The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings - Lot 065 : If You Go Down, You Forget…- chapter 3 -

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Written by Quincy LeeStarring Trevor Shand as JackAddison Peacock as EmmaRomy Evans as SophieScarlett Shand as ChloeConan Freeman as AbdulJeffrey Allen Sneed as LucasDee Quintero as Yairahttps://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1ek4kgj/theres_a_trapdoor_no_one_knows_whats_below_it/?share_id=gmO2FWO4dl7C4FAqbd_cQ&utm_content=2&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1 Featuring Stephen Knowles as The Antique Dealer Theme music by The Newton Brothers Additional music byCO.AG ([e-mail]) Vivek AbhishekSUBSCRIBE us on YOUTUBE: https://bit.ly/3qumnPHFollow on Facebook : https://bit.ly/33RWRtPFollow on Instagram : https://bit.ly/2ImU2JV Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

D equals N. I know who that is. Come on in. To say I've been expecting you is a bit of an understatement. You ever heard of the rule of three. It states that whatever you put out into the world will return to you threefold. It's the number of invocation and incantation.

As well as the number wrapped in, around and through the story I'm about to tell you. This knife of pure silver might be protection, or it could be a curse. You'll soon find out in, if you go down, you forget. Chapter 3. Before we begin, I want to point out some of the customers whose names have been etched in brass on this beautiful plaque. I had made above the front desk. These are some of the members of the inner circle of the antiquarium. We go by the Obsidian Covenant.

Recent initiates include Kaylee Dart, Cookie Fenner, Elliot Kay, Jamie Sweet, Aaron Young, Confusion 420, Chanist Martin, Corinna, and, And Edana Murdick. We are ever appreciative of your devotion to the order. Go to the Obsidian Covenant.com to receive the sacrament. Now, where were we? Oh yes.

Welcome to the antiquarium of sinister happenings and odd goings on. If you go down, you forget. The abandoned house sits on a forgotten street. Paint flaking from the siding like dead skin. Broken shingles leaving bald patches on the sagging roof. A putrid stench wafts through the windows. Hidden in the basement of the house.

He's a corpse. Police haven't found it yet. But flies have. Multiplying in the eyes of the dead. wriggling through rotting flesh, swarming with frantic activity. It's not the first time the house has been buzzing. In summer of 1968, neighbors complained of a sewage stink. The stink persisted for weeks until police at last investigated to discover a horrific scene within.

Bodies leaking into the upholstery. Bodies rotting into the bed sheets. bodies staining the hardwood. And in this maelstrom of death, a single survivor. A resident of the household named Freddie Wilkins Jr. He was alone, sitting on the stairs with his head and his hands. He kept insisting, it's still in the house. Nobody ever bothered to find out what it was.

the Wilkins house was boarded up. But 56 years later, Freddie Wilkins is still right, is in the house. Since I'm the one who did the digging into the history of the Milwaukee murder house, it's up to me, Emma Marie Anderson, to explain how it all ends. But first, a little bit about how it started, for me, at least. When my ex texted me out of the blue asking for a favor, it had been ten weeks since our breakup.

Ten weeks since my puppy-eyed con artist dumped me and disappeared, leaving me in the dark as to his fate. And after two months of crying myself to sleep, I finally made peace with the fact that my shooting star, the one, was gone from my sky no matter how hard I wished for him. and then suddenly a text. Babe, it's Jack. Can I ask a favor?

What do you do when the guy you've just mourned reaches out for a favor? And not just any favor, but a dangerous one. The favor. Translate an ancient text from Latin and Aramaic and join him at this murder house to release it. from the basement, a sinister it that's taken two teen sisters captive. On a video call, I see my guy for the first time in weeks. The murder house behind him, all cracked windows and sagging roof,

and all that piece of shit, he's wearing the heart locket I gave him on our anniversary. Never wore it when we were together, but now it glints on his neck as if to say, you're still the one to me, babe. Fuck off! is what I want to tell him. But then he sends links. Articles. Pictures of the missing sisters.

And... Oh, hell. The younger sister is like 12. 14. Her name's Sophie. And then there's her older sister, Chloe, reported in the news as a missing 17-year-old named Timothy. And suddenly I remember something else about my asshole X.

