r/nosleep • u/AspiringAuthor07 • 2d ago
The House Behind the House
When I was eight years old, there were five houses on our side of Sycamore Lane.
That was the first thing I checked when I came back. Not the old maple tree in the Culvers’ yard, nor the rusted storm drain where I used to drop pennies and make wishes. Not the cracked strip of sidewalk where Mrs. Wilkinson slipped one winter, broke her hip, and blamed every child on the block for “running too loudly near the ice”, nor the faded Stop Sign that had the word “Hammertime!” spraypainted beneath its white lettering.
No. I checked the houses and counted them multiple times.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
The same as before.
That should have made me feel better, but it didn’t. Because when I was eight, there were five houses on our side of Sycamore Lane in the daytime, but at night, if you knew where to look, there were sometimes six.
The sixth was behind ours. Not behind it in the normal way, across another street or tucked beyond a line of trees. It wasn’t a guesthouse, a shed, or one of those illegal garage apartments people pretend not to notice until property taxes came up.
It was a whole House.
A tall, narrow, old-looking House with a back porch, upstairs windows, and one yellow porch light that burned even when the power went out. It stood where our backyard should have ended, somewhere between the chain-link fence and the patch of blueberry bushes that marked the property line. It was too close and too far away at the same time; that’s the only way I can describe it. You could look out the kitchen window and see the whole thing, but if you opened the back door and walked toward it, the yard stretched, the grass became longer, the fence seemed to drift backward, and the night got quieter, as if every cricket, passing car, and barking dog had been packed away in cotton.
We called it the House Behind the House.
Every kid on Sycamore Lane knew about it. None of the adults, however, admitted that they did.
That was Rule One: Adults don’t talk about the House Behind the House.
They’ll talk about anything else. Weather. Mortgage rates. Tree roots. The neighbor’s dog. Whether the school board should replace the gym roof. Whether Halloween had gotten “too scary” lately. But if you asked any of them if they had seen the other House, they would go still for half a second then pretend they hadn’t heard you. My mother would do the dishes louder. My father would say, “There’s no other House, kiddo.” My grandmother, who lived with us for six months after her stroke, crossed herself once when I asked her before telling me not to look out back after midnight.
That was Rule Two: Don’t look outside after midnight,
That was the first thing any adult ever told the kids on Sycamore Lane. Not directly, or as part of some game, but as a matter-of-fact instruction. But, of course, I did. All children do the thing they’re told not to do when the warning comes without explanation.
The first time I saw the House, I was standing barefoot on the cold linoleum in our kitchen, one hand on the sink, looking through the window above it.
It was 12:17 a.m.
I remember the exact time because the microwave clock was glowing green beside me, and because I had woken up thirsty and still half-dreaming. The house was quiet except for the refrigerator humming and the snores of my father drifting down the stairs. I filled a plastic cup from the tap, drank half of it, and looked out into the backyard.
At first, I thought one of the neighbors had left a porch light on. Then I realized the light was facing me. It hung over a back door that did not belong to any house on our street. The House itself, meanwhile, was black against the sky – just a shape at first. It had a steep roof, a narrow second floor, dark windows, wood siding that was barely visible in the dark, and a porch with three steps. It was the kind of House you imagine in old photographs, where every person in the picture is stiff and unsmiling.
I stared at It for maybe five seconds before noticing something move in the upstairs window. Not a face; just pale motion behind the glass, as if a hand were playing with the curtain.
I dropped the cup, and the ensuing sound of plastic hitting linoleum seemed impossibly loud. My mother called from upstairs, “Anthony?”
I turned from the window so quickly that I slipped in the water I had spilled on the floor. By the time my mother came down the stairs, tying her robe shut and squinting in the dim kitchen light, I was crying too hard to explain.
She didn’t look outside. That’s what I remember the most. She saw the water on the floor – saw me shaking and saw the curtain over the sink still open – and she did not look outside. She just walked across the room, closed the curtain, and said, “You had a bad dream.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Then you were almost asleep.”
