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-Spring-
Shawn and Linda bought the house on Harper Lane after they toured several homes in the area. Linda thought it was the cutest little house in the neighborhood. Felt no reason to question its vacancy; they signed the papers and moved in.
There was a small patio surrounded by a low brick wall that had a flower garden just the right size for Linda’s blossoming green thumb. There were three cozy bedrooms, a spacious kitchen, and plenty of storage. The backyard wasn’t anything to turn your nose up at either. It was perfect for their family. A room for their little girl, Angie, and a room for an office.
It wasn’t until a month later that Linda noticed something odd.
Linda was a compulsive cleaner. She like to have things neat and clean at all times. Everything had a place. And there wasn’t anything that drove her more nuts than cabinet doors being left open. Shawn knew this. And yet, every morning when Linda would get up to make breakfast, there would be cabinet doors open.
At first it was only one. And she ignored it. Then there were two or three, and she would close them and go about her day. And then it was all of them. And she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Shawn!” Linda’s fists were tightly clenched, and she resisted the urge to stomp her foot.
“What is it?” Shawn appeared from the hallway, buttoning up his shirt. Linda gestured around the kitchen; her lips pursed. “Oh.”
“Oh? That’s all you have to say?”
“What? You don’t think I did this?”
“Who else? Angie’s two! Unless she’s been dragging a chair all around the kitchen while we sleep, I don’t know how you could think-”
“I’m sorry, dear, but I didn’t do this. You’re the last one to bed and the first one up.”
“Are you sleepwalking?”
“Are you?”
Linda deflated. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand. It’s been all week. I thought... I don’t know. Thought you were trying to be funny.”
Shawn went around the kitchen and closed the cabinet doors. Then he kissed his wife on the cheek. “I don’t have a cruel sense of humor. It’s probably just the foundation. I’ll have someone come out to check it. Okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” Linda sighed. “I’m sorry I accused you. It’s just been driving me crazy.”
Shawn kissed her again. “Don’t worry about it, love.”
But she worried about it. Because after Shawn left for work, she had to close the cabinets three more times. Even the dishwasher was hanging open when she went to the kitchen to make lunch. She wasn’t sure she believed it was the foundation. She felt like she was being mocked.
But she eventually put it from her mind. A man came to check the house and scheduled a day to come and level the foundation. Linda could dismiss the cabinet doors now, knowing there was a perfectly sane cause for their opening. If only they’d been able to schedule the leveling sooner than a month away. But she tried to live with it the best she could.
Shawn, on the other hand, discovered his own worries. He had a workbench in the garage where he liked to build model cars. Nothing special, just a hobby to keep his hands busy. His day job was a little monotonous, and he needed a creative outlet: he spent two or three evenings a week in the garage to assemble and paint the little cars. It was on one of these occasions he heard the footsteps: it sounded like someone was pacing right on the other side of the garage door.
“Linda, is that you?” Shawn said. He didn’t know why she might be outside, unless she was just getting some fresh air while Angie played in her room. But pacing?
No one answered, and the pacing continued, so Shawn rapped on the garage door. The sound stopped for a moment and then resumed.
Shawn set down his tools and went to investigate. Linda was in the kitchen washing dishes and Angie was toddling her dolls back and forth in the living room. He took this in and his expression turned stony.
“Where you going, hun?” Linda asked when she saw Shawn heading for the front door.
“I think there’s someone outside,” he said. “I hear footsteps in the driveway. I’m just going to check it out.”
“Be careful,” Linda said, but with no actual concern.
Shawn stood on the porch and gathered himself and then walked around the house to the driveway and looked back and forth. No one. He went out to the street and looked both ways, but he didn’t see anyone at all.
“See anybody?” Linda asked when he reentered the kitchen.
“No.” Shawn frowned. “But I swear I heard someone out there.”
“Hmm...” Linda picked up on his tone and felt the beginnings of worry herself. “Should we get some cameras?”
“Maybe. If I hear anything again... It might have been my imagination.” Even though he knew it wasn’t, he didn’t want to cause alarm.
Two days later, he heard it again. There was definitely someone walking back and forth in his driveway; just on the other side of the door. Shawn would swear it to anyone. This time he wasted no time and ran through the house and outside to try to catch the culprit. But again, no one was there. No one in the street. No one hiding behind a fence. Nothing.
“Shawn?” Linda stood in the doorway; her face pinched with fear.
“I’m going to look into getting some security cameras.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Linda chewed her bottom lip and asked, “Are we not safe here?”
Shawn crossed the space and wrapped his arms around her. HE took a deep breath and tried to convince himself along with her. “It’s going to be fine. Don’t worry about it.”
Shawn found some reasonably priced security cameras a week later. He installed them around the outside of the house and watched the monitors obsessively for three days straight. And he saw nothing. He heard nothing. After the fourth day, he relaxed and went back to working on his model cars in his spare time.
In late April, after they hired someone to level the house and the cabinet doors didn’t open on their own anymore, after there had been no sign of a stranger in their driveway, Linda discovered something different to be frightened of.
