Demon Hole

I don’t believe in ghosts but when I was little, I thought that maybe my grandma’s house was haunted. Specifically the upstairs. Extra specifically my mom’s old room. It was always dark and damp when the rest of the house was bright and often smelled of chocolate chip cookies and mountain dew (a strange combination, I know, but it reminds me of my grandma).

I wasn’t allowed in there. No one was. My mom was the only exception and even she avoided going near it. I asked her once, years after my grandma sold the house, why she avoided even passing by her old room and she told me that she didn’t like the vibes it gave off. She said that ever since she messed with a Ouija board in there when she was fifteen, something had just felt off about it. We aren’t allowed to have a Ouija board in our house even now, when my mom is on the edge of forty-two. I always wondered why.

I didn’t ever experience anything strange in that room when I eventually disobeyed the rules and snuck in. It was just… smelly and dark. I sneezed as soon as I walked in the door because of the build-up of dust. And, because I was a kid of maybe eight, maybe nine, I decided to snoop through my mom’s old stuff. It was mostly boring: yearbooks and VHS tapes and anything else you’d assume a teenager in the mid-90’s would own. It was strikingly normal and entirely unassuming. I was unimpressed- and strangely disappointed. It wasn’t as if I went into that room expecting to find a ghost chilling on the bed or a demon writing at the desk. I knew nothing would be there when I opened the door. But I was still let down. I heard my cousin call my name from down the hall and rushed out, a hollow place in my chest where excitement was just minutes earlier.

My cousin knew I had been in the room the moment I stood in the doorway of the playroom. She laughed and asked me if I found anything. I said no, because I hadn’t. She asked if I had gone in the closet. Again, I answered that I hadn’t. My cousin just smiled and went back to playing with the dolls.

“There’s something in the closet, you know,” she said a few minutes later. I was now picking at my nails in the corner of the playroom because I was too old to play with dolls, even though she was older than me by three years. I looked up and tried to raise my eyebrow but it didn’t go up all the way (I wouldn’t learn how to raise it fully until I was eleven).

“No there isn’t, Brittany,” I said, because I knew better than her. She was just trying to mess with me like always.

“No, really. There is. I saw it.”

“Then what is it?”

Brittany shrugged. “Grandma told me not to tell you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fine, don’t. But don’t let Krista go in there.”

This intrigued me. My sister was gullible then, still is now, so I stopped picking at my nails and sat up. As much as Brittany teased me, I teased Krista three times more. And if this was another opportunity to do so, I wasn’t about to pass it up. Brittany watched me leave the room and didn’t stop me when I opened the door to my mom’s old room. I marched to the closet and opened the door. As I expected, nothing was there. I rustled through the clothes, growing steadily more frustrated. Still nothing.

“On the bottom,” Brittany’s voice said behind me, and I didn’t jump. She laughed anyway.

I looked down. And sure enough, there was a hole in the floor, pitch black.

“What is it?” I asked. Brittany squinted at the darkness.

“A demon hole,” she said finally, and I hated how she phrased it. Demon hole. Like a snake hole or a badger hole but with some red, horned beast inside instead. Like it was normal.

“Like- Hell?” I asked. I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell and I didn’t then, either, but I asked anyway just to be sure. Brittany didn’t seem sure herself.

“Kinda.”

A moment passed in silence.

“I still don’t believe you,” I said. Brittany shrugged again.

“Krista would.”

Krista would, so we went to get her.

“There’s something we gotta show you,” I remember Brittany saying. Krista frowned and her glasses raised with her scrunched cheeks. “It’ll be fun, don’t worry.”

It wasn’t fun. At least, not for Krista.

“What are we doing in here?” She asked when we got to the room. She was around seven years old then and just starting to disobey every word our mom said, but even she knew we weren’t supposed to be in there.

“We found something,” Brittany said and elbowed me. I nodded.

“Come on.” I grabbed Krista’s arm and pulled her to the closet. “Look.”

Krista visibly tensed when she saw the hole. “What is that?”

Brittany and I shared a look.

“A portal to Hell,” I told my sister. She started crying. Of all the tricks I’d pulled on her, this was one of the tamest. And yet this was the one that made her cry. Krista shoved me and ran out of the room.

“I’m telling Grandma,” Brittany said. And she did. And I got in trouble, but not as much as you’d think I would for telling my sister there was a portal to Hell in our mom’s old room.

The hole was actually a way to get into the empty space in the roof where insulation was stuffed. My mom told me that later, after I’d been scolded, and Brittany had laughed.

“Don’t go near it,” my mom said. “And don’t go in that room anymore.”

I didn’t go in the room anymore and up until that house sold, I ran past it to get to the playroom. Krista didn’t step foot inside or near it ever again.

I bring up the portal to Hell to her every now and then and Krista just laughs and remembers how I got in trouble. Brittany brought it up a lot when she was still coming to family holidays and she tells the story differently than I do. According to her, she only told me about the hole in the closet because she was worried I would fall in and I was the one that dragged Krista upstairs to see it. I wonder sometimes if she actually remembers it that way or if she’s just trying to get me in trouble all over again. I think maybe it’s a bit of both.