Joshua’s Story

From Episode #79 

Crawlspace

Written by Jordan Miller

I.

Joshua watched as the black ballpoint pen in his hand moved swiftly across the piece of paper, trailing from its tip the loops and curves that spelled out his name. Suddenly everything felt to him so far away, as if he were watching someone else put down their signature through a sheet of dark glass. After the last bit of ink was down he lifted the pen and looked at it like it was the first one he had ever seen in his life. 

I dare ya, fairy boy. I double dog dare ya. 

He pushed the cruel nasally voice in his head away and looked at his signature. He had dared, and the proof was still drying in black ink at the bottom of a piece of paper in front of him. That’s it, he thought to himself, two seconds of scribbling my name and that’s it. Done.

“Congratulations, Mister Vasquez. You’re officially a homeowner!” Joshua looked up at the small framed, bubbly young woman in front of him. Her perfect white teeth were exposed in a smile that stretched from ear to ear, framed by blonde hair in tight curls that bounced up and down above the shoulders of her realtor’s sports coat. On the lapel of the sports coat was a small plastic name tag that read Molly Keres. Looking at her, Joshua felt a bit like a deer in the headlights of a train. He must have appeared that way too, because Molly cleared her throat and tried again to elicit some kind of response from her client. “Well, how’s it feel?”

“Good, I think. Really good, actually” Joshua replied, still staring at the pen in his hand. He surprised himself and realized that it was true. It did feel good. 

“Have you told the missus yet, or is it a surprise?” Molly asked with a playful nudge. Joshua smiled politely and set the pen onto the counter top. He looked at the wedding ring on his hand before stuffing it away into his jacket pocket.

“I think I’d be pretty deep in the dog house if I bought this place without talking to the wife first” he said. Molly smiled back. Her comment had been innocent enough, and with the ring still on his finger it was an understandable one to make. It was his own fault for keeping the damn thing on, and he thought he really ought to consider taking it off one of these days. It had been five months since the split.He was certain that she wasn’t still walking around day to day wearing his ring on her finger. Not his Rachel, oh no. That wasn’t her style. Shed the old and move on, that was her philosophy through and through. 

Shedding the old was something Joshua had always had trouble with, and maybe that was partially where things had started to go wrong with them. Rachel was always about finding the new and exciting adventure. The thought of moving back to his home town would have been so ridiculous and repulsive to her that he would have never dared bring it up. Not in a million years she would have said, but now she was gone, and here he was.  

None of these were things you told to your realtor, mind you, especially one you just met. So Joshua put on his best happy husband smile and said “she’ll love it”. Molly’s smile widened and she reached out her hand. Between her neat, manicured fingers dangled a set of silver keys. 

“Are you ready to start your new life?” Molly asked cheerfully as she dropped the keys into Joshua’s palm.

II.

That night Joshua went to get take-out from the Chinese place he had loved as a kid only to find it had gone out of business and been replaced by a Verizon store. That had depressed him much more than he expected and suddenly wished he had taken the extra thirty seconds to check the internet before driving out there. It was just some second rate Chinese restaurant, after all, but something about it still bothered him. A lot can change in fourteen years, he supposed. Certainly he had changed in that time, hadn’t he? Somehow he wasn’t so sure about that and felt more depressed than ever. He pulled out his phone, found a nearby pizza place, called in his order and decided to pick up some beer on the way home. It was, after all, his house warming. 

Joshua enjoyed the pizza and beer at his kitchen table, surrounded by mountains of cardboard boxes he was in no rush to unpack. Something inside him didn’t want to, if he was being totally honest with himself. The whole thing still kind of scared him, being back here after so long, and unpacking those boxes somehow made it real.

Come on fairy boy, open one of them up. I dare ya.

“The only box I’m opening up tonight is this one” Joshua said to no one as he lifted the pizza box lid and helped himself to another slice. 

An hour later half the pizza and most of the beer was gone. Joshua was about ready to call it a night but felt some urgent business needed to be dealt with first. As they used to say when they were kids, he had to race like a pisshorse. After he was done he had started to wash up when he stopped and looked at himself in the mirror. He thought about how it had been over a decade since he had seen a reflection of himself while in this town. Usually that’s not something he would think about, but there was something different about reflections here, if you believed what the kids used to say. If you listened to them, then you would know that here reflections fall under the jurisdiction of The Law Man. 

He hadn’t thought about that old urban legend in years, but that’s what coming home does to a man, Joshua thought. Coming home brings back old devils. He looked at the clock on his phone. 11:42PM. There was still time left if he felt like facing that devil head on. 

