Page 6

Back inside, Thomas was slumped in the armchair by the fire, a blanket draped over his shoulders. He was still getting his bearings. Warming from the cold. His gaze swept the walls, landed in the far corner, and held there. Memories clouded his eyes—melancholic, bittersweet. He looked at Eve and Charlie. They were sitting on the couch across from him, concerned. His eyes dropped to the beer in Charlie’s hand.

“You want one?” she asked, reading his mind.

“That…” He hesitated. “That would be great.”

Charlie pushed herself off the couch and headed for the kitchen. As she slipped out of view, Thomas turned to Eve. He looked embarrassed—ashamed, even. “Sorry I frightened you back there,” he said.

“No.” Eve shook her head. “It’s okay, I was just—worried.” An understatement, but it seemed to make him feel better.

He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. “Haven’t done that since I was a kid…”

“Sleepwalking?”

He nodded. “Used to have night terrors too.” He settled back into his chair, the glow of the fire spilling out over his face. “Parents told me it was caused by demons, so that didn’t really help either.”

Charlie strode back in and handed him an open beer.

“Thank you.” He smiled. “Might help me sleep.” He took a swig.

Sitting next to Eve, Charlie said, “Caused by demons?” She’d only caught the tail end of the conversation.

“Night terrors,” he said. “Sleepwalking. My parents said it was Satan, trying to drag me down into the fires of hell.” He chuckled bitterly.

Charlie frowned. “Jesus…”

“That’s right,” said Thomas. “They told me if I ‘called on the name of the Lord,’ the ‘devil’ would flee.”

“Did you?”

Thomas said, “Call on the Lord’s name?”

Charlie nodded.

“Every single time.”

“Did it work?” Charlie asked, already knowing the answer.

Thomas’s eyes flicked to hers, fire reflected in the corners. “Once or twice.” He looked away, scratched his nose. “Funny thing is, in high school, when I finally learned what actually caused my sleep disorders, misfiring neurons… It all just…” He did a flourishing gesture, like a magician making a coin disappear. “It all just went away.” He tilted his bottle toward the foyer. “Like I said, that was the first episode I’ve had in decades. Familiar environment triggering old habits, I guess.”

Charlie nodded in silent agreement. Occam’s razor. He’d taken the explanation right out of her head.

More silence filled the room, another of those soundless nothings in which no one knew what to say. Thomas stared down at the floor and took a sip of beer. “Sleepwalking in the snow,” he mused, half to himself. “When I was a kid”—he pointed up—“they found me on the roof once, swinging a broom around. Still don’t know how I got up there, but thank God they found me before… you know.” He drank some more. “Maybe I used the broom to fly up there.”

Eve laughed politely.

Thomas fidgeted, twisted his wedding band. “Oh and, I’d, uh, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell my family about any of that, out there.” He looked toward the foyer. “I don’t want to worry them…”

“Of course,” Charlie said.

Thomas turned from the fire. “Anyway,” he said. “I’ll see myself back to bed.” After a few more glugs of beer, he got up, started to leave, and—

“Wait,” said Eve, almost blurting it out. Both Thomas and Charlie looked at her, puzzled.

Eve went on, morbid curiosity taking the wheel. “Earlier, you asked me if I ever noticed anything…”

“Oh.” He nodded. “If you’d ever noticed anything weird around the house? It’s nothing.” He waved a hand, his face flushed. “It’s nothing.” He started to leave again, but—

“Wait,” Charlie said. “Now I’m curious.”

With a sigh, he turned back. “It’s just—odd things happened here when I was a kid, that’s all.”

“What kind of things?” Despite her skepticism, Charlie was actually a fan of paranormal stories. Not because she believed in them. No, it was because of what they said about the storyteller. They “revealed truths about human nature and misperception.”

Thomas shrugged. “I mean… I don’t think it’s haunted.” He hesitated. Again, Eve felt his reluctance. She was about to tell him it was okay, he didn’t have to share, but then he said, “Have you?”

“Have we what?” Charlie asked.

“Noticed anything strange about the place? I mean, aside from the usual quirks…”

Eve and Charlie shared a look. “No,” Charlie answered.

Disappointment flashed across Thomas’s face. As if their common experience might’ve validated whatever the hell he had been through. Of course, even before tonight, Eve did have moments here, fleeting sensations of impending doom, being watched, followed. But that was par for the course wherever she went. “Normal” anxiety stuff.

Thomas glanced over his shoulder, once again confirming they were alone. He trudged back and sat down.

After a long silence, he began. “I was around eight years old when this happened. We’d been living here for the better half of a decade, no incidents. Not even a bump in the night. But… we had this coatrack in the foyer, painted white. One of those old Victorian ones with the hooked arms.” He held up his hands, making a crooked U shape to show. “One day, my sister, Alison, about fourteen at the time, started asking where it came from, she’d never seen it before. We told her it had always been there, and she agreed, but she was certain it had been a light gray, not white. When everyone—me, our parents—assured her it was always white, she let it go. The whole little incident was written off as a case of the gets.”

“The gets?” Charlie inquired.