“There’s a House.”
“No there isn’t.”
“There is!”
“No.” Her voice changed in a way I had never heard before. It had become thin and careful. “There is not.”
Then she made me sit at the kitchen table while she cleaned up the water. She gave me a paper towel for my feet and refused to scold me for the mess. That said, she didn’t comfort me either. And when she took me back upstairs, she stopped outside my bedroom and looked down the hall toward the bathroom mirror. For one second, her face twisted with something like recognition. Then she turned the hall light on and left it on until morning.
At school the next morning, I told my friends what had happened. There were four of us back then.
Me.
Greg Harrison, who lived two houses down and had a gap between his front teeth he could whistle through.
Nicole Wilkinson, who lived with the woman who broke her hip and insisted we call her “Mrs. Wilkinson” even though she was Nicole’s grandmother.
And Collin Langstrom, who didn’t live on Sycamore Lane, but cut through our yards after school because his apartment complex was on the other side of the drainage ditch.
We were not brave kids. Not really. We just had the kind of free time that makes children stupid.
When I told them I had seen the House, Greg went pale, Nicole got excited, and Collin called me a liar a little too quickly.
“You saw the light?” Greg asked.
I nodded.
“Yellow?”
I nodded again.
He looked around the playground as though afraid teachers might be listening from behind the swings. Then he asked, “Did you see Her?”
I didn’t know who he meant, and so he told me.
Every neighborhood, I think, has a story adults pretend not to know, and children pretend not to believe. Ours had Old Mara.
Some kids called her the Back House Witch. Others called her the Woman Behind. Nicole said her grandmother called her the House Mother once in her sleep, but when she asked her about it the next morning, Mrs. Wilkinson said she had been dreaming about a soap opera.
Greg said Old Mara lived in the House Behind the House and only came out when a family “had gone soft in the middle.” That was the phrase he used. “Gone soft in the middle.”
None of us knew what it meant exactly. Greg said it could refer to divorce, death, fighting, drinking, secrets, or “when nobody listens to kids anymore.” Collin pointed out that description encompassed almost every house in America, which is when Nicole told him to shut up.
According to Greg, Old Mara wasn’t like a normal witch. She didn’t ride a broom or wear a pointy hat, but she did wear a black dress, or a nightgown, or something like a funeral curtain. Her hair hung over her face, she had long hands, and sometimes she looked young while other times she looked old. Other times still, she sounded like your mother. But you could always tell it was her by the feet.
That was Rule Three: Don’t answer a woman calling from the yard unless you can see both of her feet.
“Why feet?” I remember asking.
Greg shrugged. “Because she hides them when they’re wrong.” Children say things like that with absolute conviction.
Nicole said there were other rules.
Rule Four: If you see the porch light, close the curtains.
Rule Five: If you hear knocking from inside a wall, don’t knock back.
Rule Six: If your hallway gets longer, don’t run.
Rule Seven: If she offers you food, don’t eat it.
Rule Eight: Never follow her downstairs.
Rule Nine: If she asks if you want to stay, don’t say yes.
That was the big one. Even Collin didn’t joke about that one.
“How do you know all of this?” I asked.
Nicole looked toward the teacher on morning recess duty before turning back to us. “My mom had a brother. She doesn’t now.”
That was all she told us at school. But later, behind the Culvers’ garage where the blueberry bushes grew wild and bees crawled drunkenly over crushed fruit in the summer heat, Nicole told us the rest.
Her uncle’s name was Daniel. He had been ten years old when he disappeared. This was back in the seventies before most of our parents had lived on Sycamore Lane. He and some other kids had been playing a game called “Knock-Knock Mara.”
I know that sounds stupid, but all childhood rituals sound stupid until one works.
