Our New Home

I knew something was off the moment I saw the place. It turned out to be worse than I could have possibly imagined.

I first laid eyes on the house after my parents had closed the deal. We’d been driving through a fancy neighborhood that our rusty Honda CRV felt out of place in. After a final turn the house appeared at the end of a lane, far enough away from the other homes to feel somehow separate from the rest of the community.

It was tall and old yet well kept, earning a vintage boldness that I appreciated. Nestled into an evergreen wood, it seemed like the last bit of civilization before a wilderness that stretched ever on.

“That is our new house?” I gasped, leaning forward to poke my head between the front seats. Taken by the majesty of it, I paid little mind to the locals who stared at us as we passed.

My dad chuckled heartily. “It is, Ari.”

“How?” I was only seventeen, but old enough to know that we couldn’t have afforded such a place.

“It was a steal!” my mom chirped, glancing at my father. “We got so lucky. It’s been how long, dear, that we’ve been house hunting?”

“Two years,” my dad sighed.

“Well, patience does pay off!” my mom went on, gesturing at the house. “Wait long enough and search hard enough and you might just strike gold.”

“Smelly gold, that is,” added my dad with another chortle.

I nodded absently, gawping at the building. I didn’t need any better explanation; I was in no position to complain. That monument at the end of the lane was to be my new home.

“I want my own room!” exclaimed my younger sister, Lina. My younger brother, Kai, pouted a little at that. She was eight, and he was four. They’d been sharing a room since Kai was old enough to be away from our parents.

“You’ll have just that, honey,” answered my mom.

Lina squealed in excitement, grinning ear to ear. She couldn’t have known that she’d soon come to regret this, and never wish to sleep alone again in her life.

Things were fine for the first few days, as you’d expect. The interior of the house was as old and proud as its exterior, and twice as spacious as our former place. It was smelly, though, as my dad had mentioned. The sour reek that seemed to permeate the place was the main reason we got such a discount, my mom explained. 

Our dogs, Chiefy and Miss Bear, loved it, even with their extra sensitive noses. They were running up and down the halls barking all day long, unbothered by the stink. They left plenty of dirt on the floors, drawing complaints from my parents. It was unsettling when the dogs growled at the house come nighttime, but that was easily explained as the old building moaned and creaked plenty when the winds off the wilderness pushed against it. The doggos would need a week to adjust; that was all.

The first thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Kai talking to himself in his room. My brother and sister were in the bedrooms on either side of my own, and it was easy enough to hear them through the old woodwork. Lina was singing along to the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack on one side – that was nothing new – but on the other side, my typically quiet little brother was mumbling, and I couldn’t hear anyone else with him.

I didn’t think much of it at first, but this behavior continued, and he’d even be talking to himself around the house. My mom was the one to confront him about it. “Kai, sweetie, what are you saying? Are you talking to yourself?”

Kai looked up at her, confused. “No, mommy. I’m talking to my friend.”

Ooo, creepy, I thought, smirking a little. 

My mother shot a strange glance at my dad – one that meant more than I could have known – then turned back to Kai. “Who’s your friend, Kai?”

He shrugged, eyes fixed on the toy blocks he was stacking on the carpet. “I don’t know.”

My parents whispered to one another for a while after this, deliberating, and seemed to ultimately decide that it was okay for a boy of four to have an imaginary friend. Fair enough, I supposed, and we carried on.

A week passed, then two, and still the dogs would not settle when it came to the house’s creaking. They would growl and even bark far too often throughout the night. What really got to me was the time Miss Bear was sleeping at the foot of my bed and started growling . . . seemingly at nothing. I couldn’t hear any creaking; It wasn’t a windy night. But she was growling at the wall of my room – the one shared with Kai.

“Enough!” I hissed. 

Miss Bear looked at me for a moment, then back at the wall and let out a sharp bark. I opened my mouth to protest, but abruptly she yelped, backing away, tail between her legs. Her sudden fear shot my own feeling of “ew creepy” right up to “oh fuck oh god oh hell no.”

“What is it, girl?” I whispered.

Miss Bear’s hackles were raised, her tail still between her legs. She maintained a low growl. Then all at once she shot out of my room, veering toward Kai’s door.

