The Backward Steps

My earliest memory isn’t a face or a voice, but a weight. It pressed on my chest like a cold stone, and when I cried, it grew heavier. I was barely three years old, lying in my crib in the upstairs bedroom of the old farmhouse my parents had bought for a song. The previous owner, a reclusive beekeeper named Ezra, had been found dead in the cellar, his body folded into the coal chute. The townsfolk whispered he’d been buried alive, but the coroner wrote ‘accidental asphyxiation’ on the death certificate. We didn’t know that then. We just knew the place smelled of honey and rot, and that the stairs creaked in a rhythm that was almost musical.

My brother, Carl, was five and shared the room with me. At night, he’d hold my hand across the gap between our beds. ‘It’s just the house settling,’ he’d say, but his fingers were always cold. I was too young to understand why the air in that room felt thick, like swimming through syrup. I started having ‘episodes,’ as my mother called them. I’d wake up screaming, my face wet, and I’d insist that ‘the lady’ had been sitting on my chest, her long hair dripping water onto my cheeks. But our house had no lady, only the ghost of a beekeeper who never left the cellar.

One night, when I was six, I got out of bed to use the hall bathroom. The hallway was pitch black, and the floorboards complained under my bare feet. I counted the steps from our door to the bathroom: twelve. But on this night, I counted thirteen. A new step had appeared at the far end, a shadowy indentation in the wood that led to a closed door I’d never seen before. My heart hammered. I knew I should turn back, but something pushed me forward, a draft of cold air that smelled of burnt honey. I reached out and turned the knob. The door swung open onto a flight of stairs going up, not down. We lived on the second floor; there should have been an attic, but my parents said it was sealed off. These stairs were raw wood, splintery, and they went up into a darkness that seemed to breathe.

I called out for my mother, but my voice came out as a whisper. I started to climb, my small feet barely covering the length of each stair. The air grew colder, and the buzzing of bees grew louder, a low hum that vibrated through the soles of my feet. At the top, there was a single bare bulb hanging from a wire, casting a sickly yellow light. The room was empty, save for a child’s rocking chair, moving back and forth by itself. In the middle of the floor was a chalk circle, and inside it, a small wooden doll with its eyes scratched out. I picked it up, and I heard a voice behind me, soft and broken: ‘You shouldn’t have come up here, little one.’

I spun around, but no one was there. The buzzing intensified, and the rocking chair stopped. I ran, but the stairs seemed longer than before, the steps now descending forty, fifty, a hundred. I was weeping, calling for Carl, for my parents, but my voice was swallowed by the hum. Finally, I burst out into the hallway outside our bedroom, gasping. The bathroom door was directly ahead, twelve steps away. I never told anyone about that room. I thought it was a dream, a night terror.

But the episodes worsened. I’d wake up with my pillow soaked, and I’d find small handprints of mud on my sheets, though no one else had been in the room. My mother took me to doctors, but they said it was just childhood imagination. When I was eight, we moved out, and I forgot about the farmhouse, or tried to. We moved to a bungalow in town, and the nightmares faded. I became a sensible adult, a librarian, and I moved to a city apartment with creaky pipes and nosy neighbors. I told myself it was all in my head.

Last month, my brother Carl died. He was only thirty-two, and the police said it was a heart attack, but his face was frozen in terror, and his body was covered in small, uniform welts, like bee stings. At his funeral, a woman in a black veil approached me. She was old, with skin like wrinkled paper, and she smelled of honey. She pressed a key into my hand and said, ‘The stairs have been waiting for you.’ Then she vanished.

The key was old, brass, with a symbol etched into the bow: a spiral. I knew instantly it belonged to the farmhouse. I drove back after the funeral, my hands shaking on the wheel. The house was still there, but it looked younger, as if it had been untouched by time. The porch steps were coated in dust, but I could see the faint imprint of small bare feet leading to the door. I unlocked it, and the smell of rot hit me. I went straight up the stairs, to the hallway, and I counted. Twelve steps to the bathroom. But at the far end, there it was: a closed door I’d never seen in my adult memory, but which I recognized from my childhood dream. My legs moved on their own, and I opened it. The stairs were there, and the buzzing was deafening. I climbed, and at the top, the room was no longer empty. On the rocking chair sat a small girl, her back to me. She wore a white dress, and her hair was wet, dripping onto the floorboards. She turned her head, but her face was blank, smooth, save for a mouth that opened into a black hole. She spoke, and her voice was the sound of bees swarming.

‘You left me,’ she said. ‘You made me stay here.’

I wanted to run, but my feet were rooted. She raised a hand, and I saw the chalk circle on the floor was not a circle, but a spiral, the same as the key. ‘The steps are backward,’ she said, ‘because you came back. Now you’ll stay.’ I looked down, and the stairs were gone. I was trapped in that room with a child made of shadows, and the only sound was the relentless buzzing of her words. I’m writing this now, from a small notebook I found in my pocket, but I don’t know where I am. The walls are smooth, and there are no doors. But I hear footsteps on the other side of the wall, walking up, and down, and up again. And I know they’re for me.