My extended family owns a big property down South. It sits in the flattest, dryest plains you could imagine, with the dullest house I’ve seen at the end of a drive that takes you through what looks to be untouched post-apocalypse. It’s a two-story antebellum affair, built of planks that were probably painted a hundred years ago, but are now dried and grayed by the sun. Its windows are cloudy and floors creaky, but its interior has some charm, and we’ve refused to sell it, mostly since nobody wants to figure out who exactly it belongs to.
School will be starting up soon, so to put an end to the drowsy mid-August slump, I decided we’d go down and give the place a visit. I’m forty or so, work in an office job, with a wife and two kids. I gave my aunt a call, and made sure nobody was at the old place, then broke the news to my kids when they got home. One’s seven and one’s nine, both boys, and they were surprisingly excited. The last time we’d went had been boring beyond belief, thanks to the nearest town cancelling the annual fair, but they must have been too young to remember.
It wasn’t an unpleasant drive. We stayed the night in a pleasant little inn in Kansas, and arrived around noon at the property. I unlocked the front door with a charmingly outdated brass key, and walked back a century in time. A thin layer of dust covered most of the living room. A fireplace sat on the left wall, and on the right a doorway led into a small kitchen. Against the back wall of the living room was a less-than-sturdy staircase, and two bedrooms sat at the rear of the first floor. I rolled my suitcase up against the wall to the kitchen, moving an intricately carved hat stand to the other side of the doorway. “Welcome in!” I announced, as the other three filtered in.
The room was dimly lit even with light streaming through the windows. Luckily the house had been “modernized”, with electricity in some of the rooms. I flicked a switch, inviting the pleasant glow of an incandesent floor lamp on the other side of the room. My older son flopped down into a red velvet armchair, with gilded armrests, as if he’d been standing for hours. “You just spent three hours sitting in the car, Mikey,” I reminded him, smiling.
“Gotta say, this isn’t my kinda place. If I gotta share a room with Todd, I’m at least taking the nice chair.”
He was right about it being the nice chair. A wooden chair sat opposite the fireplace, with a rough construction that seemed oblivious to the possibility of splinters. An equally robust bench sat between them, facing the fireplace, made of the same gray, splintered wood. My wife Liz sat down, stretching, while my youngest started exploring the house. I walked to the foot of the stairs, looking up at the second floor. I could see an attic door in the ceiling to my right, and at the top of the stairs against the wall sat a table, with a vase of cotton plants, which had dried out long ago. I walked up tentatively, checking each step to ensure it wouldn’t buckle under my weight.
On my left was a short hallway, with a room on each side. On my right, an open space stood empty, with windows overlooking the dirt driveway. I tried to open up the door to one of the rooms, which I seemed to remember held cardboard boxes of old documents and trinkets, but it wouldn’t budge. The other room seemed to have been a bedroom. Its only window was boarded up, and the only furniture, a bed, made of the same rough wood, sat against the far wall. There was a closet door opposite the foot of the bed, but it too was stuck. The house had surely shifted, especially given the unstable soil it rested upon.
The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. I cooked some delightfully rustic (my wife used less forgiving terms) food on the 1970s-vintage electric stove, and opened the windows to let a breeze in to combat the stifling warmth of the un-air-conditioned house. Not long after sunset, which we watched from the porch, I put my sons to bed, both in the bedroom downstairs, across from ours.
At some point in the dead of the night (I’d foregone my digital alarm clock, trusting the sun would wake us up), I felt something over my shoulder, standing beside the bed. The room, which had no windows, was pitch-black. I felt it drift away, and fell back asleep.
I awoke again, this time with light faintly streaming through the now open door. “Dad,” a voice said. I could make out Todd, my younger son, standing shortly inside the doorway. “I keep waking up. I think someone is coming in our room.”
I quietly crawled out of bed, trying not to wake Liz. “It’s probably just the house settling and making creaking noises,” I whispered. “Or maybe Mikey couldn’t sleep.”
