Fiction – Seán Hill

A Haunting

It was a small house in a relatively new neighbourhood that had only been a stretch of sparsely-inhabited countryside for centuries beforehand. The house had six rooms, four up top consisting of three rooms made into bedrooms and a bathroom, and two down below, a sitting room and kitchen. The house at that time, home to three young children and their parents, was naturally full of sounds, and you can tell when some of those sounds don’t quite fit. I don’t think I can give many specifics, but the first things I distinctly remember were footsteps. And not a slow few footfalls, but an almost continuous coming and going outside the rooms I would sit in. I remember I would listen to it, and wonder what it was my mother was looking for, but for some reason I didn’t want to help.

It was when I began to see things in the next few years did older events take on a new light. It was never constant, it came in waves. For a few days it might be particularly bad, then for a span of weeks there’d be nothing more than the creak of a floorboard. When it happened, I’d see a shape maybe in an upstairs window as I walked home, or I’d be in our small back garden and see something through the open back door, moving upstairs. Sometimes I’d be in the house, and would see a shape turning a corner. A child’s imagination is unruly, and my siblings and I all had our fair share of monsters under the bed. But this was different. I began to become nervous in the house, especially alone, or even just when I was the only one upstairs or downstairs. On days off early from school, from which I could walk home myself, I can’t begin to tell you how wrong it felt to dread coming up to the front door of my own home because I’d have to be in there, alone.

It all began to pile up. For me, and for everyone else. But no one talked about it. I know my siblings heard things from the way they seemed preoccupied. I never caught my parents talking about it or sharing looks. Sometimes I’d find someone in a mood, but no one said anything, and it began to gnaw at me. So one day, when I was about twelve years old, I confided in my brother, with whom I had grown a little distant as he entered his mid-teens and I was still a child, that I thought our house was haunted. It was the shock of my life when he said he thought so too. We spent some minutes asking each other questions. Fact is, it had been going on for roughly as long as we both thought. My brother told me he couldn’t bear to walk around a corner in the house any more. He was convinced he was going to walk right into it.

One particular thing comes to mind: we often found doors closed. This was especially horrible for my brother and I, who had taken to leaving doors as wide open as we could throughout the house. There was always the notion that something had closed it, and was waiting on the other side. There were times, I’m not proud to admit, we slept elsewhere than our own bedroom because the door was closed when we got to it.

Over time, the atmosphere in the house became oppressive. My brother spent much time out, I spent many weekends staying over at friends’ houses, my parents, who only shared a handful of particularly bad experiences, rarely left each other’s sides. I think we had all come to an understanding, and though we never talked of it together, things were passed between individuals. We were always waiting for something to happen so it would be over for the moment.

It was near my fifteenth birthday, during a period when it wasn’t especially bad. It was the end of summer holidays and a late weekday morning. The bathroom was quite small, and we had a walk in shower, slightly raised off the ground. The shower itself was in the corner, with doubled over, opaque curtain of thin plastic on a rail overhead. I was in the shower when it happened. Out of nowhere, like an invasive thought, I got that awful feeling a person gets when they’re being watched. A gut response, they say, to being hunted. I didn’t quite know what to do, I just tried to finish washing off. In the rush, I didn’t notice that something had pressed itself up against the curtain. I think I stumbled backwards into the wall, watching fingertips pressing and curling, the dome of a head pushing into the plastic. The way the curtain clung to it as it twisted itself up violently in it disgusted me in a way I can’t begin to describe. Light from the frosted window barely silhouetted it, but I could tell it was horribly thin. Then, as it moved towards me, the curtain was pulled taut on its rings like vacuum sealing over its face, and I began to scream.

I remember crying into my mother’s arms, and no one asked why. I spent some nights with an uncle. I couldn’t tell you what he was told, or what I was like. I do remember serious talk between my parents for days after. Not a month later, we moved out. I remember that face, and it still comes to me in a nightmare. I never followed up on the house in all the time after, to see if it couldn’t keep tenants, or if it remained empty. Or, I should say, mostly empty.