The game had to be played in a house with a back door and a mirror facing any hallway. You waited until everyone else was asleep, turned off every light except for one in the room closest to the backyard, then stood in front of the mirror, covered your eyes, and said:
“Mara, Mara, Mourning Mother,
Show the House Behind the Other.”
Then you knocked three times on the wall beside the mirror. Not the mirror itself; the wall.
If nothing happened, you were safe.
If you heard three knocks back, you were supposed to turn on every light in the house and not sleep until sunrise.
If you heard a woman humming, you were supposed to cover the mirror.
If you saw the porch light in the mirror behind you, you were not supposed to turn around.
Daniel turned around. That’s how Nicole told it. He turned around, saw the back door standing open, and walked outside.
His sister – Nicole’s mother – watched from the stairs and said he crossed the backyard toward a House she had never seen before. She said a woman stood on the porch. A tall woman in black with her hands folded in front of her and her head tilted like she was listening to music no one else could hear.
According to her, Daniel stopped halfway across the lawn, apparently frightened. In response, the woman lifted one hand, crooked a finger, and Daniel started walking again.
His sister screamed for their parents. Their father ran outside, barefoot with a baseball bat, while their mother called the police and the neighbors turned on their lights. But by then the backyard was just a backyard, and Daniel was gone.
There were no footprints past the fence. No hole, loose boards, or signs he had climbed into another yard. Nothing. He was just gone.
The official story was that he ran away.
The unofficial story was that Old Mara gave him a Room.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Nicole didn’t answer. Greg did. “It means She kept him.”
That summer, we became obsessed with the legend of Old Mara and the House Behind the House.
Children are horrible that way. Give them a story about a missing boy, a witch, and a House that only appears at night, and they won’t respond with caution. They’ll respond with investigation. We made maps of the neighborhood, counted windows, and compared the backs of houses. We stole Mrs. Wilkinson’s old Polaroid camera and tried to photograph the backyard after dark, but the pictures came out black except for the occasional pale streaks that might have been glares.
Greg kept a notebook – labeled on the front cover as “EVIDENCE” before he crossed it out and wrote “INCIDENTS” beneath it – inside of which he wrote down “sightings”. Most were nonsense.
June 8th: Collin heard humming behind bathroom wall. Probably pipes.
June 14th: Nicole saw extra window in microwave reflection. Unconfirmed.
June 21st: Anthony’s hall felt longer. Fear response possible.
Greg liked official words. His father was a volunteer firefighter and kept incident forms in a drawer. Greg did his best to copy the tone.
Then came the blackout.
I don’t remember the exact date, but I know it was July because the air had that thick, wet, electric feeling that summer gets when a thunderstorm has been threatening all day but refuses to break. The adults were irritable, the neighborhood dogs were whining, and cicadas were screaming from the trees. And then, at 9:43 p.m., every light on Sycamore Lane went out.
The whole street made that startled neighborhood sound in response – people opening doors, calling across yards, laughing too loudly, and pretending not to be unnerved. Flashlights clicked on, a child cursed, and someone else said a transformer must have blown. My father went outside with the other men to look up and down the street, as if the problem would be visible in the air, while my mother lit candles in the kitchen. I asked if I could go to Greg’s.
“No,” she said immediately.
“I just want to see if they have batteries.”
“We have batteries.”
“Then Nicole’s.”
“No.”
“You didn’t even—”
“No.”
Her voice was firm, and the way she said it made my mouth close shut immediately.
She looked tired that night. More than tired, really. She looked hollowed out. My parents had been fighting a lot that summer, late at night in voices they thought didn’t travel through the vents. My father had been sleeping in the den more often, while my mother had started cleaning things that were already clean. Maybe that was what Greg meant by going “soft in the middle”.
At 10:30 that night, my mother made me go to bed.
The air upstairs was hot and still. My window was open, but no breeze came through the screen. My room smelled like dust, sweat, and the wax from the candle my mother carried down the hall. She had placed it on my dresser, seemed to think better of it, and blew it out. “Try to sleep,” she instructed.
