Written for Sunday Whirl Wordle.
Here are Brenda’s prompt words:
letters, urged, exist, pranks, view, incessantly,
west, fools, lunatic, bones, ghastly, vast
The letters began arriving the week after we moved into the house on West Elm. No stamps, no return address, just my name in a cramped, spidery hand, and inside, a single line: They exist here. You should not.
My wife called it pranks. “Some local fools having a laugh. Probably kids,” she said, tossing the envelopes into the fire. But the fire never seemed to burn them at all. Each morning they were back on the kitchen table, edges curled and blackened.
Then the knocking started …. not at the door, but beneath the floor. It came incessantly, three slow raps, every night at 9:07, lasting exactly two hours. My wife urged me to ignore it; I tried. I lay awake staring at the ceiling, counting, until I fell into a restless sleep.
The next morning I went to Town Hall looking for information on the house. The woman I spoke to went pale when I described the house and gave the address. “That was the old asylum’s annex,” she whispered. “They say a lunatic inmate buried his keepers under the cellar and kept the bones for company.”
That night I pried up the floorboards. The cellar below was impossibly vast, far wider than the house above it, stretching into darkness beyond the reach of my lantern. And on the dirt, arranged in neat rows, were hundreds of letters, all addressed to me, some dated decades before I was born.
From somewhere out of view, something ghastly drew a long, slow, rattling breath.
“Finally,” it wheezed. “I’ve been writing to you for so long.”
Behind me, the floorboards began, one by one, to slide back into place.
NAR©2026
#Wordle
This is “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated, and may not be used without permission. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
