Cellar Dark

The cellar door was open... just a crack.

"What can pass through a crack that small?" wondered Jack.

Nothing bad. A bug. Maybe a spider. A bug was just food for Boss, the hognose snake upstairs in a box by his bed. And a spider... well, spiders were creepy. But things that crept were slow and Jack was quick. He could get by that door fast. Faster than a spider could scuttle, even going all out. A spider would just eat his dust.

Damned though if that crack hadn't stretched out to a two-finger gap. Not a thing to be seen but black. Not night black neither. Cellar black. That particular quality of dark that hides things. If you peered hard, that dark fed reams of garbled intelligence to the imagination, but it flat out starved the more reasonable portions of a boy's brain.

Jack's brain insisted the cellar door was yawning wider. Movement too slow to see, but after a space of time measured in thudding heartbeats, even that last conservative, rational part of Jack agreed. The door was open a foot at least. And for an awful certainty... something peeked out.

A paralyzing fear spread over Jack and numbed him to the floor. A face looked out from the open door. But it wasn't a monster face, all hideous with a dripping maw and hungry teeth. No. It was a boy. A boy like Jack. It looked all the world like Jack. A twin come up out of the cellar. That numb cold was settling like snow over Jack's heart now. There was no place in the world for two Jacks. As if it read his mind, that other Jack grinned pure evil and winked. Winked goodbye.