That I've always admired his romantically heroic. streak. A heroism he decries, maybe because it's not on brand for a con artist. There's probably nobody better suited to confront it down in the dark than my grifter with a heart of gold that he never wears, except, apparently, when trying to wheedle me into helping him. So, all right, fine. I guess I'm helping my asshole ex. But he'd better not call me, babe. In a video, the sisters took of themselves exploring the house for the first time. The camera pans around the dim interior, lingering on boarded windows in a decrepit armchair. Fiery orange rays illuminate the space from the only unboarded window.

In a dark corner, stairs with stained carpeting lead to pitch blackness. You guys, look at this place. Sophie. The camera pans to an older teen, Chloe, whose voice cracks boyishly, but, whose cadence and clothing are feminine, an androgynous hot-topic teen with a long-sleeved tea and hair bound up in a ponytail. The camera bounces closer to Chloe

and pans downward to a rectangular black hole, indistinct in the dark until the searing brightness of a flashlight beam illuminates weirdly pixelated wooden stairs down to a basement. It looks like a janky set for a teen horror movie. Chloe takes the camera as it turns, pointing at her feet. Her Converse shoes are weirdly distorted,

her legs warping as she steps down, the camera glitching. The moment the lens passes the threshold, the image turns to total blackness. It's been ten days. Ten days since Chloe disappeared below with no food or water. How many corpses lie below now? Now, as the house buzzes with flies once again,

and the odor of rot wafts up through the trap door. Over the decades, how many squatters or urban explorers like the sisters have entered? How many have gone missing? How many souls have been swallowed by this house since Freddie Wilkins Jr. first sat on the steps, head in hands, and quietly insisted, it's still in the house. Jack recruited two others to join our mission to rescue the sisters. Lucas, a burly firefighter armed with an axe, an Abdul, tall and rugged with a shotgun and holy water. Then there's me, with a silver knife and crucifix, and a machete as a last resort.

And of course, Jack, weaving like a coyote between a pair of wolves, leading us on the moonlit sidewalk to the murder house, lean and scruffy in his torn leather jacket. full of bluster and bravado, the guys banter and brandish their weapons, while I bring up the rear, reviewing the research I've already gathered about the house. Being the only girl, I'm the voice of common sense. And as we approach the front steps, I hear myself say, No, we're not dueling to see whether the axe or machete is better. Seriously, why are guys so dumb?

The banter quiet says Jack reaches for the doorknob. The door hangs ajar. like an invitation. He sets a finger to his lips before tugging it wide. The gaping darkness. The buzzing flies. The smell. Why the hell they want to explore a place like this?

Teenagers do some stupid shit. Jack hazes them into silence, even though Lucas is right. For the girls to explore a place like this seems incredibly foolish. As I crossed the threshold, every hair on my face. neck rises at the palpable sensation of something wrong, something off, something evil about this place. Chords and cables snake across the dusty floor. Lights lie in the walls of the room currently switched off, their cables running to a generator outside. Heavy metal music plays from speakers, drowning out any noises we might make. A single pale lamp illuminates bear traps that

glint at the far end of the room. Jack has been busy, apparently, setting all of this up before our arrival. And just beyond the metal teeth, a rectangle of solid black, from which the stench wafts, along with the occasional fly whizzing up from below. Is this spooky as shit?

A hiss, freezing several steps away from that gaping black rectangle. Yeah, I know. It's definitely spookier at night. Jack agreed. his voice muffled by both the loud music and the sleeve he holds across his nose. He flicks on another lamp and points to symbols etched into the floorboards. As I watch, he takes a knife from his pocket and drags it along the wood.

All right, ready to see some shit? Not even a scratch. Now check this out. He pours lighter fluid over one of the symbols and sets it alight, both of us backing away from the sudden flames. But when they subdue, the wooden floorboards are not. even singed. He arches an eyebrow at me.

Emma, this next part is all you. Once I'm below. Once I give the signal, I'll need you to break this warning. It's funny and flattering that when my man, my ex, finds something he can't solve, like a trapdoor warded with arcane

symbols and the only clue to breaking them in scribblings of Latin and Aramaic, he thinks Emma. Like I'm saying, some sort of skeleton key to all academic knowledge. I don't even speak either of these languages. I'm just a grad student. Not even started my program yet.

