The Count of the Missing Paint

When I was sixteen, my mom, my older brother, and I moved into a small, slightly run-down house on the outskirts of a town called Aldergrove. The house wasn’t old, built maybe twenty years ago, but it had a strange, stale smell that never quite went away, no matter how much we cleaned. We lived there for about eight months before anything out of the ordinary happened.

It started with a bang on the wall of my bedroom, so loud it rattled the cheap framed print of a lighthouse I’d hung above my bed. The print fell, the glass cracked, but I figured it was just the house settling. The next week, I was in my room when the closet door, which was slightly warped and always stuck, slid open on its own, stopping halfway, then slowly closed again. I remember thinking, ‘Did that just happen?’, but I convinced myself it was a draft.

Then came the night of the ball. I was lying on my side, on the edge of my bed, the room dark except for the faint glow of the streetlight through my curtains. I saw something moving on the floor, coming toward my face. It was dark, about the size of a baseball, but it rolled with an eerie smoothness, as if it were being pulled. I froze, my heart pounding, and when it was inches away, I scrambled up and hit the light switch. Nothing was there. I checked under the bed, in the closet, everywhere. Empty.

After that, I started to feel like the house was watching me. I’d catch a movement in my peripheral vision, but when I turned, nothing. My brother, Jake, said he felt it too sometimes, but my mom never mentioned anything. I thought maybe the house was trying to get my attention, or that it had a fascination with me specifically.

Then came the night of the whisper. I woke up around 2 a.m., thirsty. I lay there for a while, trying to fall back asleep, when I heard a sound right next to my ear. It was a whisper, so fast I couldn’t make out the words. It was like a burst of static, but with a human quality. I snapped my eyes open, but there was no one there. The room was silent. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

The whisper became a nightly ritual. Sometimes it was just a breath, sometimes a jumble of syllables. Once, I thought I heard my name, but it was stretched and mangled: ‘Sss-aa-mmm.’ My name is Sam. But it didn’t sound like a person calling me; it sounded like something trying to imitate a human voice, getting it wrong.

I tried to record it with my phone, but the audio always came out garbled, like there was interference. I told my mom, and she just shrugged, saying, ‘Old houses make noises.’ But this house wasn’t that old.

Then one afternoon, I was in the living room, reading, when I noticed a small, dark stain on the wall near the baseboard. It hadn’t been there before. I touched it, and it was slightly warm. I rubbed at it with a rag, but it wouldn’t come off. Over the next few days, the stain grew, spreading like a bruise, and the smell of stale air intensified.

My mom finally called a contractor to check the walls. He found something weird: in the space between the living room and my bedroom, there was a small, sealed cavity, about the size of a shoebox. Inside was a tin can, rusted and bent. He pried it open, and inside was a child’s drawing: a crude picture of a house with stick figures, and in the attic, a lumpy shape with red eyes. On the back, in shaky handwriting, were the words, ‘Don’t let it out.’ We didn’t know what to make of it.

I started having vivid dreams. I’d be walking through our house, but it was wrong: the walls were covered in dark, wet-looking stains, and the air was thick and hard to breathe. In the dreams, I’d always end up in the attic, which we never used, but there was a pull, a voice whispering, ‘Open the door.’ One night, I woke up to find myself in the hallway, facing the attic door, my hand on the knob. I hadn’t been sleepwalking before.

I finally opened the attic door. It was dusty, with old boxes and broken furniture. In the corner, under a pile of yellowed newspapers, was a small, antique music box. It was covered in grime, but when I wiped it off, I saw the lid was painted with a scene of children playing in a field. Under it, the word ‘Sophie’ was scratched.

I winded the music box, and a tinkling melody played, but it was slow and distorted, like it was being played underwater. And then, from everywhere, a whisper grew, this time words I could understand, repeated over and over: ‘Almost there, almost there, almost there.’

That was when I realized the house wasn’t haunted by a ghost. It was something else, something patient, that had been waiting in the walls, feeding on our attention, growing stronger. The room additions, the pictures falling, the ball, the whispers, the music box—it was all a countdown. And the next day, I found a new stain on the wall in my room, but this time it was shaped like a hand, pressed against the drywall from the inside.

I still live in that house. You don’t just leave a thing like that. But every night, I lie in bed, listening, waiting for the whisper to become a scream, and I wonder how long until the hand breaks through.