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step towards the kitchen door and then stopped.  
    “The wind,” he whispered to himself. That was the answer—the wind must be blowing through the back door enough to swing the kitchen door. That would also explain the throbbing of the lantern. It would react to the breeze in the same way. Robby relaxed for a tiny fraction of a second before he remembered his dad closing the back door tight. There shouldn’t be any wind.
    “Robby?” his dad called from the hall.
    He was afraid to respond. He was afraid that as soon as the thing on the other side of the door heard his voice, it would come for him.
    “ROBBY?” his dad called.
    He kept his eyes glued to the kitchen door and started to move sideways towards the hall. From his new angle it looked less like the door was moving. He shuffled a little faster.  
    The lantern went out.
    Robby felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder. Robby gasped and struggled to not piss himself.
    “Come on, Robby, your dad wants to talk to you," Paulie said, from the darkness.
    “Okay,” Robby said. It came out as a whisper.
    Paulie led Robby down the dark hall. His eyes adjusted quickly, and Robby could see the outline of the doorway to the privy and his dad’s feet sticking out into the hall. He expected his dad would yell at him for not answering. Instead, he found his dad sitting on the floor with his legs straddling the hole to the cellar. He pointed the light down into the hole.
    “I want you to see something, Robby,” his dad said. “I would just take a picture, but we didn’t bring a camera. I figure your memory is just as good as any camera.”
    “Okay,” Robby said.  
    “But there’s some other stuff down there I don’t want you to look at," Sam said. “I’ll go down first, and then you’re going to look in this direction,” he waved towards the back of the house.
    “Okay,” Robby said. “Hey Dad, there might be something in the kitchen.”
    “Paulie, can you go check out the kitchen?” Sam asked. Paulie nodded and headed off.
    Sam swung his legs through the hole and dropped down into the cellar. He held his arms up for Robby like when Robby was a little kid. Robby sat down on the edge of the hole and slid towards his dad’s arms. Sam set Robby down on the dirt floor and turned him towards the back wall.  
    The little cellar was carved out of the rock ledge that ran up their street. They stood on a dirt floor and hunched beneath the low ceiling. Sam pointed the flashlight at the stone foundation. On top of the ledge, to even out the dips and sways of the rock, a stone wall held up the back wall of the house. Below the stacked rocks, on a big flat slab of ledge, dark red shapes had been painted on the stone. Robby studied language. Letters and numbers from different cultures fascinated him, but these were nothing he recognized. They looked like a cross between Chinese characters and hieroglyphics. The symbols weren’t in lines, or divided up into words, they were just spread out across the bottom of the wall in random groupings and sizes.  
    “What do you make of that?” asked Sam.
    “I don’t know,” Robby said.  
    “They go from here, all the way to over here," Sam said. He swept his flashlight across about twenty feet of rock. In places, the symbols were so densely packed, they almost looked like a picture.  
    “Is it words?” asked Sam.
    “I don’t know,” Robby said. “Could be, I guess. But I don’t recognize any of it. Except this one here. This one that looks like a guy with his knees up. There’s an Egyptian symbol that either means a god or a young woman, depending on the context. It looks like that.”
    “Huh," Sam said. “Does it just look like it, or do you think that’s what it is?”
    “And these two here,” Robby said. “These look like Japanese kanji. Slightly different than the Chinese versions of the characters that mean supernatural power.”
    “Is it a code, or a message?” asked Sam.
    “Could be,” Robby said.