Creepypasta

The Ladder

The ladder hadn’t been there this morning; of this, I was certain. Nor had it been there before in all the time I’d known this house.

And it’s not that I don’t know it well: it used to belong to my grandparents, and I spent many a summer here; I know the building inside and out, every nook and cranny, as only a child possibly could. I know this ladder doesn’t belong here, that the house doesn’t even have an attic; the slope of the roof (a roof I almost fell from on more than one occasion during my early teens) is too shallow to offer anything in the way of storage space. That’s why I keep so much junk in the basement: rarely (but still occasionally) appliances, holiday decorations, and furniture I simply couldn’t bring myself to part with when I inherited the place.

And yet there it was, in front of me: a ladder, its gnarled wooden rails thoroughly at odds with the upstairs landing around it. It was carved roughly from some dark, almost black, wood; not a variety I recognised, although I don’t claim to be an expert on wood.

I’d seen enough horror films in my time to know what would happen if I were to go up there, although I didn’t let that stop me taking a look up, standing in front of the impossible hatch in my ceiling and tilting my head back. I saw rafters, insulation… more or less what I expected to see. Deciding there was nothing to fear, I decided to make my way up there. With the benefit of hindsight, I can honestly say this was the worst decision of my life.

As I passed through the rectangular aperture above me, I felt as though I was moving through some form of thick gel, rasping against my skin and stinging my eyes; I closed them, and continued, feeling blindly until I felt my head come free of the strange sensation. I opened my eyes.

The room I found myself in was dark, lit only from a circular window on the far wall. The weak beam of light did little to illuminate the place, not reaching far enough to show me any walls beside the one the window was nestled in, which was made of the same dark wood as the ladder, this time cut into rough, splinter-filled planks. There was a curious smell to the place, although it was faint enough that I couldn’t quite place it back then. I crept over to the window, reasoning that a peek outside wouldn’t hurt.

I’d expected to see the familiar lawn, the familiar street: the mailbox sitting in the ground at a slight angle (I still recalled catching that with my car two weeks ago), the oak tree, which still had a homemade swing attached, the birdbath, the gravel driveway, the field across from me… more or less the American Dream incarnate, really. Instead, what I saw was… impossible. The image has never truly left my mind.

Low in the pitch-black, starless sky was an eclipsed sun, a halo of light, almost white but with a purple tint. This narrow disc illuminated a wasteland, a cruel parody of the world across from me: the oak tree a fungus-encrusted stump, the birdbath a heap of rubble, the field across the road nothing but black, withered, long-dead stalks. I tore my eyes away, finding they had adjusted to the semi-darkness: I could make out the room a little clearer now, clear enough to see several mounds of rags and crates, along with furniture (or at least what looked to be furniture), covered by dust sheets the same purple-tinted white as the sunlight in this impossible place. I bent down, lifting the corner of the nearest one and finding myself looking at a bookcase, ornately carved from the now somewhat familiar black wood. It was completely full, too, leather-bound tomes covering each and every shelf. I picked one at random, taking it down and letting it fall open in my hands.

Curious symbols swirled around on the page, which may once have been white but had faded through yellow and well into brown with age. I didn’t recognise the language, although I know less about written languages than I do about wood; I took a year of Spanish back in high school, but I didn’t even come close to passing. I tucked the strange book under my arm and made my way back to the ladder, hearing the floorboards creek under my feet as I did so, feeling the strange, rasping gel rub envelop me as I made my way back down into the familiar world. The book was still with me. I made my way downstairs, and was about to make my way into the sitting room when I realised how dusty the book was; clearly, the dust sheet it was under hadn’t worked. The dust was just as wrong as everything else from above that ladder: rather than being grey, or grey-white, it was a reddish-brown, almost rust coloured. Deciding against getting any of that on the sofa, I continued down to the familiar concrete walls and wooden floor of the basement.