Foundation
By Jamie Vincent
The first time I crossed the threshold of the house alone my gut told me I was an unwelcome guest, and that it did not belong to me despite the fact I held the key to the door in my hand.
I stood in the entryway, taking in the high ceilings, the dated carpet running up the stairs, the ugly wood paneling. It felt like I was in the maw of something awful, on the verge of being devoured. Of course, in the end I ignored my gut feeling, confusing my deep dread for disgust, or possibly anguish at how much work I would have to do.
What a fool I was then.
It used to be a rural hospital, back before there were regulations or standards for those sort of things. Locals came in with gangrene and pregnancy complications and all manner of other maladies. Bloody wounds were often ineffectively bandaged, or otherwise left to drip onto the unsealed wooden floors, not to be cleaned until it was too late and the crimson had soaked permanently into cracks and crevices.
The damage wasn’t immediately obvious in most of the rooms. You’d have to lean close and focus your gaze hard to notice the dried brown blooming in various sized blotches like some kind of invasive mold. In the master bedroom, however, you didn’t need to look closer. This was where emergency surgeries and amputations used to take place; they clearly hadn’t bothered putting down a tarp.
My realtor didn’t try to cover the floor either, though she did save the room for last during my initial viewing. If I hadn’t mentioned the closed door, I’m not sure she would have bothered showing it to me at all.
‘Surgeries weren’t very clean affairs, in that period,’ she had said, scratching the pointed end of her chin with a biro that had her own smiling face printed on it. She wouldn't go a step further than the doorframe. ‘I’ll be frank with you, most of the patients died here. That’s where the trouble with selling has come from, besides the state the place is in.’
I had laughed at that, walking all the way to the far window and peering out the cloudy pane, as if observing closely the overgrown grass outside.
‘Do you find most of your potential buyers are superstitious?’
‘No, not as far as I know. I don’t think it matters much. Most people at least start to consider the paranormal when faced with something as cliche as an old house with a grim history. They just won’t say it.’ She paused, as if choosing her next words carefully, something light to ensure I would still put down the money and get the property off her back.
This ended up being something like “It’s not exactly the ideal place to raise a family!” followed by painfully faux laughter.
But I was already determined that it could be, it would be. I was picturing ripping out all the aged bits, fitting in new, shiny pieces in their place.
‘Thankfully for you, I don’t believe in ghost stories.’
#
A couple days into the job, my ears finally attuned to the constant creaking and shifting of the old structure. Instead, I had learned to hear something new, something that cloaked itself so well in the noise of everything else before.
Everywhere I walked there was a second pair of footsteps, trailing right at my heels, only just slightly off time.
I tried my hardest to ignore it, to lapse back into simple ignorance so I could finish my work without constantly worrying about some sort of intruder following me around, or my own mind playing tricks on me. Sometimes it worked. For hours, I was uninterrupted and convinced of my freedom. Then it would return.
The paranoia was the worst at night, wrapped in my bed sheets, attempting to sleep. The endless countryside all around the house was dead silent at night, besides the occasional chirping of a cricket somewhere in the grass below. All I was left with was the tree scraping on the window, or the wind otherwise battering the pane until I found myself unconscious.
On one especially windy night I found myself woken up by the tapping and scratching in the early hours of the morning. I was surrounded by pitch black, the kind where you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed, and I heard a new sound. My intruder, breathing hard, standing somewhere over me. Each inhale was labored, painful, the exhales always a dry death rattle.
It was exactly the way my mother breathed right before she died, when she was attached to all sorts of machines and monitors and IV drips that forced her to linger much longer than she should have.
The scene was morbid, unnatural. It was partially my fault. The doctors had only done what I asked. I was too busy to make it to her any sooner, so they tethered her to life long enough to fit into my schedule.
I laid there, heart pounding in my chest for what felt like hours on end until I heard that distinctive echo of what seemed like my own footsteps, walking further and further away until they finally disappeared.
Every night from then on, it happened the same. When it left and I was allowed to sleep, I dreamed of the fissures in the ceiling, of following them like a map leading to nowhere, of my mother in the hospital bed with her zigzags of wires. In the morning, I always woke up covered in mosquito bites, freezing cold despite the late spring warmth.
Sleep only became harder as the days wore on. On top of the nightmares and the disembodied breathing, I attained a sudden new fear that the ceiling would fall on my head while I slept. My idle body, awake but doing nothing, started to look like an asset loss. I decided to burn the candle at both ends, working through the night to get the job done as fast as possible.
The electrician I contracted didn’t turn up the day he was meant to, leaving me with nothing but burnt out, useless vintage electrics to work with. I was thanking my luck when I found a collection of old wax candles hidden in a decrepit chest of drawers.
