Page 90 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

“No, that was a dramatic pause.”

I roll my eyes. “Fine. Tell me, Ben, why was the foundation crumbling?”

“Because there’s a secret compartment in it.”

“Huh?”

He starts digging in lieu of an answer. It takes a few minutes before he has the spot cleared, maybe six inches below the surface. There’s a box—a metal box—inlaid in the concrete, which has crumbled around it.

“I… don’t understand,” I say.

“Don’t ask me. It’s your messed-up family.” He stops abruptly. “Fuck.”

“In order to collect my multimillion-dollar inheritance, I’m sentenced to a month in the place where my father murdered a child. ‘Messed up’ is the nicest way to describe my family.”

“It’s not that.” He leans on the spade. “Your family has owned this property for hundreds of years.”

“Yep.”

“They built this shed and laid the foundation maybe a hundred years ago.”

“That’s the story. The current shed is newer—my grandfather and my father replaced it before I was born. But the foundation predates both of them.”

“Then so does this compartment and what’s in it. But it’s still your family. Your history. I wasn’t thinking about that. I made up my mind to show you and just plowed forward. I’ve been avoiding it because I didn’t want to seem crazy, when I should have been avoiding it because it’s your family history. I don’t know if it’s true or not, Sam, but it’s messed up.”

“I believe we’ve already established that my family is the very definition of messed up.”

I keep my tone light, but there’s a buzzing in my head that says I should stop now, that I don’t want to see what’s in that box.

“Please tell me it’s colonial witchcraft,” I say. “My distant female ancestors breaking free of their Puritan shackles to dance naked around a fire and copulate with the devil.”

When he doesn’t answer, I say, “I’m kidding. Unless that’s what it is, in which case, it’s nonsense. Nothing wrong with a little pagan nature worship—and consensual sex orgies—but witchcraft and devil worship are bullshit, like the Satanic Panic when my parents were teens.”

He wipes the back of his hand over his sweaty brow. “I don’t quite know what it is. Weird and creepy stuff that seemed like silly hocus-pocus fantasies until… until last night.”

I crouch at the hole. The cavity in it was obviously created at the same time as the original foundation. We’ve been referring to it as concrete, but that’s because neither of us is a builder. It’s a solid stonework foundation. Concrete? Mortar? I don’t know. But whatever it is, whoever built it included a cavity to fit that metal box. In the last decade or so, the material around it has started to crumble, leading to the hole, and the box is no longer firmly fixed in place. I can slide the whole thing out, which I do. I set it on the dirt floor of the shed as Ben shines his cell-phone light on it.

The box isn’t much taller or wider than a standard sheet of paper.It’s maybe three inches deep and obviously very old. There’s a keyed lock in one end, but that’s broken and looks as if it has been for years. When I pull on the lock, a drawer slides out. In it is a book wrapped in…

I look up at Ben.

“It was like that when I found it,” he says.

The book is in a freezer bag. A modern plastic freezer bag with a zippered seal.

“So it hasn’t been in here, untouched, for a hundred years,” I say.

“No.”

I unseal the bag and slide out the book. Despite the modern waterproof wrapper, the book is old enough that I’m hesitant to even touch it.

I carefully open the leather cover to see yellowed pages, handwritten like a journal, with ink so faded that Ben needs to give me his phone. Even then, I can barely read the writing. It’s cursive, which I didn’t take in school, but I did spend a summer learning for fun. This isn’t like the cursive I know, though. It’s closer to calligraphy, and I struggle to make out a few words, only to realize they’re in an older form of English.

Colonial English, with unfamiliar words and spellings. I flip through a few pages, skimming and trying to make sense of what seems incomprehensible. Then I hit a word that stops me cold.

Nekker.

I point at it. “I saw this in the other book, too. Nekker. Nix. Nixie. The drowned dead.”