The Creeper of Munir House

The first night in our ancestral home in Old Dhaka, I heard the sound of water dripping, though every tap was dry. I lay in the sweltering heat of the tin-roofed room, listening. It was rhythmic, like a heartbeat, coming from the corner where a wooden wardrobe stood nailed to the wall. I dismissed it as rats or the old pipes. In the morning, the floor beneath the wardrobe was bone dry. My mother, busy unpacking, scolded me for staying up too late and letting my imagination run wild. I left for the rickshaw to my university, and the memory dissolved in the cacophony of the city.

My name is Rifat. We had moved into my grandfather’s house after my father’s business collapsed. The house was a relic from the British Raj, a two-story structure with peeling paint, iron grilles, and a courtyard choked with weeds. The previous tenants, a Hindu family, had fled to India during the Partition, and the house had been allotted to my grandfather. It had remained largely untouched since. I was a student of literature, and my nights were for studying. That’s why, at 2:30 AM, I was still hunched over a book on Victorian poetry, the fan whirring overhead.

That night, the heat was oppressive, the kind that makes you sweat in your sleep. I finally switched off the lamp and lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. A waft of cool air brushed my face, and I saw it. A woman’s face, pressed against the window grill, her features distorted. Her skin was a sickly pale, her eyes were narrow and black, and her hair hung in lank, wet ropes around her shoulders. She was not a human face; it was too long, too flat, with a mouth that stretched impossibly wide. She looked at me without blinking, her head tilted as if studying a specimen. My limbs locked. I couldn’t even close my eyes. She held my gaze for a long time, then slowly withdrew, as if sinking into the darkness. The moment she disappeared, I screamed, but no sound came out. I passed out.

In the morning, I told my mother, but she waved it off. ‘You saw a dream, beta. The house is old, it plays tricks.’ I wanted to believe her, but I noticed the window was shut tight from the outside. I went to college, but the image haunted me. I started sleeping with the light on.

A week later, I was reading in the same position. This time, I heard a sound like wet cloth dragging across the floor. I looked up and froze. The woman was inside the room, standing at the foot of my bed. Her black hair covered her face now, but I could see her hands—they were long, with fingers that bent backward at the joints. She began to approach, her movements jerky, like a film reel skipping. I tried to mutter a prayer, but my tongue felt like lead. She leaned over me, and I smelled rotting vegetation and stale water. She whispered something in a language I didn’t know, but the sound was like leaves rustling. Then she was gone, and the room was still. I didn’t scream. I couldn’t. I just lay there, my heart hammering, until dawn.

The next day, I visited the local imam. He listened to my story and grew pale. He said there were old stories about this house, about a woman who had been drowned in the well in the courtyard by her own family. Her ghost, he said, was a ‘creeper’—a being that feeds on fear. He gave me an amulet and told me to aim a mirror at the window, but I didn’t have the courage to face her again.

That night, I placed a mirror on the windowsill. At 2:30, I felt the temperature drop. She appeared in the window, but this time, she didn’t look at me. She stared at her own reflection, and a horrible grin spread across her face, splitting it even wider. She raised her hand and pointed at me. I saw my reflection in the mirror, but it wasn’t me. It was a corpse, bloated and black, my face twisted in a final scream. I screamed then, a real scream that brought my mother running. She found me on the floor, the mirror shattered.

She didn’t tell me it was a dream this time. She called a kaviraj, an old practitioner of folk medicine. He examined the room, then whispered that the woman was bound to the well, and that the mirror had trapped me in her world. He performed a ritual involving salt and iron, and for a while, the noises stopped. But I knew she was waiting. I could feel her eyes on me at night, even when I couldn’t see her.

A month later, I was walking in the courtyard, and the well had been sealed with a concrete slab decades ago. But I saw water seeping from its edges, forming a puddle that shimmered in the moonlight. In the puddle, her reflection appeared, her face clear and smile. She mouthed a single word: ‘Mine.’ I felt a pull, as if the ground beneath me wanted to drag me toward the well. I stumbled back, but my left hand brushed the puddle, and her cold, wet fingers closed around my wrist. I yanked away, leaving my wedding ring—my father’s ring—in her grip.

I ran inside and stayed in my room, not sleeping for days. My mother noticed the bite marks on my arm, and she finally broke down and told me the truth: my grandfather had known about the woman. He had tried to exorcise her, but the house was built on the well, and the boundaries were thin. He had made a deal with her: every generation, she would take one of the men at his most vulnerable. My grandfather was spared because he married my grandmother, who was a descendant of the family that had drowned her. But my father, he was taken when I was only a child. That’s why we had to leave—the house claimed its due.

I am writing this by candlelight, because the electricity in the house has been flickering ever since I touched the puddle. I know now that I cannot escape. The woman, the creeper, is not a ghost to be banished. She is part of the house, the old, damp soul of it. She has chosen me. I can feel her climbing through the walls, her fingers scraping like roots. Tonight, at 2:30, she will come through the window again. But this time, I will not run. I will look into her face and ask her name. I want to know if she was a victim or a curse. I want to know if the dead can rest when the living forget them. And as the clock ticks toward midnight, I hear her dripping sound, coming closer, and I realize that in the end, we all become part of the house’s story—we become its echoes, its scars, its hungry silence.