Patty Perkins, Nine Years Old
by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Patty Perkins, nine years old, was hurrying along.
No. Hurried along. Better.
Patty Perkins, nine years old, hurried along.
Along the street, duh.
No, down the street.
Patty Perkins, nine years old, hurried down the street.
Yes.
Patty Perkins, nine years old, hurried down the street. Patty liked hurried. It sounded like a word you’d read in a book. Patty liked books. She liked reading them and pretending she was in them. Which was why hurried was better than quickly. Though to be fair, she had considered quickly. Except quickly suggested a speed close to running. Mommy said never to run. She was always after Patty about that. Especially when Patty was wearing her pink princess slippers like now, even though it was a little cold out. Though not as cold as inside the house, which for some reason had been much colder since the men came with the big, wooden trunk.
You could trip and fall, Mommy always said. Which is why she told Patty never to run.
Except today. Run, Patty! Mommy had yelled.
Patty heard her, even over the noise coming from the basement, including the sounds that didn’t make much sense—the wet, growling, moaning, scratching, dragging-along sounds.
Patty Perkins, nine years old, hurried down the street.
Despite what Mommy yelled, Patty wasn’t running because she was afraid of tripping. Pink princess slippers weren’t good for running, especially on the sidewalk. The sidewalk was in Upper Arlington, where Patty lived. Upper Arlington was a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. A lot of houses in Upper Arlington were big and fancy. In one of those houses, Patty heard Susie’s mom say bad things about Daddy. Like, that he was different.
The good thing was that most of those big, fancy houses weren’t on Patty’s street. Patty lived on Northwest Boulevard. Daddy called her house modest. Even though Mommy called it spacious. That was one of the things Mommy and Daddy argued about sometimes. Modest versus spacious. Patty liked the word argued. Well, more than fought, which Mommy and Daddy sounded like they did when their voices grew loud enough that Patty put on the Frozen soundtrack full blast and curled up under the blankets with the pillows on top.
Patty Perkins, nine years old, hurried down Northwest Boulevard in Upper Arlington, Ohio.
Patty wasn’t going to the closest neighbors. The closest neighbors weren’t mean or anything. She just didn’t know them that well. Her parents didn’t talk much to the neighbors. Or maybe it was that the neighbors didn’t talk much to them. Anyway, Patty hurried down the street a little bit farther than the closest neighbors. Down to Ms. Stauch’s house. The yellow house with the big maple tree in the yard and the daffodils, tulips, and irises. Some days, Patty’s mommy let her walk to Ms. Stauch’s house by herself as long as Mommy was watching from the sidewalk in front of Patty’s house. These days—since the men came with the trunk—Mommy hugged herself as she glanced at the open door of their house, then back at Patty as she walked to Ms. Stauch’s. Not hurried. Walked. Walked, um, leisurely. Patty liked that word. It was another word like you’d read in a book. Like the book Patty was pretending to be in today.
Patty hoped Ms. Stauch wouldn’t mind that she had on her pink princess slippers and her pink princess sweatpants and sweatshirt, which she liked to wear after school. In fact, Patty had just put them on when she heard the sound. The crying. Coming from the basement. Much, much louder this time. The sound she decided to investigate, even though Daddy had said several times not to. Which is why she wasn’t in her school clothes.
As Patty neared Ms. Stauch’s house, she got the tiniest funny feeling in her tummy, like she’d eaten too much candy or watched something scary on the computer. It was a little like the feeling Patty always got walking there because Patty was nervous before her piano lessons started. Not because Ms. Stauch was cross or that Patty didn’t like piano. She liked her lessons. She liked piano.
No, Patty got nervous because she was afraid of making mistakes and of other people knowing about it. Like the mistake she thought she might have made when she investigated the crying coming from the basement that she wasn’t supposed to.
Ms. Stauch’s baby was another reason Patty liked her piano lessons. He was so cute. Liam Joseph Stauch-Kerr. If Patty was really good and listened to Ms. Stauch’s instructions and had a good practice, Ms. Stauch would let her play with Liam before Patty walked leisurely back up the street. Back to her house, where Mommy was waiting because Ms. Stauch always texted her to let her know that Patty was coming home.
Patty picked up her pace because of the tiniest funny feeling in her tummy. Because of what happened back at her house. Because of the mistake she might have made. Made because of the baby she heard at home, just now, its little cry coming from the basement right after the loud crash. The crying, louder this time, that Patty thought she heard. A baby that sounded a lot like Liam. But that couldn’t be. There weren’t any babies at home.
