Secret in the Basement

Have you ever been to the basement of secrets? If you click the right spot in the very bottom left corner of the map, you’ll get to it. It’s difficult to find, so much so that back when I played in 2016, upon accidentally walking out of the shop, I put some profanity into the chat box and got a two day suspension for it.

I do so fondly miss the days when I didn’t know what was good for me. I would sit in that room for hours, relishing my little secret. I mentioned 2016, and to tell you the truth, I haven’t logged on in years. I couldn’t pinpoint an exact reason as to why I stopped playing if I wanted to, but this has a part in it. I was so naïve, back then.

I would sit in there for hours, not expecting anyone to come through, in all honesty. But someone did, one fateful day. It was a surprise to me, and though they only came for the shop, we struck up a conversation. Forgive me, I cannot remember their name or what we talked about, but it’s not important. I don’t think so, at least.

We would meet up there often, just to chat. I don’t know why we didn’t go to our dens instead. I wish we had.

One day, as we were talking about god knows what, they told me, “Brb, my room smells terrible. I’m going to open a window.”

As if on cue, I noticed a foul odor as well. I couldn’t place what it was back then, but I can now. Maggots, and—there’s not a word for this one, but I’ll tell you a comparison.

There are some train tracks near my house, and you’ll find all sorts of wild animals there. The train comes by twice a day, early in the morning and late at night. It’s not dangerous to wander along the metal beams, and it’s something I often do. With all the wild animals about, you’ll see things you wish you had and things you wish you hadn’t. I remember I came across a dead coyote one day, very far along the decomposing process. Flesh tore away to reveal muscle and bone beneath, scavengers had broken into the poor thing’s brain cavity to eat what was to be found inside. I don’t have a precise word for it, but it was a miasma of death. That was the odor I discovered in my room. Maggots and a miasma of death.

I opened the doors and windows too, and told my friend promptly after, “Weird. My room smells bad too.”

We thought nothing of it at first. Odd coincidence, but who was I to put two and two together? I was eleven, I didn’t know any better.

As we continued to chat, the screen seemed to get brighter and brighter. I’m not epileptic, but the intensity of it all made my head throb terribly. I told them, and they said they felt the same. Still, we didn’t leave. I was used to headaches, I could let it be.

I suppose that they could not. At some point in our conversation, they went silent. Their speech bubble indicated they were typing something, but it didn’t stop. Minutes passed by, and I wondered to myself, How on Earth are they fitting all this into the word limit?

And then they left. Their character simply vanished from the room. Squinting now, from the headache and the blinding luster of my screen, I searched for them on my buddy list. It appeared that they had logged off.

The smell was getting worse somehow, it had probably seeped into the rest of the house. The correlation began to click in my head, and just as I was about to leave the game, my screen froze.

Not the Animal Jam tab. Not Google Chrome. It was

the

whole

screen.

And then it went black, like most computers do when they crash. I pressed the power button, but I soon realized it was futile. I got no error screen, no reboot window, nothing. Just before I got up to get my dad, it was back. The screen’s brightness was back to normal, and the odor seemed to ebb from the room. My heart was pounding, but I told myself I must have only panicked.

I was wrong—wrong that everything was back to normal, wrong that I had only panicked.

In the room, the purple banner on the wall to the right was pushed to the side by blanched talons. The smell of maggots creeped back up my nose as it moved the fabric to the side. It pulled its twisted, contorted, horrific white body through the rectangular opening in the wall. In a moment of trepidation, I closed the tab and turned my computer off.

I could not begin to describe what the horrific thing looked like, perhaps because I allowed myself to watch it for only a brief moment, or perhaps because I have repressed the memory of its appearance entirely.

For weeks I refused to log back in. When I finally mustered the courage to do so, I found that my friend had not logged on since the day I saw that creature.

Fair enough, I hadn’t logged in since then either. I assumed they’d come back some day soon, but they didn’t.

The paranoia that eats at my head tells me they’ve been harmed, but my rationale says they could have been so frightened that they quit the game forever. I don’t know which it is, but I hope they’re okay. That was, however, the last time I ever saw them.

I’ve never gone back to the basement. Any reason to avoid it outweighs the reasons to shop there, in all honesty. In the years since, I have begun to wonder if it was all a nightmare or hallucination. No one else seems to remember this event ever happening, my family can’t corroborate the awful smell and I can’t recall anything else that happened that day. But my friend’s account, it’s still there. They still haven’t logged back on.

A year ago when I logged in to cancel my membership, so that the game would stop charging my parents for it, out of curiosity I checked them on my buddy list again. Sure enough, it looks the exact same as the day I last saw them, and their login history remains the same. God, I hope they’re okay.