“Forgetfulness,” he clarified. “Misidentification. After all, light gray and white are quite similar. We even laughed about it later that day, but…” He tapped a finger on the armrest, a twitchy, off-kilter movement. “The next morning, Alison claimed a painting had appeared on her wall. At first, she was just annoyed. She’d assumed one of us had put it there while she slept. A bad joke. But no one took credit. Like the coatrack, this painting had always been there. Hell, our own mother had painted it years before.”

He rubbed a thumb into the back of his hand, leaving behind white marks that filled with red as the blood returned. “With alarming speed,” he went on, “things got worse, much worse. She insisted the wallpaper was changing, the floors, furniture—even the layout of the house. Old rooms vanished; new ones appeared. And all the while, she was the only one who could see it.” He paused. “Of course, our parents should have taken her to a psychiatrist, a doctor, gotten her real help…” Thomas inhaled, let out another sigh. “Alison believed something in the house, or the house itself, was toying with her. Altering her reality, bit by bit. And our parents, they did nothing to dissuade her of that belief. In fact, they all but encouraged it. Said it was the work of the devil. After all, if Lucifer was responsible for my sleep disorders, why not this?”

He set his jaw. “Just like with me, they told her to pray, to invoke Jesus’s name. When that didn’t work, they accused her of doubting the Lord, allowing the devil into our home. In their eyes, it was her fault. Then, they caught her carving those symbols, like the one from under the banister.”

Charlie raised an eyebrow. Thomas, remembering she hadn’t been there earlier, added, “You’ll find them around the house.” With his index finger, he drew an invisible circle in the air, then added the intersecting lines. “Furious, my father asked her what they were, why she was carving them, but she wouldn’t answer. She literally wouldn’t say a word about it. So, he assumed it was paganism, or something worse, and they punished her. Wouldn’t let her leave the house, not even for church, and that’s when…” He trailed off yet again, gravely silent. “Her core memories began to change. People she’d known all her life became strangers, and strangers became… familiar.”

Familiar.

The word plunged into the depths of Eve’s mind, breached the gray matter and, like a parasitic worm, burrowed a home there.

Thomas shifted his weight, uncomfortable. “Almost overnight,” he said, “Alison believed that our parents had been altered. According to her, even their names, their personalities, their pasts were different. Eventually, she thought everyone around her was an imposter, that the real versions of us had somehow been replaced. So… she tested us, asked us questions about the past, desperate to know if we were actually her family or, well, you get the idea. She begged us to believe her, to save her, but— I…” He cleared his throat.

“Sometimes I feel responsible for what happened. I know I was only eight. I just, I feel like I could’ve done more—could’ve gotten her real help…” He rubbed his forehead with the back of his thumb. “I— I guess I thought coming here might bring me some sort of closure, but…” He tugged at his sleeve and turned to the fire. Its pallid glow cast black shadows across his solemn features. “And… if I’m being honest, every now and then, over the years, I’ve wondered if there was something else going on. If maybe Alison was right. Maybe something truly incomprehensible happened here…” He looked around. “But coming back… It’s just an old house.” He looked to Charlie and Eve, his eyes apologizing for the dark story.

They remained quiet, half expecting him to say something more, but that was it—loose ends and all. Eve and Charlie glanced at each other, now feeling more than a little guilty for nudging him to share. But, in their defense, they hadn’t expected a story about a tragic descent into madness. Still, Eve fought back the urge to interrogate further; she wanted to know more. Know what happened, where his sister ended up.

Charlie said, “It wasn’t your fault. You were just a kid.”

Thomas nodded, appreciating the words but not accepting them. His eyes wandered to the empty spot above the fireplace mantel. He stared at the blank wall for a somber moment, then looked away. His face twitched, a barely perceptible movement beneath his right eye. “Anyway, I should get some sleep.” He pushed himself to stand. “Thank you both, for… calming me down. Letting me vent.”

“… Of course,” said Charlie.

Grateful, he drifted out of the room, into the foyer, and back upstairs. Charlie waited until his footsteps receded into quiet.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

A growing knot was forming in Eve’s chest. “Why would he come back here?” she mused aloud.

Charlie shrugged. “People cope in different ways.”

“I guess.” After another short silence: “What do you think happened with his sister?”

“Definitely some kind of psychosis,” Charlie said. Of course, the possibility of anything supernatural hadn’t even broached her stratosphere. Not even for a second.

“Where do you think she ended up?” Eve asked.

“With parents like that? Nowhere good.”

Eve settled back into her seat, her eyes fixed on the fire once more. Charlie stretched out her arms and rose to stand. “Anyway, we should pack it in too.”

Eve, still lost in rumination, nodded.

When they retired upstairs, Shylo was already waiting for them, curled up on the foot of the bed. Both Charlie and the dog dozed off within minutes. But Eve, with Thomas’s story running through her mind, couldn’t sleep. All the strangeness of the night was still rattling around in her head. Everything replaying over and over. But slowly, despite her racing thoughts, Eve’s eyes began to close, everything fading into murk until, finally, she fell into a much-needed slumber.