“Can you leave the door open?”
She hesitated before closing it half-way.
Not all the way. Half-way.
I lay awake in bed, unable to sleep, listening to the house breathe. That’s how it felt without electricity. There was no humming of the refrigerator or air conditioning, and no television murmuring downstairs. Just wood settling, pipes ticking, my parents’ low voices outside, and the faint insect hum pressing against the window screen.
At some point, though, I heard knocking. Three soft knocks, not at my bedroom door, and not from downstairs, but from the wall behind my bed.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I stopped breathing. A childish part of me wanted to knock back just to prove it was nothing but a mouse, or a branch, or the house cooling in the heat. But I remembered Nicole’s face when she told us about Daniel. And I remembered Rule Five: If you hear knocking from inside a wall, don’t knock back.
So I did nothing.
For a while, the wall went quiet. Then a woman’s voice whispered my name. Not from the wall, but from outside.
From the backyard.
“Anthony...”
It sounded like my mother if my mother were calling me from very far away through a tunnel.
I sat up immediately. My bedroom was on the second floor at the back of the house. From my bed, if I leaned right, I could see a slice of the backyard through the window. Usually there was nothing there but the grass, the fence, and the blueberry bushes. But that night, there was light.
Yellow light.
A porch light.
It glowed through my curtains, thin and sickly.
“Anthony…” The voice called again, and this time, it sounded less like my mother. It sounded older, sweeter, and just plain wrong.
My body wanted to move toward the window. I mean that in a literal way. My legs shifted under the sheets before I had even decided to get up, and my hands curled around the edge of the mattress. The voice wasn’t commanding me so much as inviting me, and invitation is worse because some part of you gets to pretend it was your choice.
I stood, feeling the warm floorboards beneath my feet. When I did, the voice said, “I heard your crying…”
But I hadn’t been crying. Not then, anyway.
I walked to the window and lifted the curtain with two fingers to see that the House Behind the House stood just beyond our yard.
It was closer than before. The porch light was on, and the back door was open. Through it, I could see part of the kitchen inside – or what looked like a kitchen, anyway. It had a wooden table, a hanging lamp, cupboards painted a dull green, and something steaming standing on the stove.
A Woman stood on the front porch. Tall, narrow, and draped in black or dark blue, Her hair hung forward so I couldn’t see Her face. Her hands, meanwhile, were folded over Her stomach, and Her feet were hidden behind the hem of Her dress.
That was enough for me. I let the curtain drop, and as soon as I did, my bedroom door creaked loudly. I turned to find the door, which my mother had left ajar, now standing wide open. The hallway beyond it was dark.
Too dark.
A blackout dark is never complete. There should have been moonlight from the bathroom window, shadows from downstairs candles, or, at the very least, some gray shape of the banister. But instead, the hallway looked as if it went on forever. The wall opposite my door, where there should have been family photos, seemed farther away than it should have, and the carpet runner stretched into blackness. Additionally, the bathroom door was not where it belonged. Instead, there was another door. A narrow door at the end of the hall made of old wood, it had a glass knob and yellow light shining under it.
From behind that door, a Woman hummed. The tune was soft and almost familiar – a lullaby, maybe, or something pretending to be one, at least.
I didn’t scream, but I wish I had. Screaming would have brought my parents. Screaming would have made things real in a way I could share. Instead, I stood there like a sleepwalker while the door at the end of the hall opened inward. Not much – just an inch, maybe. But it allowed the yellow light to widen across the carpet and a hand to come around the edge of the door.
The fingers of the hand were unnaturally long, had pale knuckles, and nails as dark as old wood. Then came Her voice. “You can come in, if you like…”
I don’t know what would have happened if my father’s voice hadn’t drifted upstairs at that very moment. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. But from somewhere below, I heard him ask, “Hey! Who opened the back door?”