Todd and Mikey’s room, which had two windows, was slightly lighter, and I could see the beds. I helped Todd back into his, assuring him that everything was alright. I turned to Mikey’s on the other side of the room, and found it empty. “Todd,” I said, in an urgent voice. I heard him quickly sit up. “Do you know where Mikey went?”
“He left.”
“D…do you know where?”
Todd pointed up, in the general direction of the stairs. I walked out of the room and up the stairs, worried, trying to walk slowly on the weak planks, but rushing to find my son. I looked around, not seeing him in the open area overlooking the driveway. I opened the door to the upstairs bedroom, and saw him, sitting against the wall below the window. I rushed over to him. “Mikey, what are you doing up here?”
“I heard you tell me to go upstairs,” he said, looking into my eyes with worry.
I looked around, confused and concerned. “Okay. What happened when you went up here?”
“I got in bed. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing the closet and it was so dark and-“
Mikey trailed off. I looked at the closet door, which was again shut. I walked over and shook the handle, but the door didn’t budge.
“It was open, and inside was pitch black. I was scared. I’m not lying Dad. Why did you tell me to come up here?”
I was deeply unsettled by this point. I didn’t want to scare Mikey, so I lied. “I told you to come up here so you’d have your own room. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was so scary up here.” That part wasn’t a lie. I led him downstairs, and put him back to bed.
The next morning, I awoke to the sun streaming in through my bedroom door. I’d left it open in case something else happened, but the events of the night before were starting to feel like a bad dream. As we all awoke and gathered in the living room, I recollected the things that had happened, considering all the ways they could have happened. I get night terrors from time to time, I talk in my sleep, and the house’s foundation wasn’t particularly stable. It made perfect sense that I just sleep-told Mikey to go upstairs, and the house settled just enough to let the closet door swing open for a little while.
We had a breakfast of bacon and eggs, cooked in a thick iron skillet I found in a cabinet. “I hear there’s a waterpark in town,” Liz mentioned. That got the boys’ attention. We pulled our swimsuits out of our suitcases, and drove twenty minutes down to the town for the day. It wasn’t exactly bustling with people, but there was a small waterpark with a couple of slides, and a nice sandwich place for lunch. We drove back to the house and played some card games.
Although I’d done my best to put on a good face and see the house as charming and welcoming, as the shadows grew longer that afternoon, I couldn’t help but feel something gnawing in the pit of my stomach. It got dark outside by the time we’d finished playing games, and Liz and I said goodnight to our boys. As I sat on the edge of our bed to pull off my shoes, I glanced over at her. “Does something feel…off? About this place?”
She looked over at me. “Last night, did you hear something?”
“Hear something?” I asked, probing, hoping it was something innocuous.
“Never mind,” she replied, shaking her head.
I chose not to tell her about Mikey. Although I was pretty sure I’d just sleeptalked, I didn’t want to worry her.
I walked out to the living room and flicked the light switch, plunging myself into darkness. The starlight was just enough for me to see my way back to our room, and shut the door. “ ‘night,” I uttered, crawling under the covers, and nudging up against her reassuring warmth.
I woke to a startling crash. I bolted awake. I opened the bedroom door, as quickly as I could without flinging it into the wall, and ran around the corner. In the near pitch black room, I made out the figure of a young boy. It was Todd, on the ground under the stairs. Right at head height was a broken board, half of it hanging at an unnatural angle. “Todd!”
He sniffled. I bent down and put my hand on his shoulder as he sat up. “Why did you try to go upstairs?” I asked, with quiet restraint, holding back panic.
“It told me to,” he replied, barely whispering.
Wordlessly I picked him up, and rushed to his and Mikey’s room. Mikey was still asleep. I sat Todd back in his bed, and pulled his covers over him. I fumbled through the darkness to the fireplace, and grasped the fire poker. I stepped over and took hold of the stair railing, and carefully ascended, minding the broken step. When I reached the top, upon seeing the open door to the upstairs bedroom, I felt a chill. I stepped inside. The closet door was wide open.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Something felt deeply wrong. I turned, and ran down the stairs, feeling every board bend under my weight. I rounded the corner and catapulted into bed. All I felt was cold. I took heavy breaths, slowly feeling the warmth return, and soon drifted back to a worried, interrupted sleep.
