My house is haunted by people

My house was haunted. Not in the way kids mean it. No slamming doors and breaking plates. Just the kind of haunting that hides behind habits. The ones so subtle that you barely know it's happening. A picture out of place. A light left on. The faint, all too sweet scent of cheap vanilla and crushed gardenia perfume drifting through the vents.

It was my mom’s perfume.

I moved into my home a few years after my mom died, partly because the rent was cheap, partly because it was the kind of quiet I thought I needed. It wasn’t anything particularly special, an old brick ranch house with a low-slung roof tucked back behind a patch of pines, the kind of place you pass on the way to somewhere else. The air felt still out there. Not peaceful. Just still.

I told myself that was what I needed. Somewhere to breathe and get my footing again. But when the house began to breathe back at me, I didn’t run. I leaned in. I told myself it was her.

I knew it in my soul.

At night, I’d lie still in bed and listen to someone walking the hallway barefoot, the boards creaking in a pattern I remembered from childhood. I’d close my eyes and whisper goodnight like I used to, and swear I heard the soft reply. The doors would creak open on their own. Sometimes I’d find the bed made when I hadn’t touched it. Or the tea kettle filled and warm, waiting.

It didn’t scare me. It always felt… gentle. And if I’m honest, I needed her. More than anything I needed her back and to listen too me mourn her properly. I never said goodbye right. She died in a hospital bed, tubes in her mouth, while I sat two floors down in the lobby responding to work emails. I told myself I’d have time, as if she could somehow put off her death while I did the ever important task of telling my boss I would be absent on Monday.

The house gave me that time. It gave me everything I needed, including the book.

And by God that book changed everything.

It wasn’t mine, I know that for sure. I tripped on a raised floorboard by the radiator and there it was, pressed flat in the dust, as if it had always been waiting. Wrapped in thin muslin like it might bleed. It felt soft, like skin left too long in water. The cover didn’t have a title, just a mark burned into the hide that held the pages. It was a kind of spiral, or eye, I'm not sure how to describe it. I can’t draw it either. Every time I try it looks wrong.

I opened it like a child at their first Christmas.

The words weren’t in English. Nor in any language I could name. But I kept thinking I _almost_ recognized them, like seeing a face in a crowd and convincing yourself you went to school together. They hovered at the edge of meaning. I couldn’t read them, but they still reached me.

There’s no better way to say it than this: I felt read. As if I was the book, and the book was the reader. Something had peeled me open gently, and understood what it found.

And it told me She’s still here.

I don’t know how. It didn’t say it in words. But the moment I closed the book, I heard my mother humming from the hallway. The tune she used when she cleaned the kitchen. The one she sang to herself when she was too tired to speak.

I slept on the hallway floor that night, curled up against the closet door, with the book still in my hands.

I started reading a page a night. Just one at a time. I never understood the language, but I’d trace the letters with my finger. I’d hear her voice afterward. Sometimes just a hum, sometimes a whisper. Once, I swear to God, she said my name.

It felt like a miracle. Like the book was letting her through.

I didn’t tell anyone. Not about the book. Not about the sounds. Not about the way I started sleeping less but feeling more awake. I didn’t want to break it and lose everything all over again. She always told me you don’t talk during a prayer.

The book never spoke. Not out loud. But it never needed to. I kept finding it in new places, on the kitchen counter open to new pages. In the passenger seat of my car. In my mother’s old hope chest, which I had never been able to unlock before but still kept regardless.

It always opened to a different page. Always left me with a different feeling, a warmth in my chest, pins in my hands, sometimes the sound of distant thunder when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

I started talking to it. Quietly. Asking it questions I never said aloud in prayer. Is she proud of me? Is she angry I wasn’t there? Can she hear me now?

It never answered with full words, but the hums and whispers were enough.

The house stopped feeling like it belonged to me. Not in a bad way, more like how a church doesn’t belong to the congregation. You enter on borrowed ground. You keep your head low.

My grief counselor says this is all normal. “Auditory hallucinations aren’t uncommon when someone you love dies suddenly,” he told me, jotting something in his notes. “The brain searches for patterns, for comfort. That’s all... Just keep to yourself, focus on getting better for now.” He looked at me with one eye squinted, like he wanted to say I was crazy but thought better of it. But he didn't need to say it for me to understand.

That's why I didn't tell him about my dreams. I’ve been dreaming of her. In the dreams she stands just at the edge of the room, too far away for me to see her face clearly. She sways gently, like she’s underwater. Her mouth moves, but no sound comes out, just a kind of low static like words pushed through an old radio. I try to get closer, but something always wakes me up.

I don’t know when I doubted it was just her. But a contributing moment was small, stupid. I had come home to find the television on, tuned to static. And over the hiss, I heard someone whisper my mother’s name.

