Speaker 1: I live in an older apartment building in the same
town where I grew up. The place was built somewhere
in the nineteen sixties, back when everything was made out
of concrete and steel. You can tell it's been patched
up and repainted more times than anyone can count. Like
many buildings from that era, it also has a shared basement.
Down there, every apartment gets a small chain link fence
to keep whatever doesn't fit upstairs, holiday decorations, old furniture,
and junk. You can see into every cage from the
aisle if you stand in the right place. Most tenants
hardly go down there. I'm one of them. The only
reason I went down that afternoon was that I needed
to dig out a box of winter clothes i'd stored
months earlier. The basement door is at the end of
the hallway, near the laundry room. It's all locked, but
every tenant has a key. When I opened it, the
familiar smell of dampened cardboard drifted up the stairs. I've
looked on the lights and walked between the rows of
storage cages until I reached mine near the back wall.
At first, nothing seemed unusual. Then I noticed one of
the boxes was on the floor. It had been sitting
on the top shelf last time i'd been down here.
I remembered putting it up there because it was filled
with old box and weighed too much to keep moving around.
Now it was lying on its side near the front
of the cage. I stood there for a moment, trying
to remember. Maybe I'd taken it down the last time
I was here and forgot to put it back. That
seemed like the simplest explanation, so I stepped inside, lifted
the box back on to the shelf, and didn't think
much more about it. I didn't go back down to
the basement for a few weeks. I'd blown a fuse
in my kitchen and needed a screwdriver to open the panel.
Instead of driving to the hardware store. I remember the
toolbox I kept downstairs. The basement was quiet when I
locked the door. Just the dim fluorescent lights humming overhead
filled the silence. Nothing looked different from the last time
i'd been there. I walked back to my unit and
unlocked the padlock. The first thing I saw when I
opened the gate was the toolbox. It was sitting on
the floor in the middle of the cage. I stopped.
That toolbox had been on the top shelf. I knew
that for a fact, because I remembered hauling it up
there when I moved in. It was one of those
heavy metal toolboxes filled with old tools from my garage.
It probably weighed forty pounds. I stood there staring at
it for a moment, trying to replay the last time
i'd been down here. But this time it was reasoned
enough to know I hadn't moved it. I stepped inside
the cage and crouched down to pick it up. That's
when I noticed a cluster of water pipes ran along
the ceiling above the storage unit. In the summer, they
always gathered condensation from the humidity in the basement. Yet
there were streaks running along them, long clear paths where
the condensation had been wiped away. I thought maybe somebody
had brushed against them, But the marks weren't random. They
were long and narrow, and there were several of them
running along the pipes in uneven lines. I stood there
for a second looking up at them. It almost looked
like someone had dragged their fingers across the metal or
something else. The thought crossed my mind for a moment
before I laughed it off for probably another tenant. I
picked up the toolbox and set it back on the shelf.
Then I grabbed the screwdriver I came for and headed upstairs.
Tried not to give it much more thought. I tried
not to think about the basement again until a few
days later. But the truth is the image of those
streaks and the pipes kept drifting back into my head
at odd moments, not enough to worry about, just enough
that I found myself replaying the scene in my mind
every now and then. Eventually I went back down, partly
because I wanted to grab a camping lantern from one
of the boxes, mostly because I wanted to reassure myself
that nothing strange was actually going on. The basement looked
the same as always when I opened the door, nothing
moving and nothing out of place. I walked to my
locker and unlocked the padlock. The moment I opened the gate,
I knew something had changed again. A cardboard box near
the front had a chunk torn out of one corner torn.
The edge of the cardboard was ragged and damp, looking
like something had chewed through it. I crouched down slowly
the hole was about the size of a fist. Inside
the box were all clothes I hadn't worn in years.
I stared at the tornage for a few seconds, trying
to make sense of it. Maybe mice basements get mice sometimes.
But when I looked closer, the marks didn't look like
rodent damage. The tears were too wide, the dent in
the cardboard spaced too far apart. They looked like bite marks.
I felt a small ripple of unease moved through my stomach.