Joshua looked back at his reflection. He didn’t intend on doing it, did he? If he didn’t, why had he checked the time in the first place? If he wasn’t trying to face his past, why had he moved back here at all? Why agree to buy the first place in your price range that you looked at? Why any of it? Joshua stared hard at himself and for the first time in years, really remembered the story of The Law Man.

The Law Man wasn’t a policeman, or even a security guard, he was just The Law Man. He made the rules. According to the kids he was invisible but could see you through your reflection in the mirror. Most of the time he couldn’t hurt you, but if you were to stare at your own reflection at exactly the moment when 11:59 changed over to midnight, without blinking, then The Law Man could get you. 

At about this point in the story the kid telling it would usually deepen his voice or tilt the flashlight up underneath their chin for added effect. First thing you’ll notice, the storyteller would always say, is your reflection grinning a wide, inhuman grin and the eyes will change to that of an old man. The Law Man’s eyes, of course. He would then reach out of the mirror, grab you, pulling you through into his world. 

Then would come the best part, when young Joshua would usually feel like he was about ready to wet his jeans with abject terror. The Law Man would cut the heads off of anyone he pulled into his world with a large, rusted executioner's axe. He kept some kind of unthinkable monster as a pet, chained up and howling in the basement, and The Law Man would feed it the bodies of those he pulled through the mirror. The heads, he kept as trophies in some kind of crazy head museum or something. Or at least that was the best young Joshua could figure.

You know why? The storyteller would then ask the group. 

Because he’s the Law Man and he makes the laws!

That was usually about this time that the friend of the kid telling the story would jump out and terrify out any poor kids listening. Then everyone would laugh and have a good old time.

Everyone except for Joshua. Joshua didn’t laugh. He was horrified by the story and the other kids knew it. He could still hear the obnoxious nasally voice of Freddy Morris taunting him to stay up during a sleepover and look into the mirror and try it out. Freddy had triplet teenage sisters and his parents more or less had their hands full with them, so his mom would pass him off from one friend to another as play dates. The unfortunate thing for her was that nobody wanted to hang out with Freddy and those playdates usually didn’t last too long. The truth was that Freddy was just such a little shit that after a couple sleepovers the kids usually ended up complaining to their parents and Mrs. Morris would have to go out and find some other poor sucker to set up playdates with. That time it had been Joshua. 

C’mon, you’re not afraid of stupid little story, are you? Scared of a little fairy tale? Huh, fairy boy? Joshua hadn’t thought consciously about Freddy Morris in years but realized that he had been hearing that little shit’s nasally voice in his head all day. You afraid of the Law Man cause he makes the laws? If you’re not scared then prove it to me. I dare ya, fairy boy. I double dog dare ya. 

He never proved anything to Freddy. He had gotten upset and his parents had sent Freddy home early. That playdate hadn’t even lasted one full sleepover, a Morris family record, and boy howdy was Freddy’s mom pissed. For young Joshua, he slept with the lights on that whole week, and The Law Man would remain a personal boogeyman for years. 

Joshua checked his watch again. 11:48. Still plenty of time, he thought, and looked at his reflection once again. He stared at himself and sifted through those hurtful memories. Those childish fears that still cut like a kitchen knife. Those old terrors that in retrospect are so laughable, but  down somewhere deep still leave a mark because the ferocity of childhood fears can rarely be matched in modern adult life. Maybe it was recalling all of those forgotten memories, or maybe it was coming home after all these years and the need to prove to himself that a man can start over again. Maybe in part it was the beer, but Joshua decided it was high time to put old devils to rest once and for all.

He went to the kitchen and popped open one last beer. He still had about ten minutes to kill and there wasn’t much you could do in that amount of time besides maybe enjoy one last serving of liquid courage. He drank it in the bathroom, leaning against the sink with his back to the mirror, checking his watch every thirty seconds or so. Finally his watch read 11:59. He sat his empty can on the counter and turned to face his reflection. Looking himself in the eyes, he resolved himself not to blink and started counting the seconds in his head. Around twenty five seconds in, he had to fight the urge to look away and check his watch, but he had to be sure he made it. 

The image of a terrified, drunken maniac stared back at Joshua from the mirror, but there was nothing supernatural about it. It would probably scare some people on the street but it was just his reflection. Forty five seconds. That had to be enough time. It was at least halfway to midnight when he started. He looked down at his watch and sure enough, it was midnight. He looked back up at his reflection, relieved and surprised that he was relieved. Had he really expected something to happen? He laughed and looked at the man in the mirror who was laughing along with him. The idea of one more beer suddenly seemed appealing when Joshua heard something and stopped laughing. He and his reflection stood there listening to the rising sound of distant echoey screams.