She’d been cleaning all morning. The vacuum scared Angie, so she played in her room with the door shut. It was nearing lunchtime when Linda went to find her. But she wasn’t in her room.
“Angie?” She called into the hallway.
Linda heard a splash and a giggle from the bathroom. She sighed and shook her head, but had a smile on her face.
“What are you doing in here?” Linda put her head around the doorframe of the bathroom and saw Angie in the bathtub. Angie, fully clothed, sat in a tub almost overflowed with water. “Oh, Angie.”
Angie giggled and splashed the water over the edge.
“How did you fill up the tub by yourself?”
“I didn’t.” Angie held up her arms so Linda could lift her out of the tub.
“You know you aren’t supposed to lie to me.”
“Not lying. She did it.” Angie pointed back to the bathtub.
“Angie, there isn’t anyone there.”
“Yes huh.”
Linda peeled off Angie’s wet clothes and wrapped her in a towel. She then reached into the tub to unplug the drain. For a brief moment as she tugged on the chain, she felt a hand wrap around her wrist and squeeze. She screamed and jumped back from the tub, nearly tripping over Angie.
“She wasn’t done with her bath, mommy.” Angie said.
-Summer-
It was 4th of July before anything else happened. Angie was with her grandparents, and Linda and Shawn threw a little party with a few friends. They spent most of the evening in the backyard. They drank, they laughed, and they enjoyed the fireworks from the park down the road; all in all, it was a grand night. They could almost forget about the weird things that had been happening.
Until they went back in the house at the end of the night.
“Woah, who tracked all this mud in the house?” Jennifer asked. She stepped to the side and revealed the muddy footprints across the wood floor.
“What? There hasn’t been rain all month, where’d the mud even come from?” Shawn asked.
Linda followed the prints down the hall. They wrapped in a circle around the kitchen island and went out the other side door. They continued down the hall and cut off, as though whoever had made the prints had walked right through the wall. She felt cold all over.
Back in the kitchen, their friends had already forgotten the prints and were on to talking about other things. But Shawn made eye contact with Linda when she reentered the room and could see her fear. He decided not to press the subject. He squeezed her hand and whispered, “Let’s not worry about it tonight.”
So they didn’t. Alcohol really helps when you’re attempting to suppress stressful thoughts.
The next afternoon, Linda scrubbed the floor until it shined. She tried not to think about what she was cleaning. They’d made a mess during the party, that was all. She didn’t bring it up again, and neither did Shawn.
It was mid-August before anything else disturbed their peace. Linda had allowed herself to forget and Shawn went about his daily business as though nothing had ever interrupted him.
Angie was in the backyard on the porch swing and Linda sat nearby with a magazine while Shawn attempted to fix the lawn mower. It was a typical Saturday afternoon. Linda put down her magazine and stretched.
“I’m going to make some lemonade, you two want some?” She asked.
“Yes, please,” Shawn said without looking up from his work.
“Yum!” Angie said with a smile.
Linda crossed the threshold and froze. Spread out across the kitchen floor were all the knives from the block. They laid out from smallest to largest and pointing toward the door where she stood. If that wasn’t startling enough, a small grey cat was fiddling with the handle of the third knife. A small grey cat that Linda had never seen before.
“Shawn!” She called over her shoulder and she tried to keep the panic out of her voice. She didn’t want to alarm Angie.
“What is it?” He jumped up from the lawn mower and jogged across the lawn. He saw the fear in her eyes and how pale her face was and grew more concerned the closer he got.
“Look...” was all she said.
Shawn moved around her to see in the house. The cat continued to play with a knife on the floor.
“What... How did... Where did the cat... What the hell is going on here?”
“Mommy?” Angie trotted across the sidewalk and peered through their legs. “Ooh! A kitty! Can we keep it?”
“Oh, honey...” Linda began, but Angie had already rushed into the house to pet the cat.
Shawn darted in behind her to snatch up the knives on the floor before she could hurt herself. “Angie, sweetie...”
“It’s so cute!”
Linda and Shawn exchanged a look over their daughter’s head.
“Let’s just not-”
“Worry about it. Yeah.” Linda took the knives from Shawn and left the room.
-Fall-
Shawn and Linda went all out for Angie’s birthday party. Streamers criss-crossed around the ceilings in each room and stars dangled down around the adult’s heads. Angie ran from room to room, giggling madly as she wove in between legs.
Linda tapped her fingers against her pink party cup, sleep deprivation catching up to her. She found it hard to focus on the guests or anything at all. Shawn had done all the work with the decorations and was the one socializing with their friends.
She was just so tired. Every night this week, noise from the front room woke her up. First, it was Angie’s ride-on car. The music floated down the hallway and startled Linda awake. Then it was the jack-in-the-box. Tinkle, tinkle, pop! And she was awake. No one was out there, though. No one at all. Shawn never heard it. He slept through the night, and Linda suspected he didn’t even believe her.
“Hey!” Angie called out from the other room. Linda jumped and followed the sound.
Angie was in her bedroom, running from one wall to the other and laughing.
“What are you doing in here, hunny?” Linda asked.
