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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Wild-Tea-9242 on 2024-09-26 20:17:23+00:00.

We went straight down into the basement and began a frantic search for the belongings of the deceased victims using the flashlights we had left down there before. I was in the main room with the furnace, sorting through stacks of junk. There were definitely items from victims everywhere, things that went unnoticed by us before, like graffiti cans someone must have brought to tag the old buildings, women’s bags, wallets, etc. The amount of those types of items down there made my stomach queasy but I kept searching, the silence cut down by the sounds of things rustling around.

“Grace!” I heard Vanessa whisper-shout my name from the adjacent room.

I hurried through the doorless entryway that led to that area of the basement and shined my flashlight on Vanessa, who was leaning on the wall with her ear against it. “Come listen,” she whispered and gestured for me to come near.

I drew closer and pressed my ear over the wall, frowning. I didn’t hear anything but our quiet, rhythmic breathing so I gave her a confused look.

“I heard sounds in the wall.” Vanessa looked at me with wide, fearful eyes. We both were thinking the same thing, thinking about how three of the four children’s bodies were found within the wall.

“Probably rats.” I stupidly said.

She gave me a look. “Have you seen one living thing since we’ve been in this mess?” I didn’t say anything.

Vanessa looked over at a tall wardrobe standing in the corner, mahogany and draped with cobwebs. She walked over to it and looked inside it. There were dusty coats inside and she pushed them to one end, jumping as she was startled by her own reflection in a mirror that took up the whole back panel of the wardrobe’s interior.

“Weird.” I noted, shining my flashlight at it.

A sound made us turn our heads behind us. An object we disturbed during our search settling in place, maybe. Something dropping or shifting naturally. But when I looked back at the mirror I saw a glimpse of the upper half of Peter’s face peering over my right shoulder, only his eye sockets and brown bangs visible. I screamed and jumped back.

“What?!” Vanessa asked, shining the flashlight around to see nothing at all.

“He… He…” I stuttered, my hand on my chest as I looked behind me and backed into the wardrobe. It slightly shook, and the mirror inside jostled out of position, a corner dropping and revealing a black crack.

“Wait a second…” Vanessa removed the mirror to find a dark hole leading into the wall. My mouth fell open. I grabbed Vanessa’s arm as she lifted her leg to go inside.

“What are you doing?!”

“What if it’s in the walls?” She whispered, shrugging me off and climbing inside. “Are you coming or what?”

I cursed under my breath and followed her, bending low and slipping through the hole to the narrow crumbly space between drywall. I didn’t think the basement could get creepier but somehow it did. I felt claustrophobic there and I wanted out immediately, but I knew we needed to leave no stone unturned so I pressed on, following behind Vanessa. We reached a dead end soon, where the back of the staircase was presumably, and our flashlight beam reflected off something shiny under some light rubble.

“Look!” Vanessa fell to her knees and pulled bits of wall and wooden beams off of a dark gray backpack. The silver zipper had caught the light. Immediately, she zipped it open and triumphantly pulled out a sachet like the one I’d found earlier. The air was permeated with the smell of decay as soon as she revealed it but we were too excited to care.

“Why am I the designated eye holder?” I griped as she gave it to me.

“Come on, let’s look for that purse before those things get tired of chasing Yazzy.” Vanessa nudged me and I led us back the way we came.

“… Where’s the hole?” I asked as I looked at the part of the wall where I was sure we had entered. The tunnel stretched on farther than we remembered, and we could hear the sounds of light footsteps as someone we couldn’t see ran just up ahead. Despite this, we pressed on, hoping it was the ghost of Peter returning for his eyes. We walked and walked and walked.

“Oh God.” Vanessa whispered as we realized we were stuck in an infinite loop behind the wall.

“This can’t be happening.” I whimpered.

It seemed like a lifetime later when my flashlight beam landed on a figure crouched with his back to us. The red shirt and black hair pointed to it being Peter, and he wept softly into his hands.

“Peter.” I said softly as Vanessa clutched onto me for dear life. “We have something that belongs to you. Let us go peacefully and you can have them.”