But when he sent me snapshots of the pages, I contacted an old acquaintance, Yaira, who actually is a specialist in a cult text. We spent a long time chatting during my drive to Milwaukee before I met Jack at the diner to go over his plan. The symbols are like lines in a web, she explained. Together, the words weave a spell over the trap door

that conceals the door and creates a holy seal. The spell also affects cameras, cell phones, and memory, much to my ex's consternation while trying to figure out what's down there. To cast or break the spell, she said, finding the thread of where it begins and ends is critical. You've got to use silver and you've got to do the wards in order, but the text of the text. also warns, you'll unleash a terrible evil.

My ex has been down there a dozen times and encountered the terrible evil at least twice. The wording erased his recollections of this evil. And so, for this plan, Jack will be relying on a note he wrote while below. Do not go back down. Sophie will be safe if you use the notes to break the warning. Do not come down again because your light, Gillette, draws it, to see. To her, Sophie is hiding blend in the dark from the thing that took her sister. Tye was summoned here by the wards, which keep it in this world.

But if you barak to rats, then that will clillets and set Sophie free. Wren, it's is gone. Sophie may safely come, uspters. On the surface, these misspelled instructions tell him to break the warding to free Sophie. But Jack told me that he suspects he wrote this note under direct. with the terrible evil dictating. And so he embedded a code. If you read only the misspelled words,

it says, Use light to blind it, break the wards, kill it when it comes upstairs. The hidden plan is classic, Jack, risky, reckless. We know next to nothing about this terrible evil, but when I asked Yaira if there was any more,

she told me she was struggling to translate the next, part, but would reach out when she made progress. It's after midnight now, and nothing from Yaira as Jack prepares to execute his plan. I tap out a final text. Anything? A hand brushes my shoulder. Jack has turned down the music and is at the edge of the trap door, and Lucas and Abdullah are in position. Lucas, crouching with his axe behind the lone, stained and moldy armchair in the corner,

Abdul all but invisible below one of the boarded windows, his hand hovering by the switch to power the lights. It's time. And now, now as my trembling fingers lift my silver knife, I can barely breathe. What if it all goes wrong? What if... Get it together, Emma.

First the seal, then the signal. Lights, trap door, action. Sweat trickles down my temple. My ex takes the first few steps down, then pauses and looks at me. In the dark, I can't read those hollow eyes. But his voice says hoarsely, Don't die. Just don't die.

Okay. You either. God, we suck. Why can't either of us say anything real? What if this is our last chance before... And now he's descending, vanishing down into the black. In moments, it will be our time. turn to act. Jack has given us the cards, lights, trapdoor action, but we have to play our hand.

He set us around the room like he's set those metal jaws around the trapdoor opening, and we, Lucas, Subdull and I, we are the teeth that have to snap shut. Time seems suspended, and it takes an eternity for Jack to reach the bottom of the stairs, stack the cans, and finally disappear deeper within. And now my blood rushes so loudly, I worry I won't hear if or when he screams. There's no more footsteps to keep track of him by. Nothing but the tinny sound of heavy metal playing through speakers, covering any small sounds we make. We just have to wait and wait.

And I almost shriek. My phone's vibration roars like a propeller, and I quickly silence it, only to stare at the text that has come through. It's Yaira. Do not break the warning! I was wrong. Terrible evil isn't what's below the sealed door. It's what befalls the one who breaks the warning.

A punishment, deterrent, curse. It could kill you. Do not break the warning! Well, our friends Jack and Emma certainly have us on the edge of our seats. Occult texts, hidden messages. Sounds like a hell of a date night to me. Pardon the interruptions. My delivery driver just showed up

and he's waiting out back to drop off some more horrendous wares that will surely cross into your hands very soon. I'll be right back. Leave a message and have a... I recently ordered the accentulator picked it up from your shop.

It's pretty intriguing. The sentence it's number one through seven, but there's a secret. I don't know if you know about this, but... Smell is intoxicating. It seems like I can't... I can't get enough.

I'll get back to you. Thanks for your endless patience, friend. Now, let's get back to the demonic misadventures of Jack and Emma, and conclude our little story. Shall we? It's the Ira. Do not break the warning! I was wrong.

