The Creosote Bloom

My boyfriend, Julian, had a long-standing rule about the fourth floor of the Hamilton Arms: never look directly at the east window of the storage room. He was a groundskeeper there, a wiry man with a nervous habit of rubbing his thumb against his forefinger, and he swore the building’s older tenants refused to discuss it. The story he told me was fragmented, cobbled together from maintenance logs and drunken janitor confessions. An elderly woman, Mrs. Kowalski, had lived on the fourth floor in the 1970s. She was a recluse who kept a massive collection of dried flowers, hung in bunches from her ceiling between the exposed pipes. One winter, a space heater in the apartment directly above hers malfunctioned, and the wiring in the walls ignited before anyone could respond. The fire spread downward, and Mrs. Kowalski was trapped. The fire escape was in her kitchen, but the flames between her and the window were impassable. She fled to the only place she thought would shield her: the hall closet, which held her winter coats and, crucially, a heavy wooden rocking chair that had belonged to her grandmother. The fire crew found her huddled inside, asphyxiated, her hand still clenched around a dried sunflower.

Julian moved into that fourth-floor apartment a year after the fire, when the building management had finally repaired the smoke damage and repainted the walls a sickly green. He insisted the place had a ‘good vibe,’ but his dog, a mutt named Gus, disagreed from the first day. Gus would trot into the living room, stop dead at the closet door, and emit low, guttural growls that vibrated through the floorboards. Sometimes he’d bark, sharp and frantic, as if something inside were scratching to get out. I’d visited often, and we’d often joked about it, but there was a heaviness in that apartment, a stillness that pressed on my ears like an almost-sound.

One evening in late October, the thin radiator struggled against the cooling air, and we sat on the floor with a bowl of popcorn, the TV light flickering across our faces. We were deep into a movie about a heist gone wrong, and Julian’s hand had found its way to my knee. I leaned into him, feeling his breath on my neck, and we started to kiss, as slow and warm as the radiator’s wheeze. My eyes were closed, but when I pulled back to glance at the television, something caught my attention in my peripheral vision. On the right-hand side of the TV screen, just above the dark floorboards, there was a face. It wasn’t a reflection. It was hazy, like an image on a smudged camera lens, but unmistakably humanoid: a woman’s face, her features loose and dripping, as if made from candle wax. Her mouth was open, drawn downward into a silent wail, and her eyes were two black pits. She seemed to be looking at me, not through me, but at me, as if she had just materialized from the static between channels. I jerked upright, my heart hammering, and grabbed Julian’s shoulder. ‘Do you see that?’ I whispered, pointing. He followed my gaze, his brow furrowed. ‘See what?’ he asked, squinting. ‘At the bottom of the TV, by the fire escape window, there’s a face—a woman’s face.’ Julian looked again, then shook his head. ‘Babe, that’s just the reflection of the lamp on the DVD case,’ he said, but his voice had lost its usual confidence. I squinted, and the face flickered—if it had ever been there—and vanished, leaving only the dim reflection of the room’s clutter.

I told myself I was tired, that the pop-corn was stale, that the horror movie I’d watched last week had left a residue. But something had shifted in me. I began to notice other things: the way Gus would sometimes whimper in his sleep, his paws twitching as if running from something. The way the closet door would sometimes stand ajar, even though we always closed it. The way the air in the room would suddenly turn cold and stale, smelling faintly of burnt fabric and dust, as if a memory of smoke had seeped through the walls.

I decided to test my sanity. I started to leave a small digital recorder running in the living room while we were out, hoping to catch something on the audio. A week later, I listened back. Amidst the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional distant siren, there was a sound I couldn’t place: a soft, rhythmic creak, like a rocking chair swaying back and forth, slowly, patiently. It would start about the time we were due to return, and stop just before we actually opened the door. On the last day I recorded, the creak was followed by a faint voice, a woman’s whisper, so thin I had to replay it three times. It seemed to say, ‘Why did you lock it?’

I confronted Julian that night. I played the recording, my hands shaking. His face went pale, and he rubbed his thumb against his forefinger so hard I thought he’d break the skin. ‘I’ve been hearing it too,’ he confessed, his voice barely audible. ‘Gus barks at the closet, and sometimes I think I see the rocking chair inside, even though we don’t own one. I thought I was going mad.’ We decided to open the closet together, a bizarre act of courage born of desperation. He held a flashlight, I held a heavy textbook, though I don’t know what we expected to fight.

The closet was cluttered but mundane: coats, a vacuum, a stack of old board games. But as we stood there, the beam of the flashlight wavered, and a cold draft blew out from the back wall, carrying with it a sickly-sweet odor, like old roses and scorched wool. And then we saw it: a faint impression on the back wall, like a pressure mark darker than the surrounding paint, in the rough shape of a person. I reached out to touch it, and my hand passed through the wall—through the plaster and lath—into a void that was somehow both cold and humming with heat. I yanked my hand back, my nails scraping against the wood, and Julian shouted. In that moment, the pressure mark seemed to solidify into a face, the same face from the TV, contorted with rage and grief. Her lips moved, and I heard the whisper again, now directly in my ear, as if she were standing right behind me: ‘You have no right.’

We fled the apartment that night, taking Gus and a duffel bag of essentials. But the story doesn’t end there. Now, no matter where we go, I see that face in reflections—in the window of a bus, in a darkened shop glass, in the concave surface of a spoon. She follows us, her wailing a constant undercurrent in my ears. And sometimes, when I’m alone, I hear the creak of a rocking chair from the closet of whatever hotel room we’re in. Julian insists we’re both having a shared delusion, but I’ve started leaving the closet doors open in every place we stay, hoping that if she’s in there, she’ll at least be in the light. But I know she’s not in the closet. She’s inside me, a hot coal of fear that I can’t extinguish. And the worst part is, I’ve started to hear her whisper to me even when there’s no closet nearby. She says, ‘You have no right to be alive when I am not.’ And I’m beginning to believe her.