bed.
“Someone’s in my house,” I thought. “Possibly a friend.”
I woke the next morning with a cobwebby head, but once I wiped the silk out of my hair and eyes, my bedroom felt common again, aside from the strange humidity and an odd cast of light that had followed me out of a dream.
“Hello?” I said.
The bedroom ghost was nowhere to be felt but I began the day with a reborn sense of possibility. I dressed in jeans, an Oxford shirt, and a necktie—a uniform that placed me in the relaxed professional mindset of someone comfortable at work—and walked downstairs to the kitchen. I remembered the brownstone’s original builder was entombed inside the house, and for reasons I couldn’t articulate, I strongly suspected his bones were in the wall behind the refrigerator.
The fridge itself was avocado green and had the kind of latch-handle door, outlawed since the Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956, that contributed to the deaths of curious children who accidentally locked themselves in. I started a pot of coffee and imagined, as it brewed, what it would feel like to suffocate alone inside a box. Just as clearly, I imagined being the skeleton in the wall.
When the coffee was ready, I carried the carafe and my favorite orange mug up to the second-floor study. This was a large, rectangular room in the rear of the house with two windows, decrepit brick walls, and a heavy plank floor that had been smoothed, by two centuries of footfalls, to creamy warm softness.
I had an oriental rug the color of bread mold, a simple but imposing work desk, a trio of bookcases, a small stereo with a turntable, an upholstered reading chair, and seventeen unopened boxes of books, bones, candles, talismans, phials, records, vintage occult instruments, notebooks, and ballpoint pens: everything required to make the study my center of operations.
I had scarcely unpacked the first box of supplies when I noticed a fluttery shadow in my periphery and turned to the window. A pigeon had landed on the sill. He tilted his head and watched me with a keen, beady eye and I approached the window slowly, happy for the company. His body was unusually thick, especially in the back, and I thought without judgment that he must be a glutton.
When the pigeon flew off, I discovered my mistake. His burliness hadn’t been fat but rather an extra folded wing. I opened the sash and stuck my head outside, startled by the sparkling cold and thrilled to see the three-winged pigeon flap away. The extra wing was on his right side and made him fly erratically. I watched him enter a leafless tree, tangle in the limbs, and extricate himself before he ascended over a neighboring house and fluttered out of sight.
An omen, I believed, of prodigies to come.
I wasn’t disappointed. Prodigies abounded.
One morning, I discovered my dining room was coated with an ultrafine layer of snow. The table, floor, and wrought-iron chandelier were lunar white when I entered, and I assumed the powder was dust until I wiped the table with my palm. The sensation was painfully cold but oddly refreshing, like peppermint absorbed directly into my skin.
According to a thermometer I fetched from my study, the dining room was eight degrees Fahrenheit despite an otherwise well-heated building and a working radiator in the dining room itself. When the localized cold began to disperse, I swept as much of the snow as possible into a Mason jar. The snow soon melted into seventeen ounces of water, and yet the water remained unnaturally cold. I was strongly tempted to drink it but ultimately placed the jar in my curiosities closet, where I discovered, in the shadows, that the water was faintly luminous.
Another day, the water in the house’s pipes became impossibly hot—well beyond boiling point without becoming steam. A one-minute flow not only deformed the kitchen faucet but raised the room’s temperature so dramatically I fainted from the heat.
When I revived and fled to the cooler hallway, I heard a deep, metallic groaning in the downstairs bathroom. The sound was coming from the pipes, which were bowing and distending from the superheated water. I ran the sink and bathtub faucets to relieve the strain but succeeded only in damaging the drain pipes, too.
I ran from the bathroom to the first-floor utility room. My ancient hot-water tank was oily black and massive, with heavily grimed gauges, knobs, and valves, like a repurposed boiler from an evil locomotive. A flaking label read DO NOT ADJUST. I twisted several unmarked dials, then kicked the tank to quiet an ominous rumble. Nothing appeared out of order, and when I returned to the bathroom and retried the faucets, the water’s temperature had already begun to drop.
Much of my plumbing was visible along the house’s exposed brick walls and the lasting damage was immediately apparent. Horizontal pipes had sagged. Vertical pipes had tapered and bulged like hideous balloon animals. There were blockages and leaks, and from that day forward, the pipes’ distorted widths caused my toilet to flush with breathtaking suction and my faucets to dribble or spurt with unpredictable force.
My radiators sounded like a choir of murdered children, and now and then I sat and listened, wondering if the house was threatening me. Yet the radiators’ song was balefully lovely and the distorted pipes lent a grotesque but singular aesthetic to the walls. The house, evolving in my presence, felt more and more like home.
A different sort of mystery came to light when I visited the basement.
One dirty lightbulb with a pull chain lit the area near the stairs, and I used my pocketlight to illuminate my way around the darker depths and grottos. Motes swarmed the air but the air felt dead. The space was loaded with support beams, cobwebs, discarded furniture, moldering crates, broken tools, and dust-furred debris. All told, it was an especially decrepit but otherwise typical old basement. The ceiling joists were low and flooring nails jabbed downward only inches over my scalp. The walls were irregular concrete, studded with rocks and bricks and rusted metal, and several partial collapses of the foundation had been reinforced with makeshift buttresses.
The floor was also concrete, with cracks, swells, oily puddles, mounds of dirt, and powdery efflorescence. Much of the floor’s rear half was a patchwork of iron plates, welded trapdoors, and wooden platforms weighted down with boxes and scrap metal.
In the northeast corner, I illuminated a curious tableau. A black iron safe was riveted to the floor. The safe was three foot square, with an imposing handle and a combination lock, and was surrounded by what appeared to be a child’s furniture set. There was a tiny chair, a miniature table, and a steel-framed cot the length of my leg. On the table stood a coffee mug and a stalagmite of wax with an unlit, semi-melted candle on top. Beside the cot was a small wooden radio, the dial of which was tuned to my favorite station.
The radio played when I switched it on. The candlewax was pliably fresh. After determining the safe was locked, I went upstairs to call Mrs. Zabka on the phone and ask her if she knew the combination.
Mrs. Zabka informed me that everything in the northeast corner of the basement belonged to a man named Mr. Gormly. He alone, she assured me, knew the combination. When I asked who Mr. Gormly was and where he’d gone after abandoning his possessions, she said the man had lived in the basement for decades and, as far as she understood, was living there still.
I was astonished by the news and asked her why I hadn’t been informed about him earlier. Mrs. Zabka corrected me: I had been informed when I read and signed Addendum 7c of the Affidavit of Title, which guaranteed Mr. Gormly’s right to inhabit the northeast corner of the basement in perpetuity. She assured me Mr. Gormly was a quiet tenant who paid his rent, in cash, on the night of each new moon.
That explained the mint-scented envelope, containing a hundred-dollar bill, I’d found in my study the day I moved in. I had assumed some