“Playing tag.” She giggled, swatted the air, and then took off through the door.
Linda wanted to think it was just the rush of air from Angie running past her, but she swore a second flutter of air had gone by her legs. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. Her daughter was NOT playing with a... ghost.
“Linda? We’re lighting the candles!” Shawn said from the kitchen and she wandered back that way. She put the incident from her mind and tried to enjoy the rest of the party.
Once all the guests had left and Angie was in bed, Linda told Shawn what had happened during the party. He remained silent for so long; she wasn’t sure he was going to respond at all.
“Well,” he said at last, “an imaginary friend at this age is-”
“Seriously?” Linda cut across him. “After everything else, you’re going to say it’s an imaginary friend?”
“Babe... I just don’t... I’m sorry. I’m trying to stay positive here. This is our house. I can’t be scared of it. And I wish you wouldn’t be either.”
“I’m not scared!” Linda turned away and walked to the back door. Tears filled her eyes, but she fought them back down. She didn’t want to cry. Not again. “I’m just... oh my god. Shawn!”
He rushed to her side and looked out the window with her.
“What the hell...” he stepped out into the yard and approached the small grey lump in the grass. “Oh, no.”
It was the cat; the cat that had appeared from nowhere and Angie had loved dearly for the last two months; dead in the middle of the yard.
“What the hell!” Shawn said again.
Linda felt the tears spill over and fall down her face. “What are we going to tell Angie?”
“He ran away.” Shawn said at once. “He showed up one day, maybe he had a different home, and he went back.”
“Okay... What are we going to do? I can’t keep living here.”
“Okay... don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out.”
-Winter-
Linda watched Shawn place the “For Sale” sign on the lawn and then turned back to the kitchen. Angie was preoccupied destroying a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the table and didn’t notice Linda wipe the tears from her face. Linda was happy, sad, and scared all at once. She knew they needed to be out of this house, but it was their first house as a family. And yet, whatever else lived here terrified her more.
Sold or not, they were moving into an apartment at the end of the month. Linda had made it clear to Shawn that they weren’t staying there any longer than they had to. Their realtor had assured them it would sell fast, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
Shawn reentered the house and ruffled Angie’s hair. “Who wants to come with me to get boxes and tape?”
“I do! I do!” Angie erupted at once and flung the remaining bits of her sandwich back onto the plate.
“Okay, go get a clean shirt on and we’ll go.”
Linda took the plate over to the sink, and Shawn wrapped his arms around her from behind.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered into her hair after she jumped. “Come with us. You don’t have to stay here alone.”
“I planned to go with you. I’m tempted to say let’s stay in a hotel, but I know we can’t afford that with everything else going on.”
“Well, if it’s bothering you that much, I could try-”
“Mommy!” Angie screamed from down the hall.
They both ran to her room and found her curled up in a corner by her dresser.
“What is it? What happened?” Linda asked and pulled Angie into her arms.
“The girl! The girl over there!” Angie pointed to the rocking chair across the room and hid her face in Linda’s shoulder.
Shawn looked at the rocking chair, then back at Linda. His face was pale and his expression confused. Linda’s eyes filled with tears and she pushed past Shawn to get out of the room. Shawn edged backwards and watched the chair until he was in the hall. He found Linda comforting Angie at the kitchen table.
“She...she smiled and there was...blood in her mouth....and...and...” Angie whimpered.
“Shhh....shhh, sweetie, it’s okay.” Linda wiped the tears off Angie’s face while she let her own fall off her cheeks. “Why don’t you go in the backyard and play for a little while? Your daddy and I will take care of everything in here and we’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back in, okay?”
Angie nodded and hopped off the chair. Once she was out the door, Linda rounded on Shawn.
“That’s it! I’ve had enough. We need to get out of this house. Now.”
“It’s on the market, we just have to wait-”
“We can’t wait! Did you not hear what she said?”
“Kids have active imaginations, Linda.”
“No, that’s bullshit! It terrified her. Kids don’t get terrified about things they imagined.”
“What do you want me to do? We haven’t even had offers yet. We have to be patient.”
“No! I can’t be patient! I can’t just not worry about it anymore! We need to do something. We need to-”
A cabinet door swung open and a stack of plates crashing to the floor. Linda let out a shriek and covered her ears.
“What the....” Shawn stared at the shattered pieces of glass.
“Don’t you see?” Linda took deep breaths to try to calm down. “We need to leave. Today.”
“Okay... okay. Go pack a bag. I’ll get Angie. We’ll...stay at a hotel for now. I’ll call the realtor on the way....”
Linda was out of the room before he’d finished talking.
Two weeks later, the realtor unlocked the door to let Mrs. Hernandez into the house to look around. Mrs. Hernandez took one step into the room and stiffened.
“It’s very cozy. The rooms are back this way-”
“No.” Her jaw clenched, and she held the strap of her purse tight in her fist.
“I’m sorry?”
Mrs. Hernandez shook her head, glanced around once and took a step backwards. “No. Not this house.” And she walked to the front yard.
The realtor shut the door behind her, irritated and confused. The house settled and sighed back into the silence.