Basement Friend | Sightings Archive

Apollo Ipsum / Things That Shouldn't Exist / Case 01

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Fictional case file and witness thread from the Apollo Ipsum story world.

Someone has been leaving things at the bottom of the stairs.

Card reference / Recovered tape, recording 04

The first object was a teaspoon. It lay on the concrete beneath the cellar light, bowl upwards, as though someone had placed it there carefully. Mara recognised the bend in the handle. She had thrown it away the previous winter.

She saw the face while leaning across the banister. It was below the last lit step. The rest of the figure disappeared into the dark, but its hands were visible against its clothes. She shut the door. When her brother came to look, there was only the spoon.

Over the following week, other things appeared in the same place: a mitten, a brass button, a photograph of a kitchen she did not recognise. Nothing was dusty. Nothing was ever there when someone else went down first. Mara began recording herself at the cellar door because she wanted proof of the sound she heard after midnight. On the tape it resembles a person patiently sorting through cutlery.

On the fourth recording, she describes a blue toy car. Her brother had lost one like it as a child. She brings it upstairs to show him. There is a long pause, then the sound of her opening a cupboard. She says the car is already inside.

The recorder remains running on the kitchen table. For nine minutes, nothing happens. Then something is set down beside it. Small wheels turn against the wood. Mara asks her brother whether he has come back. His reply, recorded later over the same tape, is that he was still at work.

The final section contains no voices. An object is dragged slowly across the kitchen floor. The cellar door, visible in the photograph filed with the tape, has a new bolt on its outside. The photograph was taken from downstairs.