I jumped out of bed and followed her into my brother’s room. Kai was awake. He was sitting on his bed, facing our shared wall.

“It’s okay,” he said to our dog. “It was just my friend.”

I looked from Kai to the dogs – Chiefy had come as well to see what the fuss was about – then threw my hands up and left. It was okay for a boy of four to have an imaginary friend. Right?

The next day, on a whim, I took a closer look at the wall my brother and I shared. I swung the curtains open to let in the daylight, then ran my hand over the wooden planks and the ivory paint that covered them. I couldn’t sense anything off. There were a couple paintings hanging on the wall, a dresser pushed up against it, and an air intake vent at its base.

Unsatisfied, I decided to lay my shoulder into the dresser and push it away from the wall. The cool draft from the air vent caused goosebumps to break out on my leg as I peered behind the dresser.

It was subtle, but at the bottom of the wall, just above the baseboards, there was a stain. It was old and brown, but might have once been red. The stain ran down the wall in rivulets, as if a thick liquid had splattered there and dribbled down.

Scrunching my nose in disgust, I took a quick sniff. The same sourness that the house was notorious for filled my nostrils, but nothing else. I’m not sure what I was expecting, really; like I said, the stain was old. It was probably nothing. With an aggravated huff I shoved the dresser back in place and got on with my day.

Later that day I was in the living room with Lina, who was unusually quiet. My mom was complaining to my dad that we were out of groceries again, and that she was going to run to the store. She asked Lina if she wanted to join her, and to both me and my mom’s surprise, Lina said no.

Once my mom had gone, I asked my little sister what was up. “You always go with mom. Is everything okay?”

She shrugged, but didn’t answer.

“Hey, Lina,” I pressed, “what’s up? You can talk to me.”

She slowly looked at me, and said, “This house is scary.”

Frowning, I asked her to elaborate.

For a time she considered how to explain. Finally, she said, “It feels like we aren’t the only ones living here.”

I explained to her that this wasn’t true, and that we just weren’t used to living in such a large and old home. She didn’t seem all that convinced, and why should she have? The place was damned creepy. The incessant creaking and moaning, the stink, the dogs always growling, Kai’s awful imaginary friend, strange stains on the walls . . . Hell, even the way the neighbors always stared at us was weird.

That night I awoke to one of our dogs sniffing my feet. This obnoxious new habit woke me up as often as the growling. I assumed it was to do with the smell of the place: it probably clung to my feet as I walked around during the day, and dogs are infamous for sniffing, licking, and even eating anything that smells funky. 

I pushed the dog back with my heel and grumbled, “Stop. Go.”

The dog – which I assume was Chiefy by the heavy footfalls – obeyed and left.

I was halfway sunken back into sleep when Lina’s shrill shriek sent my heart into my throat.

I scrambled out of bed, terrified that my sister had badly hurt herself somehow. This wasn’t a little scream; it was the type of scream that told you something was really wrong.

I was the first to enter her room, though I could hear my parents bumping around down the hall. “Lina!” I cried. “Are you okay?”

She was sitting up on her bed, back against the wall, blanket scrunched up to her eyes. And how bright those wide, petrified eyes were, even in the dark. Lina whimpered something unintelligible.

I stepped closer, noticing that she wasn’t really looking at me, but beyond me, at the corner of her room.

She whispered: “S . . . Someone . . . behind you . . .”

I could hear my parents stumbling out from their room; they weren’t here yet. I was petrified, nearly unable to move. Lina kept staring past me, her tears glistening in the gloom.

Slowly I turned around.

In the darkness that dominated that corner of the room I thought I saw the figure of . . . I’m not sure what. To this day I’m not sure if I really saw anything or if I just imagined it. But I think it was a woman, or a girl. Naked and bloodstained. Faceless, but for the shine of two piercing irises.

I screamed. Lina joined me.

My father snapped the light on as he stepped into Lina’s room. The darkness was gone, and with it the figure. “What the hell happened?” he bellowed.

In tandem Lina and I pointed at the corner. My sister mumbled, “There . . . There was . . .”

“There was someone in the corner,” I finished for her, my arm trembling. As unsure as I am in hindsight of what I saw, in that moment I was not. I was mortified. As someone who had never believed in the supernatural, I found myself feeling differently all at once.

