“The Echo in the Crawlspace”

Robert Yoder never liked the crawlspace.

It sat in the far corner of the basement, wedged beneath an old set of wooden stairs that led to the backyard storm door. The house was built in the late sixties, and the crawlspace—according to his mom—once held ductwork that had long since been removed. Now it was little more than a sealed, triangular void behind a discolored sheet of plywood nailed flush to the studs.

When Robert was younger, he imagined raccoons or stray cats hiding inside. As he got older, the concern turned to black mold, spiders, or something worse—like the kind of forgotten electrical wiring that could burn a house down if left alone long enough. His mom always told him to leave it be.

He usually did.

But today wasn’t usual.

Today, Robert and his best friend, Mason Kittredge, were helping clear out the basement storage room for an eventual remodeling project. Most of the work involved stacking dusty boxes near the washer and dragging old junk toward the driveway. They were halfway through when Mason slapped a cobweb off his sleeve and leaned against the wall near the crawlspace.

“Man, your basement smells like a wet sock,” Mason said.

“It’s better than upstairs,” Robert shot back. “My mom’s been cooking cabbage all week.”

“That’s a hate crime, dude.”

Robert snorted and kept sorting through an old box of VHS tapes. Mason grabbed a broom from the corner and poked at the plywood panel covering the crawlspace.

“You ever open this thing?” he asked, tapping the surface with the handle.

“Nope. Pretty sure it’s sealed for a reason.”

Mason tapped again. “What if there’s something cool inside? Old toys? Forgotten cash? Vintage comics?”

“Or a dead possum.”

“Fair.”

Mason angled the broom and rapped the plywood three times in quick succession.

The sound echoed—and then it didn’t.

Robert straightened.

From behind the panel came three knocks, matching Mason’s rhythm and spacing with unnatural precision.

Mason froze mid-smirk. “You… heard that, right?”

Robert set the VHS down slowly. “Yeah. Probably just— I don’t know. Pipes or something.”

“There’s no pipes back there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you don’t either.”

They stared at the plywood.

Mason tapped again, once.

A single knock answered from the other side.

The broom clattered from his hands. “Nope. Absolutely not. That wasn’t normal.”

Robert stepped closer, his curiosity overpowering the uneasy tightness forming in his gut. The knocks hadn’t sounded muffled or distant. They had weight—as though someone stood only inches behind the panel.

He placed his palm on the plywood. It felt cool.

“Probably just—something shifting inside,” he said, though he didn’t believe it.

Mason shook his head. “Shift this.”

He tapped out a short, syncopated rhythm: two quick knocks, a pause, then three spaced farther apart.

The reply came instantly.

Two quick knocks. A beat. Three slow ones.

A perfect match.

Robert’s mouth went dry.

“Okay,” Mason whispered. “Seriously. What the hell was that?”

Robert didn’t answer. His mind churned through explanations—air compression, thermal expansion, some weird acoustic anomaly. None of them fit. The timing was too perfect. The spacing too exact. No random settling of the house behaved like that.

He lifted his own hand, knuckles near the wood. “Try something,” he murmured.

Mason backed away several steps.

Robert tapped twice—one soft, one firm.

The wood answered: one soft, one firm.

He stared at Mason.

“I didn’t do that,” Mason said.

“Didn’t say you did.”

“I’m just establishing my alibi.”

Robert leaned in. “Okay. Last one. Then we leave it alone.”

Before he could tap, a sudden single rap struck from inside—sharp, deliberate, and perfectly centered.

Robert jerked his hand back.

“I didn’t touch it,” he said.

“Yeah,” Mason whispered, “but something else did.”

They stood motionless, listening. The basement felt colder than before, though the air wasn’t moving. No furnace noise. No outside traffic. Just a low, steady hum from the overhead bulb.

Robert stepped back. “We’re done. Let’s just go upstairs.”

“For once,” Mason said, “I agree with you.”

But neither moved. The crawlspace commanded their attention, the way a deep lake invites you to stare long enough until you feel the pull of its depth.

Robert swallowed, unsettled by how quickly fascination was replacing fear. He wanted to knock again. To test it. To understand it. The precision of those replies…it wasn’t random. It wasn’t guesswork.

It was intentional.

