you like.”
She told me she was willing to sell the house, and had in fact been waiting years for an appropriate buyer—someone who understood the brownstone’s nature and wouldn’t balk at the stack of legal disclosures, failed inspections, decrepitude, and warnings. Given her shut-in status, I was surprised she wanted to move.
“Oh, I’ve never lived there,” Mrs. Zabka said.
She was an absentee owner, residing in the suburbs, and hadn’t visited the place in the years since Mr. Stick died.
“May I ask why you bought it?”
“Someone needs to own it.”
“Has anyone maintained it?”
“The house maintains itself,” she said.
Years of study and experience had taught me there was more than one kind of ghost. Some were caring. Some were violent. Some were grieving, scared, or lost. There were conscious ghosts who interacted with the living, and there were others who were more like residues or echoes—perceptible but totally unable to perceive.
What they all had in common was a tether to the world. Whatever the links or reasons, they were here instead of gone.
When my mother had left Mr. Stick’s house only partially herself, maybe part of her had stayed. Would she talk or be an echo? At very least, the house itself was bound to give me answers, and I was more than willing to face whatever dangers might exist if I could finally escape the limbo of unknowns.
I moved into my new home on a feverish January day that started off sunny and ended—auspiciously, I thought—with a squall producing thundersnow. Being immediately housebound because of the storm didn’t worry me, since I had already arranged for reliable grocery deliveries, I had no local friends or family to visit, and I had no intention of leaving the house after waiting so long to thoroughly explore it.
The building was an abnormally narrow but otherwise unremarkable brownstone, wedged like a shim between a pair of other brownstones. There was no house number, no baroque doorknocker, and no uncanny chill produced by its appearance. The chocolate-brick façade featured an oak door on the first story and skinny twin windows on each of the two upper floors. The neighboring buildings abutted mine directly and allowed for no side windows in the front two-thirds of the house. In the rear, however, my brownstone extended fully to the alley and the neighboring buildings didn’t, leaving space on either side and a smattering of windows that offered light and limited views.
My house’s slenderness contrasted with its extraordinary depth, which made the interior feel simultaneously claustrophobic and endless. Its hallways ran lengthwise but zigzagged at intervals, with the doorways to rooms alternating sides, and so it was impossible to stand in the front and look directly to the rear. The layout was nook-like, many-cornered, and disorienting. A child playing hide and seek could disappear for hours.
The entire building smelled of burnt cinnamon, except for my second-story bedroom, which smelled of warm spring mist. No actual mist was perceptible but the window overlooking the street was fogged with heavy moisture. I had a bed, a nightstand, a dresser, and a lamp, along with a small and tidy bathroom next to the bedroom closet.
The house contained a comfortable study, a formal dining room, an additional bathroom, innumerable closets and compartments, and many other rooms, both major and minor, that were connected in semi-logical ways and enticed me with unique personalities and auras.
And yet for all the promising character, nothing otherworldly revealed itself during my initial walkthrough, and shortly after dusk, with the January slush-light of sunset around me, I wondered if the house distrusted me. I was new, after all—as foreign to the building as the building was to me. Maybe the house was keeping secrets in the presence of a stranger.
Over the years, I’d found that undressing in unfamiliar places—hotel rooms, for instance, or long-neglected burial grounds—fostered greater openness and trust in my environment. My body was so compounded with my identity that physical nakedness seemed to expose my truest self. And while my vulnerability was largely symbolic—a necktie and pants hadn’t made me safer, especially since paranormal dangers were more liable to threaten my sanity and spirit—I felt more at risk without the armor of my clothes.
I undressed that night and walked around naked, wearing only my shoes because of the nails and broken glass in several of the rooms. I hoped the house would recognize my gesture of unguardedness. Desperate for any sign of life, I re-explored the whole building, listening and watching, and then I brushed off a chair in the dining room and sat beneath the unlit chandelier. I thought I heard the dust motes settling around me.
“Hello?” I said.
The dark offered nothing in reply.
“Hello,” I said again, answering myself.
I gathered my clothes and carried them up to my twilit bedroom, missing my parents and disappointed that my new home hadn’t presented so much as a ghostly twinkle or unexplained creak.
Upstairs, the bedroom’s tropical warmth soothed my chill from the otherwise wintry house, and I was prepared to sleep naked, as I might have done in summer, when I suddenly felt what seemed to be a breath inside my ear.
I spun. The room was empty. Nevertheless I felt the rising shame of standing there naked. My sense of being watched seemed to indicate a watcher.
I snatched a sheet to cover myself. I’d made my bed less than two hours earlier, and yet in the interval a spider’s nest, apparently hidden in the mattress, had spectacularly hatched. Dozens of grape-sized spiders polka-dotted the bed and scattered chaotically as soon as I exposed them. Many clung to the sheet I’d wrapped around my waist, and both my penis and my thighs were overrun with tickles.
I clutched the sheet and laughed. There I’d been, glum and lonely in the moribund house, and now a panoply of spiders and a ghost had appeared.
“Hello!” I said, thrilling at the animated room.
I swapped the sheet for flannel pajamas and sat on a narrow, spiderless section of the bed, and then I closed my eyes and covered my ears, exactly as my mother had taught me as a child.
I had encountered ghosts before but only passingly. I’d rarely felt the true, electric sparkle of connection. Generally ghosts regarded me with hazy apprehension, as if the skin between our worlds were too opaque to see through. Contact was often like a flashlight through a hand when only the glow and maybe a vein or two are easily discerned.
This was something else.
I sensed the ghost was female. She stood in the corner of the bedroom, slightly to my right, watching me and radiating needful curiosity. A D-minor tone persisted in my hearing like a pressure change, or possibly a memory of sadness, and I couldn’t tell if she or I—or both of us—was causing it.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m William. Do you live here, too?”
She faded like a cellphone signal in a tunnel. I concentrated hard and leaned in her direction but a growing void of loneliness convinced me she was gone.
I opened my eyes and stared at the empty corner, where a hook and wire dangled from the rough brick wall. An earlier inhabitant had probably hung a picture there. I felt the ghost’s absence like I felt the missing picture.
I shooed
