The Cellar of the Blue Iris

It was the summer of 2011 when Anna and I bought our first house in the quiet town of Maplewood, Ohio. The place was a fixer-upper, but we loved its high ceilings and the wide porch that wrapped around the front. We had two cats, Miso and Soba, and they were the first to notice something wrong. From the day we moved in, they refused to go into the basement. They would hiss and flatten their ears at the top of the stairs, their tails bushed out like bottle brushes. We thought it was just the unfamiliarity, but the feeling persisted. In our bedroom, there was a persistent scent of lavender and something acrid, like burnt sugar. Anna kept asking me, ‘Are you baking? Did you spill something?’ I always said no, but the smell clung to the curtains and the sheets. We washed everything, but it lingered.

As August rolled around, we had finally coaxed the cats downstairs by placing their food bowls on my workbench in the unfinished part of the basement. The finished half was a home theater the previous owner had built, with a large screen and plush recliners. The laundry room and storage area were in the rougher section, where I spent my weekends tinkering. One hot afternoon, I came home early from work to set up a new Blu-ray player behind the entertainment center. The house was silent except for the hum of the air conditioner. I was flat on my back, fiddling with the cables, when I saw a pair of scuffed work boots on the stairs. They descended slowly, deliberately, and I froze. I craned my neck around the dust-covered cabinet and saw a man in a blue work shirt step onto the concrete floor. He walked across to the far wall, where an old metal shelf stood, and then he vanished into the shadows as if he had never been. I scrambled to my feet, heart pounding, but there was no one there. I told myself it was a trick of the light, but I knew what I saw.

Weeks passed, and I couldn’t shake that image. Anna noticed I was jumpy, but I didn’t want to worry her. Then she mentioned one night that she heard someone humming a tune she didn’t recognize, coming from the basement. I dismissed it as the furnace or the pipes. But the true horror began when I found the photographs. I was cleaning out the laundry room, which had a small utility closet. Inside, behind an old water heater, was a cardboard box wrapped in duct tape. Curious, I opened it. It contained a collection of old photo albums and loose prints. The pictures were of a family, all smiling, but in every shot, there was a dark blurry figure in the background. Sometimes it was a shadow on a wall, sometimes a smudge on a window, but always present. The last photo was of a man in a blue work shirt, standing in what looked like our basement, except the walls were unpainted and there was no theater equipment. The date on the back read ‘June 1987.’ I felt a cold knot in my stomach. I showed Anna, and she turned pale. She whispered, ‘That’s the man you saw.’ We burned the photographs, but that night we both woke up to the smell of lavender and burnt sugar, and the sound of footsteps walking across the basement floor.

I couldn’t sleep after that. I started camping out in the living room, keeping the lights on. Anna tried to remain strong, but she was scared too. One evening, I decided to dig into the house’s history. The county records showed that the house was built in 1925, but the basement had been remodeled in the late ’80s by a man named Harold Betz. Harold was a handyman who had disappeared in 1992, and his wife had sold the house a year later. No one knew what happened to him. I became obsessed. I spent hours in the basement, searching for any trace. I moved the shelf where the man had vanished, and behind it, I found a small door that had been painted over. It was hidden so well, I almost missed it. With a crowbar, I pried it open. The space beyond was a cramped, damp crawl space, filled with old tools and a mildewed mattress. On the mattress were the remains of a man, a set of work clothes, and a rusted hand saw. I called the police, but they could not identify the body. The news spread, and a woman in town told me that Harold Betz had a wife who was a florist, and that she used to give him a lavender cologne that he loved, and he always smelled of burnt sugar from the candy shop he frequented.

We moved out soon after, selling the house at a loss. I still have nightmares about that crawl space. And sometimes, when I’m in a new place, I catch a whiff of lavender and burnt sugar, and I know that old cellar isn’t done with me. But the strangest part is the blue iris. In the backyard of that house, there was a patch of irises that never bloomed except for one. It was a deep blue, almost black. I dug it up before we left and planted it in our new garden. Every year, it blooms around August, and every time I see it, I think of that man descending the stairs, and the silent judgment in his eyes.