“Rob,” Mason said quietly, as though afraid the plywood could hear him. “Please tell me you’re done with this.”

Robert wasn’t. He could already feel the curiosity taking root.

“Let’s finish the basement,” he said instead.

They turned away, but both kept glancing over their shoulders, expecting another knock.

The plywood stayed silent.

But Robert felt watched—an awareness that hadn’t been there before. Not imagined, not irrational, but something measured and patient.

Something waiting.

Part II

Robert didn’t sleep much the night after the knocking. He lay awake replaying the sound in his head, trying to match it against anything he knew about acoustics, vibration, or the way old houses sometimes echoed when air ducts contracted. But nothing lined up with the neat, mechanical timing of those taps. It had answered him the way a person would—only faster and with a confidence that suggested it wasn’t guessing.

By morning, Mason had already tried to downplay the whole thing. He showed up at Robert’s house with a half-eaten Pop-Tart and the same uneasy grin he wore freshman year when he’d failed algebra.
“Probably pipes, man. Or the ductwork settling. Your place is older than my grandma.”

Robert knew better than to push. A little agreement made Mason easier to handle.
“Yeah,” he said. “Still… worth checking again.”

That was the hook, and Mason took it. They headed downstairs with two phones, a tripod, a battered laptop, and a bundle of tools they’d grabbed from the garage. Robert set the phone on the floor near the plywood panel. Mason stood farther back, as though the extra three feet offered real protection.

Robert tested a simple pattern first—two knuckles, one beat apart.

Tap… tap.

Inside the crawlspace, the answer came instantly, precise and perfect, down to the slight difference in force between the two taps. Mason let out a sharp grunt under his breath.
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe not pipes.”

Robert crossed his arms, mind working. “Try something.”

Mason shook his head. “You’re the one who wants to do this.”

“Exactly. If I do everything, we can’t rule out coincidence.”

The argument held. Mason stepped forward, put one hand on the concrete wall beside the panel, and rapped twice with a screwdriver handle. The sound was hollow, sharp, and metallic.

Something behind the plywood struck back with the same object—metal on wood, ringing bright.
Mason dropped the screwdriver. It clattered across the concrete.

“That’s not funny.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Robert said quietly.

Mason rubbed his arms, trying to hide the way his shoulders had tightened. “What the hell could be in there?”

Robert didn’t answer. He was watching the plywood. The panel sat flush against its frame—no bulges, no gaps, no movement. No way someone inside could have reached it with a tool. No way someone could have matched the exact tone of the screwdriver unless they were hitting with the same weight and leverage.

“Let’s record the next one,” Robert said.

They reset the tripod and angled Mason’s phone toward the panel. Robert lifted a wooden dowel they’d brought down and held it an inch from the surface. He struck once, enough to leave a faint dust ripple.

From inside, the reply came—not just matching the impact, but matching the trajectory.
The return hit sounded as if it had swung from the same angle, despite the plywood showing no sign of bending.

Mason swallowed hard. “Try something harder.”

Robert hesitated. “Like what?”

“Something it can’t copy.”

He looked around the basement. A coiled extension cord hung near the water heater. A paint roller leaned against an old shelf. Then Robert spotted a heavy wrench lying near the sump pump. He picked it up, weighing it in his hand.

“Careful,” Mason said, voice low.

Robert swung the wrench lightly, striking once against the panel.

The echoing blow from inside shook dust loose from the rafters. The impact matched his own perfectly—and yet had a crispness to it his blow hadn’t. As if the thing hitting from inside wasn’t hindered by plywood or angle. As if it understood the wrench better than he did.

“It’s learning,” Robert whispered before thinking.

Mason stared at him. “What does that mean?”

He didn’t have an answer. He only had questions—too many to shape into words.

They tried patterns next. Simple rhythms. Morse code. A stuttered beat. A three-count. A skipped beat. Every sequence came back with flawless timing.

Mason paced behind him. “Stop. Seriously. This is starting to feel—”

“What?”

“Like we’re not the ones running the experiment anymore.”

Robert recorded everything. He dragged the laptop closer, opened a sound analysis program, and replayed the audio they’d captured so far. Waveforms lined up to the millisecond. The matching sequences weren’t just identical—the return taps were cleaner, more precise. Less human.