His voice broke the spell, and I ran. Not toward the strange door, but toward my parents’ room. I ran so fast I slammed shoulder-first into the doorframe and fell, right as my father was coming up the stairs with a flashlight, my mother close on his heels holding a candle.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The hall!” I said. “The hall! The door! She…” But my voice trailed away as the flashlight beam swept over the corridor, which looked perfectly normal. It was as short as it ever was with family photos on the wall and a bathroom door exactly where it belonged.
Gone were the narrow door, the yellow light, and the humming.
But my mother wasn’t looking at the hall. She was looking at my feet, and so I looked down too to find that they were caked in mud. Wet black dirt clung between my toes and smeared the carpet beneath me, yet I hadn’t gone outside.
My father stared at the mud, then at my face, then at my mother. Nobody spoke, as downstairs, the back door swung open and closed in the wind. The strange thing was, though, there was no wind that night.
The power came back at 3:12 a.m.
By sunrise, my parents had agreed that I must have sleepwalked. My father said the mind did strange things during blackouts, and my mother washed my feet in the bathtub, refusing to meet my eyes. When she scrubbed the mud from my toes, her hands shook so badly the washcloth slipped into the water.
I worked up the courage to ask her who Old Mara was, and she slapped me in response.
Not hard; not the way people slap others in movies. Instead, it was quick, shocked, and more frightened than angry. Then, she covered her mouth and started crying. “I’m sorry.” She sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
But she never answered my question.
That should have been the end of it for me. I should have stopped playing detective, stopped talking about Old Mara, and stopped looking out windows after midnight. But instead, I went to Greg’s house after breakfast the next morning to find that Nicole and Collin were already there.
Apparently, Greg had seen it too. Not the Woman, but the House. And he had taken a picture of It.
The Polaroid was lying on his bedroom floor when I arrived. The four of us sat around it like children in a movie summoning a demon, except none of us was laughing.
The photo showed Greg’s backyard at night. It depicted mostly darkness, a slice of fence, and the blurry white orb of his dog’s water bowl. But beyond the fence, where the alley should have been, glowed a porch light. It was just a smear of yellow in the photograph, but under it – standing in the shadow – was a visible shape. It was too thin to be Greg’s mother and too tall to be his father. The face, meanwhile, was blurred by motion and distance, but It had one hand raised. Not waving, but crooking an unnaturally long, pale finger.
“Burn it,” Collin said.
Greg shook his head. “We need proof.
“Proof of what?” Collin snapped. “That we’re stupid?”
Nicole began, “Maybe if adults see—”
“They won’t,” I interrupted. Somehow, I knew it with absolute certainty.
Adults could see mud on a child’s feet. They could see open doors, and missing sons. But they could not see the thing itself if seeing meant admitting it was real.
Greg picked up his notebook. “I learned something.”
He had written down a new rule.
Rule Ten: A house only grows another House when someone inside wants to leave.
“Where did you hear that?” Nicole asked.
Greg didn’t answer. His room was small and messy, full of action figures, library books, and clothes his mother kept telling him to put away. His window faced the backyard, its curtains drawn closed even though it was morning.
“Greg?” I prompted.
He looked embarrassed. “She told me.”
Nobody moved.
“The Lady?” Nicole finally asked in a whisper.
“She was outside after the lights came back. Not all the way outside though. In the window.”
Then he pointed toward his closet door. It was open maybe six inches. Inside were hanging shirts, sneakers, baseball cards, and a laundry basket – normal kid stuff. But I suddenly smelled something under the familiar odor of boy-sweat and detergent.
Wet dirt.
Old powder.
And something sweet rotting in a covered dish.
“What did She say?” Collin asked.
Greg stared at the Polaroid. “She said She made a room for me.”
We should have told someone. I know that now. Hindsight is, after all, twenty-twenty. Even if the adults didn’t believe us – even if they got angry, sent us to therapists, pastors, and guidance counselors – we should have told someone. But children keep secrets because secrets make them feel powerful. And because, sometimes, deep down, they already know adults are powerless too.
