Beneath the Boards

by Fendy S. Tulodo

It started with a whisper.

Not a voice. Not words, exactly. Just a soft scratch beneath the floorboards. Like someone dragging fingernails across old wood, slow and deliberate.

Olivia thought it was the pipes settling. Maybe mice. That’s what she told herself the first time. But pipes don’t breathe. And mice don’t talk.

She lay still in her bed, heart hammering. The sound came again. Scrape… scrape… like something testing the barrier, waiting.

Then a breath—warm, moist, like exhalation through a crack in the wood.

Olivia clamped the covers over her head. She was fourteen, too old for stupid fears but not old enough to ignore the way her stomach knotted in terror.

The whispers gained words the next night.

“Oliviaaaa… let us ouuut.”

She pressed her hands to her ears. Squeezed her eyes shut.

A dream. Just a dream.

Until the floorboards shifted beneath her bed.

She saw it the next morning. A thin, jagged crack near the foot of her bed, like the wood had moved in the night. She crouched, running her fingers over the split. The plank was loose.

A sliver of darkness peered back at her from below.

A hole.

Waiting.

She yanked her hand back and threw her rug over it. Out of sight, out of mind.

But the whispers didn’t stop.

Her family moved in three months ago. A fresh start. That’s what her mom called it. A fixer-upper, but full of “character.” Olivia didn’t care about character. She wanted out.

The house was old. The walls breathed in the winter; the floor groaned underfoot. Her dad said it had good bones, but to Olivia, it felt like something else.

Something hungry.

Her parents didn’t notice the sounds. Or if they did, they didn’t say anything. They had other problems.

Her mom, always tense, always on edge, like she was waiting for bad news. Her dad, burying himself in work, avoiding conversations. And her brother—God, Ethan—an insufferable ten-year-old brat.

If Olivia told them about the whispering under the floor, they’d laugh. Tell her it was stress. School. The move.

So she kept quiet.

Until the scratching got louder.

The sound woke her at 3:14 AM.

Not whispering this time. Tapping.

A rhythmic, methodical tap… tap… tap… against the wood.

Olivia bolted upright, pulse hammering.

The rug moved. Just an inch. But she saw it.

Like something beneath it had pressed up.

She stopped breathing.

Silence.

Then—

The floorboard lifted.

Only a fraction of an inch. Just enough to see the dark slit of the hole beneath.

Olivia launched out of bed, heart slamming. She snatched the rug, threw it back down, and piled her heaviest books on top of it—textbooks, dictionaries, her brother’s stupid Lego bin.

And then, she waited.

The tapping stopped.

The whispering didn’t.

“You’re so lonely, Olivia… we can play… just let us out…”

She shoved her fingers in her ears and screamed into her pillow.

Olivia tried not to think about it. But the hole was always there.

Beneath her bed. Beneath the rug. Beneath the books.

Waiting.

At school, she drifted. Words blurred on the page. Whispers curled in her head, slithering like insects into her thoughts.

“We see you, Olivia…”

She flinched in the middle of math.

Ethan noticed. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” she snapped.

But something was wrong.

That night, she peeled back the rug. Slowly. Like unwrapping a wound.

The crack in the floor had widened. The wood bent, like something below had been pushing up.

She dropped to her knees.

And for the first time, she looked inside.

It wasn’t just a hole.

It was a hollow space, stretching into the darkness, deeper than it should be. Three feet? Five? Maybe more. The air inside smelled wet.

Something shifted.

Her breath hitched.

A glint. A shape—pressed against the slats.

Then a whisper. Not from below. From inside her head.

“Thaaank you, Oliviaaaa…”

She scrambled back, slammed the rug down, and shoved the books back on top.

She couldn’t sleep.

The sound was different now. Not whispering. Not tapping.

Breathing.

A slow, deep inhale.

Like something was waiting for her to fall asleep.

She stared at the ceiling, hands clutched to her chest, breath shallow.

At 3:14 AM, the floor creaked.

The books shifted.

The whisper came again. Inside her skull.

“You let us see you, Olivia. Now it’s our turn.”

And the floorboard exploded open.

Hands—long, thin, clawed—shot up from the darkness, grabbing for her, splintering the wood.

Olivia screamed.

The door burst open—her dad, her mom, Ethan. Her dad flicked on the light.

