The Cold Spigot

My mother and I moved to a little town called Stillwater, right off the coast, where the fog rolled in thick each night and the houses seemed to lean against each other for comfort. Ours was a two-story Victorian with a wrap-around porch, but it had a strange, cramped kitchen that always felt a few degrees colder than the rest of the house. I was twelve when we first noticed the sink acting up. Mom worked the morning shift at the pharmacy, so she’d leave before the sun rose, and I’d have to get myself ready for school. One morning, while I was munching on cereal and scrolling through my phone, the faucet in the kitchen turned on by itself, a hard blast of water that hit the metal basin with a clang. I froze, the spoon halfway to my mouth. The kitchen was empty, but I felt a chill crawl up my spine like a spider. I crept to the sink, my heart thumping, and turned it off. The water was icy cold, and the pipes groaned as if complaining. I never used that sink again without checking it first.

When I was thirteen, I had a terrifying encounter in the shower. We had an old claw-foot tub with a shower curtain that had a pattern of seashells, and one night, as I was washing my hair, I noticed something strange out of the corner of my eye. A thin, blue-ish appendage, like a finger but longer and boneless, was poking through a gap in the curtain, inching toward me. I yelped and batted it away, but when I turned around, it was gone. The water turned scalding hot, then freezing cold, and I scrambled out, dripping on the floor. I never showered alone in that house without a knife within reach.

The worst was the upstairs hallway. It was lined with old portraits of the previous owners, their eyes following you no matter where you stood. One afternoon, when I was eleven, I was home alone with a new phone, and I decided to take a picture of the hallway to test the camera. When I looked at the image, there was a dark, hunched figure standing behind me in the doorway of my room, even though I was alone. I spun around, but nothing was there. The picture was deleted, but for weeks, I felt a presence breathing down my neck whenever I walked upstairs. Mom said it was just my imagination, but she started sleeping with the lights on.

By the time I was fourteen, I had learned to ignore most of the oddities—the creaking floors, the whispers in the walls, the cold spots that seemed to wander. But one evening, I was reading in the living room when I heard a faint, rhythmic dripping from the kitchen. I hadn’t used the sink, but I went to check, and there, in the dim light, I saw the faucet slowly turning, as if an invisible hand were twisting it. Water began to fill the basin, and I could see my reflection in it, but my reflection was smiling, and I wasn’t. I ran to my room and buried my head under the pillow, but the sound of running water followed me, echoing in my ears.

The final straw came on a night when the power went out during a storm. I was alone, and in the dark, I heard the kitchen sink turn on full blast. I crept downstairs, my hands trembling, and found the water overflowing, flooding the floor. And then I heard a voice, soft and intimate, whispering my name. I turned to see the reflection in the water—a face, not mine, with hollow eyes and a wide, stretching grin. I fled the house, never to return. Mom sold it later, but I still wake up to the sound of running water, and I never trust a sink again.