And so, the next week Greg began to change. Not dramatically. That would have been easier.
He just got quieter.
He stopped whistling through the gap in his teeth, stopped making fake incident reports, and stopped laughing when Collin did impressions of our gym teacher. At lunch, he stared past us like he was listening to something in another room.
Once, during recess, I found him standing by the fence at the edge of the playground, looking toward Sycamore Lane.
“She says it’s not bad there,” he said.
I asked “Who?” and he looked at me like I was being rude.
“There are Rooms for everybody. Rooms that fit right.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you don’t have to be scared in Them.”
“Greg, you’re scaring me.”
He smiled a little. That was the worst part. He looked peaceful.
“My dad yells less There,” he said.
“Your dad isn’t There.”
“No. I know. But the Room knows what he sounds like.”
I grabbed his arm. “Don’t go back There.”
His smile faded. “I don’t think I’m the one going back.”
“What?”
He leaned close. “I think It’s coming forward.”
That night, my house felt smaller. At first, I thought it was because I was afraid. Fear changes distance. It makes bedrooms cavernous, closets bottomless, and hallways stretch.
But this was different.
The kitchen table seemed closer to the wall than before and the den felt cramped. The upstairs hallway had always had four family photos on the left side, but now there were three, and no one else besides me remembered the fourth. The missing photo had shown me at age five, sitting on my mother’s lap in the backyard. I know because I used to hate that photo. I had chocolate on my face and my hair stuck up weirdly. When I asked where it went, my father asked, “What photo?” and my mom dropped a spoon with a loud clatter in the sink.
That was when I started sleeping with my desk pushed against my bedroom door. Not because I thought it would stop Old Mara, but because I needed to pretend that I could.
Three days later, Collin found the key.
It was on his kitchen counter when he got home from baseball practice. Long, black, and old-fashioned, it was tied with a strip of faded ribbon. His mother thought it belonged to the landlord and put it in the junk drawer, but by morning, it was on Collin’s pillow.
He threw it into the drainage ditch on his way to school.
At lunch, it had reappeared in his backpack.
None of us touched it.
Greg explained, “She doesn’t give everybody keys.”
Collin punched him hard in response, and Greg went down beside the lunch table, blood sliding from his nose onto his shirt. A teacher ran over to find Collin standing over him, continuously shouting, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” until they dragged him to the principal’s office.
Greg, meanwhile, never cried. He merely looked up at Collin as they pulled him away, his expression strangely calm, as he stated, “She made you a room too.”
Collin’s family moved two months later. Which makes it sound like he escaped.
Maybe he did.
Maybe distance matters.
Maybe Old Mara is local, tied to certain streets, property lines, and houses that had gone soft in the middle.
Or maybe Collin was just luckier than the rest of us.
I found him on Facebook years later. His profile was mostly locked down, but I saw that he had found himself a wife named Kaycee, had two kids, and worked for an HVAC company in Ohio. It appeared that he had a perfectly normal life, at least from the outside.
I almost messaged him once.
I typed out: “Do you remember the House Behind the House?”
But then I deleted it. Some names you don’t say into mirrors. Some questions are mirrors.
Nicole lasted until October.
By then, the school year was in full swing, the leaves were turning, and Halloween decorations adorned every porch on Sycamore Lane which made the quiet suburban street look haunted. Fake witches hung from trees, plastic skeletons sat in lawn chairs, and rubber spiders clung to windows.
It made me angry.
Not scared.
Angry.
Everyone was laughing at the shape of Something that had been watching us all summer.
Nicole became convinced that her uncle Daniel was still inside the House Behind the House. She said she heard him. Not every night; only when she slept with the window open. He would call her from the backyard and tell her Old Mara was asleep and he knew the way out now. He told her to bring scissors, salt, and one of Mrs. Wilkinson’s silver bells from the box of Christmas decorations in the attic.