Mommy and Daddy had explained many times that they couldn’t give Patty a brother or sister, but she shouldn’t worry because they loved her so, so much. Patty believed that. About how much they loved her. Sometimes, though, she worried about how much they loved each other. Sometimes, her head under her pillow, she worried if they loved each other.
Daddy took care of Patty and Mommy. He was a professor. He taught folklore at Ohio State University. The Ohio State University. He’d even written a book, which he was proud of. Very proud. It was a book for grown-ups, though. Patty wasn’t allowed to read it. She’d tried, once, when Mommy and Daddy were having a discussion downstairs. A loud discussion that might have been on the way to a fight. Patty didn’t feel like she was cheating, in terms of not being supposed to read the book. It had been left out, after all, on the corner of Mommy and Daddy’s bed. The loud discussion might have been about the book, which was why it was left on the bed.
The book had a long title. It was called—she said it slowly to herself. The Epistemology of Evil: A Consideration of Demons, Dragons, and Devils from Ancient Babylon to the Present Day. The cover was scary: a figure, hard to tell if it was a man or a woman, dressed in a long, black gown, disappearing through mist into a dark forest. Inside was a much more frightening picture. A creature she didn’t know how to describe. Like if you combined a shark, a squid, a dinosaur, and a bunch of other animals, if you could even call them that. She shut the book and had nightmares for a week.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Patty’s mother said when Patty thrashed and moaned awake.
“I got scared,” Patty said. But she didn’t say why out of fear of being punished for looking at Daddy’s book.
The thing that scared her most was how real the creature looked, almost as if it were a photograph and not a drawing. Mommy had a lot of books with a lot of animal photographs. Mommy was a professor, too. Also at the university. Except she taught biology. Some of the discussions she and Daddy had were about things Mommy said couldn’t be true, and which Daddy said might be true if Mommy would only listen and not focus—that was the word he used—on just what she read in her books. Those were some very loud discussions, especially recently.
Patty Perkins, nine years old, hurried down the street.
She was getting closer to Ms. Stauch’s house. She wondered if Liam would be there. Crying, like the baby in Patty’s basement. Except there couldn’t have been a baby. Could there?
She knew she shouldn’t have paid attention to the sound. Daddy told her not to. Except that other funny sounds had been coming from the basement, and it was kind of hard not to hear. Daddy said it was just pipes. The sounds had been coming for a couple of weeks. Since the men came. The funny men.
The men had something to do with other discussions that Mommy and Daddy had been having. Discussions that involved money and sometimes became fights. Mommy was upset because Daddy had been “gambling.” It meant Daddy had lost some of their money. Maybe more than some. Mommy was worried. Daddy wasn’t worried. He was angry, not because he lost the money, he said, but because he needed the money for his work. Daddy needed the money, he said, because the university was doing “budget cuts.” Mommy said budget cuts didn’t affect the money Daddy said he needed for his work. She said spending money on Daddy’s kind of research wasn’t right. That there were limits.
Things changed after the men came. Funny-looking men. Three of them. Each of them had a long beard. Very long. Not gray, though, like wizards. Beards as black as black construction paper or black licorice. Beards that contrasted with their heads. Which were bald. Bald and shiny, shiny as the balls on the pool table in the basement when Patty was still allowed down there. Long black beards and shiny bald heads. The three visitors’ shirts and pants were baggy and drab, the color of roots, like the clothes they wore in the Little House on the Prairie books, or even older, like in the school’s picture books about the Middle Ages. Three men, with long, black beards and shiny bald heads, wearing strange clothes the color of roots, carrying a large, wooden trunk. A trunk the size of a refrigerator turned on its side.
The three men came, and after a very loud discussion between Mommy and Daddy, two men carried the trunk down into the basement, and the third man carried a cooler. A cooler the man said was full of meat. Patty asked if they were putting the meat in the basement freezer. The man frowned and didn’t say anything. The whole time, Mommy stood in the kitchen with her hand over her mouth and watched but didn’t help.
Three things happened after the men came. The first was that the discussions about money stopped. They seemed to have money again. Patty got a new dress, and Mommy got a new computer, even though she told Daddy she didn’t want it and never opened the box. Daddy came home one day with a new car—a whole new car!—but Mommy made him take it back the next day after another loud discussion.