He tried a more complex rhythm. A half-beat pause. A longer syncopated run. On the last tap, he hesitated, deciding whether to add one more.

Before his knuckle struck the board, something on the other side hit first—with the exact tap he’d planned but hadn’t made.

Mason backed away, hands raised. “Nope. That’s it. I’m done.”

Robert stared at the panel. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t even flexed his hand. The thing in the crawlspace had responded to the pattern in his head.

He tried to recreate the moment—tried to think through a sequence without making a move. Inside, the plywood stayed silent.

Only when he almost tapped again did the answering strike come—fast, crisp, like it had been waiting for him to decide.

Mason cursed under his breath and headed for the stairs. “Seriously, Rob. Whatever this is… it’s not a game.”

Robert barely heard him. His attention stayed locked on the plywood panel. The crawlspace was still. Quiet. Patient.

For the first time since the knocking had started, Robert wondered whether it was answering them at all.

Maybe it was directing them instead.

Part III

Robert didn’t sleep much after the second round of experiments. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the plywood trembling under his knuckles, the way the patterns had come back at him faster than he could think them up. Mason had bailed early, muttering something about having “other stuff to do tomorrow,” but Robert knew avoidance when he saw it.

The morning light didn’t help. It only washed the basement in a watery glow that made the crawlspace look smaller and more harmless than it had any right to be. He went downstairs anyway, camera in hand, and queued up the files he’d transferred last night. If something had gone wrong—if they’d been tricking themselves—there would be signs.

The footage looked ordinary at first. Robert and Mason knocked, laughed, argued. A few seconds later came the first reply, crisp and sharp. He replayed that moment several times, slow-motioning the sequence until the waveforms broke into wide, stretched lines. Nothing unusual there.

But at the seventeen-minute mark, during the screwdriver test, a faint shift flickered at the edge of the frame. Not a shadow exactly. More like the camera trying to correct for something that wasn’t in view. A ripple of motion, subtle enough that he had to scrub back several times to be sure he wasn’t imagining it.

When he zoomed in, it grew worse. The distortion quivered in perfect time with his own hand movements. Not mirrored—off by a fraction. A lag that shouldn’t have been possible, yet too consistent to be random.

He paused the video.
Maybe Mason was right. Maybe they shouldn’t have pushed this far.

But the thought lasted only a breath before something else took hold—something that had settled on him last night and refused to move. Curiosity crept in the way cold seeps through old windows, steady and quiet. He texted Mason.

Come back. I found something.

No answer.

He waited five minutes, then ten. The silence made the basement feel closer around him. He sent another:

Just get down here. You’ll want to see this.

Finally, Mason replied.

I’m not going near that thing again. Unless you’re dying or something exploded, I’m out.

Robert typed back:

It’s your face on the footage. Looks wrong. Just come see.

A long pause. Then:

Fine. Five minutes.

When Mason arrived, his shoulders were hunched, jaw tight. “This better be more than compression artifacts,” he muttered.

Robert played the section. When the distortion rippled, Mason leaned closer to the screen, brow furrowed.

“What is that?” he whispered.

Robert rewound. “It moves wrong. It’s synced to us, but… not exactly.”

Mason stepped away from the laptop. “I don’t like it. Let’s drop it.”

Robert glanced toward the crawlspace panel. “Or we go back down and figure out what caused it.”

Mason let out a strained laugh. “You mean figure out what’s been knocking back like some… basement metronome? Yeah, no thanks.”

But when Robert walked toward the stairs, Mason cursed under his breath and followed. Fear or loyalty—it didn’t matter. He came anyway.

The plywood stood exactly as they’d left it, screws half-loosened from the last attempt at prying the thing open. The room felt still, but not dormant. As if the empty air waited for something to happen.

Robert lifted a hand.
“Just watch.”

He didn’t touch the panel. He just moved his fingers toward it—slow, a few inches away, not close enough to make contact.

From inside, the wood flexed inward. A shallow bend formed where his palm hovered, soft at first but unmistakable. Mason’s breath caught with a quiet choke, and he stumbled back.

Robert lowered his hand. The wood relaxed a moment later, flattening again.

“The hell was that?” Mason whispered.