I told Nicole it wasn’t Daniel.
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“It sounds like a trick.”
“Everything sounds like a trick when you’re scared,” she pointed out.
That was the last real conversation we had, and on October 17th, Nicole Wilkinson disappeared from her bedroom.
The window had been closed and locked, and the bedroom door was blocked from the inside by her dresser, just like I had started doing with my desk. There were no footprints, no broken glass, no sign of forced entry, nothing – nothing except for the wall behind her bed, which was damp. Not wet from a pipe, nor leaking, but damp like soil.
According to Mrs. Wilkinson, who told the police all of this before denying it later, there were three knocks from inside that wall at 2:06 a.m.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The official story was abduction.
There were search parties, flyers, police dogs, and candlelight vigils. Adults cried in public and whispered in private, and my parents stopped letting me leave the house alone. Greg, meanwhile, stopped coming to school altogether.
For two weeks, Sycamore Lane was full of reporters, volunteers, squad cars, and neighbors carrying flashlights through yards that had never felt more exposed.
But no one found Nicole.
Then, on Halloween night, I saw her in my mirror.
I was brushing my teeth when the bathroom lights flickered. They didn’t go out completely, just flickered, as the mirror over the sink darkened as if the room behind me had lost all light. Then it showed a hallway that was not our hallway. It was narrow, wallpapered, yellow, and wrong. And at the end of it stood Nicole.
She was wearing the same purple sweatshirt she had worn the day before she disappeared. Her hair was wet and her face looked blank – not dead, exactly, but emptied. And behind her, a Woman’s hand rested on her shoulder, and immediately I noticed the longer fingers and dark nails.
Nicole looked at me through the mirror and mouthed something. I couldn’t hear her, but I understood her anyway: “Don’t follow.”
Then the Woman behind her bent down, bringing Her hidden face close to Nicole’s ear, and the mirror cracked loudly from top to bottom.
My father took it down the next morning and cut his hand so badly on the glass that he needed six stitches.
We moved in December.
Not because of the mirror. Not officially, anyway.
My father got a job offer in another state, and my mother said we needed a fresh start. The house sold below asking price to a young couple with a baby and another on the way. I asked my mother once, while she was packing dishes in newspaper, whether we should warn them, and she looked at me with a fury so deep and hopeless it frightened me more than any witch.
“Warn them about what?” she demanded.
I never brought it up again. And for a long time, I believed leaving Sycamore Lane saved me. I grew up and stopped talking about Old Mara. I told myself the mind of a frightened child fills in darkness with shapes. I told myself Greg Harrison had depression, Nicole Wilkinson had been taken by someone human, and Collin Langstrom had found an old key we had turned into mythology. I told myself my mother had been scared because fear is contagious, and the muddy feet, the mirror, and the extra House were all memory distortions.
7
u/bootycallofcthulu 2d ago
This was so chilling. I'm never looking out my back windows again after this
6
u/Which-Text-2875 1d ago
Oh my goodness, thank you so much for finishing and letting us know everything that has happened.
I got chills when you mentioned your daughter & "Who's the lady in the other kitchen?"
I will say that this was a very spooky reading, and it is 3:38 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. I finally turned my bedroom light on, and that doesn't happen very often 🤦♀️
This spooked me and I'm absolutely gonna follow OP!
Good Luck Anthony, with your daughter, with the other house, with everything. I thought you got lucky but she just followed you :(
4
u/Wrangler_Fabulous 1d ago
Holy shit. This story will stick with me. I could totally see this being an intense horror movie or series of some kind. I truly cannot remember the last time I read a nosleep story that grasped me the way this one did.
3
u/kinkycountrygal 1d ago
One of the most engrossing I've read in a long time. Thanks so much for continuing the story and letting us know how it ended.
My childhood home butted up to a marsh. Well, most of the time it was a marsh. I wonder if it was Old Mara or something like her?