My father frowned at the corner, which was unoccupied. It was entirely normal, except . . . 

I noticed it then: old stains, similar to those behind my dresser, low on the wall.

By then my mom had joined us, and the look she shared with my dad sent ice down my spine. Somehow, the expression on her face scared me more than even the thing I had maybe seen in the shadows.

“There’s nothing,” my dad announced after a moment.

“Tyson, dear . . .” my mom said.

My dad held up a hand, as if to say, Don’t. He turned back to my sister and I. “Girls, it’s normal to get spooked in a new house like this. Happens to your mother and me, too. But don’t let it get to you, y’hear? It’s just an old house. It’ll take some getting used to.” He gestured at the dogs, who had hurried in at some point amid the confusion. “Even these two get spooked here and there. It’s normal.”

We spoke a little longer, until Lina and I had calmed down a little, then decided to go back to bed. Lina asked if she could sleep in my room. I said yes, more for myself than for her. She joined me on my bed and quickly drifted off, assured by her big sister’s presence. I lay there for a while, wondering how it was that Kai hadn’t woken from the earlier screaming. Then, just as I fell asleep, I thought I heard my brother in the other room, speaking to his imaginary friend.

The next day we all carried on as though nothing had happened the prior night, though there was a tension in the way we moved through the house and spoke to each other. Lina was the worst of us in this regard: she spoke very little and, more concerningly, did not play or sing along to her Kpop soundtrack a single time.

I was in the midst of mopping the floor – the dogs had gotten it dirt stained again – when the false normalcy of the day broke. Kai approached my mother in the kitchen as she was chopping vegetables. My dad had just returned from the store with two bags of groceries and was orbiting my mom as he unloaded them.

Kai softly said, “Mom . . . ?”

“Yes, hon? What is it?”

“Can we go back to our old house?”

My dad ceased his motion, facing away but listening keenly. I did the same, pausing with the mop pushed halfway across the landing.

Mom looked worriedly at Kai. “Why do you want to go back, sweetie?”

“I don’t want to talk to him anymore,” whispered Kai.

A horror passed over my mother’s features; it was the same expression that had shaken me the night before. My father placed his hands on the countertop, bowing his head and letting out a long, grizzly sigh. “Shit,” he muttered.

“Tyson . . .” my mom murmured. “We ought to discuss this with Ari, at least. She’s old enough. She ought to have a say!”

I dropped the mop with a clatter and rushed into the kitchen. “Have a say about what?” I demanded.

“Damn it,” my dad said. “Kai, buddy, go watch a show with Lina, will you?”

“But—” Kai started.

“I’ll answer your question soon, bud. I promise. For now go join Lina.”

Somberly my little brother obeyed. A moment later the raucous sound of Spongebob Squarepants carried down the hall. I looked at my parents and crossed my arms.

“Ari, love,” my dad started, “we weren’t totally honest with you when we first moved in.”

I frowned, waiting.

My mom said, “The smell isn’t the only reason why we were able to afford this house.” She spoke as if the words hurt to say.

“What other reason?” I asked impatiently.

Dad sighed again. “Something happened to the family who used to live here. Something awful.”

That image of the bloodstained girl in the corner flashed through my mind. I hugged myself, feeling the sting of tears at the back of my eyes.

“I’ll be blunt,” my father continued, “‘cause there’s no better way of saying this. The family who last lived here . . . they died. They were killed. Right here in this house.”

I lifted a hand to my mouth. The tears were here now, their warmth running down my cheeks.

“Tyson, tell her the whole thing,” Mom insisted.

“Damn it. Fine.” My dad looked me square in the eyes. “The father of that family . . . he was the one who killed ‘em. After which he killed himself.”

I sank into one of the dining chairs, shaking. I thought of the brown stains on the walls, how they looked like they had once been crimson. “And you bought this house anyway?” I cried.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, dear,” my mother said. Then she added: “Though, perhaps it was a mistake.”

