Something Strange Beneath the Floorboards

Oliver Barrett considered himself painfully ordinary. At thirty-four, he lived alone in a small apartment above the hardware store he managed in a sleepy, gray town called Merton’s Hollow. His days were predictable, marked by the creak of the shop’s old doorbell and the hum of the fluorescent lights. He liked it that way—nothing strange, nothing unexpected.

He had never broken a bone, never traveled farther than a few towns over, and had never loved anyone the way novels insisted he should. He kept his hair neat, his receipts organized in shoeboxes, and his thoughts to himself.

People in Merton’s Hollow called him reliable. He preferred invisible. In a place where nothing ever changed, Oliver liked to think he fit right in: predictable, harmless, necessary like a brick in a quiet wall.

His apartment above the hardware store was a snug arrangement he never questioned. If he listened closely on nights when the wind rattled the eaves, he could hear the metal shelves downstairs sigh under the weight of nails, screws, and forgotten tools. It comforted him more than voices did.

Sometimes, though, when the wind died down, an emptiness settled in the apartment’s corners—like a draft under the door that no amount of weather stripping could fix. On those nights, Oliver would stand at the window for hours, watching streetlights flicker over cracked sidewalks, wondering if life should feel like more than waiting for something you can’t name.

He told himself he was content. He almost believed it.

One drizzly Tuesday evening, a leaking pipe forced Oliver to pull up a section of the floorboards in his cramped bedroom. He crouched, flashlight wedged between his teeth, prying up warped planks that groaned like something resentful of being disturbed.

He expected mold. Maybe a mouse nest. What he did not expect was the box.

It was metal—tarnished but intact, about the size of a shoebox, with no lock, no hinges—just a faint seam that suggested it could be opened. His breath puffed in the cold draft seeping from the gap in the floor. He touched it and immediately drew back. It was oddly warm, as if it had been waiting for him, and him alone.

Heart thumping louder than the rain against his window, Oliver lifted it out and placed it on his bed. He hesitated, then pried at the seam with a screwdriver. It opened easily, silently, like a sigh.

Inside was something like a stone, but not quite. It shimmered faintly, shifting between colors that had no name. When he leaned closer, it pulsed—once—like a heartbeat answering his own.

Oliver recoiled, knocking over his bedside lamp. Shadows quivered. The stone rose an inch above the bedding and stayed there, hanging weightless in the air as if gravity had given up on it.

Oliver stared at the floating stone, breath shallow and loud in the hush of the room. The object turned slowly in the air, shimmering through impossible colors that left afterimages in his eyes. He felt a tingling in his fingertips—a hum that reached into the pit of his stomach, as if some hidden muscle were flexing deep inside him.

He backed against the wall, knocking a photo frame to the floor. He should run. Call someone. But he couldn’t tear himself away. Instead, he stepped forward and stretched out his hand. The stone drifted toward him like iron drawn to a magnet.

When his palm hovered inches below it, the stone sank gently, settling into his hand with a warmth that spread through his veins like molten gold. In that instant, he wasn’t in his bedroom anymore.

He was on a vast plain under a sky split with two suns—winds howled around black spires jutting from the earth like the bones of a sleeping giant. He could feel the grit of sand on his teeth and hear a voice—his own?—whispering in a language he did not know, yet somehow understood completely.

He blinked. The bedroom walls reappeared, but they felt paper-thin, the world beyond them irrelevant compared to the vision behind his eyelids.

Oliver cradled the stone to his chest and stumbled to his desk. He pulled out an old notebook and began to write. Symbols poured from him, pages of them—circles within triangles, lines intersecting at impossible angles, the edges of each character pulsing faintly once he finished them. He had never drawn anything like this before, yet his hand moved confidently, as if guided by something patient and ancient.

Over the following nights, the object changed him. He stopped sleeping. Not because he was afraid, but because when he held the stone, he dreamed awake. Images flooded his mind: vast oceans under alien stars, cities made of glass and song, a sense of deep, endless memory that was not his but begged to be remembered.

Wordless truths bloomed behind his eyes, pressing at his skull until he gasped for air. He stopped going to the store, stopped answering the phone.

He thought of calling someone. The police? A scientist? But the idea felt absurd. How do you explain that you found a breathing rock beneath your floorboards?

The next morning, the shop bell rang and rang, but no one answered. Some loyal customers banged on the glass, peering up at the second-floor window. They saw Oliver standing there, staring blankly at the street. But he did not wave. He did not see them.

Each night after that, the lights in his apartment danced like auroras, and more pages covered his floor, walls, and ceiling—patterns that seemed to shift when you looked away.

Neighbors whispered about the light they saw from his window—strange colors, flickering until dawn. Some nights, they swore they heard a voice echoing from his room, though none could describe it later without stumbling for words.

A month later, a dull boom cracked the silence of Merton’s Hollow at three in the morning. Neighbors rushed outside in robes and slippers, staring up at the apartment windows. Oliver’s entire room glowed as if it were a sunrise trapped inside four walls. Then—silence. No more lights. No more Oliver.

The following morning, the store didn’t open. No sign of Oliver Barrett.

When the landlord finally braved the locked door, he found the room empty, except for a single stone, floating in the center of a circle of symbols scorched into the floorboards—waiting, warm, patient.

No one dared touch it at first. Some said the landlord called a priest; others claimed a government man came in the night. But the truth, like Oliver, simply slipped away.

A week later, the apartment was quiet again. The scorch marks faded, the boards replaced as if nothing had ever been disturbed. Only a faint warmth in the wood, like an echo waiting patiently for the next pair of curious hands to set it free again.