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Empty, save a single sprung mousetrap and a rusted mound of what looked like steel wool.

In the parlor, I retrieved the iron fireplace poker and tested its weight in my hand. Then, without thinking of the consequences or my safety, I returned to the kitchen and struck the doorknob over and over. I wedged the pointy end between the door and jamb and pried with all my strength. I cursed and shouted and kicked the solid structure to no avail.

I was not quiet or subtle. Mordecai would know my intent. What he might do when I approached was a problem for later. He did not get to fuck me, play with my mind, and walk away.

It took over fifteen minutes, and I nearly gave up. Sheer stubbornness and pent-up anger kept me going. With sweat running in rivulets down my forehead, my palms stinging and blistering, and my arm muscles aching from exertion, I finally managed to shatter the frame enough to disengage the bolt.

I suspected the door had been locked for decades. Swollen in its setting, it squeaked and creaked and protested as I tugged it open, releasing a wall of trapped, stagnant, and musty air from within. Unfinished wooden stairs led below. The afternoon sun I’d permitted into the kitchen illuminated only the top few steps, but the ones nearer the bottom vanished into oily darkness.

“I’m coming down,” I shouted as a warning or threat—I wasn’t sure which.

With a bravado I didn’t feel, armed with a flashlight app, a fire poker, and mounting indecision, I descended the stairs. The hollow thunk of my shoes seemed to soak into the heavy atmosphere, and I couldn’t help envisioning a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. A subterranean tomb. Curtains of cobwebs. Insect carcasses. Trip wires. Rolling boulders. Flying blades ready to decapitate me.

I needed to watch less TV.

I kept the light on my feet the entire time, watching my step but also too afraid to pan, thanks to the crippling horrors of my imagination. The final step landed me on a dirt-packed floor. The air was damp and cold with the heavy scent of earth and rot. I shivered and moved the beam around the cellar, chasing away shadows.

The fieldstone walls wicked moisture from the surrounding earth. The low and exposed timbers overhead were too close, and I had to duck lest I smack my head. Old knob-and-tube wiring hung from the beams, dangerously stripped in places. An antique coal chute. A massive, rusted cast-iron broiler that was no longer in use. Rows of wooden shelves, rotting and falling off the wall where they’d been mounted. A handful of stray mason jars gathered dust. Old tools. Stacks of disintegrating newspapers that I assumed were decades old. Overturned wooden crates and rolls of wire.

The area was claustrophobic. I inched forward, taking care not to knock my head on the ceiling. Around a bend, tucked in the far corner, I found him.

He slept in a long wooden box, a simple pauper’s coffin without frills and adornments. It looked like a shoddy, cobbled-together assortment of the crates I’d seen at the bottom of the stairs. Roughly built to suit his needs. It was filled with rich, dark soil, and Mordecai lay on top of it on his back as peaceful and still as a dead man in a casket.

My lungs constricted. Visions of my father’s funeral came back to me, and a flutter of panic almost made me turn around and run. Squeezing my eyes closed, I vanquished the memory. This wasn’t the same, no matter how it looked.

Mordecai was not dead.

Rather, he wasn’t dead in the conventional sense of the word, right?

He was… undead.

“Fuck.” I couldn’t think in those terms. I’d spent years slaughtering undead beasts in games, but those were fantasies.

This was real.

The bass drum of my heart resounded loudly in my ears. It pulsed in my throat and hands and the soles of my feet. I feared it would wake him, but he didn’t stir. Approaching with caution, I shone the flashlight over his inert form as every nerve in my body jittered. Eyes closed. Hands folded on his abdomen. Hair more tumbleweed than I’d ever seen it. Skin like porcelain with flawless features more suited to a marble statue, or rather, a figure in a wax museum.

The frenzy I’d witnessed earlier was gone. He looked peaceful. Innocent.

Harmless.

With more than a slight tremble, I reached out and brushed the back of my fingers over his slack cheek. Cold, but as soft and real as human flesh. He didn’t react, so I combed order into his hair, flipping the runaway strands off his forehead and reintroducing the part down the side. It lacked Mordecai’s usual finesse, but it was the best I could do without gel and a comb.

With care, I pressed my palm to his chest over his heart and concentrated. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but the absence of a heartbeat made me jerk my hand away.

“Can you hear me?”

He didn’t flinch or respond.

“Mordecai?”

Nothing.

Unsure what to do, knowing from lore that he likely wouldn’t wake until sundown, I went back upstairs and retook my spot at the island.

Shortly before seven, I was on my phone, flipping through my FYP on TikTok, when Mordecai materialized in the doorway.

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