Robert tried again, this time moving his hand left to right, tracing an arc.
The plywood bowed along the same curve, as if something inside dragged it from the opposite side.

Mason pressed himself against the far wall. “It’s anticipating you,” he said. “Not copying. It knew where you were going.”

No jokes left in him this time.

Robert stepped closer. His chest tightened, not in panic but in recognition—like stepping into a complex math problem and understanding just enough of it to know the rest was far beyond him.

He rested his hand on the screw-head they hadn’t removed yet. Mason grabbed his arm.

“Rob, don’t.”

“We’ve already gone too far to pretend this isn’t happening.”

“That’s exactly why we should stop.”

Robert turned the screwdriver. The final screw loosened with a brittle squeal.
The plywood sagged.
The room shifted around them.

Outside the crawlspace, nothing moved.
Inside, the air seemed to wait.

Robert leveled the camera. Mason swallowed hard. The last barrier hung crooked and ready to fall.

He pulled it away.

Part IV

Robert kept the camera trained on the crawlspace as the final screw clattered to the floor. The plywood sagged forward, held in place only by friction and a smear of old paint sticking along the top edge. For a moment, it hung there—tilted, stubborn—before peeling away like wet bark and dropping onto the concrete with a sharp smack.

A stale draft drifted out. It carried the scent of dust, insulation, and something faintly metallic, like old water left too long in a rusted pipe. Robert lifted the camera a little higher.

The crawlspace opened into a narrow, triangular void braced by foundation beams. The walls were rough and uneven, patched with insulation that looked as if mice had tunneled through it decades ago. The space ran long and dark, fading into a blackness the flashlight couldn’t cut.

“Nothing,” Robert whispered, though he wasn’t sure if he said it for Mason or for himself.

Mason crouched beside him, gripping his own flashlight with tense fingers. He leaned in a little, shoulders tight, his breath slow and measured. “It… it should be right there,” he murmured. “If something was knocking—there should be something.”

Robert kept filming because that was the only thing that made sense. The knock patterns. The perfect timing. The way the panel pushed back where his hand hovered. The entity had responded like a mirror, a machine, a mind—something. Something that now sat before them as an empty space.

“Shine the light left,” Robert said.

Mason angled the beam across the joists. It revealed nothing but dust and the faint shimmer of disturbed cobwebs.

Another sweep—right side. More dust. More empty space.

There was nowhere for a person to hide. No turn, no vent, no broken panel or gap in the stonework. Only the triangular run tapering deeper into shadow.

Mason leaned closer, pressing one hand to the wood frame for balance. “Maybe we—maybe there’s another way in? Some air duct or—”

His voice cut off.

Robert steadied the camera. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I thought I saw something… movement, maybe. Could’ve been dust.”

He brought the flashlight forward another inch, peering into the dark.

“Hold up,” Robert said, reaching out. “Don’t go all the way—”

Too late.

Mason ducked his head inside.

The flashlight beam shook once in his hand, skittering across dirt and joist-shadows—

—and then Mason’s entire silhouette jerked forward, as though someone had hooked him behind the collar and yanked.

The sound wasn’t a scream or a struggle. There wasn’t time for either. Mason simply vanished into the dark with the abruptness of a pulled curtain.

The flashlight dropped and bounced off the concrete. Its beam rolled wildly, spinning across the walls and catching the raw edge of the crawlspace opening. The empty space swallowed the last flicker of Mason’s light before the beam settled, motionless, pointing at nothing.

“Mason!”

Robert lunged forward, reaching the threshold, but his hand met only cold air. No movement. No sound. No sign of a struggle. Mason had been there one moment and gone the next, as if pulled through a slit in the world.

A soft thump sounded behind him.

The plywood panel leaned upright again—no hands on it—no shift of airflow—just lifting and swinging back into place.

Robert staggered away as the panel rose, slowly at first, then snapped shut flush against the frame with a solid, resonant clap.

He stood in stunned silence, camera still recording, flashlight beam twitching across the floor. The crawlspace entrance was sealed once more, looking as unremarkable as it had hours earlier. Only the absence beside him, the chill in the concrete, and the fallen flashlight proved anything had happened.

“Mason…” Robert whispered.

The crawlspace didn’t answer.

Part V