The first time I saw the man, he was standing inside my farmhouse kitchen with his forehead pressed against the ceiling. I was holding a hammer because I had heard someone walking upstairs, and I remember thinking that this was the worst part of any farm horror story I had ever heard. Then he slowly lowered his head and looked at me.
His face was mine.
Not similar to mine. Not someone who looked like me. It was my face, including the small scar above my left eyebrow. He was wearing the same gray shirt I had on, except his shirt was soaked with something dark.
I dropped the hammer.
He smiled.
Then he said, “You’re late.”
I ran outside.
I didn’t think. I didn’t grab my phone or my keys. I just ran through the yard and stopped beside the old tractor shed because my legs gave out. I could hear him walking around inside the house.
Slow steps.
One room at a time.
I had bought that farm three months earlier. The farmhouse was old, but it wasn’t abandoned. I had spent most of those three months repairing it myself. The previous owner had left almost everything behind, including an old wooden ladder and a heavy metal trapdoor in the kitchen floor.
I had never opened the trapdoor.
That afternoon, I had been fixing a pipe under the sink when I heard knocking beneath the kitchen floor.
Three knocks.
Then three more.
I remember getting angry because I thought some loose pipe was hitting the wood. I moved the table, pulled up the trapdoor and looked down.
There was a staircase underneath.
That made no sense.
The house had no basement.
I went down anyway.
I wish I hadn’t.
The stairs ended in a narrow room directly underneath the kitchen. There was a wooden chair in the middle. Someone had tied a piece of rope around it.
On the wall behind it were dozens of scratches.
Most were short.
One was a sentence.
I AM STILL HERE.
I went back upstairs.
That was when the man appeared.
Now I was outside, watching my own farmhouse through the kitchen window.
He walked past the glass.
My face looked out at me.
He raised one hand.
I raised mine without thinking.
He stopped.
Then he pressed his palm against the window.
I backed away.
His fingers bent backward one by one.
I could hear the bones cracking even though I was standing twenty feet away.
I screamed and ran toward my truck.
The doors were locked.
I pulled the handle again and again.
Behind me, the kitchen window shattered.
I turned.
The man was standing in the broken window.
His body was still inside the house, but one leg had somehow stretched across the wall and was hanging outside. His knee bent in the wrong direction.
He looked completely calm.
“You’re late,” he said again.
I finally got the truck open.
The engine started, but before I could drive away, the radio turned on by itself.
A recording of my own voice came through the speakers.
It was me saying, “Don’t go downstairs.”
Then another voice whispered underneath mine.
“He’s already downstairs.”
I looked toward the farmhouse.
The man was gone.
For a few seconds, nothing happened.
Then I saw myself standing in the upstairs bedroom window.
There were two of me now.
One upstairs.
One inside the kitchen.
Both were looking at me.
I drove through the fence.
I didn’t stop until I reached the main road.
I called the police from a gas station, but when they arrived with me, there was nobody in the farmhouse. No broken window. No footprints. No damaged trapdoor.
They searched the whole building.
One officer opened the kitchen trapdoor.
He looked down for a few seconds.
Then he closed it.
He asked me, “Did you build that room?”
I said no.
He didn’t answer.
Before leaving, he told me I should stay somewhere else for the night.
I did.
The next morning, I returned with a friend.
The trapdoor was gone.
There was only a normal wooden floor.
My friend laughed and told me I had probably been exhausted.
I almost believed him.
Then he noticed something under the kitchen table.
It was the hammer I had dropped the day before.
There was dried blood on it.
I had never seen blood on that hammer before.
My friend picked it up.
From underneath the floor came three knocks.
He froze.
Three more knocks followed.
Then my voice came from beneath us.
“You’re late.”
My friend looked at me.
I couldn’t speak.
The floorboards began to rise between our feet.
Something underneath was pushing them upward.
Then a pale hand came through the gap.
It had my scarred wrist.
And another hand appeared beside it.
Then another.
I ran.
My friend didn’t.
I heard him scream once.
When I reached the yard, I looked back.
He was standing in the kitchen doorway.
His head was bent sideways.
He was smiling.
Behind him stood three men with my face.
All three were looking at me.
None of them moved.
Then the kitchen door closed.
I still own the farm.
I don’t live there anymore.
I don’t know who does.
Every few nights, my phone rings from the old landline number at the farmhouse.
I never answer.
But sometimes, when I am half asleep, I hear the voicemail notification.
There is always only one message.
My own voice says:
“Come home.”
Then something underneath it knocks three times.