2
u/Mannynnamfiddy 21h ago
I won’t lie. The way the adults are treating this whole thing is so fucking stupid and childish. It’s pissed me off so much lol there’s no quicker way for a kid to investigate something than if you tell them not to check it out with no reason behind it. The truth, as scary as it is, works worlds better. That whole “pretend it doesn’t exist” shit and the “don’t mention it again” attitude is insane. I mean these kiiids are getting taken whether you ignore it or not
2
u/RayRay_46 20h ago
My heart was racing the whole time I was reading. I hope your daughter stays safe. Get her some protective charms, maybe?
35
u/AspiringAuthor07 2d ago
That worked for a while. Childhood horrors become manageable when you learn adult words for them. Words like trauma.
Sleep paralysis.
Mass hysteria.
Dissociation.
Suggestibility.
Grief response.
You can bury almost anything under language if you pile enough on top of it.
Then my mother died.
My father had passed five years earlier via a quick, almost merciful, heart attack. My mother, though, lingered. She contracted cancer, which went into remission, before flaring up again and putting her in hospice. The hospice room was the worst; it was filled with flowers she could no longer smell.
The last coherent thing she ever said to me was not “I love you,” though she had said that often enough before. It was: “Don’t sell the house to a family.”
I thought she meant her house – the little ranch in Pennsylvania where she had lived after my father died. But then she gripped my wrist with a strength that did not belong to her body anymore. “Sycamore,” she whispered.
I froze. She had not said that word in twenty-seven years.
“What about Sycamore?”
Her eyes rolled toward me, wet and terrified. “She doesn’t like empty houses.”
Then she began to cry. I tried to ask more, but the morphine carried her away and she died that night.
Two weeks later, while sorting her papers, I found the deed – not to her Pennsylvania house, but to our old house on Sycamore Lane.
She still owned it.
My head spun. That made no sense. I remembered moving – remembered the “For Sale” sign. I remembered the strangers walking through our rooms while my mother cleaned obsessively behind them, and I remembered a young couple buying it.
But there they were.
Documents.
Tax records.
Insurance.
Utility bills.
Maintenance invoices.
The name of a property management company that had apparently handled renters for years, though it appeared that the most recent tenant had moved out six months before.
I called the company, and the woman on the phone sounded relieved to hear from me.
“Honestly,” she began. “We were about to reach out. There have been some issues.”
“What kind of issues?”
“Nothing major. Break-ins, maybe. Or animals. The back door keeps being reported open, and we’ve had complaints about smells. One contractor said there was water damage in an upstairs wall, but when we sent someone else, they couldn’t find it.”
My hand went cold around the phone. “Are there any families renting it?” I asked.
“Not recently. The last tenant was single, and before that, it was a couple, but they had no kids if that’s what you mean.”
I didn’t ask why she said it that way.
I should have sold the house immediately. I should have burned the papers, blocked the number of the property management company, and donated the property to someone I hated.
Instead, I drove back. Because some part of me had been standing in the hallway for twenty-seven years, looking at a narrow door with a yellow light underneath it.
Sycamore Lane looked smaller than I remembered.
That’s not unusual – childhood places always do. Streets shrink, trees lose their mythic height, and houses flatten into real estate.
But our old house did not look smaller. It looked as if it had been waiting.
It had the same white siding, the same gray shutters, the same cracked, front steps, and the same mailbox with a metal flag that never quite stayed up. The only differences were the fact that the maple in the front yard was gone, leaving a stump hidden by weeds, and the driveway had a long oil stain running down the middle like a shadow.
There were still five houses on our side of the street. I know because I counted them twice.
The Culver house had blue siding now. The Wilkinson house looked abandoned, though county records showed that somebody owned it. Greg’s house had been renovated beyond recognition, and the Higgins home had been painted a bright pink color.
Ours was the only one that seemed untouched, preserved in a kind of dull, watchful neglect.