Chapter 7

I look back at the white salt lines in horror but before I can think of a response, a guttural scream pierces the air from the master bedroom above us.

Charlie clutches Bryce’s leg, a tear streaking down his face. Bethany puts a hand over Harlow’s upturned ear, pressing her tighter against her shoulder in the hopes she’ll stay asleep.

“What is that?” I shout, but the screaming is too loud for my voice to carry.

Bryce guides Charlie to my side and I kneel down, swiping at the tears now spilling from his eyes. I wrap my arms around him, trying to reassure him that everything will be okay—even as the notion feels further from the truth than ever.

Bryce makes his way to the stairs, but he gets no more than one foot on them when the screaming stops. A moment later, the unmistakable wailing of a newborn baby replaces it, followed shortly after by the humming of a lullaby.

For several minutes, the entire house is filled with a flashing series of crying, humming, and shushing. The cries of the baby transform from a newborn to an infant and then eventually, to a toddler, before they change all together into giggles and laughter.

“Alice, smile,” rings out in a woman’s cheerful voice.

“Alice!” a man’s voice happily shouts. He is met by the giggle of a toddler and the tiny scamper of bare feet against the hardwood floor. It is so close it sounds like it passes right by us.

A door thuds closed.

“There’s my beautiful girl!”

“Mary?”

“In the kitchen.”

When the sounds stop, Charlie pulls his head away from me to look around but there is nothing there but the darkness still engulfing the foyer.

“What’s happening?” Bethany whispers. “What are all those sounds?”

“I–I’m not sure.” I stammer.

The walls begin to shake again, a steady trembling that sends Charlie grasping at my shirt again. A burst of static crackles through the air from the family room, like the sound of an old speaker coming to life.

“. . .three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. Reports say President Kennedy has been seriously wounded. . .” Another burst of static washes

out the sound of the old television broadcast until all that remains is a low electric hum and then the soft crying of a woman.

“Mary?” the same man from before says, his voice low and gentle.

“I heard,” the woman says, and then the soft cry transforms into a loud sob, keeping time with the trembling walls.

“Memories,” I say quietly. Bethany stares at me blankly.

“What?” Bryce asks.

“The house. It’s playing us their memories,” I clarify.

“How is that possible?” Bryce asks but there is no time to answer before more voices fill the air around us. We follow them from room to room as the house plays us the sounds of the past.

The happy laughter and the scamper of children’s feet down the hallways transforms into shouting and the slamming of doors until a dark gloom settles deep into my bones.

A screaming match between Mary and Robert unfolds in the master bedroom—Robert accusing her of being unfaithful. I can just make out the quiet crying of children in the hallway outside the door. I pull Charlie closer and he whimpers against me.

“Why don’t we just leave, then?” Mary’s voice screeches. “I’ll take the kids and we’ll go stay with my parents,” she threatens.

“Over your dead body,” Robert growls, slowly.

Moments later there is a loud banging sound, followed by the slamming of the front door downstairs. It is the last sound the house plays for us.

Its final memory.

We stand around in silence, too stunned to speak.

“I want to leave,” Charlie cries into my hair as I hold him tightly against me.

“We can’t leave,” Bethany reminds him. “We’re locked in here.”

“Why?” Bryce says, his voice detached. “Which one of them is haunting us?”

“We need to go upstairs,” I announce to shocked faces.

“We are upstairs,” Bethany says, as if speaking to a child.

“To the attic,” I clarify. “I think there might be answers up there.” I’m not even sure if I believe it, but we have to try.

“We’ll go,” Bryce says. “You kids stay here.”

“No!” Bethany and Charlie cry in unison.

“We don’t want to stay here alone,” Bethany adds.

Bryce and I exchange a look before he finally nods.

“Okay,” he says. “We’ll all go.”

The house is still dark, none of the lights will turn on even now that the haunting voices have subsided. The air escapes my lungs as I glance down the hallway in the direction of the attic door. The door at the bottom is standing wide open despite none of us going near it.

As we creep closer, I can see that the door at the top is open too. A single hanging bulb casting an eerie glow down the rickety stairwell.

“Are you sure about this?” Bryce says, tensing beside me. I offer him a feeble attempt at a smile.

“Only one way to find out,” I shrug.

We creep up the stairs single file. Bryce takes the lead and I trail along behind the kids. Harlow has managed to stay asleep through all of the noise and as I watch her chest rise and fall in Bethany’s arms I can’t help but flash back to our first morning here and the calm sensation that overtook me as I relaxed on the front porch swing.

In the attic, the Jenkins’ box is still sitting in the middle of the floor where I left it and I lift the lid once more, sorting through the items on top that I’ve already looked though. The will stands out and I pass it to Bryce.

“Look, a copy of the will. Except Bryce?” He watches me intently. “You’re not in it,” I say, shaking my head.