III.

It was impossible for him to know how long, but Joshua simply stood and stared at his mirror listening to those screams for what seemed like an eternity before being able to bring himself back to reality. This wasn’t something supernatural, this sounded like a living woman screaming for her life. He pressed his ear against the mirror and the sound grew much louder. Putting his ear against the drywall next to the mirror, he could still hear the screams but they were quieter and noticeably more muffled. Moving back to the mirror and listening again he was suddenly certain of one thing but needed only to prove his suspicion. That would be relatively easy. After a quick trip to the living room where his tool box was readily accessible, he returned to the bathroom with a hammer.

Covering his eyes, he swung against the mirror and felt the hammer swing further into the wall than it should. Something he had already feared would be the case. He listened as the shards of glass fell and broke against the countertop, and the reverberation as pieces fell into the adjacent space he had just uncovered. Behind the mirror was darkness, but Joshua could hear the screaming much louder now and knew he had uncovered something. He wasn’t sure what, but it was something.

Flipping on the flashlight on his smartphone and making sure no jagged shards of remaining mirror would slit his throat, he peeked his head inside and looked around. He had expected a room, but what he found was a corridor that went further in both directions than the light from his flashlight could illuminate. He pulled his head back into the bathroom and tried to figure out his next move. The mirror, which he now just assumed was a two way mirror, was far too small for him to crawl through, but he figured if there was a corridor that big back there, then surely there must be a doorway somewhere. 

Keeping his ear to the wall, Joshua moved out of the bathroom down the hallway. He listened to the screams and looked for a place where they might sound a little bit louder, searching for a way in. He took a detour into the kitchen to open one box and pull out a large kitchen knife for just-in-case.

Returning to the wall he made it to the living room before noticing a change in the sound of those blood curdling screams. He could hear them growing not only clearer but more cavernous, as if he were approaching some large opening, when all he saw ahead of him was more wall. There was a bookshelf, however, that had already been there. The house had come partially furnished, and the bookshelf had been the largest item that had come with the property. The opening had to be behind there. 

Joshua was able to move the bookcase with relative ease, mostly because it was still vacant of any books. Despite his expectation to find something there, he still felt his stomach drop to the floor as he stood back and beheld the wooden door that had been hidden behind the bookcase. The first thing that struck him was how old the wood in the door was, far too aged to match anything else in that fairly modern house. From behind that doorway the screams continued louder than ever, and with a shaking hand he turned the knob and pulled it open. 

As he pulled the ancient door open the screams grew louder, and he was hit head on with a thick wave of rotten stink so putrid that Joshua almost ejected his beer onto his new carpeted floor. The air inside that door was sour with old earth and musk, so Joshua threw on some shoes, pulled his shirt over his nose, and pressed on.

Using his smartphone flashlight to guide him, he wandered the hallway inside the door. The floor also was made of aged wood. He walked until he saw light and passed by the mirror on the opposite side of the wall. He looked in at his bathroom and heard pieces of broken mirror crack under his feet as he passed, and suddenly he remembered an old saying about how breaking a mirror brought bad luck. 

The hallway finally ended and turned to the right where it immediately opened up into a set of old stairs leading down into the blackness. He was lucky to have his flashlight on or else he would have fallen down those steps and probably broken his neck, but wonders never cease, he thought. 

As he descended the stairs he found himself latching on to a ridiculous idea and couldn’t help but laugh, despite the growing layer of fear he now felt weighing him down like a thick blanket. How much extra square footage had he just stumbled onto and how much would it drive up any resale value? Not many houses in this area came with secret passageways and underground dungeons, after all. People paid extra for that sort of thing all the time.

He stepped off the bottom step and felt dirt under his shoes. Shining the light from his phone onto the walls he found they were made of stone, very old stone from the look of it. Best he could figure his house had been built right on top of it, whatever it was. The screaming continued, occasionally broken up by sobbing or pleading, but it was no longer distant. Now it was very close. He called back to the voice several times but she seemed not to hear him, only to continue screaming like a loon. Joshua had never been this scared in his life but also, thinking back, he wasn’t sure if he had ever felt quite as alive either. That mixture of feelings was strange and almost overwhelming, but not altogether unpleasant. He thought about The Law Man, that faceless boogie man who, now that he turned his mind that direction once again, did turn out to have a face after all. 