I felt a soft breath on the back of my neck and spun around, my heart jumping out my chest. Vanessa screamed. Peter was now behind us, with a grin that was impossibly wide. I looked down at his open hand, where the sachet which I did not remember handing him was now sitting. With that, he was silently pulled by an unseen force back into the darkness, the holes in his face looking at us the entire time.

“Thank God!” I cried, looking behind me to see that the hole leading out of that dreadful space had appeared again. We hurriedly climbed through, through the wardrobe and back into the basement.

“Grace.” Zack’s voice tickled my ear.

The stagnant basement air was filled with the shrill sounds of Vanessa and I’s terror as we burst into a run, not even bothering to look behind us. We beelined for the stairs, Vanessa running faster than me. I was scared that she’d leave me behind like I had left Zack behind. I tried to run faster as she reached the first step before I did, my shoes stomping the floor so hard it shook.

Then suddenly I was under the floor, my body wracked with pain and the sound of wood splintering and giving way covering up Vanessa’s screams. I looked up through the hole, and saw Zack crouching over me, his pale hand reaching for my face.

I thrashed wildly like a caged bird and kicked him away, scrambling deeper into the hole. It was then that I realized it was a crawlspace, and there was a small hatch just beyond where one of the kids’ bodies was found. I hurtled through it, crawling through the claustrophobic little tunnel caked with dust and webs. It smelled like rot down there, but I hardly noticed as I tried to listen to see if I could hear Zack giving chase. I didn’t hear anything, but I looked behind me anyway.

I couldn’t hear anything because somehow the little blonde ghost was silently scuttling after me in the crawlspace instead of Zack. Her mouth hung open, a black void like her eyes. Her dirty, cracked and bloody fingernails scraped the floor as she went. Her movements looked unnatural, like she was in sped up footage, and my heart lurched in my ribcage.

I crawled faster, hyperventilating and feeling my mind cloud with overwhelming fear. Up ahead, I spotted a dead end, but just in front of it was a hole. I allowed myself to drop through, and I felt the crisp grass and something else cushion my fall. I rolled over on my back and looked to my side to see a faded, old pink clutch purse, with a zipper and a bit of what looked like old blood smeared on it. I grabbed it and zipped it open as a stark white arm followed by a curtain of blonde hair slipped through the hole. A revolting stench unleashed into my nose as I pulled out another sachet and threw it at the wraith clawing her way towards me.

Sarah, on all fours, stopped, stared at it, then snatched the sachet and crawled backwards lightning fast until she disappeared into nothingness. The tension in my body diminished as I was alleviated of her presence.

As I crawled from under the house, I wondered briefly about the crawlspace which very clearly seemed like a discreet escape route for a man who knew he was doing something terribly illegal. A way he could leave without being caught If the authorities came to his door. But if he had gone through such lengths, why did he end up killing himself and revealing his crimes?

This didn’t occupy my thoughts for too long as I looked out at the empty street and wondered where Vanessa was. Did she escape Zack? If so, where did she go?

As if on cue, a distant scream echoed into the night, and my head snapped towards the treeline behind the house on the left which we had never explored. Realizing this was Vanessa’s voice, I darted towards where I heard it, hoping beyond all hope that I could make it in time. I was not going to let her die like I had done to Zack.

I weaved around the trees, my lungs on fire and my legs growing tired. “Vanessa!” I called. “Where are you?!”

I spotted platinum blonde hair in the distance and sped up, approaching Vanessa who was standing still and staring upward. I crashed into her, hugging her in relief that she seemed fine. “I found Sarah’s eyes and gave them to her!” I told her breathlessly. “We just have one last pair left!”

I pulled back and looked at her shell shocked face. Finally, I followed her gaze and looked up, pointing my flashlight skyward.

The eyeless corpse of what I recognized to be Lisa Waller dangled by a noose from a tree branch, cutting through the silence with the steady creaking of the rope. She was a white woman with brown hair, a tank top, shorts, and sneakers, who seemed to be in her mid twenties to early thirties.

I looked around, sweat falling into my eyes as I took in the sight of dozens of corpses hanging from the trees, all eyeless and all with nooses arou…

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