Our growing silence was borne partly out of amazement, but also somewhat out of fear. While there was nothing obviously scary about anything we were seeing, there was a…wrongness to the rightness, if that makes any sense. I remember thinking about the pitcher plants my mother used to grow. She would show us how the insects would be drawn to the flower, venturing inside so deep they couldn’t escape from the bottom.

The bottom of the Ricter house was, naturally enough, the basement. And it was the floor we had saved for last. I wanted desperately for Jeffery to chicken out so I could too, but my stomach dropped when he headed toward what we had already figured out was the basement door. Determined not to look weak in front of him, I pulled out my flashlight and followed him down into the dark.

There were no lights down there, but then there were no lights anywhere. No lights on the walls or ceiling and no light switches or outlets that we could find. Still, what had been an eccentric curiosity looking through the sunlit rooms upstairs became another bad omen as we trudged down the wooden stairs into the oppressive darkness below.

The beams of our flashlights barely seemed to make a dent as we reached the bottom, and we had to walk forward ten or fifteen feet before I could even see the brick wall that made up one of the boundaries of the basement. Even then I was more aware of the light shining back at us as we approached. I had a moment of panic at the thought that someone was down here with us, but then I realized Jeffery was laughing.

It was a mirror. A large, ornate full-length mirror hanging on the far wall. Walking closer, I could see our shadowy outlines in the dim, reflected light of our flashlight beams, mimicking our motions as we studied the mirror and then began timidly looking around again for other things that might be down there.

Except there was nothing. The floor was dirt and the walls were brick, and aside from the pristine mirror hanging alone on the wall, nothing else was there. Except…as I swept my light across the dirt floor again, I realized something was there after all.

Footprints. There were dozens of footprint trails crisscrossing the dirt, most of them well-defined and seemingly recent, though it was hard to tell in that house. Still, I knew most of them couldn’t be ours, and I felt my heart hammering as I looked back to Jeffery to tell him we needed to leave.