“No!” rebuked my father. “There’s nothing wrong with this house. It’s a little creepy, a little creaky, but that’s it! Living here’s still a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”

And that was the end of it, for the moment at least. My dad refused to entertain the notion that our wonderful new home was haunted, and honestly, I wasn’t quite there yet myself. Again, I’d never believed in that sort of thing. And the girl I thought I saw – I could have imagined it! My sister had told me there was someone there. When you look into the dark, often you’ll see just what you’re expecting – or worse, what you’re fearing. That doesn’t make it real!

So we carried on. Kai was told to ignore his imaginary friend. Lina needed a few days, but eventually she got back to her Kpop Demon Hunters obsession. The dogs even settled down somewhat. Nothing else would happen for a while that suggested our house was haunted, and I tried my damnedest not to dwell on the fact that a family had been butchered within my home’s walls. At least I finally understood why the neighbors gawked at us so much. What sort of family would want to live there? they were surely thinking.

The peace we maintained for a while was broken by my brother’s crying one day. Despite Kai’s age, he was not one to cry easily, so when I heard him weeping, I set my textbook and notes aside and went to check on him.

I knocked gently and opened his door. He was sitting on the floor in the middle of his room with his legs crossed, crying into his palms. “Heya, Kai,” I said, approaching him and kneeling. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

Kai’s lower lip quivered as he spoke. “He came back.”

My stomach sank. “Who came back?”

“My friend—” he started, but hesitated. “The scary man.”

“I thought he was your friend . . . ?” I asked, as confused as I was frightened.

“No no no no no,” Kai whimpered. “He’s bad.”

I looked warily around the room. Swallowing, I asked my brother, “Where did you see this man?”

Hand shaking, Kai pointed at our shared wall. I shivered as I looked at it.

It was much like my side. There was a small desk pushed up against a surface of wooden planks painted ivory white. A couple paintings hung on it, and an air vent was built into its base. There was no brown staining that I could see here though, mercifully.

I sighed as I hugged my little brother. “It’ll be okay,” I fumbled.

Unsurprisingly, Kai did not seem assured.

I tried again. “Hey, do you want to sleep with me tonight?”

His eyes lit up. “Really?”

“Yes, really!” I answered with a smile. I hadn’t invited him into my room much in the past couple years. Seeing how much it meant to him warmed me and made me feel a little bad.

That night he pranced into my room, pillow clutched in his arms. “Close the door,” I told him with a smirk, “or Chiefy is going to be licking our feet tonight.”

We got cozy in bed and I read him a bit of a book he loved about a boy and a dragon. Once we were done with that, I asked him if he wanted to tell me anything about his former friend – the so-called “scary man.”

He pouted and shook his head.

Fair enough, I thought, regretting that I’d even asked. I shifted the subject to one of his favorite shows, earning back his precious smile. We spoke for a while about similar things that brought him comfort, and eventually he dozed off. After tucking him in I got back to studying for another hour, and then turned off the bedside lamp and went to sleep.

It was a few hours into the night when one of the dogs started sniffing my foot. I was mildly aware of this in a state of half sleep, and tried to ignore it. Then the hound started licking, making it impossible to shrug off.

“Stop,” I moaned, nearly letting out an involuntary giggle at the tickle of the tongue on the sole of my foot. “Cut it out! Go!”

The dog listened, panting for a moment longer, then stepping away. I was starting to drift back asleep when I remembered that I had asked Kai to close the door earlier – specifically so that the dogs wouldn’t get in.

Abruptly I sat up. My heart quickened as I turned to look at the door.

It was closed.

I swung off the bed, taking care not to wake Kai, and whispered, “Chiefy? Miss Bear? Are you in here?”

There was no response. There was no dog.

I stood in the middle of my room, heart hammering, unsure what to do or think. I lifted my foot and felt it – it was damp! But then I was sweating – surely that’s all it was? A little sweat on my foot. The sniffing and licking was a weird dream, that’s all. I’m too old to be getting spooked like this, I told myself, frustrated.

I got back into bed with a huff and tried to get back to sleep. It took some time, and as I lay there, I thought I saw a figure standing in the shadows past the foot of my bed. A bloodstained girl, perhaps?

I’m too old for this, I repeated, exhausted and frustrated. Stop imagining things, Ari. I turned away and closed my eyes.