In the morning, I wasn’t as quick to shake off the feeling from the night before. I gathered everyone in the boys’ bedroom, where we sat on the beds. I explained what had happened with Todd, who had some bruises, but nothing serious. There was an unspoken unease, that made us all eager to get out of the house for a while. Liz decided to take Todd to a petting zoo half an hour down the road. Mikey, who was too old for the petting zoo (since when?), wanted to go walk the property with me.
Liz and Todd took the car out to the petting zoo, leaving us waving in the driveway. We turned to our right, and headed out to the barn, a half-collapsed wooden structure that held some old tools and not much else. I grabbed an axe and Mikey took some hedge clippers, and we strolled the boundary of the plot, hacking through some brush that had popped up along the barbed wire fence. The sky, which had been cloudy for the first time that morning, started to darken, eventually promising rain as we made it half a turn from the driveway again.
As rain started to fall and thunder echoed from across the plains, we crossed the front path back to the barn. As I walked under the windows of the house, I couldn’t help but feel it was watching us…or maybe that something was watching us from it. I brushed past my worries. I was toting an axe, after all. As we leaned our tools back against the rotting barn wall, heavier drops started falling, and the thunder grew louder. Not wanting to be the only other tall things on the prarie, we made our way back from the barn to the house. Lightning stuck just a few hundred feet away, with a blinding flash, burning a line into my retinas…straight down to the power line along the road.
When we got inside, as I’d expected, the light switch didn’t work. The storm clouds had blocked out the sun, leaving the house almost as dark as the night before. A gust of wind slammed the front door shut. Mikey was silent. He slowly walked forward, straight toward the back wall of the living room. I followed him, at his same slow pace. As he reached the foot of the stairs, I turned. I cannot describe the shock of seeing the attic door standing open, the ladder folded down, making contact with the second story floor. Mikey gasped. I silently covered his mouth with one hand, and wrapped around him with the other. I tried to walk backward, pulling him away with me, but he was frozen, fixed on the gaping black entrance. As something moved in the corner of my eye upstairs, with sudden strength, I pulled Mikey to the side. This must have shaken him, and his feet moved. I released him and he ran, ran to the door. I followed in his path, looking back, seeing a glimpse of a shadow against the top of the back wall. I didn’t want to look back to shut the door.
Mikey faltered, running out of breath, as he ran down the porch stairs and across the front path. I picked him up, holding him tightly, my arms burning, as I ran. He let out a wail, finally, and tears streamed down our faces. With some distance between ourselves and the house, I let go of Mikey and turned, and saw a shadowy figure in the upper window. Its eyes were dark, hollow. Until Mikey grabbed my arm and pulled me away, I stared, unable to move away from the figure. “What are you staring at?” he whispered, wrapping me in a hug which seemed more like a straightjacket.
Silently I reciprocated, holding him tightly, as rain battered us and thunder rolled through the barren landscape around us. With immense relief I saw headlights in the distance, and a blue SUV purred into the driveway. we threw ourselves into the car, and with a silent understanding, Liz immediately reversed out and flew toward the nearest town.
-–
I’m not sure what we encountered in that house. I think it must have been a ghost, or some sort of reaper. I know I shouldn’t have lived, that without Mikey, I would’ve walked back into that house. That without me, one of the boys might have had too close of an encounter with that thing. I don’t know what Mikey saw in that closet, and I haven’t asked him since. I don’t know what Liz heard, but I think if we hadn’t been sleeping in the same room, she would have gone up those stairs too. I haven’t told them what I saw, and I don’t know if they saw it too. All I know is, if you’re invited to stay in a house that old, and you start feeling drawn to something, you get. out.