The hands were gone.

Only the hole remained, silent and gaping, a dark wound in the floor.

Her mother knelt beside her, voice shaking. “Baby, what happened?”

Olivia couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

Her father frowned. “We’ll fix the floor in the morning.”

Fix? FIX?

She wanted to beg them to leave. To burn the house down. To run.

But they didn’t hear it.

The whisper.

“Oliviaaaa… you belong to us now…”

She tried to fight it. Tried to tell herself it wasn’t real.

But the hole grew.

The floorboards warped, curling at the edges, widening the void beneath.

It whispered in her dreams. Crawled inside her thoughts.

At 3:14 AM, she woke up standing beside the hole.

She didn’t remember getting up.

Didn’t remember moving.

The books were gone. The rug peeled back.

The hole was open.

And something was waiting.

A shadow. A shape. Eyes—too many, glistening black, blinking in sync. A mouth, stitched shut with thick, black thread.

It had waited long enough.

The claws shot up, wrapping around her ankles, yanking her down.

Olivia screamed.

The last thing she saw was the floorboards slamming shut above her, the whispering voices laughing inside her skull.

And then—

Silence.

When Olivia’s mother came to wake her, she found nothing but an empty bed.

Just a whispering scratch beneath the floorboards.

Waiting.

Hungry.

The whisper did not pull her in. It did not lunge from the darkness or coil itself around her like a serpent. Instead, it waited.

Olivia’s body remained rigid, trapped under a force she could not name. The gaping wound in the floor stretched wide—a void with no bottom, no light, no end. She could feel something stirring inside it, but not in the way a thing moves.

It was everywhere at once.

It existed beneath the house. Beneath the town. Beneath her own skin.

She tried to scream, but her throat was a locked door. Her hands, traitorous and obedient, twitched toward the hole as if drawn by invisible strings. The air pressed against her ribs, squeezing tighter, tighter—

“You let us see you, Olivia…”

The voice curled inside her head, wet and eager, echoing in ways that should not have been possible.

“Now we want to see more.”

She fought against the pull, every muscle straining. Move. MOVE. But her legs remained locked in place. The air around her was thicker than water, as if she had waded into something gelatinous, a living thing closing in.

Her fingertips brushed the edge of the hole.

And the world folded inside itself.

A scream erupted from her chest—though she wasn’t sure if it had come from her or the house.

The air snapped. The floorboards rippled. The ceiling twisted like wax, and for one impossible moment, Olivia was not standing in her bedroom.

She was inside the walls.

She was inside the floor.

She was beneath herself.

A second Olivia stood above her.

Her own body. Her own face.

But something was wrong.

The girl standing there—the other Olivia—was frozen in time, mouth twisted into a silent, unspoken scream. Her eyes were black pits, wide and staring, trapped in a moment that had not yet arrived.

And below her feet—

There was no floor.

Only the hole.

Only the thing inside it.

And now Olivia was part of it.

She tried to move, tried to claw her way back up, but she had no body. No limbs. No voice.

She wasn’t in the room anymore.

She was the room.

The whispers slithered around her, brushing against her mind like wet fingers.

“You see now, don’t you?”

A sick, heavy realization settled into her.

She had never lived here.

She had never moved in, never unpacked, never sat at that dinner table with her parents. The memories were wrong, twisted like old film reels spliced together.

She had always been down here.

She had always been watching.

The house shifted.

The walls exhaled, the air warming as the room above her flickered like a dying lightbulb.

And then—

Another girl stepped inside.

A stranger.

Not Olivia. Someone new.

She dropped her bags on the bed, stretching, looking around with tired, unsuspecting eyes.

The whispers surged forward, surrounding her like a thousand unseen hands.

And Olivia—the real Olivia—felt her own mouth curl into a grin.

Not her mouth.

The thing wearing her face.

“You let us see you, Olivia… Now it’s your turn to watch.”

The hole was waiting.

And soon, it would feed again.

Want more gripping stories by Fendy S. Tulodo? Read “Postmarked for My Bones” from Horrific Scribes, July 2025, “Genesis in Reverse” from Horrific Scribes, November 2025, “The Black Gut Laugh” from Horrific Scribes, April 2026, and “The Double Note” in Horrific Scribes October 2026.

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