The Ashwood Slumber

The Ashwood farmhouse had three floors of creaking heart pine and peeling wallpaper, but the troop leaders had finally coaxed a fire to life in the upstairs hearth. We dragged our sleeping bags up the narrow stairs, past the landing where a grandfather clock had stopped at 3:13, and claimed spots in the long attic room. The flames threw dancing shapes on the sloped ceiling, and for a while, it felt like a sleepover, all giggles and flashlight tag.

Earlier that day, we had wandered down the dirt road to the clapboard chapel of St. Eulalia’s, a lean-to of a church with a bell that hung in a wooden belfry. Some of the older girls dared each other to ring it, and the clang startled rooks from the trees. A few of them hopped the low stone wall around the graveyard, stepping on the sunken graves, and one girl, Dana, pretended to conduct a mock sermon at the altar, waving her arms and chanting ‘Repent! Repent!’ in a deep voice. I laughed along, though something about the stillness of the place made my skin prickle.

Back at the farmhouse, as the fire settled into orange coals, Dana started telling a story about the farmer who had built the place. She said his wife had died in the upstairs room where we were sleeping, her hair caught in a spinning wheel, and that her ghost still combed the floorboards for stray strands. We all laughed, but I noticed the younger girls, like my friend Mara, pull their sleeping bags a little closer together. The wind picked up, rattling the windowpanes, and the fire spat a spark onto the braided rug.

We played a game of hide-and-seek, but the attic was too small, so we drifted to the other rooms. I found a hiding spot in a narrow closet under the eaves, pressing myself against the rough wood. As I waited, I heard a sound, not of footsteps, but of something dragging, heavy and slow, across the floor above. I froze. The attic had a trapdoor to a crawl space, but we hadn’t seen any ladder. The dragging stopped, then started again, as if something was circling.

I pushed the door open and peeked out. The hallway was empty, but the floorboards were coated with a fine gray dust that hadn’t been there before. On the dust, there were parallel lines, like the tracks of a snake, but wider, and they led from the trapdoor to the top of the stairs. I followed them, my heart thumping, and they stopped right at the threshold of our attic room. The door was ajar, and I could hear the others’ laughter inside. They hadn’t noticed anything.

I stepped in, and the fire had dimmed to a whisper. The air was cold, and I saw that the dust had settled on everything, turning our colorful sleeping bags to gray lumps. The girls were all staring at the ceiling. Above us, the wooden beams had begun to sag, bowing inward as if under a great weight. A soft hiss came from the fireplace, and I swear I saw a shape shift in the soot, a twisted figure with arms too long.

Then Mara pointed to the floor beneath the window. A line of dark, viscous liquid was seeping from under the baseboard, spreading into a shape, a spiral, like a finger drawing in syrup. It spelled a word: ‘ASH.’

The fire flared, and the heat blasted us, but the cold clung to my bones. The girls started to scream, but their voices came out as whispers. The clock downstairs began to chime, thirteen times, each stroke shaking the house. And from the ventilator in the corner, a voice, dry as leaves, said, ‘You played in my garden. Now you’ll stay in my house.’

We ran, all of us, stampeding down the stairs, but the doors and windows were sealed with that same gray dust. The leaders tried to break a window, but the glass wouldn’t shatter, instead bulging inward like a membrane. The night grew long, and the house grew colder, and we huddled in the center of the room, listening to the scratching in the walls. By morning, the fire had died, and the dust had lifted, and the door to the outside swung open. But when we counted, we were one short. Dana was gone. They searched the house, but all they found was a single strand of gray hair on her sleeping bag, and a small pile of ash on the floor where she’d been.

We left that place, and never spoke of it. But I still dream of the Ashwood farmhouse, and the sound of something dragging across the floor above, and the whisper that says, ‘One more, one more.’