BY Carrie-Edmund Laben
It’s the middle of the night and you step on something wrong in the dark, something cold
and smooth and less yielding than the rest of the rag rug just outside the bathroom. In that
moment you finally consciously think the goddamn house is haunted.
Into the bathroom and across to the toilet in two big steps. You keep your eyes averted
from the mirror as you turn on the light -- a childhood instinct, a good one. The door firmly shut,
whatever you stepped on outside. But you’re going to have to walk down the hallway again to
get back to your bedroom, to go back to sleep, in your haunted house.
You make a few half-hearted attempts to rationalize, the way you did when you woke to
the front door hanging open, or heard singing in the backyard at night, or three days ago when
your mother’s photos, all the records of her last visit to her childhood home, the photos of mango
trees and doorstep chickens and cousins in bright wedding clothes, fell one by one off the wall to
land face down on the couch. But theories about strange acoustics and vibrations from the
highway aren’t doing it now. That was the denial stage, or maybe bargaining -- “if I don’t hear it
again, I must have imagined it” -- or something. What comes next? Depression, right? Can’t
remember. Not acceptance. That’s the end.
Without accepting any of this, you still have to walk across the bathroom again, turn out
the light and go down the hall to your bedroom in this house where you live alone except,
apparently, for a ghost. Or ghosts. You’d been thinking of getting a housemate to help with the
mortgage in the fall, or even, down the road, turning the basement into a separate unit. Would
that make things better or worse? Would you have an ally or would you now be watching some
stranger, or some fellow adjunct even, for signs that their regular quirks were actually
possession? Would they be watching you?
On the way back to the bedroom you jump over the rug -- another childhood game, the
floor is lava. Your ankle twinges like an adult’s, but you don’t feel anything wrong pressing
against your soles, and that’s enough. You sort of sleep.
Unlike the previous hauntings, this one leaves evidence in the morning light. At first you
think of an enormous cockroach, but you bend down and when you don’t see any legs or eyes
you make yourself touch it. It’s a piece of black leather, a bit worn, a scrap too small to be
anything but trash. When you try to pick it up you find that it’s braided into the rug.
There was no black leather in the rug when you bought it. You know this to the tips of
your fingers. You felt the rug several times, all over, looked it all over too, top and bottom,
stitching and edges, trying to find a reason not to buy it, which the lump of black leather would
have been. But in the end you handed the woman at the estate sale two twenties, because it was
getting late in the afternoon and she’d knocked the price down from sixty, but even more
because the colors were the colors of Mom’s photos -- soft pinks and blues, vivid reds and
greens. It worked with what you wanted to do in your new house. Because one thing (battling
with so many others) that you wanted to do in your new house was remember Mom. She would
have loved the house, at least she would have loved that you owned a house, and you would
never have owned it or anything like it if she hadn’t died so suddenly and so unfairly. So
something of her needed to be here.
“It’s just, you know, everything has to go,” the woman said as she took your money and
tucked it away in her fanny pack. “There’s hardly any room at the assisted living center, and she
had so much stuff... I never thought of the house as cluttered, she was an immaculate
housekeeper.” You fixated on this, someone else losing their mother in such a different way, still
having their mother a little bit, getting to wean off their mother’s existence like they had off her
breast. It didn’t seem to help her, though. She looked so tired, took your money with a nail-bitten
hand. You weren’t going to be jealous that she got better suffering.
But she probably didn’t have to put up with a haunted house, either.
You feel extra-guilty when you step out to the porch with your mug of tea, because there
she is, the white woman with the bitten fingernails, gazing from the sidewalk at her mother’s old
house. The new owners have already pulled out most of the ragged bushes that grew right up to
the foundations and over the windows, started putting in brick walkways and solar lights. You
raise a hand when she turns and it seems that she must notice you. She walks towards you -- no,
towards her car, parked on your side of the street. Right in front.
“Hi,” you call awkwardly, and when she pauses, “how’s your mother doing?”
“She has good days and bad days,” the woman says. Only after she drives away do you
think, that’s true of literally anybody.
A few mornings later -- days of not drinking anything too close to bedtime, of taking
melatonin and refusing to identify noises -- she’s out there again. This time, some stray electrical
current of politeness, of this-is-what-people-do-in-neighborhoods, makes you wave her up onto
the porch and make her tea as well. Peppermint for her, she says, she can’t handle caffeine and
her stomach always hurts these days. Her name is Jill. She told you before, at the sale, but you
wouldn’t have remembered if you’d racked your brain for a month. You’re grateful that she told
you again. You’re grateful that she’s revealing the weakness of her stomach, making it easy to be
nice to her.
