The Belladonna Hour

The first time I saw the thing in the wallpaper, I put it down to the cheap gin I’d been drinking. It was the summer I turned eighteen, stuck in my grandmother’s crumbling farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, watching her drift in and out of lucidity. The house was a tomb; it smelled of mothballs and decay, and the walls were covered in a floral pattern so faded it looked like the ghost of a garden. My brother, Lenny, had come with me to ‘help out,’ but really, he just wanted to escape his own mess. For the first week, nothing happened. We’d sit on the porch, watching the wheat fields sway, pretending we weren’t both waiting for Grandma to die.

Then, one afternoon, I was in the parlor, trying to find a book to read, when I spotted something in the pattern on the far wall. A face. No, not a face – a suggestion of a face, made up of the swirling leaves and petals. I squinted, and it was gone. I blamed the heat, the dust, the fact that I’d been reading too much Poe. But the next day, I saw it again, clearer this time. A woman’s face, pale and sunken, with hollow eyes, woven into the very fibers of the paper. I pointed it out to Lenny. He leaned in, frowning. ‘I don’t see anything,’ he said. ‘You’re seeing things.’ Maybe I was. But the face stayed, watching me from the corner of my eye, and sometimes, when I moved, the wallpaper seemed to ripple, just a little, like it was breathing.

A week passed. Grandma had good days and bad. On a bad day, she’d call me by my mother’s name, and her eyes would go wide, and she’d whisper about ‘the ones who come from the ground.’ I ignored her. Then, the dreams started. Every night, I’d dream I was walking through the fields behind the house, the tall grass brushing my knees, and I’d hear a woman singing in a language I didn’t know. The sound would draw me closer, but no matter how far I walked, I never reached her. I’d wake up sweating, the song still in my ears, echoing like a memory.

On the night of the full moon, I woke to a strange silence. The farmhouse was never quiet; it creaked and groaned like an old ship. But now, nothing. I pulled on my boots and went outside, leaving Lenny snoring in his room. The moon hung huge and white over the fields, making everything look silver. And there, at the edge of the wheat, I saw a woman in a white dress, her back to me, her hair long and black. She was singing the lullaby from my dream. I called out, but she didn’t turn. I walked toward her, the wheat rustling around me, and the closer I got, the more the air felt thick, heavy, like I was wading through water. She was just a few feet away when she began to turn. And that’s when the crunch of glass came from the house.

I spun around. Every window in the farmhouse shattered at once. The sound was deafening, and I saw Lenny’s silhouette in his room, lit by the moon, his hands covering his ears. Then, the singing stopped. I looked back – the woman was gone. But in the place she had stood, the wheat was flattened in a perfect circle, and there was a small, withered flower, black as coal, with petals that seemed to pulse with a life of their own. I picked it up, and it was ice cold. That’s when I knew something was in the house with us, something that had been there long before we arrived, waiting for us to disturb its slumber.

The next morning, Lenny was pale. He said he’d seen two shadowy figures in his room, standing over his bed, their fingers brushing the broken glass. I didn’t tell him about the woman or the flower. I just buried the flower out in the yard, far from the house. But that night, I heard a scratching at my window. I pulled back the curtain, and there was the woman, her face pressed against the glass, her mouth open in a silent scream. And behind her, in the fields, I saw dozens of black flowers, blooming where none had been before. They were spreading, I realized. And the wallpaper in my room – when I turned back, the floral pattern had changed. The blossoms were black, and the woman’s face was no longer in the leaves; it was in the cracks of the ceiling, watching me with hollow, knowing eyes.

Lenny refused to stay. He packed his bags and drove off that morning, leaving me alone with Grandma and the creeping wrongness. A week later, I found her in her rocking chair, dead, a smile on her face. In her hands, she clutched a small, black flower. I should have left then, but I couldn’t. I was transfixed, obsessed. Every night, the song grew louder. The wallpaper grew darker, the flowers in the fields multiplied, and the woman grew more solid, more present. She wanted something from me. And I was beginning to understand that when the last petal fell from the belladonna in the garden, she would be free.

It was the belladonna, I realized. The house was built over a patch of deadly nightshade, and my grandmother had kept it, planted it in a pot in the conservatory, as a sort of guardian. But the spirit in the wallpaper was older, and it had fed on the nightshade for decades, using it to anchor itself to this world. And now, with Grandma dead, the belladonna was dying too, its leaves curling and browning. I watched it shrink day by day, and the woman grew stronger. On the last day, the walls in the house began to bleed black, and the air was thick with the smell of rot. I stood in the conservatory, staring at the withered plant, and the woman appeared behind me, reflected in the glass. She was beautiful, in a horror that made my heart seize.

‘The hour has come,’ she said, her voice like rustling leaves. ‘You will take my place.’ She pointed to the plant, and I saw it sprout anew, but with my face blooming at its center, my eyes open and screaming. And then the wallpaper closed over me, and I was inside the pattern, trapped in a world of green and black, watching through the glass as the woman now wore my skin, walking through the house, whispering to my grandmother’s corpse. I know now that I will never leave. And sometimes, on quiet nights, if you look at an old flowered wallpaper long enough, you might see my face among the leaves, begging to be set free.

But no one ever looks. They find new homes, rip down the paper, and burn it. And I am there, in the ash, in the smoke, drifting on the wind to find another house with walls that weep and flowers that bloom with poison. I am the one who comes from the ground, and I am waiting for you.