After his parents' divorce, seven-year-old Cory lives with his mom in the basement of his aunt's house. His aunt, uncle, and cousins were largely unhappy with this situation, and so was Cody who did not take to living in that smelly basement without a room of his own very well. He had nightmares about magical skeletons living in the closet, ready to take him to the Graylands where they got their supernatural powers from. As he festers alone, Cory imagined that instead there were maybe Clay people, like in the movie he had seen on his cousin's black and white TV, who would come kidnap him the way his dad tried to after they first separated.

Being alone in the basement all the time wore on Cory. He wished his dad would come and protect him and be a normal father, keeping him safe from the imagined monsters from the Graylands. When he tries to tell his mom, she doesn't really believe he is scared and thinks he just wants to sleep upstairs. Cory turns to the wall and tells the monsters to stop coming. And they listen. When he sees some scratches on the wall months later, however, Cory begins to fear again. Maybe they had just barely broken through but were tired and had left those marks as notes he had to decipher.

Fearing there is a message written in reverse, Cory takes a mirror from one of his female cousins and tries writing down the scratches. Nothing comes of it besides him getting caught and talked down to by his cousins and uncle, who tease him mercilessly. Later, Cory grabs a can of yellow paint from the garage and covers the cement walls. He believes that the gaudy and bright images he draws will protect him or make him feel happier at least. When Cory's uncle finds out, he beats him until his aunt appears and calls him away. When his mom comes home and tries to get him out, his uncle beats her too. No amount of pleading will get Cory out.

Cory stews in the dark, imagining all of the possibilities of what could have happened upstairs and what the Graylanders could be plotting now. The sound of sirens punctuates the darkness sporadically. Suddenly the drawings begin to glow bright. Cory thinks that maybe God has come to save him now that everyone else failed. But soon the whole house starts rattling and shaking and the air becomes smoky. Hurrying to a small vent in the wall, he sticks his face to it and breathes as his body grows hotter. After a while, he could see again. The house had mostly burned down and he could see the sky behind the now-burnt door to the basement and the fridge that blocked it. Climbing out, Cory sees that everything around him has been hit by some bomb blast: the buildings, the skyline, the dead people littering the street. He walks aimlessly, calling for his mom. Then he runs into a Graylander. Some hideous, amorphous blob of what could be a man. It holds out its eye to him, but Cory doesn't want the useless gift of an eye from a blind subterranean creature. Throwing it away, he begins running through the ruined Denver streets, away from the beast.