It’s easy to listen to Jill talk about her mother’s joy at puttering in the raised garden beds
of the assisted living facility, her disgust with the pushiness of the nurses, her (which her are we
talking about now, Jill or the mother?) mixed emotions about the changes to the house across the
street -- “you can look right in,” Jill says of the windows sans bushes, even though they have
perfectly normal curtains, “Mom always treasured her privacy.” It’s easy, a few days later again,
to make another cup of peppermint tea. Easy to listen, to say nothing about the ghosts. Easy,
even though it’s hard, to listen to Jill’s anxious, inconclusive words about the cancer, and
whether Mother is strong enough to undergo another round of chemo, or whether it would be
kinder to...
There’s another round of chemo, and Jill doesn’t come just when it’s started to feel like a
routine. You are back to being alone in the morning, with plenty of time to go over the evidence
of the previous night. You’ve been careful not to step on the rug still, but that’s getting harder,
somehow. It looks exactly the same on the floor of the hallway in daylight, weird leather lump
and all, but at night it feels bigger to jump over. The singing in the yard, that’s closer too, and
louder, and though you still can’t make out words you can tell now that it’s women’s voices, at
least two of them, sometimes maybe more, at times it sounds like far more than your yard could
hold. At least the front door stays closed, and though things move around -- books from shelf to
table, a lamp from table to floor -- they aren’t marred like the rug was. The pictures aren’t
threatened again.
You Google “haunted house, what to do” but you get a bunch of fiction, advice for
Halloween parties, and three pages with the exact same robot-sounding text about sage. By the
time you finally see Jill again you’re ready to ask, has she heard anything about this house, did
anyone confide anything in her or in her mother (do people confide things in a woman who
treasures her privacy?) but she has so much to pour out that you don’t get the chance. Her mother
is dying in earnest. You say “already?” before you bite your tongue - the goodbye you maybe did
envy a little bit had been even longer in your imagination.
“She stopped eating,” Jill says. “She just doesn’t want to any more.”
Jill keeps pouring out words, you keep pouring out tea. And it’s inevitable, though it still
throws you off guard when it happens, that she says “Can I use your bathroom?”
You point her the way rather than walking her in, feeling paralyzed and... ashamed? You
didn’t do anything! But. And she’s gone for a long time. So long that you think of going in, and
don’t, and then do. She’s standing on the rug. Just standing, Not looking at the lump, not
touching it with the toe of her white Nikes. Just looking like someone hit pause while she was
coming back from the toilet.
“Are you... ok?” The most useless question, you hate hearing it yourself, but it snaps her
back into focus.
“Oh! Yes. But very tired. I should get going soon.” When she steps back out, off the
porch and into the August sun, she looks pale and cold.
You don’t see her the next day, and you brace yourself to never see her again. She might
decide on a clean break, a new town, ginger tea instead of peppermint. She might start an
exercise program or learn to knit or to identify birds. She might join a support group. These were
all ideas that people floated for grief, all less rash than buying a house with your inheritance to
live in all by yourself in a town where you might not even get tenure, where the wind is bitter in
winter, where not one restaurant serves good roti. Which house then turns out to be haunted.
She wasn’t even exactly a friend, you tell yourself as you stare ceiling-wards in the dark.
She always talked, rarely listened. Had you even told her that your own mother was dead? At
first it had seemed like one-upmanship to mention, and then later awkward. And she’d never
been inside except one time, the last time. She never invited you for tea in return. You tell
yourself this, steadily ignoring the voices in the backyard, which are certainly two or three, and
have almost become familiar.
But Jill does come back. It’s two weeks later. You’re putting the finishing touches on
syllabi late into the evening, and the next morning you linger over the tea the way you usually
don’t since she stopped coming by. There’s a lot of traffic, not quite move-in day for the dorms
but the students who live off-campus are returning. You don’t recognize her car among all the
others until she parks.
She barely spares a glance for her mother’s old house, which has a little fountain in the
front now, and a bench that no one sits on. She heads straight for you.
“How is...” You don’t end the sentence, it’s another stupid question. You have a good
guess, and either way she’ll tell you. The redness around her eyes is already telling you,
probably.
Jill sits down, silent, and takes the tea you offer. She seems to be studying the mug, and
then she looks up and applies the same regard -- on the edge of judgment, but not quite there -- to
your face. You wait for the words to flow, but they don’t.
She stands, and puts the mug on the wicker table, walks away. Towards her car, you
think, but even as you process this bizarre rudeness she walks past it, past the curb, into the
middle of the street where returning students coming off the highway are going a bit too fast for
the neighborhood, into the front of a bumper. It doesn’t seem like such a bad accident, even so,
except that she’s dead when you jump off the porch and join the shrieking driver kneeling over
her. You tell the kid it wasn’t their fault, tell the police that too. Tell them you’ve no idea, you
don’t even know her last name, she’s just someone from around the neighborhood, but her
mother had been sick and she’d been under a lot of stress. They take a statement and leave a
card. The ambulance goes with no light on.