I straightened up and started looking around the rest of
the cage. That's when I noticed the plastic bin. One
of the clear storage bins on the lower shelf, had
a rough hole showed through the lid. The plastic edges
were bent inward and cracked, like something had worked at
it repeatedly. I lifted the lid. Inside was some old
blankets and a jacket. The moment I picked up the jacket,
I wrinkled my nose at the sharp stench of sweat
and something metallic underneath it. I set it back down slowly.
My heart had started beating faster now, a quiet rising
tension you get when your brain hasn't figured something out yet,
but you instincts already have. I scanned the rest of
the locker. The jacket hanging in the wire wall caught
my eye. It hadn't been there last time I came down.
I stepped closer. The sleeves had been twisted together into
a tight knot around the hangar, not loosely tangled, twisted
over and over until the fabric had wound itself into
a thick rope. I grabbed the sleeves and tried to
pull them apart. They didn't move. Whoever had done it
had twisted the fabric so tight it took me several
minutes to slowly work the not loose. I stood there
holding the jacket when I heard the noise, a slow scrape,
somewhere behind the storage cages. I froze. The noise came
again through the narrow spaces between in the units. I
held my breath, listening. The sound continued for another second,
then it stopped. I didn't wait for it to start again.
I dropped the jacket back onto the shelf, stepped out
of the cage, and locked the gate, without taking my
eyes off the dark rows of storage lockers around me.
Then I walked quickly back to the stairs. By the
time I reached the basement door, my heart was pounding
hard enough that I could feel it in my throat.
I didn't stop moving until I was back upstairs in
the hallway. My heart was still racing, and I felt
a little ridiculous standing there, breathing like had just run
up a flight of stairs. Old basements make noise, Pipes
expand metal shifts. Things settle, but the bite marks and
the box and the hole in the plastic bin kept
replying in my head. And that sound, the slow scraping
between the storage cages. I told myself I was being stupid,
but I walked down the hallway to the building manager's
office anyway. Our building manager, Carl, lives in the ground
floor apartment near the entrance. His door was open and
I knocked on the frame. He looked up from a
small TV sitting on his kitchen counter. Hey, he said,
what's up. I hesitated for a second before answering, have
you had anyone messing around in the basement lately? Carl
frowned slightly. No, why. I explained what I found. The
moved boxes, the hole in the bin, the strange marks
on the cardboard I left out the bart about the
scraping noise. Saying it out loud suddenly sounded too dramatic.
Carl listened for a minute, then pushed himself up from
the chair. Let's go take a look. We walked back
down the hallway together and unlocked the basement door. The
lights flickered on the same way they always did. The
storage cages looked exactly like they heard ten minutes earlier.
Karl walked down the aisle between them, glancing casually into
a few units. Doors still locked, he said, after a moment,
pointing back toward the stairwell. No sign anyone forced it.
We stopped at my locker. I showed him the chewed
box and the damaged bin. He crouched down to look
at the cardboard for a second. Probably mice, he said
that big, I asked. Carl shrugged. Rats. Maybe he stood
and dusted off his hands, or another tenant moving stuff
around happens all the time. People forget which unit is
theirs and poke through a few before they realize. I
looked round the basement again. It felt different standing there
with someone else beside me, less tense, less like something
was hiding in the dark spaces between the cages. Karl
clapped me lightly on the shoulder. Don't worry about it,
he said, If it keeps happening, let me know. I nodded, yeah, okay.
Walking back upstairs, I felt a little embarrassed for making
it sound like something serious. It was probably just what
Karl said, a rat or someone moving things around and
not remembering where they put them back. By the time
I got back to my apartment, i'd almost convinced myself
that was all it was. I stayed away from the
basement for a while after that, because the whole thing
had left me feeling a little foolish. Karl had looked around,
found nothing, and explained it away in about thirty seconds.
The longer I avoided thinking about it, the easier it
was to believe him. Weeks passed before I had any
reason to go back down. It was a Saturday afternoon
and I was looking for a small folding table i'd
stored when I moved in, something I could use on
my balcony. I locked the basement door and stepped inside.
