The Broom’s Cadence

In November 1984, I was still renting the old Fenwick place on the edge of Maple Hollow, a town that had seen better days. The house, built in 1895, sat on a hill that looked down at the frozen lake, its tall windows like staring eyes. I had decided to hold a yard sale to clear out the accumulated junk of a lifetime, and the neighborhood kids—Tommy, Lucy, and the twins, Alex and Sam—had offered to help sort through the boxes in the cellar. It was a damp, stone-floored space with a low ceiling, lit by a single bare bulb that swung when you walked past. The cellar was divided into two parts: the front, where we worked, and the back, hidden behind a curtain of cobwebs and old blankets, where the furnace and the coal chute were.

On the day of the cleaning, we were all in the front part, rummaging through old trunks and shelves of dusty knick-knacks. I was at the big stone sink in the corner, washing a pile of chipped plates for the sale. The sink had a old pump handle, and the water ran cold and brown. Suddenly, I felt a sharp tap on my left arm. I looked down, and the broom that had been leaning against the wall next to me was now upright, its bristles brushing my sleeve. It hit me again, three quick times, like someone tapping to get my attention. The broom was an old one with a worn wooden handle, and it couldn’t have moved on its own. I screamed. The kids, who had been laughing over a box of old records, all froze. Their faces went pale. Tommy dropped the record he was holding, and it shattered on the floor.

When I finally stopped screaming, I realized that Max, my golden retriever, who had been lying by the stairs since we came down, was missing. I called his name, and we all searched through the clutter. After a few minutes, Alex found him in the far back, behind the blanket curtain. He was tied to a heavy iron pipe that ran along the wall, his leash replaced with a length of rusty telephone wire, looped around his collar so he couldn’t move. He wasn’t barking, just whimpering softly. My blood ran cold. We had all been in the front, no one had gone back there, and the wire was not from the house. It looked like it had been cut from the old wiring that hung from the ceiling in the front, but none of us had touched it.

The kids were terrified. They ran up the stairs, and I heard the door slam. I untied Max with trembling hands, and he bolted up the stairs ahead of me, leaving me alone in the faint light of the bulb. I stood there for a moment, listening to the hum of the old furnace. A cold draft blew from the back, and I thought I saw something shift in the shadows near the coal chute, but it was probably just my imagination.

That afternoon, I called the local priest, Father O’Malley, to bless the house. He laughed and said it was just an old house making sounds, but he agreed to come by. He walked through the cellar, muttering prayers, but he didn’t find anything. He told me to keep the broom in a different place. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the broom and the wire. And for the first time, I noticed that the cellar was the only room in the house that never warmed up, even in summer. It had a smell of damp earth and something else, something like old iron and burnt dust.

After that, the kids never came back. They would cross the street to avoid my house. I tried to continue with the yard sale, but I didn’t have the heart. The boxes sat in the cellar, and I eventually stopped going down there. I would stand at the top of the stairs and stare into the gloom, and I always felt that I was being watched. I saw things out of the corner of my eye—movement, a shape that disappeared when I turned. Once, I left a cup of coffee on the railing at the top of the stairs, and when I came back, it was on the cellar floor, unbroken, as if placed there gently.

I dug through the town records to find out more about the house. It had been built by a man named Silas Fenwick, who had been a stationmaster on the old railroad line. He was a recluse, and he had a daughter who died young. Rumor had it that he kept her body in the house, and that he was buried in the cellar under the coal chute. I tried to dismiss it as folklore, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house was alive in a way that was not natural.

In January, I decided to move out. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I packed my things, but I left the cellar untouched. On the last day, as I walked through the empty rooms, I heard a sound from below. It was the rhythmic tapping of the broom against the sink, like a heartbeat. I didn’t go down. I just walked out and closed the door behind me. I never looked back.

But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear that cadence in my dreams—three taps, a pause, three taps—and I know that the house is waiting, and it is patient, and it will find another soul to haunt.