But it wasn’t her voice.

Still, I didn’t run.

The presence with me felt far too loving to be anything but a mother.

I used to wake up with the sense that my mother had just stepped out of the room, like if I sat up fast enough, I’d catch a glimpse of her robe disappearing around the corner. Now I wake up with the sense that someone else is already in the room. Watching over me and waiting for me to do something wrong so I can be punished.

I started checking the locks again after finding my back door open. Twice, then three times. Nailed the window shut in the spare bedroom after I found it open one morning, the curtains fluttering even though I know I hadn’t touched it in weeks. My mind said wind. My bones rattled and knew better.

The final straw came when I found the attic door open.

It's one of the one's that hangs down into the hallway on a folding ladder. I’ve only ever opened it once. No reason to go up there, it’s just full of insulation and dust. But when I came home from work on Thursday, it was down. Hanging open like a gaping maw.

I stood there for a long time. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.

Eventually, I grabbed a broom handle and nudged the ladder back up, locking it in place. I told myself a lie about warped hinges. Then I put a chair under it, like that would help.

That night, I dreamed I was on the ceiling, looking down at myself in bed. We we're looking at each other, waiting for the other to break the silence first. She was sneering at me.

I tried to call my sister the next day. We haven’t spoken much since the funeral, but I needed someone to tell me I wasn't actually crazy. She didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail I don’t remember recording. I played it back before sending it. I was awfully calm, calmer than I remember.

"I'm going to come see you this weekend. Wait for me." No panic. No fear. Just a statement. Like I’d said it a hundred times already.

I didn't wait for the next day, it was late afternoon and my sister only lived six hours away. Depending on how much I wanted to chance getting pulled over, I could make it before midnight. I only took a few clothes, and I left the book. I made sure to, it was put in the drawer of my nightstand and I checked before I left to make sure it was still there.

Driving out of town was like a weight off my shoulders, I hadn't realized how hard it was to breath in that house until I was finally out of it. I had forgotten how beautiful the area was, the interstate was lined with rows of trees and shrubs that were such a vibrant green they almost looked fake. Black letters on a bone white background stood out like a sore thumb.

WHO HAVE YOU REALLY BEEN PRAYING TO?

It was the only billboard that I saw for miles, the sun had set and I pulled into a probably roach infested motel that stood together with a lone gas station. The clerk thanked me for "being patient" as soon as I came in, and didn't blink when I asked what she meant. It felt like I had been cast as the star in a tragicomedy where everyone's already memorized their lines except me. She held my hand tightly when she gave me my room key, almost urging me to stay put.

"You're not alone in your mourning."

I ripped my hand out of hers, the key falling to the floor. She followed the key with a sour expression, snapping back at me and gripping my shoulders, but not pulling me closer.

"That was for you! Why would you do that it was a gift! All of it! You're ungrateful! Ungrateful! Ungrateful! UNGRATEFUL UNGRATEFUL UNGRATEFUL UNGRATEFUL!"

She screamed at me out of the building, and in the parking lot, running all the way until I got back on the interstate. I could get to my sisters house in just a few hours, the calmness I felt when I was out of the house was gone. The ever present and overbearing feeling of someone there with me back in full force just to leave me crying and struggling to find my sister in my contacts.

It started raining twenty minutes later.

Not a light drizzle, but a thick, warm downpour that slammed into the windshield and turned the world into a smeared blur of tail lights and shadows. The kind of storm that makes you feel like you're driving underwater. Having to focus on the road gave me time to calm down and reason with myself. Maybe that lady was just nuts, or maybe I had actually been rude.

The radio died first. Just cut out mid song. I didn’t touch it. Didn’t even flinch. I think some part of me had expected it. I left it off, just let the hum of the engine and the thrum of rain drown out the sound of my heavy breathing.

Then the headlights flickered.

Only for a second. But I saw something on the side of the road when they did, a figure just past the guardrail, standing still in the rain, their face pointed toward the highway, toward me. I told myself it was a trick of the light. But a few miles later, I saw them again.

Same stance. Same height. Just… there.

It happened three more times. Always standing. Always watching. Never moving. It wasn't possible for it to be the same person.

The next time my phone lit up, it wasn’t a return call from my sister. It was a calendar notification I hadn’t remembered setting.

“Prepare the hid......”

I couldn't read it all, there was no sound. Just a vibration and those words. When I tapped the screen, it disappeared like it had never been there.

I almost turned around, I had a thought that the familiarity of my home would be better that whatever punishment I was going to face. But I kept going, white knuckled and shaking, because the only thing worse than staying on the road was going back and succumbing to whatever was there.

