The Brindle Pattern of the Wallpaper

My first encounter with the unnatural occurred in the autumn of 1992, when I was six years old. My family had just moved into a sprawling, rundown Victorian house on the outskirts of a small Nevada desert town. We’d been there barely a week, and I was still not used to the way the floorboards creaked like old bones or the way the wind howled through the gaps in the window frames. My mother had put me in the ‘sewing room’ for the night, a narrow chamber off the main hallway that smelled of mothballs and dust. My real bedroom was being painted, and the fumes were unbearable, so I was given a fold-out cot and told to be brave.

I wasn’t scared that first night, not until the moonlight crept across the wall and made the faded floral wallpaper seem to shift. The pattern was a dance of tiny, brownish-purple blossoms, and in the dim light, they looked less like flowers and more like eyes. I remember staring at them, trying to convince myself it was just my imagination, when the broom appeared. It wasn’t a normal broom, but a miniature one, no bigger than a matchstick, and it popped into existence at the foot of the cot, perched on the edge of a pair of old boots my father had left there. It began to sweep back and forth, dusting the leather, and I watched, more amused than frightened. It was so small and meticulous, like a tiny servant carrying out its duty.

I was so engrossed in the broom’s rhythm that I almost missed the flying carpet. It came into view from my right, a postage-stamp-sized rectangle of woven gold and red, hovering in the air with a gentle bobbing motion. It was absurdly cartoonish, its edges fringed with little tassels that swayed as it moved. It circled the room once, twice, and then, as if acknowledging my presence, it dipped toward me. It came to rest on the blanket by my hand, and the tiny broom, as if in response, swept itself off the boot and onto the carpet. Then they both lay still. I remember thinking, ‘This is a dream,’ and I closed my eyes, willing myself to ignore the prickling feeling on my skin.

When I opened my eyes again, the room had changed. The wallpaper was no longer static; the blossoms were writhing, and the pattern seemed to be rearranging itself into something deeper. The brownish-purple shapes began to elongate, forming the suggestion of letters, or perhaps an illegible script. The broom and carpet were gone, but in their place, a single, large moth fluttered at the window, its wings beating with a sound like dry leaves scraping. It tapped against the glass insistently, and I found myself walking toward it, my feet bare on the cold floor. The window was sealed shut, painted over, but as I approached, the moth vanished, and in its stead, I saw my reflection. But it wasn’t my reflection. It was me, but older, and my eyes were hollow, and my mouth was open in a silent scream. I stumbled back, and the reflection didn’t follow. It just stayed there, staring, as if trapped in the glass.

I bolted from the room, running down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom, but the hallway stretched longer than it should have. The same door passed by again and again, and the wallpaper pattern was everywhere, the blossoms now forming swirling spirals that seemed to pull my gaze. I started to hum to myself, a tune my grandmother used to sing, but it came out wrong, with a dissonance that made my teeth ache. Then I heard a voice, low and guttural, from nowhere, saying, ‘You shouldn’t have shut the window.’ The voice was thick, like molasses, and I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. I spun around, but there was no one there, only the hallway, and the wallpaper, which now seemed to be breathing.

I finally crashed through a door, and it wasn’t my parents’ bedroom. It was a room I had never seen before, a small, windowless room with a single poster of an old movie, ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ on the wall. A bed sat in the corner, and on it was a pile of children’s clothing, all folded neatly. The clothes were my size, but they weren’t mine, and I had never worn them. On the pillow lay a hairbrush, with a few strands of auburn hair caught in the bristles. I felt a sudden, irrational sadness, as if I had lost something I never had. The air grew cold, and the poster’s edges began to curl, and I knew with a certainty that I was not alone.

I don’t remember leaving that room. I only remember waking up in the morning, in my own cot, with the sunlight streaming through the window and the wallpaper pattern looking benignly dull. My mother found me in the sewing room and asked why I had been crying in my sleep. I couldn’t answer her, and she just chalked it up to nightmares. But later that day, I went to the window, and I looked out at the desert, and I saw a figure far off, standing among the sagebrush, wearing a long coat. It was too distant to see its face, but it was watching me. It stayed there until the sun went down, and when I blinked, it was gone.

Years later, when I was a teenager, I learned that the house had been built on the site of an old mental asylum that had burned down in the 1940s. The fire had killed a nurse and a young patient, a boy named Samuel, who had a habit of ‘sweeping’ his room with an invisible broom and pretending his blanket was a flying carpet. I never went back to that room, and I never spoke of what I saw. But to this day, I cannot look at wallpaper with an ornate pattern without seeing the blossoms move, and I cannot hear a moth tap against a window without feeling that cold hand on my shoulder. And sometimes, when I’m alone, I hear that guttural voice, asking, ‘Why did you shut the window?’ And I still don’t know the answer.