Thanks for taking my call. This was December of '77. Christmas week, specifically. We'd just bought this old adobe house outside Mesilla, down in southern New Mexico. Place had been sitting empty for eight, maybe nine years before we got it. The realtor couldn't tell us much about the previous owners. Said they'd left in a hurry and that was that. I remember we closed on the 19th. Linda, my wife, she wanted to wait until January to move in. Thought it was crazy trying to do Christmas in a house with no working furnace. We'd been fighting about it for weeks. And that's the thing, I was stubborn about the whole situation. Wouldn't let it go. My brother thought I was out of my mind, dragging my family down there in the middle of winter. Linda finally agreed, but she and the kids were staying at the Desert Inn in Las Cruces until I got the heat working. So that whole week before Christmas, the 22nd through the 25th, I was out there alone. Just me, a sleeping bag, a transistor radio, and about forty years of dust. The adobe walls were thick. Two feet of mud brick, maybe more. The realtor kept talking about how quiet it would be, how peaceful. And it was quiet. No traffic, no neighbors for half a mile. Just the wind and the old house settling into itself.
First night, I woke up around 2 AM. Thought it was the radio at first, but I'd turned that off hours before. It was laughter. Children laughing, somewhere inside the walls. I sat up in my sleeping bag, heart going like a jackhammer. Tried to figure out where it was coming from. The sound moved. Started near the bedroom, then drifted down toward the kitchen. High-pitched, like little kids playing some game. But the rhythm was off. Too fast, then too slow, then fast again. Like they didn't quite understand how laughter was supposed to work. Told myself it was the wind. Old houses make sounds. But I knew wind, and this wasn't it. Linda heard it too, Christmas Eve. She was standing right next to me when it started up again. family spent 3 months at a motel while renovating - Reese' Grabbed my arm hard enough to leave bruises the next morning. The sound came from everywhere at once. Through the walls, under the floor, somewhere above the ceiling. Moving around us like we were surrounded. And that's the thing, I grew up with four siblings. I know what children sound like when they're playing. This was close. Real close. But it wasn't right. Like something trying to imitate laughter without ever having heard the real thing.
Christmas morning, I finally went into the crawlspace. There was an access panel in the hallway closet. I'd been avoiding it since we moved in. Didn't want to know what was under there. I grabbed a flashlight, pulled off the panel, and squeezed through. The space was about three feet high. Dirt floor, old wooden beams holding up the house above me. Smelled like earth and something else I couldn't place. Something that made my throat tight. That's when I saw the handprints. They were everywhere. Dozens of them, pressed deep into the dirt. Small, like children's hands would be. But the fingers were too long. Way too long. And they had too many joints. I could see the knuckle marks clear as anything, four joints per finger instead of three. Some of them looked like they had six fingers. Some had more. They covered everything. The wooden beams, the dirt floor, even pressed up into the underside of the floorboards above me. Like children had been crawling around down there for years. Decades, maybe. I stopped counting after thirty different sets of prints. I backed out so fast I tore my shirt on an exposed nail. Left some skin on it too. Didn't feel it until later.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]