The house was a simple, single-level shack rotting quietly a quarter mile outside of town. It wasn’t in the forest. No, the forest was further east. But it was surrounded by an out-of-control growth of trees, shrubs, and stubborn vegetation allowed to thrive wildly in the ninety years that the house and the land around it was abandoned.

Zeke was ten when he and his brother played explorer in that overgrown land. Victor was thirteen. They came to that house with less than an hour left on their curfew. Victor wanted to go inside. Zeke did not.

“You could fall through the floor,” Zeke argued. “The floor’s probably rotten as hell.”

Victor shrugged, unimpressed by his younger brother’s use of foul language. Victor was big for thirteen. Big and unafraid. He went into the house with a gleam of excitement in his eyes. Zeke hovered back, nearly pressed against the trunk of a young elm, ready to hear the inevitable crash of Victor’s hefty body falling through rotting floorboards and landing in the dirt cellar he imagined had to be beneath the house.

But Victor would never emerge from that house. And as the sun set, hours later, much later than Zeke had ever stayed passed curfew, his throat raw from shouting for his brother, Zeke returned to town.

Officer Wilcox discovered the boy crying, treading towards home with brambles stuck to his shoelaces. The man knew the ins and outs of their little town, and he’d never seen Zeke looking so miserable.

“Trouble, son?” he asked as he drove slowly along the boy’s path.

Zeke’s tearful story of is brother entering the house and not coming out again hit the papers the next day. His father, who dutifully went to work, spent that next afternoon following his young son to the house and shouting for Victor. Under Zeke’s watchful and terrified gaze, the father went into the house.

“Victor!” he called. Zeke could hear his father’s voice hitting the empty walls, leaking out of the broken windows.

That was the last anyone saw of Zeke’s father.

Search parties were sent. Over the span of a week, hoards of people went into the house to investigate. All of them returned safely.

The story became a supernatural sensation. Teenagers and conspiracy theorists began to journey to that middle-of-nowhere town just to visit that abandoned shack. The tourists came, took pictures, and the most daring went inside the house. Almost all of them returned again.

Sonya Lane, age sixteen. Landon Foxtrot, age twenty. Cecil Hanson, age forty-one. Emmett Stuart, age eighteen. They were the next four victims of the house. In a five year span, they had gone inside and never came out again.

The most interesting of those four missing tourists was the case of Cecil Hanson, who visited the house with a small squad of UFO spotters. He tied one end of a rope around the base of an elm, the same one Zeke had stood beside while his brother disappeared, and the other end around his waist. Cecil then went inside the home, tethered to the tree with barely enough length to walk into the shack and out of sight.

After about a minute, the rope went slack. His UFO spotter friends pulled the rope out of the house, only to find the other end was frayed and singed. In official reports, all stated that the rope smelled of sulfur.

Twice, the county board tried to demolish the house, but both times petitions were signed and protests were held. The town was thriving with the extra business of tourism, and most business owners used that claim to fame to enhance profits. The little once-unknown shack a quarter mile out of town was now a “mystery spot.”

What Unsolved Midwest podcast reporter Emil Short wanted to find out, sixty years after the initial disappearance of young Victor, was why did Zeke sign the petition to keep the house standing both times? Wouldn’t the man who lost both his brother and his father to the house want to get rid of the nightmare? As a form of payback or even just to rid himself of the constant reminder of the worst tragedy to strike his family.

Emil drove one-hundred and fifty miles from Chicago to ask Zeke.

The reporter found the seventy-year-old man in his trailer home, sweating in the summer heat in a stained white tank top and jeans that were weighed down by a heavy leather belt. The old man agreed to answer any and all questions about his experiences as long as Emil agreed to go with him to the house at the end of their interview.

As Emil had been planning to visit the house for a photo op for the podcast’s Facebook page, anyway, he graciously agreed.

Sitting at the thin, tipsy kitchen table with old Zeke across from him, Emil pressed record and began the interview with questions about Zeke’s father, brother, and what life was like growing up in a town like this.

Zeke raised a dark, weathered hand and stopped him.

“I could tell you about growing up in this small town, a boy in an interracial family in the sixties.” His voice was raspy, almost comically high for how tall the man was. “But you aren’t reporting for a historical paper on social economic status for your internet news channel.”

Emil gave a tight smile. Podcast. The concept wasn’t that difficult to understand.

“You came all this way to find out what happened the day my brother disappeared,” Zeke continued. His long fingers reached into his back pocket and pulled out a crumpled box of cigarettes. He slid one out and tapped the filter on the table before putting it into his mouth. He spoke as he lit it. “You want to know if I saw anything. I had to answer those questions as a boy. First to the police, then to any tourist who came armed with my address and their determination to find out was it ghosts? Aliens? A serial killer?”

Zeke chuckled at the memory and pinched the cigarette between his fingers to lower it away from his lips. “A couple of times they even asked if I done it. Can you believe that? I was ten when my father and Victor went missing. A scrawny ten at that.”

Emil’s eyes quickly scanned the walls of the trailer, hoping to catch a glimpse of a family photo. The only decorations Zeke had ever deigned to mount on his wall was a large stuffed big mouth bass, a calendar, and a framed movie poster of Planet of the Apes.

“What happened that day is no mystery. I was honest from day one. Victor walked into that doorway and never walked out. The next day, my father did the same thing. There was no sound, no smell, no sensation that clued me as to what happened to them.”