He settles on the floor beside me, thumbing through it while I dig to the bottom of the box for any clues that might help us figure out what’s going on here.

“Who did you say you spoke to about the inheritance?” I ask as he stares blankly at the pages in front of him.

“Some man,” he answers numbly. “His name was Harold. Or Hector. He said he was settling the previous owner’s estate after his passing.”

“Henry?” I ask, the pieces clicking into the place.

“That could—wait. Like the boy who lived here?”

“Something happened to the family that lived here before us,” I say. Their old family photo is poised in my hand. Bethany snags it away, brushing her fingers over the faded paper.

“They look like us.” she says absently.

My fingers brush against a heavy card and as I lift it from the box in front of me, my hands begin to shake.

“No,” I breathe.

The room stands still, the rest of my family fading out as darkness encroaches my peripherals.

“We look like them,” I finally add.

The card in my hand is of a man and a woman, smiling and in love. Between them a little girl in a red satin dress, and beside them a teenage daughter and an eight-year-old son.

It isn’t the Jenkins who lived here before us though.

It’s us.

Last year’s Christmas card—snapped at a scenic lookout in the desert of Arizona. I remember that day like it was yesterday. It was ninety degrees and the sun was glaring down on us at midday. We were all sweating and grumpy by the time we snapped this picture.

We were just about to call it quits and hope we got a good one when Charlie told some joke about a cactus that made us all cackle deliriously and the photographer captured the perfect photo at just the right moment.

“Bryce,” I say, unable to mask the horror in my own voice. With shaking hands, I pass him the photo. “How did this end up here?”

He stares at it, unblinking. He shakes his head, nearly imperceptibly.

“It’s not possible,” he says so quietly I barely hear him.

“You never met them?” I ask. My mind is reeling, trying desperately to form some kind of connection.

“No. Robert was related to me somehow, but my family never spoke about him. Never came near this house. If he died and left this place to me, I don’t even know how he knew I existed.”

I consider this for a moment. We send Christmas cards to all of our extended family. Any one of them could have shared the card with Robert or his living children, if they were somehow still communicating with him after all these years. That still doesn’t explain how it ended up here though.

“Who sent the cleaning crew in before we arrived?”

“The same guy. Why? What are you thinking?”

“Maybe you were talking to Henry. Maybe someone else in your family has been in touch with them all this time and gave them the Christmas card.”

“But why?” he cuts in. “Why us?”

“Mary and the little girl went missing. The police never solved the case and then Robert took the kids and left. No one ever saw them again,” I spit out, trying to summarize everything I learned about them as quickly as I can.

“What does that have to do with us, Molly? How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been looking into it since strange things started happening around here,” I glance nervously at my hands. Ashamed I never told Bryce how bad things had gotten before it was too late. “Maybe Henry was hoping we could figure out what happened now that his dad is gone? If strange things happened with the house when they were here, maybe he thought it would respond better to a family that looked like his.”

“That’s enough,” Bryce says, his voice slightly raised. “We need to get out of here.”

He slams the will down on the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust. I stand to follow him, still trying to figure out how our Christmas card ended up in this vacant house, in a box labeled 1960.

I scoop Charlie up off the floor and Bethany races down the stairs ahead of me, still carrying Harlow, though I know she must be tired.

Bryce storms straight into the dining room, picking up one of the heavy oak chairs that sits around the dining table. Without a second thought, he rears back and slams it against the window. The pane vibrates from the impact but the window remains unbroken.

He swings again, harder this time. The chair bounces off the glass with as much force as he swung it with but still there isn’t so much as a crack left in its wake.

He tries again, and again, smashing the chair into the window until he is gasping for air as the chair finally crumbles beneath the weight of his desperate blows.

“Bryce,” I say. “It’s no use.”

“We have to do something, Molly!” he shouts. I wince at his raised voice and a flicker of regret crosses his face. “I’m sorry,” he says, crossing the room to stand in front of me.

I nod by way of answer and he goes to the kitchen and grabs a cast iron skillet, throwing it at the window on the back door. It ricochets off the glass, slamming to the floor with a loud bang.

The walls around us tremble again and I suck in air, preparing to hear more voices but there are none. Instead the walls continue to vibrate softly and then I notice moisture seeping from them again.

Streaks of water slide down the glossy paint. The house is crying again.

The house is crying.

“It’s not a ghost,” I announce. The pieces all snapping into place as if a puzzle has been laid out in front of me this whole time.

Everyone stares at me expectantly as I try to form the words to explain what I think is going on here. Even as I begin to speak, I know it sounds crazy.

“We’re not being haunted. It isn’t a ghost. It’s the house.”

“What are you saying, Molls?” Bryce asks.

“The house is,” I pause, unable to rationalize what I know now to be true. “The house is alive.”

“The house is. . .alive?” Bryce repeats back as a question.

“Yes,” I confirm. “Look.” I point to the walls, still shuddering and excreting unexplainable trails of water. “It’s crying.”