By the time I pulled into my sister’s driveway, it was five minutes past midnight.

The porch light was off.

I sat in the car, engine idling, trying to decide whether to knock or sleep in the front seat. The air smelled wrong. Like gardenia and vanilla, but sharp now, cloying, like it had turned rancid.

When I finally got out and walked up to the door, I noticed the lock was already broken. Not picked. Smashed. Like someone had taken a rock and slammed it into the handle until it fell off.

I pushed the door open.

The house was dark, all the curtains drawn, no sign of life. I called my sisters name. Nothing. I stepped into the hallway, and the door shut behind me without me touching it.

The house was silent, but not empty. I could hear them, but I tried so desperately for them to not hear me.

There were footsteps overhead. Slow. Measured. And then the sound of multiple people breathing, not loudly but synchronized, like the type of breathing your therapist has you do during a panic attack.

I ran to the kitchen as quietly as I could for a knife.

It wasn’t there. Nothing was. Not a single drawer had utensils. Not even a spoon. The whole kitchen had been gutted. Only a single item sat in the center of the table.

The book.

Still wrapped in muslin. Patient, somehow, like it had been waiting for me to come find it again.

I heard the first footstep behind me and turned, nothing. Then the second. Then the third. Then dozens. Coming from every direction.

They weren’t hiding anymore but it was still too dark for me to see them.

I backed into the hallway, heart in my throat, and caught sight of them through the crack beneath the bedroom door, the light was on, illuminating bare feet. So many. Standing in complete stillness, toes pointed at the seam, as if waiting for the cue to enter.

I ran. I made it to the front door.

It was stuck shut from the outside, like someone was holding the other side so you couldn't pull it open.

A soft whispering began to echo down the stairs, dozens of voices layered atop one another, pleading something I couldn’t understand but knew I’d heard before. From the book? From the dreams?

Something touched my back. Fingertips.

I turned and saw a face. Not my mother.

A woman, gaunt, eyes wide with reverence and madness. I didn't recognize her, but she wore the face of my sister. Behind her, more were coming out of the walls, from the crawlspace, from behind the furniture. They turned on the lights, and stood before me even when I could see them clearly.

None of them spoke.

I didn’t either. I couldn’t. Something in the air made my throat burn. It was thick, warm and sweet, the way meat smells before it spoils. The gardenia and vanilla was unbearable now, it clung to the walls like mold.

The gaunt woman stepped forward and smiled like we were old friends. Her teeth were too small, too filed down. She held in her hands the muslin wrapped book, no longer resting on the kitchen table. She offered it to me like a gift.

I backed into the coat rack and nearly screamed when a jacket met my body. The woman rushed to my side, smothering me, urging me to not panic. She plainly spoke my given name. She pulled me by me neck to face her, I could feel her own fingers gripping me beneath the glove she had made from my sister.

"I love you." She was trying to convince me. "I would die for you" she wept.

"Don't be scared. You recognize me don't you? I'm wearing this to not scare you, it's for you." She waited for a response, but continued without me. "You will help me. I don't want any of you to be afraid."

I shoved her, reaching for the door again, out of instinct more than hope, but the knob was still gone. There was nothing for me to do except claw at the base of the door like an animal.

The cult didn’t move like people, it was like a wave. The same way the ocean is connected, they moved together like they had rehearsed it already, even giving grace to the woman while she tried to fix her skin. They didn’t grab me, not roughly. They laid hands on me like I was sacred. Like I was loved. Smoothed me as if they were trying to comfort me.

That was the worst part.

They were.

Dozens of hands, warm and reverent, held me to the ground and pushed every ounce of air they could out of the lungs. I didn’t fight. I couldn’t. The song had began, my mother’s lullaby, clear and slow, sung by twenty voices in unison. A funeral hymn disguised as comfort.

It felt like my bones would crush under their weight, and I believe they may have. I couldn't hear them break, I couldn't hear anything over the high pitched rushing sound behind my ears, but I felt them give away under the force they were presented with. My body was hot and wet, surely my ribs must have ripped my skin, but I couldn't feel it. Any of it, it was an overwhelming force that overcame me and molded me to its liking, pain filling me like a glass about to spill over. Darkness was forced into my eyes, accompanied by the strained feeling of my eyes about to pop from their sockets.

I awoke in my own bed, the book still tucked into my nightstand. Everything was silent. No dogs barking. No traffic. Nothing in my house was amiss, I don’t think the world stopped. Just my part in it. I’m not afraid, not exactly. I’m just… almost done.

And when I am, I think I’ll smile. And I think I’ll be used.

Not broken. Not killed. Not erased.

Used. For a good cause, you can't cover a field with and inch of fabric.

I will be loved in a way that burns. You'll be loved too.