The Face In The Tiles

It's the boy who sees it first. He and his mother live by themselves in an old Victorian house on the outskirts of the city. One night, as the boy is finishing his chores, he happens to glance down at the floor. What he sees makes him scream and drop the plate he's drying. Staring back up at him from the floor tile is the very definite impression of a face. It sits there, immobile, as if made from stone, drawn into a terrible grimace. It looks as if someone is trying to push their face through the kitchen's tiled floor from beneath.

The boy rushes from the kitchen to tell his mother, but by the time she comes to look the face has disappeared. She writes off the strange face as the boy's imagination. That is, until it happens again. It's the mother who sees it this time; a grim, stony face peering up through the floor. There one minute and gone the next.

It becomes a regular occurrence. Neither the mother nor the boy can come up with an explanation for it, and it scares them both terribly. The boy starts having nightmares and the mother begins losing weight. At last she decides that something must be done. She hires some builders to come in and pull up the floor. All day she and her son wait anxiously in the lounge while the men work at pulling up the old stone tiles. Finally, thinks the mother, the face will be gone.

But around an hour into the work, there's a cry from the kitchen. One of the workmen comes stumbling out, looking sick. Before she can stop him, the boy has darted into the kitchen to see what they've uncovered beneath the floor. The mother has no choice but to follow.

There, in the middle of the floor, surrounded by chipped and broken tiles is a large, dark, hollow space. It's clear that the builders must have broken through to it as they pulled up the floor. The boy's standing by the edge looking in, an expression of sick horror on his face. As she goes to pull her child back to safety the woman glances down into it too. At the bottom lies a huge mass of yellow-white bones. It's a mass grave; the pile's surmounted by the grinning, hollow shapes of a dozen human skulls.