The smell hit me first. Basements always smell a little stale,
but this time there was something stronger mixed in with it,
not quite rot, not quite garbage, something animal. I paused
at the bottom of the stairs. The lights flickered on overhead,
revealing the same rows of storage cages stretching down the room.
But something was different. I walked slowly down the aisle
toward my locker, scanning the cages on either side. A
section of fencing near the middle of the basement had
been bent outward, not cut. The wire had been forced
apart in a wide, uneven whole, big enough for someone
to crawl through. I stopped and crouched down to look
at it. The metal links were walked and twisted, like
something had pushed through them with a lot of force.
I stood there for a second, my mind automatically trying
to picture what kind of tools some one would need
to do that. Boat cutters would leave cleanes. This wasn't clean.
This looked like the metal had been torn open. I
kept walking. Two cages later, another hole appeared, same thing,
wire mesh bent outward from the inside. The uneasy feeling
in my chest started creeping back. When I reached my locker,
the gate was still locked. That should have made me
feel better. It didn't. I unlocked it and stepped inside.
The first thing I noticed was the food box. I
kept a few random things down here, old camping supplies,
some bottled water, and a couple of canned goods that
had ended up in storage during a move. Two of
the cans were gone. Another one sat on the shelf
with the top crussed inward, like someone had squeezed the
metal hard enough to split it open. I picked it
up slowly. The lid had been forced inward in a
jagged circle. The metal bent down into the can. My
fingers brushed the edge and came away sticky empty. Something
had eaten the contents. I set it back down and
stepped out of the locker, looking around the basement again.
That's when I noticed the pipes. A network of thick
heating pipes ran along the ceiling above the storage cages,
wrapped in pale insulation that had long since yellowed with age.
Across one stretch with long, dark streaks, something had dragged
itself along the insulation several times. The marks were irregular
smeared in places where whatever had moved across the pipes
had shifted its weight. They ran along the length of
the ceiling for nearly fifteen feet before disappearing into a
dark section of the basement. I followed them with my
eyes until they ended near the far corner. That where
I saw the bones, A small pile of pale shapes,
tucked into the corner between two cages. Then I stepped closer.
There were animal bones, small ones, probably from a rat
or a bird. But they weren't just lying there. They
were broken, snapped open down the middle. The ends splintered
cleanly apart, like something had cracked them to get at
the marrow. I stood there, staring at them, the smell
in the basement suddenly making more sense. The thought that
fawned in my head felt ridiculous, but once it appeared,
I couldn't push it away. Something was living down here,
and whatever it was, it wasn't acting like any sane
person I could imagine. Back in my apartment, I was
sitting on the couch watching TV, and something below me
made a dull, metallic rattle, not loud enough to shake
the floor, but enough that it carried up through the
pipes and vents. I muted the television. For a moment,
everything was quiet. Then it happened again, metal brushing against
metal somewhere in the basement. My stomach tightened, immediately. I
sat there listening, trying to convince myself it was just
the heating pipes expanding or someone moving something in their
storage unit. With a sound came again, longer, this time dragging.
I grabbed a flashlight and headed for the hallway. Before
I fully decided to the basement door was locked, like doorways,
I used my key and pushed it open slowly. The
smell hit me first, again strong. Now the basement looked empty.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then I heard it,
a low shuffling sound somewhere deeper in the rose, something
moving between the cages, crawling. The metal fencing rattled softly
as whatever it was brushed against it. My heart started hammering.
Then I heard breathing, slow and heavy, somewhere past the
third row of lockers. I didn't wait to see it.
I backed toward the stairs as quietly as I could.
I turned and ran up the stairs two at a time.
Once I reached the hallway, I dialed Carl's number. It
rang five times before going to voicemail. I tried again,
same result. I stood there for a minute, staring at
the phone. Finally I left a message, Hey Carl, it's
me from three b something's definitely living in the basement.
I think it might be an animal or something I
got in through the foundation. You should probably call animal
control or someone to take a look before it gets worse.
I hung up and waited a few seconds. Nothing. Carl
worked at early mornings. If it was already asleep, he
probably wouldn't hear the message until the next day. Standing
there in the hallway, I tried to calm myself down.
