The Constant Drip

I was five when we moved into my grandmother’s house, a crooked Victorian on the edge of a dying mill town in upstate New York. Most grandmas’ houses smelled of cookies and mothballs; this one smelled of damp plaster and old copper. The house had a peculiar layout: a vast, dim parlor that you entered first, and then a smaller, narrower room we called the ‘back room’ where we slept. I hated that parlor. It was always cold, no matter how high my grandmother cranked the radiators, and the air felt thick, like walking through cobwebs you couldn’t see. There was a constant, rhythmic dripping from somewhere inside the walls, even when the pipes were dry.

My sister and I shared a narrow bed in the back room, which had a single window that looked out onto a dead elm tree. At night, the dripping grew louder, and I would lie awake, listening to the sound of something slowly being turned off, then on again. It was not a comforting sound. It was a sound of patience. And I knew, even at five, that something in that house was waiting.

The first night, I saw the children. They were twins, a boy and a girl, with pale faces and hair the color of rust. They rode tricycles—old-fashioned ones with metal pedals and rubber wheels that made a soft whirr on the floorboards. They would circle the parlor, around and around, their wheels tracing figure-eights over the same worn spot on the rug. I saw them from the doorway, and they saw me. The boy smiled, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. The girl just stared, and I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the room.

My grandmother dismissed them. ‘Just the Hennessy twins,’ she said, her hands busy with a canning jar. ‘They’ve been here since I was a girl. They don’t mean any harm.’ But she wouldn’t look at me when she said it. And that night, I woke to the sound of tricycle wheels in the hall, passing our room, back and forth, back and forth. I pulled the blanket over my head, and my sister, sleeping beside me, never stirred.

The dripping grew worse. It started to sync with my heartbeat. I began to see things in the shadows of the parlor—not just the twins, but darker shapes, hunched over in the corners, whispering in a language I didn’t know. The twins would sometimes stop their riding and look at the shadows, and the shadows would look back. I understood, even then, that the twins were not the most frightening thing. They were just the forerunners.

One afternoon, I found a door in the parlor that I had never noticed before. It was behind a heavy walnut wardrobe that I had always assumed was against the wall. But there was a gap, and through the gap, I saw a small door, painted the same color as the wallpaper. I pulled the wardrobe aside, scraping my fingers on the rough wood, and opened the door. Inside was a narrow staircase leading down into blackness. The dripping was louder here, and I heard, from below, a soft, rhythmic creak—like a rocking chair on a wooden floor.

I should not have gone down. But there is a curiosity in children that overcomes fear, and I descended. The steps were steep and slick with damp. At the bottom was a small room, unfinished, with dirt walls and a low ceiling. In the center was an old rocking chair, empty, but rocking slowly on its own. Beside it, an oil lamp that lit itself as I watched. And in the corner, a faucet. It was dripping. The drip, drip, drip echoed off the walls, and I realized that the sound in the house was not from pipes. It was from this faucet. And the rocking chair was not empty. It was just that whoever was rocking was so still, so quiet, that I had not seen them at first.

A voice, dry as dead leaves, said, ‘Why, hello. You can see me.’ I looked at the chair. An old woman sat there, her skin like parchment, her eyes like wet stones. She smiled, and her teeth were long and pointed. ‘I’ve been waiting for a child to find me.’ She gestured to a small table beside the chair, where there were two glasses of water, one already half-empty. ‘The twins bring me company, but they don’t stay for long. They have their tricycles to ride. But you… you have come to play.’

I ran. I ran up the stairs, through the parlor, past the twins who had stopped riding to watch, and into the back room, where I shook my sister awake. But she just rolled over, mumbling, ‘Leave me alone.’ I lay in bed, trembling, and the dripping seemed to slow. And then it stopped. All night, there was silence. But in the morning, when I went to the bathroom, I found the faucet in the sink was dripping. It had never dripped before. And in the mirror, behind my reflection, I saw the old woman standing in the doorway of the parlor, smiling.

We moved out a month later. My grandmother said the house had ‘changed’ and she could no longer live there. She never spoke of the twins again. But to this day, I cannot stand a dripping faucet. And sometimes, when I am alone and the house is very quiet, I hear the soft whirr of tricycle wheels, and the rocking, and the drip. And I know that the old woman in the basement is still waiting, and that one day, I will have to go back and finish the glass of water she left for me.