Emil leaned forward. “But what did the police find? Blood? Hair? Footprints? The report don’t give any real information.”

Zeke’s eyes sparkled for just a moment, then he looked down and flicked his ashes into a plastic bowl. “The footprints in the dirt stopped just three feet into the entryway. One step, two step, three step, gone.”

Emil’s brow furrowed. That’s the first he’d heard of that factoid. Zeke began a coughing fit. He stood, lumbered two steps into the kitchen and removed a glass pitcher of brown liquid from the fridge.

“Tea?”

“Please.” Emil eyed the foggy, dingy cups as Zeke pulled them from the cabinet. One rule of interviews was to always accept food or beverage from the person being interviewed. It was an unspoken way of earning trust. Even if the dishes were dirty and the tea untrustworthy.

Emil accepted his glass and held it as he pondered aloud. “Three steps and then nothing. But was it clearly defined? Could wind or weather have possibly removed the dirt on the floor, making it impossible to see how far Victor and your father traveled? Were all the rooms checked? Closets, cupboards? Is there a lower level to the house?”

Zeke chuckled as he returned to his seat across from Emil. The old man sipped his tea and cleared his throat. Emil paused his slew of questions to test the tea on the tip of his tongue. Sweet tea. Southern style. He took an official drink and was glad he did so.

“Excellent tea.”

Zeke took a final drag from his cigarette and put it out in the makeshift ashtray. “Those who went into the house and made it back out again found nothing but an empty shack with holes in the roof and no glass in the windows. There wasn’t even a hair uncovered. It was like my brother and father vanished in a puff of smoke. But you know what, Mr. Short, there was something that never made it into the papers, the police reports, or any of that business.”

Emil almost began to drool. “There was? What?”

Zeke rose from his seat. “Come with me to that house and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

The drive took less than three minutes. Zeke insisted they drive separately. Emil followed the old man’s truck through the short blocks of town and down the gravel road through the overgrowth. They parked their cars in a patch of grass. A small, worn out wooden sign read Mystery Spot and a white arrow made with dripping paint pointed them in the right direction.

Emil began talking as soon as they exited their vehicles.

“I’ve always wondered,” Emil said. “Why did you never move away? Why did you stay so close to the location of your childhood trauma?”

The corner of Zeke’s mouth twitched up. “All will be revealed, Mr. Short.”

For some inexplicable reason, Emil felt a shiver run down his back. He smiled at himself. Never before had he bought into the mystery-soaked, nonsensical supernatural undertones of the stories his podcast churned out. It brought in listeners, but Emil knew it for what it was- fiction.

The old man led the way through the trees and brush. He moved nimbly for a man in his seventies. Emil stumbled and staggered, his feet accustomed to paved streets and pathways.

At last, the house appeared in an embrace of growing trees. The wooden siding, once white, was gouged and discolored from weather and vandalism.

Again, Emil felt that chill. Zeke lit another smoke, staring into the house. Emil watched the old man’s expression, trying to decipher it. He had expected something dramatic. Sorrow, fear, sick anticipation. Something. But Zeke looked upon that old house the way a farmer surveys his land. With a familiar but reverent warmth.

Emil made a mental note to himself to use that line in the podcast.

“I’ll tell you something no one else knows, Mr. Short,” Zeke said.

Emil frowned. Was the old man’s voice deeper? It was definitely less raspy.

“When Victor didn’t come out of that house, I went inside after him. I went in there, into that dark doorway. I was so scared, I was shivering. I went in there looking for him. And I found something. Can I show you what I found?”

Emil nodded fervently and followed Zeke as he began striding toward the doorway.

“Are we going inside?”

Zeke gave a nod. “It’s easier if I show you.”

Emil wracked his brain. Had he ever heard of any accounts describing Zeke going into the house? Ever? Either before or after he lost his family? Emil was sure that Zeke had never admitted to ever going into the house. And here they were, going into it now. Walking up to the door, into the darkness of the house.

The wood creaked as they stepped inside, swallowed by the dust-filled shadows. They took one step in. Two steps. Three steps. Then stopped.

Zeke’s voice boomed into the empty house. “When I went in after my brother, I met the thing that took him.”

“The thing?”

“It said it would spare me as long as I continued to feed it. As long as I protected it and lured others into this place.” Zeke coughed on a dust cloud. “But it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get anyone back here. This place isn’t as famous as it once was.”

Emil took a side step away from Zeke. Seventy years was a long time for a brain to live. Age could have brought on trauma-induced dementia.

“I can feel my health slipping away. My energy is draining. After I feed it,” he sighed, dark eyes staring into Emil’s. “After I feed the house, I get this boost. It lasts a few years. I can smoke, drink, eat what I want and I never get sick. Because I’m the bait.”

The floor in front of Emil groaned deeply. He froze.

“And you’re the food.”

As Emil felt the hand on his back, the floor broke open. Orange light and heat filled the shack. The crack in the floor opened wide, like a mouth flanked by jagged teeth of wood.

Zeke pushed Emil into the mouth and the reporter disappeared forever. The old man took a deep breath in, slowly, feeling the air cooling as the mouth closed and the light faded. His healing lungs expanded wide, and he caught his breath for the first time in years. No more emphysema.

No longer hungry, the house settled. More would come, now. Looking for Emil. Looking for answers.

Zeke returned home to wait.