Perennial

First posted March 2021.

It was not the fault of the house, precisely, that it became haunted. The house was built with perfectly straight walls, ceilings of proper and comfortable height, and rooms that were neither too warm in the summer nor too cold in the winter. Nothing about the house invited evil. Unfortunately, it did not need to invite what existed long before its first stone was laid and would continue to exist long after it had crumbled into dust.

The house stood alone at the top of a hill, and it reminded Lucy of a storybook castle. Its Gothic towers and arched windows spoke of ancient, enduring beauty, and its intricate iron gate gave a sense of protection and safety. Magic was an undeniable presence in the house, and the very air surrounding it felt alive with wonder. As she walked through the door, she sighed in warm contentment that was not to last.

It had always been Lucy’s dream to own a beautiful old house like this. When the house came up for sale at a bank auction, she couldn’t quite believe her luck. Ignoring the warnings of her friends and family against sinking so much money into a wreck that needed so much work, she pledged half her life’s savings toward the acquisition of the house, and promptly set herself to the task of designing uses for the other half. She relished the magnitude of restorative work that lay before her, promising to fill her days with the enchanting project of bringing a long-abandoned house back to life.

She wasted no time getting to work. On her first night in the house, she sat on the floor of what was to be the nursery—not that she had children, or even a partner, yet, but she intended this home to be hers forever, and she planned to prepare it for her future—and sketched her designs for the empty space as she surveyed it. Thunder rumbled outside, and the sound of rain falling heavy on the roof was soothing in its monotony.

A particularly loud crack of thunder sounded, and the light flickered once before cutting out. Placing her sketchbook to the side, she rose to her feet and turned, wondering if she remembered where the fuse box was. Behind her, lightning flashed, illuminating a small figure standing in the doorway ahead.

Lucy froze. The child was no more than six years old, blond with neatly cut hair and wearing what seemed to be an old-fashioned school uniform with a little buttoned white shirt and navy shorts. At the next crack of thunder, the boy ran into the hallway, and Lucy followed.

The boy ran all the way to the end of the hall. Lucy couldn’t see anything in the pitch black other than the boy, who had a dim, soft light about him. He turned a corner, and Lucy raced after him.

When she turned the corner into the tower room, she found herself instead standing outside on a bright, sunny day. The floor beneath her was still stone, but the polish had long worn away and the rug covering it was brittle and threadbare. Remnants of walls stood in varying states of decay, covered with overgrown ivy that wound around the room in a whirlpool of leaves. As she turned slowly, taking in all she saw around her, she caught sight of the boy standing on an exposed beam of the eroding stone tower. He looked no different than he had a moment before—but had it only been a moment? She reached up to the boy, whose gaze had not shifted from her face. He looked at her with a dour expression, not so much as blinking as she held out her arms.

“Come down from there,” said Lucy, gently. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

The boy shook his head. He pointed toward the direction from which they had come, back inside the house. The darkness inside seemed thicker, somehow; before it had been an empty dark, merely the lack of illumination, but now it had a sinister aura of fullness, of the dark containing something hidden from view. Lucy heard a creaking sound from somewhere within. Her rational mind told her it was the settling of the house, but she didn’t quite believe that thought. She turned her head to look back up at the boy, and he was gone.

Fearing the worst, she peered over the side of the half-eroded wall, expecting to see a small body on the ground below. All she saw were overgrown plants sticking up out of the water—and the water gave her pause. She was quite certain her house had no moat the last time she looked outside.

The creaking sound was moving closer to her, but the darkness was an unchanged, opaque wall of shadow. She swallowed nervously, watching the void in front of her. Between creaks there was a dull thud, like a footstep. The creaking thing could not have been more than a foot away from her in the darkness, and Lucy held her breath as she awaited its next step.

At that moment, she awoke in the nursery, clutching at her frantically-beating heart. The lights were on, and she assumed it was the restoration of electricity that woke her up. Were she not still shuddering under waves of fear, she might have laughed at her subconscious mind for turning the heavy rain storm into a flood in her nightmare.