Maybe it really was some large animal that had found
its way inside, a raccoon or a stray dog, something
that had been living off the food in the storage lockers. Still,
the sounds i'd heard downstairs didn't feel like an animal.
They felt heavier, smarter too, But saying that out loud
would make me sound insane. Carl would check the message
in the morning. If it really was an animal, animal
control could deal with it. I told myself that was
the end of it, But lying in bed that night,
I kept replaying the sound of something crawling between those cages.
The next morning, I heard back from Carl, this is
outside my scope of duties certain some pictures, so I
can escalate this short and official, sounding different from how
he normally talked. I could only take it as him
being dismissive, ready to pass on the responsibilities, so I
had to go back down to the basement. The basement
lights flickered on and I was greeted by the usual
row of cages. But now that I knew what I
was looking for, I started noticing things I'd missed before.
The ben fencing made a path, so I followed the
damage more seriously into the basement. One cage led to another,
each one connected by a hole where the metal had
been bent outward. The holes lined up in a rough
path that ran through the middle of the storage rose
a route. I crouched down and stepped through one of
the openings, careful not to catch my jacket on the
twisted wire. Inside the neighboring cage, more boxes had been opened.
A suitcase sat half and zipped on the floor. Clothes
spilled out across the concrete. I moved through another hole
in the fencing, then another. Each cage looked more disturbed
than the last, boxes torn open, food containers scattered. The
smell from before was stronger here, sweat and metal, something
stale and sour hanging in the air. Eventually, the trail
ended in a storage unit near the back corner of
the basement. I thought the cage was empty. Then I
saw the pile. Clothes were stacked in the middle of
the floor. Shirts, jackets, towels, blankets, dozens of them, arranged
into uneven towers that rose nearly three feet high. I
stood there staring at them. The stacks were careful, each
piece of clothing folded and placed on top of the next,
like someone had spent hours arranging them. Next To the
clothes were empty food containers, plastic tubs and water bottles,
a few crushed cans. They had all been gathered together
in a neat cluster against the wall. The realization crept
slowly into the back of my mind. This wasn't random.
Something had been organizing this space, living in it. It
didn't look like they were arranging for storage. It looked
like a nest. I took another step into the cage.
The floor was littered with small objects pulled from other
storage units, flashlights, gloves, and various tools. Beyond the useful things,
there were a few oddities, a child, stuffed animal, stray,
parts of sports equipment, all of them arranged in little
stacks like the clothing ordered, almost ritualistic. My eyes drifted
up to the wall behind the piles. That's when I
saw the handprints. At first I thought it was dirt
smeared on the concrete. Then I stepped closer. They were prints,
dozens of them, dark smudged impressions pressed into the dust
along the wall. But they weren't all upright. Some were sideways,
some outside down. A few were so high in the
wall they were nearly touching the ceiling pipes, like someone
had climbed the concrete and braced themselves there. I stood
frozen in the middle of the cage, staring at the wall,
trying to picture what kind of animal would leave handprints
like that, And for the first time since they started,
I wasn't thinking about animals anymore. I don't know how
long I stood staring at the wall, long enough that
the basement felt quieter than it should have. I forced
myself to look away from the handprints. The cage felt wrong, now,
too small, too enclosed. I started backing toward the opening
and the fencing, careful not to bomp the pile of
clothes in the center of the floor. That's when something
on the ground caught my eye. A spoon, just the
normal kitchen spoon, lying on the concrete near the edge
of the cage. For a moment, I stared at it,
trying to figure out why it felt out of place.
Then I picked it up. The handle had been bent
almost completely in half, like someone had taken both ends
and slowly forced the metal inward. I turned it over
in my hand. The bowl of the spoon was scratched
and dull, like it had been scraped against metal repeatedly.
Started creeping into my mind before I could stop it.
Animals didn't use spoons. I looked back at the pile
of food containers. One of the cans sat slightly apart
from the others. I crouched down and picked it up.