The following days were normal, thankfully. Kai went back to sleeping in his room and didn’t have any more visits from the scary man. I didn’t have any more creepy foot dreams. And as for the apparitions I continued to see in the shadows of the house, well . . . once I smartened up and saw them for what they were – figments of my childish imagination – they bothered me less.

Life carried on. A few normal days turned to weeks. In the surety of that routine, I couldn’t have known that the worst of my family’s ordeal was yet to come. I couldn’t have fathomed just how dark this home’s secrets truly were.

The turning point arrived during one of my daily walks. Chiefy and Miss Bear were pulling on their leashes like usual, propelling me down the street, when I caught one of the neighbors staring at me. He was out by his mailbox, closer than I’d ever caught any of them (they usually stared from their windows and porches).

The calm weeks had made me confident in my family’s choice to purchase the house, and so I let my anger get the better of me as I glared back at this man. “Excuse me, sir?” I called.

He glanced at me the way a child would look at a ghost. “Yes?”

“You and others in your home are always staring at us. It’s rude and exhausting. What is your deal?”

He fidgeted with the letters he’d drawn from the mailbox. “Err . . . well . . .” he mumbled. Then, after a moment, he looked up, seeming to gather his resolve. “Call it rude, but we can’t help but wonder what sort of folks would want to buy a house like that.”

The dogs were restless. “Sit,” I commanded. “Sit and stay.” As I met the man’s gaze again, I said, “What sort of folks, you ask? The sort who aren’t taken by superstition.” I smiled inwardly, pleased with my delivery.

The man made a face halfway between a frown and a grimace. “Superstition?” he managed. “You do know what happened in that house, right?”

I tilted my chin up and answered without hesitation: “The father killed his family and then himself. Horrible, no doubt about it. But not any reason to pass up on a once-in-a-lifetime deal – unless you’re superstitious, that is.”

“The father . . . ?” whispered the man. His eyes widened and he looked over my shoulder, at the house.

“What?” I demanded.

“You don’t know,” he said under his breath, his worried gaze falling back onto me.

“I don’t know what?” Chiefy pushed his head into my leg. Miss Bear whined a little.

The man explained. “There was a lot of confusion when the . . . when that horrible thing happened to the family who lived there. The official reports claimed the whole family had died, because that was the convenient conclusion for the investigators. But that was only a rotten bit of negligence and cowardice.” He swallowed. “The truth is that the wife and the two children were butchered . . . and the father was never found.”

Thoughts laced in fear raced through my mind. My dogs continued to whine.

“Bastard got away,” continued the man. “No one knows where he went. All of us around here upped our security after, you can bet on that. Reinforced windows and doors, alarm systems, cameras, the whole suite. And then comes along a seemingly nice little family, eager to move into that godforsaken place . . . Imagine our shock!” He shook his head. “Call it rude, miss, but you can’t quite blame us for gawking, can you?”

I licked my lips, which stung with dryness. “Where . . . Where did he go?”

The man shrugged. “Like I said, no one knows.” Then he looked around as though he were expecting an ambush. Leaning closer, he whispered, “Sometimes, though, our cameras catch footage of what looks like a ragged man, ambling around the shrouded dark of the neighborhood.”

“You’ve shown this to the police?” I asked.

“Of course. We’ve done all we can to get that investigation reopened. It was a terrible thing those investigators did. But all our efforts fell on deaf ears.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the house. My parents had gone out for groceries again; Kai and Lina were home alone. “I have to go,” I cried and started running back home.

Was the man lying? Were my parents the ones lying? I tried to make sense of it as I ran back, and slowly, in the depths of my intuition, a suspicion began to form . . .

I burst through the front door, calling out for my siblings. They appeared a moment later, confused and a little scared. “Stay with me!” I told them. “Stay close!”

I led them up to Kai’s room and asked him to show me where the scary man had been. As he lifted his arm to point, nausea swept over me.

He wasn’t pointing at the wall. He was pointing at the vent.

I should have called the police right then and taken my siblings over to the neighbor’s place. But a delirious need to know took hold of me without me having much say in it.

I lurched toward the vent and grabbed it by the sides. I pushed and pulled. It didn’t budge. I pushed harder.

Suddenly a groan passed through the wall and the vent gave way. No, not only the vent: a square section of the wall went inward, about three feet wide and tall, with the vent at its base.