In the house’s years of being unoccupied, nature had crept in at the unattended corners. Moths flew across rooms, considering Lucy’s face no impediment to their journey, vines slithered through the corners of windows, and dirt pushed up through the cracked floorboards. Every room in the house smelled of wet dirt, mould, and decay.

Lucy decided to prioritise the bathrooms in her list of renovations, as having a decent shower would make the rest of the work to do much more bearable. Wearing thick rubber gloves and a mask may or may not have been strictly necessary, but it made her feel better about the situation, at least. The large oval mirror was so clouded over with black spots and greasy stains it was impossible to look into. She lifted it off the wall and very nearly dropped the mirror as she shrieked at the spider she revealed behind it. Having narrowly avoided seven years’ bad luck, she turned her attention to the dusty, dirty porcelain. The sink’s silver taps had once been beautiful, and polishing uncovered their elaborate floral design, with raised tendrils decorating the spout and crawling up to the petals on the handle.

Real flowers echoing their ornamental depiction rose from the bathtub’s drain. Lucy pulled them free with great effort, showering the tub with dirt and broken roots. She had only just turned to deposit the debris in a bag when a squelching sound brought her attention back to the tub just in time to see a swarm of maggots crawl out of the drain. Groaning in disgust, she recoiled, standing up and shielding her face with her arm. None of the DIY books she had read mentioned anything about how to deal with a maggot infestation, and she was just wondering what she could do about them when the maggots were followed by another movement in the drain.

Slowly, something dark and wet rose to the drain’s opening. As Lucy squinted at it, a muddy, grimy hand shot up out of the pipe and splayed itself on the bottom of the tub. Another hand followed it, and slowly, the figure of a man pulled itself out. He was young, but older than the boy she saw before, and dark-haired instead of blond. His neck was unaligned with his lolling head, and his eyes did not focus on her, though she could tell he was looking directly at her.

“He’s coming,” the man whispered in a scratchy, hoarse voice.

“Who?” Lucy asked. She felt cold tears of fear pooling in her eyes and tried to wipe them away with the bare skin of her upper arm, above the top of her gloves.

The man looked at her silently for a moment before repeating, “He’s coming.”

From outside the closed bathroom door, she heard the creaking sound once more. The slow, plodding footsteps seemed to ascend the stairs. Hurriedly, she locked the door, then backed away to the wall on the opposite side. The man watched her silently, and Lucy wasn’t sure if she was imagining pity in his black, dead eyes.

The sound of footsteps grew closer to the door. She held her breath, listening intently as her eyes watered.

He knocked.

Lucy remained plastered against the wall, her knees half-bent and shaking. There was nowhere to go but out through the window, and she didn’t think falling from the first floor was a decent escape plan. He knocked again.

A flash of light shone through the window behind her and she turned to look outside. What had been a bright, sunny morning had suddenly become a dark, stormy night. When she turned back, the man was gone and the door was open. Her heart leapt into her throat, but she saw no one standing in the doorway, and the house beyond was bright with daylight.

It took her several minutes to regain enough courage to leave the room. She peered around the door frame, looking in both directions twice before stepping out of the bathroom. A heavy weight still settled in her gut, however, and she ran to the tower room down the hall to which the first boy had led her. The room was still intact, with polished stone joined together in a neat, cosy circle and the lush burgundy rug still in possession of all its gold tassels. Out the window, she could see down the hill to the neighbouring forest with no sign of rising floodwaters. She finally allowed herself a deep exhale and returned to her work.

The lack of unusual occurrences over the next few weeks lulled Lucy into a sense of security. At first she made herself believe the stress and isolation of working alone on her new house had provoked her subconscious into nightmarish hallucinations, but soon after that she forgot they had ever occurred at all. She moved from the upstairs rooms to downstairs, asserting her presence in every corner of the house with new wallpaper, fresh paint, luxurious draperies, and elegant light fixtures.

Her very last project in the house was the front parlour. Though she expected to invite people over to see the fruits of her labour at some point in the future, she had no immediate plans to do so, and thus designated the entertaining room to be the last on her list. Upon hanging the last of the new curtains, she stepped back to look at them with an overwhelming sense of satisfaction. She loosed them from the tiebacks, clicked the lamp on, and collapsed into her large green armchair, finally and completely at home.