The lid wasn't crossed like the others I'd seen before. Instead,
it had been punctured cleanly along the edge and peeled
back in a rough circle. Something thin and sharp had
been worked around the lid until it came loose. My
brain started trying to connect the pieces, the handprints, the
organized piles of clothing, the open cans. For the first
time since I'd come down here, a different possibility started
forming in my head, something that made the room suddenly
feel even colder. That's when I heard the noise, a
sudden shift of metal somewhere behind me, the sound of
something brushing hard against the wire cages. I spun around
and snapped the flashlight up. The beams swept across the
rows of lockers behind me, and my worst fears met me.
For a split second, it caught something. Two pale reflections
staring back at me from the dark between the cages,
eyes low to the ground. The shape around them moved fast.
Something thin and gray slipped backward through the wire maze
and vanished into the darkness between the storage units. My
body reacted before my brain did. I dropped the spoon.
The clang of it hitting the floor echoed off the
concrete walls. Then I ran. I shoved through the bent fencing,
nearly tearing my jacket on the twisted wire. As I
scrambled through the cages behind me, I thought I heard
movement again, fast scrambling following me. I didn't look back.
I sprinted down the aisle between the storage rose, burst
through the basement door, and didn't stop running until I
was back inside my apartment with the door locked behind me.
My hands were shaking so badly I had to sit down,
and all I could picture in my mind with his
eyes staring at me from the dark between the cages.
I sat in my apartment for almost an hour to
keep myself sane. I tried to convince myself I was overreacting.
Maybe it was just a raccoon or something that had
gotten into the basement, and a moskin look strange when
a flashlight catches their eyes at the wrong angle. For
the more I replayed what I had seen, the less
that explanation worked. It had moved too fast, too deliberately.
It was too big for anything known in my area,
and there's sand prints on the wall. Eventually I came
to realize something else. This wasn't something I could deal
with myself. After seeing whatever that thing was in the cages,
I knew I was out of my depth. So with
all I could show without looking crazy, I called the police.
The dispatcher asked a few questions. I tried to keep
the story grounded while I explained it. I think someone
might be living in the basement of my building. I said,
that was easier to say, then there's something moving down there.
Animal Control is equipped to deal with small animals, maybe
for our dogs, but this seemed too much for them
to handle, so the police felt like the right choice.
Two officers arrived about twenty minutes later. I met them
in the hallway outside the basement door. Both of them
looked like they've been expecting something minor, maybe a trespasser
or a complaint about noise, But looking at the gun
on their hips, I hoped they would react appropriately if
things got dangerous. All right, one of them said, the
other one who called, Yeah, you think someone's down there.
I'm pretty sure something is, I said, I've been hearing
movement for weeks. They asked a few more questions, then
one of them nodded toward the door. You got the key.
I held it up. The truth was part of me
wished they'd just go down there without me, let them
check it out while I waited upstairs. But the other
part of me he knew I had to show them
where everything was, the cages, the holes in the fencing,
the nest. So I unlocked the door. The three of
us stepped down the basement stairs together. The fluorescent lights
flickered on as we reached the bottom. The basement looked
exactly as it had earlier that day, rows of storage
cages stretching into the dim corners of the room, dust
hanging in the air, nothing moving. One of the officers
swept a flashlight slowly across the aisle between the units.
You said, you heard movement back here, Yeah, I said, quietly,
toward the back corner. We started walking. The officers moved carefully,
the lights scanning across the wire fencing and stacked boxes
inside the cages. One of them stopped when he saw
the first hole in the mesh. What happened here? I
didn't do that, I said. Those started showing up a
few weeks ago. He leaned closer to inspect the twisted metal.
Looks like it was forced open. That's what I thought.
We kept moving deeper into the rose. Soon we reached
the section where the cages connected into that strange crawl
route I'd followed earlier. The piles of clothes were still there,
the stacks of random objects the nest. The second officer
let out a low whistle. Someone's definitely been staying down here.