Terrible evil isn't what's below the sealed door. It's what befalls the one who breaks the warning, a punishment, deterrent, curse. It could kill you. Do not break the warning! The whole world falls away. It's just me and that little screen. That flurry of messages. But Jack is already down there, already confronting it.

If I change the plan now... angling my flashlight into the trap door opening. I poke my head in, but my light illuminates nothing in the pitch black as I call. Jack? Everything all right? Please respond. Please come back so we can discuss. Break the wards!

No. Not yet. Not already. Are you sure? Paring to add, we need to talk. But his frantic shrieking interrupts me. Oh my fucking god! Yes!

I'm fucking sure! My pulse rockets to the moon. It has him. There's no other reason for him to sound so strained with terror. It is about to kill the man I used to... The man I love. Shit. Fumbling for my silver knife,

I unfold the yellowed pages with shaking hands. Find the symbol etched into the floor matching the first symbol in Yaira's instructions. The one she says represents the key. A terrible calm settles over me now that I know what I must do. My arm plunges down, the blade clunking into the center. of the symbol. I drag the knife across the floorboard and feel a sickening wurch in my gut, a tingle along my skin, shivering up and down my flesh.

I keep going, stabbing my blade into the next symbol and the next, on and on, following the pattern on my paper. My pulse gallops, the beat escalating with each cut until my heart thrums like a hummingbird about to explode from my rib cage. A final sparkling burst, ice crackling across my skin as I ripped through the last symbol. The world goes black. I hear screaming. Jack's voice comes swimming out of the darkness.

I push myself up on my arms. I must have blacked out. From below the trap door comes a clatter of metal. The cans! That's his signal! Jack's shout sends adrenaline surging through me. I catch only a glimpse of the tall, a foolish figure that emerges from the trapdoor.

With impossibly long arms and sagging skin like sheets of flesh draped over a skeleton. The towering figure lurches out just as I slam the trap door shut. Light bursts surround us like a solar flare. The creature shrieks, staggering back. For an instant, I too am blinded, but as the speckles fade from my vision,

I see it. arms curled over its face, wailing, one elongated foot with curving toenails caught in the teeth of a bear trap. The metal teeth have bit the sunken dead flesh to the bone. Lucas lunges from his hiding place beside the old armchair, but the creature hears him, twisting and lashing out with a long arm, tossing him clear across the room, as easily as if he were a beach ball. The shotgun rings out, the first shot wide, and the second shot, It's staggering the creature, but it seems more pissed than anything, bearing yellow teeth in its wrinkled old man face. One arm now hanging loose by its side.

It lunges, grunts in rage at the bear trap still caught on its foot and twists down, bending its head low. My fingers encircle the handle of my machete, slick in my grip as I raise it above me. Time slows as Lucas struggles to his feet. Abdul reloads, and the creature finally. hears my intake of breath, its head turning as I swing the blade down. The machete embeds in the creature's frailment. As I stumble backwards, I see Abdul, now standing directly in front of it. The shot hits.

It drops. Lucas staggers over, sets a foot on the twitching corpse, and then brings down his axe. Ultimately, authorities would find six corps. as rotting in the basement. Chloe, as well as squatters who'd gone missing over the years, and one unidentified and mummified corpse, locked in a small closet. The door warded like the one upstairs,

but the symbols hastily scrawled. A surmise this last corpse was once a vampire hunter, who came to the house after the Wilkins' massacre, and lured the creature into the basement so it could be trapped and sealed off from the world. My theory is that the vampire was too powerful to be killed when it first appeared, and so the hunter's only recourse was to play the role of bait, lowering it below and using the wards to contain it.

As for the yellowed pages, they were torn from a book Jack would later recover from the floor of the basement, likely dropped by the vampire hunter. The vampire knew the pages could unlock its freedom, and when it met Jack, He offered a bargain with it in exchange for Sophie's life. He wrote his note and the instructions on his arm, promising the creature that he would break the wards.

His bargain was a lie, tainted with the truth. He did release it from its captivity. But the devil is in the details, and after massacring the Wilkins family and others, praying on people through the decades, the creature's insatiable hunger was finally ended when it made a deal with the devil. named Jack.

