The Grease Riddle

The first sign came in October 2016, not with a bang, but with a slick. I found a puddle of golden oil on the kitchen floor, spreading from beneath the stove. I thought the cat had knocked over the bottle, but the bottle was untouched, standing upright on the counter. I mopped it up, muttering about the stray animals that wandered near our farmhouse.

We were the Harlow family, new to the damp, sprawling countryside of Washington state. The house was a fixer-upper, with peeling paint and a cellar that smelled of earth and old apples. My wife, Dana, and our two kids, Sam and Ella, had adjusted to the quirks. The wind moaned through the gaps in the windows, and the radiators clanked like old bones. But the grease was different.

By November, the grease appeared everywhere. On the windowsill, on the bathroom mirror, in the shape of a crude handprint on the back door. I blamed the kids, but they denied it. I blamed the rusted pipes, but the plumber found nothing. The worst was when I woke up to find my work boots filled with thick, cold lard, and the sink was overflowing with a sludge of oil and soap. We tried to move out, but the house seemed to pull us back.

December brought the furniture. The heavy oak table would shift an inch each night, and chairs would be stacked in impossible towers. One evening, Dana found the piano lid slammed shut on its own keys, playing a discordant note. Sam’s toys would be arranged in patterns: circles within circles, as if some mad mind was trying to communicate. We tried to leave for the holidays, but the car wouldn’t start, and the battery was drained.

January 2017 was the tipping point. The grease became a torrent. It poured from the faucets, coating the dishes and the food. Our clothes were soaked in oil. The walls themselves wept a dark, viscous substance. Dana slipped on the kitchen floor and broke her wrist. Then the sounds began: the scraping of claws in the walls, the slamming of cupboards, the sound of a wet, heavy thing dragging across the ceiling.

One night, I was awoken by Ella’s scream. I rushed to her room and found her standing on her bed, pointing at the closet. The door was ajar, and from within came a low, gurgling hum. I pulled the door open, and a wave of black, greasy liquid rushed out, carrying a severed pig’s head, its eyes sewn shut with twine. I grabbed Ella and ran, but the hallway was slick, and I fell.

In the following weeks, we were prisoners. All our supplies—toilet paper, soap, shampoo—were destroyed. They’d be doused in grease or flushed down the toilet. Dana’s phone vanished, only to reappear in a jar of honey, dripping with the sticky mess. Sam’s tablet was found in the oven, its screen cracked and smeared with oil. Another phone turned up in a jar of peanut butter, buried like a treasure.

I tried to reason with whatever was haunting us. I wrote letters, left offerings of bread and salt. But the grease only grew more vengeful. It wrote on the walls, black scrawls in an indecipherable script. It hid our keys in the vents. It turned our lives into a slippery, dangerous maze. The final blow came on the night of the black moon of February. We were huddled in the living room, the only room that seemed safe, when the lights went out. A cold wind blew through the hall, and I heard the sound of a thousand tiny droplets hitting the floor. I lit a candle, and the flame flickered, revealing a figure made entirely of coalescing grease, standing in the doorway.

I screamed, and the figure tilted its head. It opened its mouth, and a river of black oil poured out, washing over the floor. The oil rose, swallowing everything. I grabbed Dana and the kids, and we fought through the thick goo, the house groaning around us. We made it to the front door, but it was sealed shut, the frame oozing with a black tar. I broke a window with a chair leg, and we climbed out into the cold night.

We never looked back. We drove away, leaving everything we owned behind. The house is still there, on that foreboding plot of land, a blot on the countryside. People say they hear a soft, slurping sound at night, and the windows are often fogged with a strange amber residue. We never learned what it was, but sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see that figure, and I smell the grease, and I know that some stains are beyond cleansing.