The Green Throne

After the divorce, my mother packed us into the old station wagon and drove us to our grandparents’ place in the hills. It was a Victorian relic, all creaking wood and peeling paint, perched on a ridge above a dying orchard. My mom and my sisters took over my grandmother’s old sewing room, which still smelled of mothballs and stale lavender. My brother, Leo, and I got the attic room that belonged to our late uncle, a man we’d never met. Dust sheets covered his old toys and hunting gear, and the bed had a mattress that felt like a slab of concrete. My grandparents were the second owners, and as far as anyone knew, nothing strange had ever happened within those walls.

Grandma and my aunt had been hairdressers back in the sixties, and they’d kept one of those vintage salon hair dryers. It sat in the upstairs hallway, just outside the bathroom, looking like something from a 1950s sci-fi movie: a big, bulbous dome on a metal stand, upholstered in cracked green vinyl, with a seat that swiveled and sighed when you sat down. Leo and I used it for kicks, blasting our faces with hot air until our skin turned pink. My sister, Ada, would sit in it and read, escaping into her books like she was hiding from the world.

One afternoon, Ada was curled up in that chair, deep in a novel about a lighthouse keeper, when she felt something scratch beneath the seat. It sounded like fingernails dragging across the vinyl, but the sound came from underneath, as if something were scrabbling against the floorboards. She ignored it, thinking it was a mouse or a cricket. The scratching stopped as suddenly as it began. When she got up, she noticed a thin, dark line running along the wooden floor beneath the chair, like a crack that hadn’t been there before. She ran her finger over it, and it was warm to the touch.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The attic room was stifling, and Leo’s snoring rattled the windowpanes. I decided to get a glass of water from the bathroom. As I stepped into the hallway, I saw the hair dryer chair silhouetted against the pale moonlight filtering through the dust-covered window. The dome seemed to glow faintly, a sickly phosphorescence. I froze when I heard a low hum, not an electrical hum, but something like a distant swarm of bees. The chair’s seat creaked, as if someone had just sat down and settled. I took a step back, and the hum ceased. I didn’t get my water.

The next morning, Ada looked pale. She said she had a nightmare, something about hands reaching up through the floorboards, pulling her down. Everyone chalked it up to her overactive imagination. But later, I noticed that a piece of the floor under the chair had begun to warp, the wood bending upward like a tumor. Grandpa cursed and said it was dry rot, though the house had stood for a century without issue. He nailed down a board, but within hours, the nail popped out and the board warped again, as if something was pushing from below.

Grandma, who had a stubborn streak, refused to get rid of the chair. She said it was a family heirloom, a piece of her glory days. So we learned to live with it. Leo refused to sit in it after he swore he heard a child laughing from the dome when no one was around. I avoided it altogether, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was watching, that its green vinyl surface seemed to ripple when I passed, like skin flexing.

Then one evening, Ada vanished. We searched the house, frantic, calling her name. Finally, Leo, pale as a ghost, pointed to the bathroom. When we opened the door, there was Ada, sitting in the chair, her head tilted back under the dome. The dome was on, blowing hot air, but it wasn’t the usual blast—it was a dry, raspy breath, like something exhaling. Ada’s eyes were closed, and she wasn’t sweating. She was as cool as ice. We turned off the switch, but the dome kept humming for a full minute before going silent. When Ada opened her eyes, she had no memory of getting up. She said she’d been reading, and then everything went dark.

I knew then that the chair wasn’t just a piece of furniture. It was a conduit. That night, I crept back to the hallway with a flashlight. The chair was empty, but I could see the warped floor beneath it, now a gaping black hole, the size of a dinner plate. I shone the light down, and instead of earth or foundations, I saw nothing—just an endless void that seemed to look back. I heard a scratching sound, not under the chair this time, but inside my head, like fingernails on chalk. I stumbled backward, and as I did, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the dome. For a split second, my face wasn’t mine. It was older, gaunt, with eyes like deep wells, and it was smiling.

I ran to my mother, but before I could speak, I heard a crash from the hallway. When we rushed out, the chair was on its side, the dome cracked, and from the crack oozed a dark, viscous substance that pooled on the floor. It smelled of rust and old pennies. Grandma came out, her face ashen. She stared at the chair and whispered, ‘It found us.’ Then she told us the truth: the chair wasn’t from a salon. It had been her mother’s—our great-grandmother’s—and she’d used it to keep her ‘clients’ still while she ‘worked on them.’ She never specified what that meant, but she said the chair had ‘taken’ something from the last woman, and she’d hidden it away in this house to forget.

We moved out the next week, leaving the chair behind. But sometimes, when I lie in my new bed, I hear it—a faint hum, and a scratching sound, as if something is trying to claw its way up through the floorboards of my memory. And I know, with a certainty that chills my bones, that the green throne never let its victims go. It only waits, and it feeds on the fear of those who remember. And I remember.