Haunted House

CHLOE WILLIAMSON

To claim that the house was haunted may have been something of an exaggeration, but that did not stop Clifford from putting up the signs. He began with one, along the highway, a simple hand-painted arrow with plain black lettering. Without a closer look, one might have assumed that it was an advertisement for pick-your-own strawberries.

It was October and the pressing heat of the Texas hill country had begun to let up slightly. In the evenings, he watched the sun set from the porch. It melted lazily across the horizon. He stirred sweet tea in his mother’s inherited crystal glasses with a long-handled spoon but, despite his best efforts, the sugar fell to the bottom.

The first time it happened, he was surprised by the physicality of it. As he lay in bed, drifting to sleep, he felt something sit next to him, depressing the mattress. He turned, but saw nothing. He did not reach out towards the empty space for fear of disrupting whatever had joined him.

Next was the newspaper, which he found rifled through on the kitchen table, the obituary page left conspicuously on top. There were only two entries: an elderly man and a community college student, both injured irreparably in the same car crash. In the mornings when he made coffee it went cold as soon as he poured it, or stayed hot far too long. He sat on the porch with it anyway, watching the gradual movement of the shadows cast by the orange trees in his front yard.

He began to move through his own home hesitantly, leaving room for the presence that had moved in. He vacuumed the carpet more frequently. He set the table with the china his grandmother had brought to Texas from Alabama, stored painstakingly in the back of her covered wagon. When he dropped a plate while washing it he cursed, and then apologized, imagining for a moment his grandmother watching him, steel gray hair wrapped tightly against her skull, a look of resolved disappointment on her face.

He imagined it next as his wife, dead for almost nine years, and he dug through storage boxes in the closet until he found the last set of sheets she had picked out for their bed. They were soft and white, with small botanical diagrams scattered evenly. He found her perfume, the bottle he had hidden in the bottom drawer of their dresser, and sprayed it above the bed. The fine mist settled on his forehead and arms. It reminded him of magnolias, and the tree-lined streets of his childhood home. That night though, his bed was empty.

The first group to visit was a couple with two young children. He offered them water or sweet tea, but the harried father declined on the part of his family. They seemed relieved when he assured them that there was no need to pay. The children tumbled around the house, spooking themselves with the creaking floorboards. After a few moments, they returned and tugged at their father’s pants, asking where the ghosts were. Without an answer, they began to whine. The father looked at Clifford, equal parts disappointment and apologetic embarrassment.

The young woman, whose sweat had made dark half-moons in the yellow fabric under her armpits, pulled him aside. I thought I heard a baby crying.

There aren’t any babies here that I know of.

It’s just, she looked down, shifting her weight from one foot to another, I just lost a baby. And then I heard one crying, and her husband called her and she smoothed her hair, produced a snack from her bag for the younger of the two children. They were gone as quickly as they had arrived.

There was the older woman who came alone and said her husband had made their rocking chair creak in the exact same way. Then the young man who ran out sobbing after investigating a tapping sound in the hall closet. They came in uneven spurts, sometimes a few at once, strangers following each other’s dusty rental cars off the highway. It was more company than he had had in years. Few took them up on his offers of food and drinks, but he started making pecan bars anyway. A few months after the visitors began trickling in, whoever or whatever had been visiting him stopped doing so. He tried to tempt it back, leaving books open to be paged through, lighting candles and turning his back on them. He unzipped the protective bag around his wife’s wedding dress and ran his fingers gently down the satin-covered buttons. A week later, he found moths nesting in the lace, chewing uneven holes in the fabric. His lack of personal haunting did not seem to deter whatever it was the visitors found. When they asked him how he had discovered the house’s miraculous properties he told them, but with each repetition the story shrank. A thin jealousy began to creep across the length of his ribs and into his throat as he watched them.

Winter came and went, and spring arrived. The trees in nearby pecan orchards grew their drooping green flowers. He stopped chopping wood for the fireplace. Still, they came: sticky-fingered children and hair-sprayed Dallas realtors and, only once, another man his age, who sat sadly at the dining table for almost ten minutes before leaving. He imagined his own ghosts hiding from the crowds. His grandmother watching primly from the armchair as a family’s dog relieved itself on the living room carpet. His wife excusing herself quietly when a trucker began to talk about bitches.

The people visiting were little more than ghosts to him either. He listened to their phantom steps through the house from the kitchen, not wanting to intrude. If they spoke to him, it was very superficial or very personal: the weather or family secrets.