The trapdoor thuds with Jack's pounding. The creature and I are lying on top of it. And Lucas sets aside his axe and grabs a spindly arm, drags the headless corpse off the door while I shuffle aside, and Jack bursts out. He squints in the bright light, his gaze sweeping the scene, the body, the head. Me.

Then his arms are around me. Thank God you're alive. His hands smooth back my hair. Emma, you're right. Yeah. She fucking ganged it, man. Holy motherfucking shit. Do you see this thing, man?

Shit! Abdul is jabbering like he can't believe the thing that came at us. Like it still hasn't settled in. Jack plunges back into the dark. He returns in a few minutes with Sophie. One hand around her head to shield her from looking too closely at the decapitated creature, and he steers her into the single dilapidated armchair in the corner and sits her down. Hey, hey.

She trembles like a baby bird, eyes red, and welling with tears. It is not your fault. To understand me, Sophie, what happened to Chloe is not your fault. Chloe would still not have been able to escape and the police would have gone down, and it would have killed them in fact. and then it might have gotten strong enough to break out and kill more people, including you and your sister. You stopped it from killing more people.

He keeps repeating himself until she nods, and she sobs, burying her head and his shoulder. It surprises me how tender he is toward this girl. It's rare for him to be so invested, especially in a kid he just met. I wonder if it's because of Chloe. Chloe, dead-named, in the newspapers. Jack doesn't talk about it much, but at her age, he too was living under a dead

name with a family he's since refused to contact. Jacklin was a girl who wanted to. He told me once when I asked him about his childhood. Now she's just a dead name. So she got what she wanted. It's hard to imagine Jack Wilde as anyone other than the puppy-eyed con artist I can't help loving like a bad habit. It makes me wonder. If Chloe had lived into her future, who might she have been? Reduced now to those headlines about a missing teen, Chloe never had the chance to live in the world as herself.

And maybe it's been gnawing at him from the moment he tugged open that trapdoor and knowing that no matter how many times he threw himself down into the dark or how clever his plan or how successful its orchestration, in the end, she never will. There will be a cover-up, of course. there always is. Jack and I returned Sophie to her parents' house. They actually thought she was at friends and had no idea of her missing status, which I assume is Jack's doing, given he had her phone. I call in anonymously to the cops. Lucas and Abdul clear out all of our equipment by the time

the cops arrived to search the premises. And finally, at just after 2 a.m., in the car just up the block from Sophie's house where we dropped her off. I set down the phone and suddenly, for the first time in forever, it's just my ex and me. No plan. No crisis. No spooky paranormal entity. Just the two of us alone together. Fuck.

What do we even say to each other? Not that there's anything to say since Jack's just catatonic. like he used his last ounce of energy and comforting Sophie after orchestrating his plan. When I try to tell him about the warding, about how I don't know the cost of breaking it, he barely even hears me and tells me he can't brain. So we go to a hotel.

The clerk asks how many rooms. Lucas and Abdul have opted to forego sleep and drive back overnight. So it's just me and Jack. Two rooms. Please. And Jack emerges from his catatonia long enough to hand over his credit card. But suddenly, I wonder, was he hoping to share a room? Was I hoping to share a room?

No, we're not together. But when we reach his door, I ask, Hey, you doing okay? Yeah, yeah, I'm good. And then as he sees me watching him, a shift. and there's that sad smile I remember the one that with his rough bristles and dark eyes always makes me think of a scruffy coyote

and he says thanks again for your help you were brilliant like always and brave and beautiful and taking it out like you did badass Emma I blush it feels good

almost normal this interaction between us almost how things you've seen to be. Gold glints on his neck. When did he start wearing the locket? Was it just for today? Just for me? Plucking at my heartstrings so I'd be more inclined to help him. I reach for it and my fingers brush his skin. Warm. No. Hot. My hand hovering at his chest. His breathing deepens as he watches me. Did you put this on just for me? His dark gaze holds mine in the soft glow of the hotel hall lamps. I don't know why I suddenly take my hand away and step back.

