The Ashwood Merchant

The house came with the fall of 1979, when my soon-to-be wife, Elaine, and I were still young enough to think that peeling paint and bowed floors were romantic. My parents had bought it from the estate of a childless widow, a woman named Margaret Oakes, who had died at ninety-two, alone, in a house that had once been a hotel in a town called Ashwood. Ashwood had boomed in the 1890s, a timber town with a sawmill and a rail spur, but the spur had been rerouted in 1905, and the town had bled out slowly, its buildings carted away or left to rot. The hotel, a three-story Victorian with a wraparound porch and a mansard roof, had been the grandest structure left standing, though a fire in the 1920s had gutted the top floor and part of the second. The widow’s father, a man named Silas Oakes, had bought the remains, hauled lumber from the abandoned sawmill, and rebuilt it into a family home, using the old hotel’s bones.

Elaine and I moved in a week after our wedding, our lives packed into a rented U-Haul. The house sat at the end of a gravel lane, a mile from the tar road, surrounded by loblolly pines and kudzu. The air smelled of pine resin and damp earth, and the only sound was the cry of a lone crow. We spent our first three days cleaning, scraping wallpaper, and discovering the house’s quirks: the front door stuck unless you lifted it by the knob, the hallway on the second floor sloped so that a marble would roll from the bathroom to the linen closet, and the basement smelled of coal smoke and something sweet, like overripe fruit. We didn’t mind. We were young, and the house was ours.

It was in the attic, where the rebuilt roof joined the original brick walls, that we found the box. It was a tin box, rusted, tucked behind a loose brick in the chimney. Inside were a dozen letters, written in a neat, spidery hand, all dated between 1901 and 1904. They were addressed to a ‘My dearest Ruth,’ and signed only with an initial, ‘A.’ The letters spoke of a merchant, a man who traveled the river towns and sold dry goods and tonics. He wrote of his love for Ruth, and of his hope that they would be married once his business was established. But there was something unsettling beneath the romantic words: he often mentioned ‘the debt’ and ‘the ledger’ and ‘the payment.’ In one letter, dated March 1903, he wrote: ‘I have made a bargain, my love, that will secure our future. I shall not speak of it in this letter, but know that it is for the best, and that I will come to you as soon as it is done.’ The last letter, dated December 1904, was short: ‘I have kept my word. I will see you soon. Do not forget me, for I will not forget you.’ There was no envelope, no other trace.

Elaine dismissed the letters as a romance gone wrong, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were a confession. I started looking into the house’s history, spending lunch hours at the courthouse and the local library. The deed for the house showed a chain of ownership: Silas Oakes had bought the property from the bankruptcy of the Ashwood Hotel Company in 1923. But the county records also hinted at a earlier transfer, a quitclaim deed from a woman named Ruth Oakes to Silas Oakes in 1905, filed with a single dollar stated as consideration. Ruth Oakes was a widow, the records said, and Silas was her brother. She had inherited the hotel from her husband, a man named Asa Oakes, who had disappeared in 1904 while on a business trip. He was declared legally dead in 1906. Asa was a merchant, known locally as ‘the Ashwood Merchant.’ He sold hardware, patent medicines, and furniture, and he traveled the back roads with a wagon full of goods. The letters were his. The ‘debt’ he spoke of was never explained.

We began to notice things. Small things at first: a cold spot in the corner of the dining room, a floorboard that creaked when no one stood on it, the smell of coal smoke that drifted through the house even when the furnace was off. Elaine found a strand of black hair on her pillow, though she had short blonde hair. I dismissed them, but then we heard the scratching. It came at night, from inside the walls of the attic, just above our bedroom. It sounded like a rat, but larger. I set traps, but they were never triggered, and the scratching continued.

The dreams came next. I dreamed of a man in a dark suit, his face obscured, standing at the foot of my bed. He held a ledger book bound in cracked leather, and he was writing in it, his hand moving in strokes that made no sense. In the dream, he looked up at me, and I saw that his eyes were milky white, like a dead fish. He spoke in a voice that sounded like stones scraping together: ‘Payment is due.’ I woke up shaking, but told myself it was just the stress of the renovation. Elaine wouldn’t admit it, but I knew she was having nightmares too. She began sleeping with a lamp on, and she jumped at every creak.

One afternoon, I decided to explore the basement more thoroughly. I had noticed a small door in the foundation, barely visible behind a stack of old lumber. I cleared it away, and found a padlocked wooden door. The lock was rusted, but I managed to pry it off with a crowbar. The door swung open onto a narrow staircase that descended into the dark. I grabbed a flashlight and climbed down. The stairs led to a brick-lined room, about ten feet square, with a dirt floor. In the center was a wooden table, and on the table was a ledger book. It was bound in cracked leather, dripping with moisture, and when I opened it, the pages were blank except for one entry in a spidery hand: ‘Asa Oakes, 1904. Paid in full.’ The ink was dark, almost black, and it smeared under my fingers as if it were still wet.

I brought the ledger upstairs and showed it to Elaine. We compared the handwriting to the letters. It was the same. We felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. That night, the scratching was louder, and we heard footsteps in the attic, heavy and deliberate. I grabbed a flashlight and a baseball bat, and climbed the pull-down stairs. The attic was mostly empty, but in the far corner, where the box had been, I saw a figure. It was a man, thin, dressed in a dark suit long out of fashion. His face was a mass of shadows, and his eyes glowed faintly, like coals. He held a ledger book, and he was writing in it. As I watched, he looked up, and his mouth split into a grin that was too wide. ‘You have found the book,’ he said. ‘Now you must take up the debt.’

I swung the bat, but it passed through empty air. The figure vanished, and the attic was silent. I stood there, shaking, the bat hanging limp in my hands. I knew then that the house was not just old; it was haunted by something that had been waiting for a new owner to collect an old debt.

We sold the house two months later, at a loss. We told no one the real reason. We moved to a new development outside Biloxi, in a split-level house with a patio and a sprinkler system. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I still see the man in the attic, writing in his ledger. And I wonder if he is still there, waiting for the next owner, the one who will finally understand what the payment is. I never found out what Asa Oakes owed, or to whom. But I have a theory: he made a bargain to ensure his business prosperity, and his part of the bargain was to serve the house, to keep it company, to lure others into the same trap. And the payment, I think, is the soul of the house’s new resident.

We are careful now, Elaine and I. We don’t buy old houses. We don’t go near Ashwood, which has truly disappeared from maps. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear a scratching in the walls of our bland, safe home. And when I turn on the light, there is nothing there. But the air smells of coal smoke and something sweet, like overripe fruit. And I know, with a certainty that chills my bones, that the Ashwood Merchant is not done with us yet.