The Brass Taste

In the sweltering summer of my twenty-third year, I moved from the clatter of the city to the quiet, dust-choked town of Parma Falls. It was a place of peeling paint and sagging porches, where the only sound at night was the creak of a windmill that never turned. I took a job as a night clerk at a motel on the edge of town, a squat building with a flickering vacancy sign. The first two years were blissfully uneventful, a monotony I cherished after the chaos of my youth. But soon, the old sickness returned—the pounding heart, the dizziness, the metallic tang of copper on my tongue. It came in fits, sometimes while I was filing receipts, sometimes as I lay in my room above the office. I dismissed it as stress, a lingering echo of a teenage anxiety I thought I’d outgrown.

Then, three weeks ago, everything changed. It was a Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday—time blurs in that place. I was in bed, the digital clock glaring 3:07 AM, when a weight settled on my chest. Not crushing, but insistent, like a large cat. My limbs grew heavy, my fingertips tingled, and then my body began to convulse. My teeth chattered, my back arched, and I saw a dark, wispy shape at the foot of my bed, just a suggestion of form against the deeper black of the room. The convulsions stopped as abruptly as they began, leaving me gasping, drenched in sweat. The metallic taste in my mouth was so strong I tasted brass, and I coughed, spitting a small, blackened object onto my pillow—a tiny, twisted nail, rusted and ancient.

I tried to rationalize it. I had bitten my cheek. The nail had been in my mattress. But the next night, at the same hour, it happened again. This time, the convulsions were worse, and I felt a cold, dry hand press against my forehead. I couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out. When it ended, I found a fine dusting of gray ash on my pillow, and the taste of old pennies. I began to document everything in a small notebook: the times, the duration, the objects left behind—a thimble, a rusted key, a lock of gray hair. The night I found the hair, I realized it was the same color as the only photograph in my motel room, a faded portrait of a woman with severe eyes and a high collar, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. The frame had been nailed to the wall, and I couldn’t remove it.

Desperate, I sought help from the town’s only doctor, an elderly man named Dr. Alistair. He listened to my story with a frown, then examined the objects I had collected. He grew pale as he handled the key, turning it over in his trembling fingers. ‘Where did you get this?’ he demanded. ‘It looks like it belongs to the old train station. It’s been closed for fifty years.’ He told me that the station was the site of a tragedy—a night watchman had been found dead there, his body twisted, his face frozen in terror. The cause of death was never determined. Dr. Alistair warned me to leave town, to forget what I had seen, but his voice was hollow, as if he knew it was already too late.

That night, I did not sleep. I sat in the office, watching the security cameras, but the feed showed only static. At 3:07, a black figure appeared on the screen, standing directly behind my chair. I spun around, but the room was empty. The overhead light flickered. The AC unit rattled. Then, the phone rang. A voice, like dry leaves scraping concrete, whispered my name. ‘You’ve been carrying me for years,’ it said. ‘Since you first tasted the brass. You think you moved away, but I was always here, waiting for you to come closer.’ The line went dead. I looked down and saw that my hands were covered in soot, and the floor around my feet was dusted with ash.

I tried to run, I truly did. But my legs wouldn’t move, as if rooted to the floor. The temperature dropped, and I could see my breath. The woman from the photograph stepped out of the static, her form solidifying, her gray eyes fixed on me. She opened her mouth, and a swarm of black moths flew out, filling the room. They landed on my arms, my face, and began to dissolve, leaving raw, stinging welts. I screamed, but no sound came out. The last thing I saw before everything went black was the woman leaning close, her breath like cold iron, whispering, ‘You’re mine now. You’ve always been mine.’

At dawn, the motel owner found me on the floor, covered in ash, shivering, my eyes wide open but unseeing. They institutionalized me, and I’ve been here ever since, in a white room with no windows. At exactly 3:07 AM, the convulsions return, and the metallic taste floods my mouth. I’ve learned to control it now, to let the tremors pass without screaming. The doctors say I’m catatonic, but I’m not. I’m just waiting, because every night, the woman comes again, and she shows me what she wants me to do next. Last night, she placed a rusted metal box on my bed, its lid slightly ajar. Inside, I saw my own face, young and terrified, staring back at me from a faded photograph. And I realized, this has never been about haunting. It’s about possession. And I have been hers for twenty years.