Did they have lights on for your mother? She wasn’t pronounced dead until she reached
the hospital, according to the report you read. So they must’ve. Surely. But you weren’t there.
You didn’t see your mother die and you did see Jill die and neither of those were the way it
should be. Nothing is the way it should be.
You don’t sleep, and hear nothing. Then, inevitably, because you did have tea before bed
and you did put some whiskey in it too, you have to get up to pee. You will jump over the rug. It
won’t be so bad, compared to the rest of the day.
Jill is standing on the rug, glowing faintly. Haunting your hallway that she’d only ever
been in the once. Beside her is a woman much like her, but older and shorter, and on the other
side a man much like her, but taller and rougher and dressed in black. The hallway doesn’t hold
that many people, and they overlap a bit at the edges, their shoulders and hips melding like
clouds.
Even in a haunted house the vision of Jill and what must be her mother could be
psychological, a stress reaction, hypnogogic. It’s the black-clad man who worries you more.
At first it seems like they don’t see you. The mother is speaking -- her mouth is moving --
but the words are far away and garbled. They grow more solid. They shift apart. Not fully apart
yet. All of their feet are somehow still on the rug.
“Finally,” the man says.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Jill answers. Her voice hasn’t changed, it’s still got the thin
brittle edge of weariness and stress in it. So much for death as rest. “Getting in here at all, getting
things all set up by myself, adding your jacket into the rug at the last possible minute because
you couldn’t even be bothered to leave behind a shirt. Because you didn’t come back to help.”
“I obviously thought I’d have more time.”
“It’s a nice enough house,” the mother says, while you’re processing the thought that the
haunting had just been Jill breaking in, until now. “But I liked the other one better.”
“The other one wouldn’t have worked,” Jill says with the same sigh she had in life. “The
people who bought it aren’t people who’d keep this rug. You’re lucky we’re even in the same
neighborhood.”
“Sure sure. It’ll do.”
“Who lives here?” The man again, still annoyed. “Hippies?”
“A girl from the college. Single. No one will notice when she goes.”
It’s so wrong and absurd that you do an absurd thing. You step forward, bend down. Grab
the edge of the rug and pull hard. It’s much heavier than it once was, but not as heavy as if three
living people were crowded onto it. Moving it makes them waver.
Jill focuses on you. “You need to leave now,” she says just as though you were the one
haunting their house. No awareness of audacity in the demand; she doesn’t even seem to realize
that it is a demand.
“But this is my house,” you say, hating how soft you sound.
“It’s our house,” the mother says with a hint of exasperation. “Wherever the rug is, is our
house. Always has been.”
“I...”
Jill speaks again, brighter. Louder. Her lungs and larynx more solid. “You said you were
thinking about finishing the basement. You could live down there.” So magnanimous. The man
in black shifts behind her. “No she can’t.”
“Shush.”
You’re still crouched, and now the rug in your hands won’t move at all. You dig your
nails in and Jill winces a little, but that’s all. So you stand back up straight.
Acceptance is the end of something, you think, but not the end of everything. The kitchen
is a few steps in the other direction, and though turning your back on the ghosts feels like the
most terrifying thing a person could do, you do it. They don’t react at all. They probably take it
as a given.
You consider a knife but the kettle is less obviously threatening. And it heats very fast.
Three cups of boiling water should be more than enough for all of them. How do you know? You
don’t. You move too fast for knowing, the kettle’s steam scalding your own hand. Jill looks at
you in confusion, then in shock, as you begin to pour.
“You’ll ruin the floor,” the mother says without any apparent alarm, but the man in black
is cursing and Jill speaks again, much faster, “Wait! Think! We can teach you, you can be part of
the rug too, we add to it all the time.”
“What the hell,” the man in black says, “No she can’t, she...”
“Shut up!”
You dump it all straight onto the rug, reaching your hand through Jill’s chest to make
sure you soak it all.
When their screaming stops, when they’re gone, you fetch some paper towels. Move the
rug out to the porch. Trash day is Thursday; if it dries before then, you think, you could drive it
to the dump, or try setting it on fire... but you’re too tired now to think, you want to sleep in
your nice fresh unhaunted house.
You wake far too early to voices. Not the singing, not Jill’s voice. Undergrads, almost
surely, on your porch. Giggling. A bit drunk. A car peels away even as you rush through the
empty hall, and when you open the door the rug is gone.
Carrie-Edmund Laben is the Shirley Jackson Award- winning author of the novel A Hawk in the Woods. Their work has appeared in such venues as The Dark, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, and Outlook Springs, and has been supported by MacDowell, the Anne LaBastille Memorial Residency, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. They hold an MFA from the University of Montana and live in Queens.