Cobwebs and dust puffed out. What I’d thought was a solid wall separating my room and my brother’s turned out to be a gap wide enough for someone to squeeze through. A sour reek wafted from the place.

“Stay here,” I told my siblings, and in my delirium I crawled through the opening.

Lina and Kai protested, but I waved them off. I shimmied along the space until I was behind the vent leading into my own room. I pushed hard, and – as I expected – the wall gave way. Another crudely cut square opened to my room. Peering out from there, the first thing I saw was the foot of my bed, and I imagined my feet poking out from the edge as I slept . . .

A sighing sound carried from the far end of the crawlspace. I froze in place, listening. The sighing was mixed with a sort of humming. “Huuuhhh,” it went. “Huhuhuhuhhhhhhhh.” 

It grew louder, a slow, rolling noise:  “HuhuhuhUUHHHHHHHHUHUHUH!”

Feeling as though my heart would burst from my chest, I slowly twisted my head.

It was awfully dark at the far end of the gap. I squinted into the shadows until I could make out a solid vertical line in the dark – the end of the wall, a corner where the crawlspace turned and continued out of view.

The sound became more excited: “HUHUHOOOOHOOOHOOOHOOOUHU—”

I leaned forward, just a bit, narrowing my eyes, trying to make sense of what I saw. . . .

Half a face, peeking out from the corner. 

One bloodshot eye. Pallid, withered skin. A twisting, unnatural grin of rotten teeth. A scraggly, bony hand clutching the wall.

The creature that might have been a man started to laugh again: “HoohooooUHUHUHUHOOO!”

I screeched as I threw myself back into Kai’s room. It was such a scream that my throat would hurt for days to come. I grabbed my siblings hands and ran downstairs, the ugly walls and furnishings of the house passing by me in a blur. That horrible laughing chased us all the way, and I swear I heard scurrying footsteps in our wake.

We burst outside and ran straight to the neighbor’s. No creature followed us there that I could see. With the neighbor’s phone I called the police, and then my parents. 

Within twenty minutes our lane was crammed with emergency vehicles, dozens of lights flashing in the late-afternoon dim.

“We didn’t know, Ari, I swear!” insisted my father. “The realtor told us they all died!” My family and I were standing huddled by our car, waiting anxiously as the authorities searched our house.

“Well they didn’t!” I snapped back. “I. Saw. Him.”

My mother covered her face with her hands. My father shook his head, cursing to himself.

Some time later one of the policemen approached us wearing a grim expression. “Whoever your daughter saw,” he said to my parents, “is gone. The house is empty. That said . . . your daughter definitely did see someone.”

My mom wailed. My dad just stared.

“Follow me,” the policeman said. “You’ll want to see this.”

Mom stayed with the kids while my dad and I went back into the house. The cop led us into an opening on the main floor much like the ones I’d discovered upstairs.

The passages on the ground floor were wider, danker. Moist dirt (at least I hope it was dirt) squelched underfoot, and I finally understood why our floors were always so muddy. The spaces between the walls eventually led to a cave of sorts, dug out of the earth below the house. There were used-up cans of soup, beans, and soda, and rotting bits of meat and fruit laying all about the place; with that I finally understood why our groceries were so quick to run out. And the sour reek . . . it reached its pinnacle here in this atrocity of a den hidden beneath my house.

The father who had slain his family had not died. He had lived on, here in this cave, leeching off of and tormenting my family. I thought about everything my family and I had experienced leading up to that moment and shuddered, nearly vomiting right there.

We moved out immediately. Not only to a new house, but to a new city. We have reinforced windows and doors in our new place, and we watch any who pass by our house the same way our former neighbors used to look at us. But it’s not enough, because the man who had haunted us was never found. He is still on the loose today. 

The five of us live as though we’re waiting for that thing to reappear. We try to lead a normal life, but Kai continues to imagine the return of his imaginary “friend.” My mother checks our pantry and fridge daily, often freaking out, thinking we’re running out of food faster than we should. My dad loses it any time he spots even a bit of dirt on the floor. And I wake up in the middle of the night at least three times a week . . . with the awful sense that something has been licking my feet.