Let’s call her ‘Jane’, because I don’t know her real name and neither does Andy. He’s been obsessed with her from the moment he laid eyes on her when we found her body in the wall. It’s not healthy at all.
You might be thinking, ‘Oh sure, blame it all on the other woman. Your husband is a grown-ass man and is just as much at fault as she.’
Typically, I’d agree with you. Typically, I’d say that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with someone that isn’t interested in me anyways, but I believe that something is very different with our current situation. I think my husband is in danger.
She left him a note this morning, written on the back of a torn piece of the old wallpaper that plasters the walls of much of the house. I was with him when found it among his supplies. He held it to his chest dreamily, refused to let me see it.
If that wasn’t bad enough, I eventually found where it came from – a patch of wallpaper was missing from the wall in the kitchen, ten feet from the ground. I couldn’t help but picture her scaling the wall, unnaturally. In my imagination and nightmares (that I’ve had more of recently, by the way) she comes and goes from the attic and crawls along the walls, always faceless, nameless.
Andy is an artist and I do freelance graphic design, so it was easy enough for us to pack up and move out here. He mainly paints landscapes but will include people when it feels right.
He confided in me that he felt he was losing any talent he may ever had – maybe he didn’t have any in the first place. Maybe he wasn’t even an artist at all, he’d just gotten lucky that a few of his pieces were extremely popular since some recent ones had been received with mediocre feedback. I thought his work was incredible and told him so. I told him that’s how it is sometimes and I felt the same with my work on occasion, but make something you’re happy with, not everything will be perfect.
Though it remained unspoken, we both thought he needed a change of scenery. When he did eventually and nervously ask me what I thought of moving out to the country, I quickly agreed. I was born in the Midwest and still at times found life in the city to be overwhelming (not to mention expensive considering our inconsistent paychecks).
We found this little farmhouse, miles and miles from the closest town of under 500 people. I think it had been owned by the city or bank, because we bought it sight unseen other than one picture of the exterior on the website we found it on. I mean, we figured it needed work, but we could afford it so that was a major selling point.
But, we’ve made a terrible mistake that may take our lives, or at least his. It turns out that we own this house on paper only. The true owner is whatever we share this space with.
As we first stepped out of the car and traversed the dusty driveway up to the house, I couldn’t help but notice the items littering the yard, like disjointed snapshots of the lives of prior residents. Disintegrating women’s shoes and stained clothes half-buried in the dirt, a sun-bleached jewelry box with deep and messy rips through the wood, a heart shaped wedding frame with a squelching black liquid in place of a photograph. Of course, none of this had been in the picture of the house when we saw it online.
As for the house itself, as soon as we opened the door, I knew something was off about the place. The windows didn’t seem to let in enough light despite there not being a cloud in the sky. I’ve since noticed that there’s some sort of darkness in this house that even the brightest of days and cleanest of windowpanes cannot permeate.
The walls were cracked and bulged in odd places where plaster looked to have been hastily and amateurly applied. A smell like that of long forgotten food permeated the air. Even after airing out the place, I still catch the occasional scent lingering throughout the house, in the air itself and absorbed by the hardwood floor and cabinets, but Andy swears he doesn’t smell it. There’s an air of sadness and longing here, that never seems to go away.
There’s also this odd smelling, greasy looking residue staining the area around the entrance to the attic that drips onto the floor. I don’t know where it comes from, but no matter how often we try to clean it, there’s always more of it.
Typically I like open floor plans, but for a reason I can’t explain, the high ceilings and few walls here felt threatening, as if any opening in this space is an invitation for something else to fill it. Sometimes I felt the presence of that ‘something’ in the form of a choking heaviness in the room, other times as anger. No, anger isn’t strong enough – it feels like pure hatred.
As we moved in our last box and locked the front door behind us, my chest tightened as I had a panicked thought – there’s nowhere to hide.
I still get that feeling sometimes. What I have yet to figure out is what exactly am I trying to hide from in our own house? Is it her?
I wish I could describe it better, the feeling I get in this place. The weirdest thing is that Andy loves it here. He’s been painting again, nearly constantly. What worries me is that from the moment he met her, and since his visits to her in the attic, his art has become much darker.