It's too much, maybe, too fast, and I just want us to talk. The heat fades. And then he gives me that smile again, like he did for Sophie, like he does for everyone. That warm and amiable and disdemeable. disarming smile that makes me think of a dog wagging its tail. Good night, Emma. It isn't until much later that I realize he meant goodbye. I'm standing in the shower, under the stream of scalding water,

washing away the grime and sweat and scent of death and terror and stress and adrenaline. And that's when it hits me. Because when I think about it, I know exactly what he's going to do. After all, nothing has changed since our breakup. I forgave him months ago for his betrayal. trail when his demon caught up to us. But he can't forgive himself. That's why he calls himself

coward, cockroach. That's why he's never tried to contact me. And that's why he wears the locket, I realize. It's what he holds on to instead. And suddenly, driven by the certainty he's going to disappear, I'm out of my room and hurrying two floors up to his,

wrapping on his door at 3.27 a.m. My heart, a little bird, beating its wings against him. the cage of my chest, little flutters of panic because can't we at least fucking talk first? Jack? Jack, are you there? I'm still rapping, panicked knocks when the door opens. And he's looking at me in his boxers, bleary-eyed. Relief floods me. Can I come in? I'm sorry. I know it's late. He steps back and lets me in, and the moment the door closes behind me, he presses me against it, his mouth on mine,

and the world tilts on its axis. And then I realize, no, it's tilted back the way it's supposed to be. It had wobbled out of alignment before, rocked by how the lady broke us apart. But now we're back in each other's orbit, and I melt against him and everything feels right. Over breakfast, my guy is waxing poetic about what a genius I am. I am brilliant. I am Buffy. His compliments leave him. me a little breathless.

We make a great team. Sure do. He leans his chin on his hand, smiling at me over the hotel's bland continental breakfast. You as the brawn, me as the brains. I arched my eyebrows. An honors student

and perennial teacher's pet, I'm used to being the nerd. Uh, I did do all the research. All right, you was the brains, me as the brown. I also sliced his neck while you just ran away. All right, you was the brain. and brawn me as a gorgeous love interest.

That makes me laugh. How I've missed his cornball humor. I take in his face, clean-shaven now, his dark tussled curls, the pale blue button down, my lips quirk. You do clean up nice. So does this mean you're okay with being together, even though you've still got that tattoo?

He's clearly in good spirits because the sparkle in his eyes dims only a little at this reference. reference to her. He shrugs. Well, since he came to my room and seduce me, I just have to figure out a way to make things work. I did not come to your room and seduce you. Totally did, and it was odd. Everything is good again. We are good again. We still have plenty to sort out, but for now, the world is right.

Except there's one very important thing I haven't discussed with him. See, I've been researching since that night. I've been in communication with Yaira hoping to find answers before he can worry, but I haven't managed to yet. So, it's probably time to let him know. The translation. The warning about breaking the wording. I never fully learned what it meant.

The terrible evil that would be unleashed on me. But I felt it hit me when I slashed. those symbols. And I think it's affecting my dreams. I keep waking up, feeling like I've just seen my own last moments. Like I've just experienced some heart racing horror.

He might not be the only one marked for an early death. Thank you for your patronage. Hope you enjoyed your new relic as much as I've enjoyed passing along its sordid history. It does come with our usual warning, however. Absolutely no refunds, no exchanges, and we won't be held liable

for anything that may or may not occur while the object is in your possession. If you've got an artifact with mysterious properties, perhaps it's accompanied by a history of bizarre and disturbing circumstances. Maybe you'd be interested in dropping it and its story by the shop to share with other customers. Please reach out to Antiquarium Shop

at gmail.com. A member of our team will be in touch. Till next time, we'll be waiting for you whenever you close your eyes. In the space between sleep

and dream. During regular business hours, of course, or by appointment, our best customer. The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings, Lot 065. If you go down, you forget. Chapter 3. Written by Quincy Lee. Starring Addison Peacock as Emma. Trevor Shand as Jack.

Romy Evans as Sophie. Scarlet Shand as Chloe. Conan Freeman as Abdul. Jeffrey Allen Sneed as Lucas De Quintero as Yaira Featuring Stephen Knowles as the antique dealer Engineering Production and Sound Design by Trevor Shand Theme music by the Newton Brothers

Additional music by Coag and Vivek Abyshech The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings is created and curated by Trevor and Lauren Shand Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Antiquarium Pod Call the Antiquarium at 646-481-7-1-9 97.