

Even so, a few kept their distance from the crawlspace. One swore the joists creaked when no one was walking. Another outright refused to cross the porch following its completion. None of them stayed long after dark.

Darrell didn’t mind the solitude. In fact, he began to feel better out there. More grounded, he’d later say.

It seemed that whatever was under the boards was grateful. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt better after leaving an offering, and the connection felt… special.  And he wanted to keep it to himself.

* * * * * *

The neighbors never knew what had happened on that property. The papers had moved on. The house fire had faded to a line item. Harold Latham’s name disappeared first from headlines, and then from memory, as most people do. But the land remembered, and so did the thing beneath it.

It waited, as it always had, for someone to feed it.

The offering didn’t have to be much—a scrap, a token, or a gesture of acknowledgment. That was enough. At least, at first.

Beneath the new porch, where the dirt hadn’t fully settled and the insulation hadn’t yet been stapled into place, something old and patient moved slowly, out of reach of prying eyes.

It shifted its weight against the supports, opened something like eyes, and smiled.

And waited for the next offering.