The second thing that happened was the house got cold, and Mommy or Daddy couldn’t do anything about it. Patty got a lot of new, pink sweaters to wear.
The third thing that happened was that the pipes started acting up in the basement. Like Daddy said they might the day the men came with the chest and the cooler full of meat.
“Should we call a plumber?” Patty said at dinner one night, trying to be helpful.
“No plumber,” Daddy said. “No one can go into the basement right now. No matter what you think you hear. Do you understand?”
“What about the laundry?” Patty said.
“We’ll do laundry at the laundromat,” Daddy said, looking at Mommy, who turned her head to the side and didn’t look back.
Mommy took Patty to the laundromat. Mommy didn’t like it. She sat and stared at the floor, not even looking at her phone. Patty liked watching the clothes go around and around in the washers and the dryers.
The house stayed cold. The noises in the basement didn’t stop. Sometimes they sounded like something was being dragged back and forth, like the big trunk was being pulled, or pushed, or flipped over. Other times, it almost sounded as if someone was in the basement. Like a baby who cried like Liam. Or another time, Patty was playing and thought she heard a girl’s voice. She went into the kitchen and found Mommy standing next to the basement door, her right hand on the doorknob, her left hand on the big padlock the funny men had installed on the door. Standing at the door and weeping.
“Mommy? Are you all right?”
Her mother slowly nodded her head and wiped her eyes.
That night, Patty saw her mother looking at a photo album. It was the book of pictures of her sister. Her sister, Flora, who was three. Who would always be three. Flora, who died when Patty was one year old. Died when the driver of a car didn’t see her running across the street. Mommy hadn’t taken the book out in years, until the sound of the girl crying in the basement started. Patty wasn’t sure, but she wondered if the sound reminded Mommy of Flora.
Maybe the sound was Flora.
Another time, Patty thought she heard a man’s voice. An old man. The voice sounded like what she could remember of Grandpa. Not old and weak, though. Old and angry. She snuck her head around the door to the kitchen and saw her father standing in front of the basement door as the voice boomed from below. Daddy stood rigid, almost like a statue, staring at the padlock, his hands balled into fists.
“Daddy?”
“What?” His voice was loud. His face was white.
The tone of Daddy’s voice surprised Patty because Daddy had never shouted. He always said it was bad for parents to shout at their children.
“Did Grandpa ever yell at you?”
Daddy turned his fists back into hands and walked away.
Patty Perkins, nine years old, hurried down the street.
She was very nearly to Ms. Stauch’s house now. In the book in her head and in real life. She wondered what she would tell her. How she would explain. How she really, really thought that maybe baby Liam was in the basement and needed to get out. How pitiful his crying was. How much louder it was after Patty heard the crash, like someone had lifted the wooden trunk up really high and then dropped it. How Patty found the key to the basement door in the drawer in Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom dresser—where Daddy put it, thinking she hadn’t seen—and inserted it in the padlock. Patty pulled the lock free and opened the door. Only a little bit.
“Liam?”
“Liam?”
A sound below as the house got even colder.
The sound wasn’t Liam.
Now the sound was at the bottom of the basement steps.
Now it was coming up.
Suddenly, Mommy was running into the kitchen.
Run, Patty!
Patty reached the daffodils, tulips, and irises that led from the sidewalk to Ms. Stauch’s front door. Patty hurried up the walk, almost tripping as one of her pink princess slippers nearly came off. She was very nearly running.
She reached the doorbell. She raised her right pointer finger but hesitated, thinking she heard something up the street. In the direction she came from. From her house. Her heart beat fast. Her tummy felt funny. She might have made a mistake. She pressed the doorbell.
Nothing happened.
The sound up the street grew louder.
She pressed it again.
Nothing. Was that someone yelling?
She rang the doorbell again.
“Patty?” Ms. Stauch said as the door swung open. She held Liam in her arms. He beamed when he saw Patty.
“The basement,” Patty said. “I’m sorry. I thought—”
“You thought what, dear?”
Patty heard the sound again. From the direction she had just come. A loud sound, like a crash. Followed by more yelling. No, not yelling.
Someone was screaming.
More than one person.
Ms. Stauch turned her head in that direction.
“Oh, my God,” she said as a spray of red misted her face. “That’s someone’s—”
Want another gripping story by Andrew Welsh-Huggins? Read “The Basement” from Horrific Scribes, September 2025 and “Sharp Enough” from Horrific Scribes, December 2025.