“The house is crying?” Bryce asks. He sounds angry as he adds, “why is the house crying? It’s locked us in here and scared the children. What does it have to be sad about?” He spins around, yelling his accusations into the depths of its darkness.

“You hurt it,” Bethany realizes. “You slammed the chair into the windows and it hurt.”

“I hurt it?” he scoffs. “THEN MAYBE IT SHOULD LET US GO!” He picks up the skillet and swings it for the window over the sink.

The walls shake harder and a deep growl thunders around us. The water on the walls begins to fall harder, reaching the floors at our feet.

“Bryce, stop!” I say, placing a hand on his arm. I run my fingers down to his, gently prying the skillet from his grip. He doesn’t protest as I take it from him and sit it down.

He leans his hands on the counter, dropping his head forward in defeat.

“Why are you doing this?” I call down the hallway. “What do you want?”

The shaking turns to a gentle rumble before stopping all together.

“Mary!” Robert’s voice rings out back from the foyer and I think maybe the house is starting its reel of audio memories over again but then my head snaps towards the family room as Mary’s voice calls out, “Robert?”

“Alice!” Mary says excitedly, followed by Alice’s voice crying, “Henry!”

Finally, they all join in unison from somewhere upstairs to exclaim, “MABEL!” and then the house falls silent again.

“It wants its family,” I realize with a shaking voice. “It thought we were them.”

“Mom,” Bethany says, her voice cracking, “what is that sound?”

It isn’t like the other sounds we’ve heard that were played back to us as if played through a speaker, reaching back through time. This one is coming from the hallway, a scraping noise and I know at once what it must be.

I pull my phone from my pocket and turn the flashlight on, shining it down the length of the hallway corridor.

Etched on the cherry wood are the words: Don’t leave me.

I glance back at Bryce with a worried expression.

“You have to let us go,” I say. “We aren’t them. We aren’t the family you lost.”

There is a long pause before the scratching sound fills the air again. This time when I glance at the wall it only says: I’m sorry.

A nervous laugh escapes Bryce’s lips as he reads the words.

“You’re sorry?” he challenges. “You’re still holding us in here like prisoners!”

“Bryce,” I warn. “Let’s talk about this.”

“Talk about what, Molly? This house has been terrorizing us since we got here.”

“I think we should stay,” Bethany interjects, joining us in the hallway. “I know it’s done some. . .scary things.” She grimaces at the understatement. “But I think it’s just lonely.”

“Wait,” I say, remembering Bethany’s words from earlier. “You were right.” I turn to her. “You said the house was relieved when it said you came back.”

“Yeah, like it thought we weren’t going to,” she adds.

“Because it did. Especially when we left with its doll—the last reminder it had of the family who lived here before us. When they left,” I nod towards Mabel, tucked safely beneath Harlow’s arm again, “they never came back.”

A rush of air hisses past us.

“So, what are you suggesting?” Bryce asks, but the look on his face tells me he already knows.

“What do you think, Buddy?” I ask, turning to Charlie, who has been unusually quiet since he stopped hiding behind me a few minutes ago.

“Is it safe?” he all but whimpers.

“We won’t stay if it isn’t,” I whisper for just him to hear. He studies me for a moment before he sniffles and gives one firm nod.

“Okay,” he says, bravely.

I turn back to Bryce, my hardest sell.

“I know this is a lot,” I start. “I’m not asking you to forget about everything that’s happened.”

“Good,” he says sternly, glancing around the dark foyer. “It could have killed us. It still could.” He says this last part to only me, not wanting to scare the children where they huddle, just out of earshot.

“Exactly. But it didn’t. And when Harlow nearly fell to her death our first night here, it was the house that saved her life. I never could have reached her in time.”

He watches me, unsure. I know I’m asking a lot of him when tonight has already taken so much.

“You don’t have to trust the house,” I say, reaching up to brush my fingers gently against his cheek. “Can you trust me?” His jaw clenches and then unclenches beneath my touch, his eyes softening only slightly.

“I always trust you,” he finally says. “One wrong move and we’re gone,” he declares.

“I agree.” I turn away from him, into the depth of house that still holds us captive beneath its supernatural will. “Okay, listen,” I call into the darkness. “If we stay, there have to be rules. You can’t ever scare us like this again.” The house doesn’t respond so I keep going. “We have to

be able to come and go. We have jobs and work and responsibilities. But if we promise to always come back, can you promise not to scare us anymore? No more locking us in. No more playing the sound track of your memories. We’ll fill you with new ones. Nice ones. But you can’t keep us locked in here like a prison.”

I am met with an earth-shattering silence that settles heavily between us. I am about to give up. To admit that Bryce is right.

Then from the silence, an unmistakable sound.

Every lock, on every window and door in the house, releasing in unison, just as the front door swings in a fraction of an inch.

An answer from the house. It accepts.

We’re free.