Bathed in dim candlelight, I ripped out all the fixtures in the kitchen, I rerouted the piping, I added the planned marble backsplash and granite countertops and a beautiful, modern range hood over the inlet where the brand-new stove would slot perfectly once it was delivered.
My candles always flickered harshly, sometimes even wobbled in their holders and threatened to fall. It was as if something was darting around them, disturbing the surrounding air, and it happened regardless of which room I was in. For minutes at a time the shadows would dance wildly across the walls and obscure my work, the edges of my twilight reality bleeding like Rorschach inkblots.
In virtually every room, it was made all the worse by the dizzying wallpaper, a sad medical-gown blue covered in dated florals. It wasn’t long before I pushed forward the task of peeling the curling strands away entirely. It was satisfyingly brutal, grabbing the loose ends and tugging with all my strength. An opportunity to exercise my sleepless rage.
There’s a certain daze which overcomes you when you go without sleep for so long, stagnant in one place. Days bleed into one long endless line of color, dripping into pools of light on the floor which ebbs and flow as they please, completely outside your control.
The nearest town was more than ten miles away, and I was determined not to drive there until I needed food or other provisions. I was afraid that whatever was in the house with me would lock me out if I left. My electrician never showed up, now multiple days late, and neither did the men who were meant to bring the new stainless-steel fridge.
#
I would not say, at any of the points I’ve described prior, that I had been driven over the brink of madness, though I did grow close a few times. It actually happened when I was working on the bannisters of the main staircase, knocking out pieces of diseased wood covered top to bottom in creeping black mold. As usual, the light was flickering, shadows were dancing over the hard, smooth surfaces of the staircase. High up on my ladder I wobbled through waves of vertigo and drowsiness, trying my hardest not to look down.
The footsteps changed when I began the more destructive work, the stuff that required knocking and tearing and smashing bits of the house which were no longer viable. It didn’t follow me while I did these things, but instead ran or limped frantically around single rooms, stomping its feet in protest for minutes at a time, so hard the floors shook.
Convinced I was simply losing my mind–which was partially the truth– and too tired to act, I ignored it. I didn’t bother to look, mostly because I didn’t want to see.
It wasn’t my curiosity that drove me over the edge; I could have lived forever in ignorance, finished my work, and moved on to the next thing without a story to tell. Whatever it was must have not liked this nonchalance.
It dragged itself up the stairs, one by one, and finally stopped dead before me, frozen in position between two steps. For the first time I faced the intruder, nothing more than a long, hunched shadow cast against the wall, appearing and disappearing under my finicky light source. I felt distinctly that, even though it had no eyes to see me with, the long stare I gave was returned twofold. My heart ceased to beat, my veins ran ice cold, I lost my balance on the ladder so severely that I nearly fell.
With the source of all my anguish before me, nothing but a shadow, a new anger pulsed through me. This nothing, this hallucination, had reduced me to a paranoid fool. I remember what followed as a series of snapshots, illuminated by the moving flashbulb of my sole light source. I clambered down the ladder with a sudden energy in my achy limbs, following its footsteps up the staircase in pursuit.
The figure limped away from me, dragging its stupid heavy boots and still somehow managing to outpace me. Down the hall we went, and into that blood-soaked master bedroom.
It disappeared then, sinking like a wall of water into the cracks in the wood. The whole floor seemed to shudder and groan, a dark patch oozing outwards from the spot where it stood. Each board bent, breathed, cried out in that same sad rattle I heard every time I tried to sleep.
I fell to my knees near a rickety board, feeling around the damp until I found a gap large enough for my fingernails. It gave way easily, the rot so advanced that it was hardly stable. It took barely any strength to peel it away, then the next, then the next. One by one I grabbed and pried each board away, desperate to be rid of whatever was lying beneath the house's porous tissue.
When there was nothing left, I stood and stared at the subfloor, the tips of my fingers coated in the ruby red of new, fresh blood and pricked with small splinters of wood. Finally, there was silence.
#
The contractors came on Sunday, each with their own excuse. I offered them tea, lemonade, anything I had on hand so that they’d stay longer and chat. The electrics were ripped clean and reinstalled, the fridge was rolled through the door on a float and settled into its gap in the new kitchen.
I laid my sleeping bag in the finally finished kitchen that night, a certain safety coming with all the shiny new fittings and the purr of the electrics. With my ear pressed to the cold, soundless grey tile, I drifted to the edge of that sharp cliff between sleep and consciousness.
Then I heard it again, the death rattle inhale of the shadow right up against my ear. No longer over me, but under me, clawing upwards through the wood of the foundation and settling flush against the bottom of my tile.
Even skinned, gutted, repainted and refitted, the subfloor thrummed with something unholy, which had been buried alive. I could change the details as much as I wanted, but it was clear: the structure would always remain the same.