“Would you like to play?”

Lucy opened her eyes at the sound of a little girl’s voice. The child in question stood by a large, round, wooden table across the room, setting up a game of checkers. She had a large pink bow set at an angle on top of her head, matched to her pressed linen dress trimmed with lace. The girl looked expectantly at Lucy.

Nodding hesitantly, Lucy rose from the chair. She took a few steps toward the girl before pausing and backtracking to the curtain. She opened it, afraid of what she might see. It was early evening, just as it had been when she closed the curtain, and the red-gold setting sun cast beams of light across the pink and purple streaks in the sky. Leaving the curtain open, she walked over to the table.

“You go first,” the little girl said.

Once more for good measure, Lucy rubbed her eyes and blinked. The little girl was still there. If she was a hallucination, she was at least a persistent one. Lucy moved her first piece, and suddenly the room was full of bright midday sunlight. Turning around, she ran to the window and looked out. Vines grew up out of the water and attached themselves to the windowpane with tiny tendrils. A stiff breeze blew the tops of the distant trees.

The little girl moved one of her own checkers pieces. “You’re very strange.”

“I’m strange?” Lucy asked as she returned.

The girl nodded. “Always at the windows.”

Not quite knowing how to respond, Lucy tapped one of her pieces as she considered her next move instead. She didn’t think asking her hallucinations questions was bound to be very productive, and if they weren’t hallucinations, well. Those answers were probably best left unheard.

The two played checkers in silence for a while until a booming roll of thunder shook the windows and the lamp went out. A distant footfall was followed by a long, drawn-out creak.

“He’s coming,” the girl whispered. Lucy looked down at her to see her previously calm, friendly face gone pale, and her eyes dark and wide.

“Who’s coming?”

The girl ducked beneath the table and Lucy followed. “Mr. Wildface.”

The footsteps were heavy on the stairs, echoing through the hollow wood.

“Who is Mr. Wildface?” Lucy asked.

Ignoring Lucy’s question, the girl looked toward the open parlour door and mumbled, “Can’t hide. Can’t stop him.”

Lucy didn’t have time to ask before the footsteps landed loud on the ground floor. A hissing, groaning noise, too quiet to be heard over the creaking from far away, grew louder as the steps came closer.

With each successive step, the weather changed. With one step, daylight illuminated the room, and with the next, they were plunged into stormy darkness again. All the while, the creaking, hissing, and groaning filled the air, louder and louder as the creature drew nearer.

He stopped briefly in the parlour’s entryway. Lucy saw what looked like two giant tree trunks with roots spreading out like toes from each one. The creature breathed heavily. Slowly, she leaned forward to see above the edge of the table over her. The creature’s wooden body creaked as he inhaled and exhaled, yellow light visible between the cracks in the bark as he breathed. His eyes glowed that same yellow, pulsing with a sickly aura. His arms and hands were clawed, leafless branches, and as he began to move again, he dragged those gnarled hands along the walls, tearing away the new decorations she had just completed.

“It’s no use,” the little girl said, and she patted Lucy’s hand before she stood up from beneath the table.

“No!” she whispered, but it was too late. The creature stopped to look at the little girl, and it creaked as a grin spread across its face. Lucy scrambled out from underneath the table and yelled, “Leave her alone!”

As she straightened up, she saw the boy, the man, and the girl, each of them standing upright, facing her with empty, black eyes, and wrapped in tree branches that seemed to pulse with the breaths of the creature the girl had called Mr. Wildface. Taking a step toward Lucy, the tree-being emitted a low, chuckling breath, and the world went black.

The house stood and decayed for many years more, silent and, to the unknowing observer, unoccupied. Through the windows and holes in the wasting walls, dark eyes watched as a small boat rowed over the new lake toward the house. Incorporeal ears heard a man say, while looking up at the ruinous house with anticipation and excitement, “It’ll take some work, to be sure, but we can tame it.” His companion laughed over the distant sound of creaking wood.