The door creaked open, releasing a stagnant breath of air that carried a heavy scent — something sour, damp, and unmistakably wrong. Officer Morales froze for a moment, the unease settling deep in his chest. The smell spoke of neglect and something darker, something long hidden. With a cautious nod, he followed the young girl, Jimena, into the dimly lit hallway.
The air inside the house was thick and unmoving. Each step they took stirred a faint echo, as though the walls themselves were whispering. “Where is everyone?” Morales asked quietly, his voice hesitant to break the eerie silence.
Jimena didn’t look back. Her small frame moved with surprising resolve as she whispered, “He’s in the basement. It’s where he keeps us.”
The words hit Morales like a shock of ice. The basement — that single word seemed to pull the light from the air. He nodded, motioning for her to stay close. As they advanced, he glanced into the rooms they passed — each one frozen in disrepair. Dust-covered furniture sat like relics of another life; children’s toys lay scattered as if their owners had simply vanished. But what unsettled Morales most wasn’t the decay — it was the absence of any trace of the living.
At the end of the hallway stood a heavy door, thick and foreign to the rest of the house. Jimena stopped before it, her trembling hand hovering over the knob. “Please, be ready,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “He’s… not like us.”
Morales steadied himself, tightening his grip on his radio and flashlight. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said softly. With a shaky breath, Jimena opened the door.
The scent of damp concrete and cold air wafted up from below. A narrow staircase descended into darkness, each creaking step pulling them deeper into the unknown. Morales’s flashlight flickered across the basement floor, revealing fragments of a hidden world — a cot, a table scattered with torn papers, and objects that made little sense. The silence was suffocating. And then, from the shadows, something moved.
