Narrator: Riley D. | Indiana, USA
Our basement was unfinished. Concrete floor, washing machine, shelves for things we should have thrown away. I was renting with two friends. We used to blame each other whenever boxes moved.
It started with a box of Christmas decorations in the middle of the floor. Then an old armchair appeared beside it. Nobody admitted moving either. I shoved them back against the wall.
The following morning the armchair was out again. Beside it were a cardboard box on its side and a smaller box in front. It looked vaguely like a living room: chair, television, coffee table. I thought one of my housemates was doing a bit.
I put a strip of tape across the basement door. It was intact the next morning. Downstairs, an extension lead ran from the wall socket to the empty box serving as the television. The plug wasn’t connected to anything inside it.
I unplugged it. There was a warm oval on the seat of the chair.
That night all three of us sat in the kitchen until after midnight. Nobody wanted to be the one who went to bed first. We heard something downstairs turn a television down. A murmur of voices, a little click, then silence. Our actual television was upstairs in the front room.
One housemate opened the basement door. We were brave enough as a group, apparently. Halfway down, he stopped so abruptly I walked into his back.
There was a face in the television box. Very low down, close to the open front, as though somebody were lying on their stomach inside it. Only the mouth moved. It was making the indistinct television sounds we’d heard.
My housemate pulled the light cord. I hated him for that. We scrambled up in the dark and dragged the kitchen table in front of the door.
We slept in the same room for three nights. The landlord eventually went down and found our boxes arranged against the wall. He thought we were trying to get out of the lease.
We did get out of the lease. It cost us. The three of us aren’t particularly close now, but every December one of them texts a photograph of his decorations in a plastic tub. Nobody uses cardboard if we can help it.
