This happened maybe eight or nine months after I moved into my first house.

I was 24 at the time, fresh out of college with a decent job.

All you need to know about the house is that it had a

very spacious basement that I mostly used for storage. The previous owners had

partitioned it into these separate rooms using plywood and exposed framing. There was

the main area at the bottom of the stairs, then a laundry section, then what I think was

supposed to be a workshop, and then this weird

backroom that was mostly just storage.

It had kind of a maze-like quality to it.

You couldn't see the entire basement from any single vantage point, which I remember thinking

was kind of cool when I first toured the place.

Anyway, it was a week night.

I needed to go downstairs to do laundry, which was the only

time I ever really went down there. The basement lights were already on, which I thought

was weird, but I didn't dwell on it for whatever reason. I'd been down there a few days earlier,

so I figured I just forgot to turn them off. The space was dim even with the lights.

I hadn't bothered changing the old yellow incandescence that had been there when I moved

in.

I started walking down the stairs and things escalated so abruptly that I couldn't react

quick enough.

I made it to the bottom of the stairs and started walking toward the laundry area when

I saw movement in my peripheral vision.

...