I opened my mouth to explain the handprints on the
wall that when something moved, A sudden metallic rattle echoed
through the cages to our right. All three flashlights snapped
in that direction. Something darted across the floor inside one
of the storage units, too fast to make out clearly. Hey,
one of the officers shouted. The shape scrambled through one
of the holes in the fencing and vanished into the
neighboring cage. Boxes tipped over as it passed. Metal shelves rattled,
Then something heavy dropped from one storage unit into another.
The sound echoed through the basement. I caught a glimpse
of it when the flashlight swept across the aisles For
a split second, the beam illuminated a thin shape moving
through the cages. It was filthy, its clothes hanging off
him in loose gray layers that looked like they being
scavenged from half the lockers in the basement. Its body
was unnaturally thin, but the way it moved was what
made my brain struggle to process it. It was on
all fours, crawling, one hand hugged around the wire mesh
as it pulled itself through a hole in the fencing
with shots looking speed. Then it climbed straight up the
side of a stoward shelf, moving with a quick, practiced
motion like it had done it hundreds of times before
the flashlight caught its face for a brief moment. Sunken eyes,
skin stretched tight across sharp cheek bones, and the final
piece of the puzzle clicked into place to paint a
morbid picture. It wasn't a creature, it was a man.
He dropped down into another unit and disappeared into the
dark rows beyond. One of the officers started after him,
with the maze of cages slowed him down. Immediately, Stop,
he shouted. With the sounds of movement were already fading,
scraping metal, shifting boxes. Then silence again. The basement went still.
The officer stood there for a moment, listening. Finally one
of them turned back toward me. Well, he said, breathing
a little harder. Now you are right. Some one had
been living in the basement, and judging by the pile
of food containers, the twisted wire cages, and the strange
tunnels running between the lockers, he'd been living here for months.
We searched the basement for almost forty minutes, checking every
storage cage and every corner behind the rows of lockers,
But the holes and the fencing connected more units than
anyone realized, and whoever he was had clearly been moving
through them for a long time. The officers didn't find him. Eventually,
one of the officers told me they were calling it in.
Within half an hour, two more patrol cars showed up
outside the building. They cleared the basement completely and told
every one in the building to stay inside them apartments
while they searched again. I sat on my couch, listening
to the muffled sounds of voices and boots moving through
the hallway and down the stairs. At one point there
was a loud crash from below, then shouting, the sound
of metal rattling violently. I didn't see what happened, but
about ten minutes later I heard someone being dragged up
the basement stairs. I opened my apartment door just a
few inches and looked into the hallway. Two officers were
pulling the man between them. It was thinner than I
realized when I saw him in the basement. His clothes
hung off him in layers of mismatched jackets and shirts
that had obviously come from different storage lockers. His face
was gaunt, eyes wide. He thrashed against the officers as
they pulled him toward the building. Entrance, just fighting wild,
desperate movements, like an animal trying to tear itself free.
It took three officers to keep him under control long
enough to get him outside. The hallway went quiet after that.
A while later, one of the officers knocked on my door.
I opened it. We got him, he said, Where was he?
Hidden inside one of the cages behind some boxes. He said,
he tried to run when we cornered him. The officer
rubbed the back of his neck. The guy fought pretty hard.
Took a few of us to get him out of there.
I nodded, Still trying to process everything. So that's it,
I asked. He gave a small shrug. Yeah, basement should
be safe now. He paused for a moment before adding,
we took a look around down there while we were searching.
What do you mean there were food containers everywhere, he said,
can goods, snacks, stuff like that. Looks like I'd been
taking things from the lockers. I thought about the crussed
cans and the open boxes I'd seen over the last
few weeks. Thing is, the officer continued, Most of it
was gone gone. He nodded, looked like he was just
about out. The officer gave me a reassuring smile. Good
thing you called when you did. After he left, I
stood in the hallway for a minute before closing my
door again. Everyone kept saying the same thing, that it
was over, that the basement was safe now, But lying
awake later that night, all I could think about was
the piles of empty cans I'd seen stacked in that
storage cage, and how carefully they'd been arranged. If the
police hadn't come when they did, if the man down
there had run out of food completely, I kept wondering
what he would have done next, because the basement was
almost out of food, but the building above it was
full of people.