IV.

In high school Joshua had done a report on The Law Man in regards to analyzing regional superstitions, believing it to be a good way to get over his irrational fear of the urban legend, which had stuck with him far longer than it should have. What he found, however, had actually brought back the nightmares and rekindled his fear in a whole new way. After pretty in-depth research he had found that the Law Man most likely had his origins in a very real string of crimes committed in their town decades prior. A boogie man made from flesh and blood. Henry James Lawson. The Law Man. 

Henry James Lawson wasn’t a police officer, just as the urban legend had said, but was a farmer with a wife, Margarette, a son Joseph and two young daughters. Around the late ‘70s people started going missing around the area. People of all types. The citizens called their phantom The Butcher and demanded he be brought to justice, to which the police force put every effort.  Eventually they got wind of something off about the Lawson farmhouse and paid it a visit one day for a friendly chat, only to find old Henry with three headless bodies in the back of his truck. 

Henry pulled his rifle and the police un-holstered their guns and right there on a bright summer afternoon they had themselves an old fashioned shootout. The whole family got in on it too, with Margarette and the children appearing from windows and firing at the police. One interview in particular stood out, from rookie policeman Payton Jenning, who described in horror as he was scrambling behind his cruiser from the hail of gunfire and shot up at the second story of the house where two guns were firing from the same window. It had turned out to be the two young girls firing from that window and the rookie had shot one of them in the head. It had stopped both shooters, though, as her sister was then too horrified to continue trying to pick off any more police. 

It had been self defense, Jenning said, and he knew that, but he told reporters that he had never fired his weapon before that day and it was something he would live with forever. Forever didn’t turn out to be too long for Payton Jenning, as Joshua’s thorough research showed that the rookie ended up quitting the force a week later and then shooting himself while standing knee deep in the river. 

The shootout ultimately cost the lives of three police officers and almost all of the Lawson family. Henry’s son had escaped with the surviving daughter, most likely out the back, and were never apprehended. Henry and Margarette were both killed by gunfire. 

One of the lesser respected newspapers of the region had claimed to catch up with Officer Simmons, a participant in the shootout at a bar after he had apparently tied on a hardy few. The officer had talked for quite a while about the whole thing but near the end, according to the so-called journalist, the officer had leaned in close and said he was there when Lawson died. Not “there” like he was on the property, but “there” like he was kneeling next to the guy, bloody and filled with bullets, sputtering his last words through spouts of blood.

“The last thing he said” the officer told the reporter, “was that he was sorry, but the thing needed to eat. Then he died, the bastard”. The article said that the officer sort of laughed at his own story, but that there was nothing funny about the way he did it. The reporter said it made him uncomfortable, and he left shortly after.

No more bodies were ever recovered, and a few weeks after the shootout a mob formed and burned the farmhouse down in the middle of the night. Officer Simmons was found to be part of that mob and was let go from his position for that act of vigilante justice, topped with two counts of being found intoxicated on the job. Over the next six years he drank himself to death, making him arguably Henry Lawson’s final victim. 

If you believe more of what the so-called journalist had to say on the subject, some of the arsonists in the mob saw two bright eyed children watching from the woods as the farmhouse went up in flames. Some thought them to be the son, Joseph, and the last remaining sister of the Lawson family.

Nobody in the town really spoke of it afterwards, probably because there were a lot more important people in that mob than some simple policemen. Business owners, public officials, judges even, so everybody kept quiet. Parents never told their children about the Lawson family, but some of them picked up bits and pieces so in the way that all urban legends grow,  Henry Lawson became The Law Man. Always looking for victims to feed to the ever-hungry beast they keep in the world beyond the mirror. 

None of this really helped Joshua now, but his mind was desperate to stay occupied. He felt the source of the screams would be right around the next corner when something caught his attention. His flashlight caught something reflective and he found a metal cabinet, old, but not nearly as old as the rest of the hallway looked to be. On the front of the cabinet were two large swinging doors that were closed but not locked, so he pulled it open. Inside was some kind of bizarre home movie collection, but it didn’t take long to realize that this collection was incredibly old. Along the top shelves were circular containers that could only be old reel-to-reel audio, stuff he remembers his dad messing around with when he was a kid. Eventually those ran out and on the lower shelf they turned into rows of cassette tapes, and then eventually on the bottom rows to a modest collection of CD’s. 