Before we moved here, he used to paint by the beach but because it was hours away he didn’t get to go often. He’d instead paint from memory, or he’d paint us together based on our old vacation pictures. Even during our first few weeks here, he painted the landscape with the light handed and airy style he was known for.
After he met her he still painted landscapes, but much darker. He’d painted the farmland you can see from outside our window, but the tall stalks of amaranth that he’d once painted as they swayed in the wind like ocean waves on the grain became a scorched and blackened field. The sky was a shade of red-orange, but in the way that indicated a long burning fire in the night, not a serene sunset. Instead of people he painted long things, with strange bodies and heads that rose above the blackened stocks, twisted and, curving in ways that no neck ever should.
I’d gone into town a few times but the people there were not friendly at all – not at all like I remembered people in the place I’d grown up in. Although to be fair, they were typically friendly until they found out where we lived. They weren’t even rude, more so the way they treated us reminded me of how my parents treated an injured bird I’d found as a child. They'd told me not to name it, not to get too attached, because they knew the poor thing wasn’t going to make it and didn’t want me to get my heart broken.
As bad as things are during the day, the nights are always worse. Not only is each night an ordeal inside the house, but outside as well.
I don’t go out if it means I’d be coming or going after the sun sets. Once glance at the fuzzy nighttime footage of the thing that spends the daylight hours under the rusted Ford Bronco in the yard was enough to make me regret us ever installing that video doorbell.
The house was creepy when we moved in, yes, but it all went downhill after we tried to renovate the place. We’d started with removing the haphazard patches of plaster on the walls so we could replace them with actual drywall, since those were the biggest eyesore.
That’s when we met Jane.
As we had cut through the first lumpy and malformed portion, a long swath of white-blond braided human hair tied up in a green ribbon spilled out. I had screamed, and Andy gasped and jumped back.
The hair was stained and sticky, parts of the head it was attached to just barely visible in the shadows beyond the opening. We didn’t need to cut into the wall further to know that we’d found something terrible. Andy went to grab his phone to call the police, and I had to leave the room and buried my face in my hands.
When Andy went back in, he called me over, his voice shaking.
She was… gone. Only a few strands of pale hair tinged red at the roots snagged on the jagged drywall remained to assure us that she’d ever been there at all.
That was the last time we’ve tried to change anything about this house, but things are still going downhill fast. Although I haven’t seen her again, I can feel that she’s still here. Worse, he has become utterly obsessed with her.
One night, I woke up, hearing creaking footsteps from the attic and panicked. I turned over to wake up Andy, but he wasn’t there. I looked for him everywhere and eventually found footprints in that liquid leading up to the attic.
I listened closely and could hear his voice, he was having a one-sided conversation and laughing. I had started to climb up the old wooden rungs myself, until I felt something up there hovering right by the pitch-black entrance – almost as if it was daring me to come to it in the darkness.
He goes up there almost every night now. When he does sleep in our bed, I swear I’ve woken up to him hovering mere inches from my face. The look he gives me when he does this – well I’d never seen such a look on his face before we moved here.
And, maybe it’s coincidental but it looks like he’s aged a decade or even two in the past few months. He doesn’t leave the house at all, and barely eats.
On top of all that, his paintings are getting worse. They aren’t even coherent anymore, just dark paint smeared across the canvas with no apparent method to his madness.
He’s also become quiet and withdrawn. He still talks, just not to me. I hear his voice echoing from the attic at night, and sometimes when he thinks I can’t hear, I’ll catch him talking to the walls themselves during the day. I know he’s talking to her, because he uses the same loving tone that he used to use with me.
Some of my things have disappeared, too. The other day I found some jewelry Andy had given me years ago glinting in the sun, carelessly tossed outside as if its very presence in the house was deeply offensive.
Yesterday, he painted over what had been his favorite painting of us on vacation that we’d had above the fireplace since we moved in. Muddy reds and black had been applied madly across the once beautiful landscape – covering us and the tall redwoods in incoherent smears. He then hung it back up as if that was perfectly normal and without as much as a comment, although he did have an odd smile on his face.
I don’t know what she is or what’s gotten into him, but I’m worried about him. Each day he seems to get worse, and I’ve noticed he’s started wearing a tattered and stained green ribbon tied around his wrist.
How do I get him to stop seeing her?
​
Odd_Critter t1_izpaeqf wrote
Burn the house. It's the only way to be sure.