He ran his fingers over the rows of old media, leaving trails in the dust but noticing the strange titles written in marker on white tape on each of the cassettes and reel-to-reel canisters. Hitch-hiker. Waitress. Salesman. Thief. Junkie. Hitch-hiker again. Jehovah’s Witness. Plumber. Politician. Never any names, just a bizarre series of professions. The list went on and on, down from the reel canisters to the tapes and then finally written in marker on the discs. It was beyond strange but Joshua had no way to play any of these recordings at the moment, and the screams were far more important.

Joshua left the metal cabinet behind and rounded one final corner, following the screams of the frantic woman. Turning the corner he saw down the hall another wooden door, much like the one he found behind the bookcase upstairs, only this one was open a crack and from inside spilled yellow light. Along the door were numerous latches and padlocks, all hanging loose and open. There was no doubt in his mind that the screams were coming from inside.

The dozen or so steps it took him to close the distance between himself and the door were the longest of his life. Trying to turn the old brass knob felt like lifting a hand tied down with a twenty pound sandbag. He announced himself in what he hoped was a calming voice before pulling open the door. 

“Hello? I’m coming in. I’m not gonna hurt you” Joshua said as pulled the door wider, but the screaming continued all the same. “Please calm down. I’m coming inside now”. As the door swung and creaked on its bygone hinges, Joshua held his hand up to allow his eyes to adjust to the sudden flood of light in the otherwise pitch basement. 

He expected to see a woman bound by the wrists and the ankles huddled in the corner, an image plucked from his memory of a hundred scary movies he had watched over the years. When his eyes adjusted, however, what he saw was an empty room with a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and a stereo (what he used to call a boombox back when people still used them) sitting on a small ledge. It all made sense now. That’s why she hadn’t responded to anything he had said. Suddenly the screams on the recording hit a fever pitch and he could hear something else behind it. He heard a low guttural sound, like some kind of enormous engine, but something about it did not sound artificial. As the new sound rose it sounded more and more like the howl of some unimaginable living creature. The woman seemed to be screaming to someone to help her, to please help her, and her screams were sounding less and less like words. Joshua quickly walked over to the boombox and turned the volume knob down almost all the way, and the sound of the screaming woman and the awful low howl went down with it. 

Joshua hit EJECT, and the lid of the CD player popped open from the top of the boombox with a hard plastic snap. He plucked the CD from the carriage and read the handwritten markered lettering on its surface. One word, like so many of the others in that strange metal cabinet. Not a name, but a profession, and one that sent a cold wave down Joshua’s spine. The writing on the CD read “Realtor”. 

Behind him Joshua heard the heavy thud as the door slammed closed and the series of metallic clicks and clanks of its numerous latches and padlocks. By the time he got to the door it was too late. It wouldn’t budge. He was locked in. 

Joshua spun around to search for another way out but there was none. There wasn’t so much as an air vent in this room, which now appeared to him to be what it always was, a cell. Along the walls he saw scratch marks ending in bloody streaks. At the bottom of one of them a broken fingernail hung from a jagged section of stone. His mind was repeating the same thing over and over and over to himself, no way out… no way out… no WAY OUT…

He began to scream and pound at the door, unaware of how much he sounded like the woman on the recording who had led him down there. He screamed to be let out, but there was no response.

Outside, still wearing the stolen realtor’s sports coat, Molly Keres leaned with her ear and palms pressed against the door, nourishing herself on the screams from inside. Molly, who had changed her last name years ago to avoid raising too many eyebrows. Molly, who had killed a policeman from the window of her house during a shootout at the age of nine, then seconds later watched her sister take a bullet in the head from one of his comrades. Molly, who had held on to her sister’s body until her brother Joe pulled her away and said they had to go. They had hidden down here, deep under the house in the part that people didn’t know about. They stayed until the people had come again , that time with fire, and they were forced to run. Joe had kept her safe as long as he could, years in fact, but things happen as they say, and now she was the only one. The last in the cursed line of the Lawsons. 

All of that seemed a distant pain now, as she stroked the ancient wooden door and listened to those wonderful screams. She listened to them the way one might press their ear against a pregnant woman’s belly and listen to the heartbeat of her baby. She was content with the knowledge that she had done her part well, and that the cycle could continue. Just in time too, as the thing down in the lower levels had grown very hungry. From under her feet a low gutteral sound began to rise up into a screeching eldritch howl. She smiled. It was responding to the man’s sounds. Behind the door the screaming stopped for a moment, then continued with even more gusto. They were responding to each other, it seemed. 

Molly kissed the door, pressed her cheek tighter against the ancient wood, and spoke her only response to Joshua’s screams.

“Are you ready to start your new life?”