The Grip of the Loosened Screws

That autumn, I moved into my grandmother’s old house after she passed. It was a drafty Victorian with a creaky staircase and a room that was always colder than the rest. I was thirteen, and my parents had just separated, so the house felt like a place to hide. I set up my computer in the spare bedroom, the one with the crooked window that overlooked the overgrown garden. I would spend hours there, listening to music on my portable CD player, reading dog-eared horror novels, and trying to ignore the way the floorboards groaned under my chair.

One evening, as I was hunched over a particularly gripping chapter, a knock came at the door. It was not the soft, hesitant knock of my mother checking on me; it was a sharp, assertive rap. I paused the music, pulled out my earbuds, and called out, ‘Mom?’ Silence. I got up, opened the door, and found the hallway empty, the only light coming from a flickering bulb at the end. I shrugged, thinking it was the wind, and returned to my book. As I sat back down, the chair gave way completely. I hit the floor hard, my tailbone cracking against the wooden planks, sending a sharp pain up my spine. I yelped, and as I looked under the desk, I saw the four screws that had held the chair together scattered on the rug. I hadn’t touched them. They were not loose; they were cleanly unscrewed, as if by a deliberate hand. I checked my back in the mirror—a large bruise was already blooming, a deep purple that looked like a handprint.

That night, as I lay in bed, the wind outside howled. My window rattled, and I pulled the covers up to my chin. Just as I was drifting off, a voice whispered in my ear, so close I felt a puff of cold air. The word was indistinct, a sibilant hiss that could have been ‘my’ or ‘die’ or ‘mine.’ My skin prickled, and before I could react, something yanked my hair—hard, at the base of my skull. I screamed and bolted to my mother’s room. She was reading, and she looked up, annoyed. ‘What now?’ I showed her the bruise, which had darkened to an angry black and blue. She frowned, ‘How did you manage that? Did you fall?’ I explained about the chair, but she just sighed. ‘You’re too old for imaginary friends, Jenna.’ In the morning, the bruise had spread, and the doctor at the clinic was puzzled. X-rays showed a pulled muscle in my lower back, but he couldn’t explain how. He prescribed rest and painkillers, but his eyes kept darting to the bruise, as if it were following him.

After that, the whispers became a constant. They would come at random times—while I was brushing my teeth, during dinner, even when I was mid-sentence. But the worst were the ‘accidents.’ Objects would shift on their own: a glass would tumble from the counter and shatter inches from my foot; a picture frame would fall off the wall, narrowly missing my head; and one night, I found my computer chair overturned, its screws neatly arranged in a row on the carpet. My mother dismissed it all, blaming my clumsiness or the drafty old house. But I knew better. I began to keep the lights on at night, but the whispers grew louder, more insistent. They would form half-words, like ‘leave’ or ‘out,’ and sometimes they would press against my eardrum as if trying to break through.

One afternoon, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, trying to read, when I felt a cold presence behind me. I turned, and the room was empty, but the curtains twitched. A deep, low voice, unlike any whisper I had heard before, spoke directly into my brain: ‘You have taken what is mine.’ I ran downstairs, heart pounding, and found my mother in the kitchen. She was holding a hammer, and she looked at me with a strange blankness. ‘We need to fix your chair,’ she said, her voice flat. I followed her back to my room, and she knelt by the chair, picking up the screws. But as she did, my CD player, which was on the nightstand, suddenly flew across the room and slammed into the wall, shattering into pieces. My mother didn’t flinch. She just looked at me and said, ‘You should go outside for a while.’ I left, shaking, and didn’t sleep that night. The whispers were there, though, under the door, under the floorboards, under my skin. They told me that I had been warned, and that I had not listened.

A week later, I was lying in bed, the whispers a constant drone, when my door creaked open slowly. No one was there, but I felt the air shift, as if something massive had entered the room. The whispers ceased, and in the dead silence, I heard the faint sound of metal on wood—the sound of screws being turned. I closed my eyes, trying to control my breathing. I felt a pressure on my chest, like a weight pressing down, and then a voice, clear and deep, said, ‘Get out.’ I didn’t need to be told twice. I scrambled out of bed, ran past my mother’s room, and out the front door into the cold night. I never went back inside. I spent the night at a neighbor’s house, and the next day, I convinced my mother to move. She thought I was being dramatic, but she agreed eventually. As we packed, I noticed that the four screws from my chair were missing. They were nowhere to be found. When I asked my mother if she’d seen them, she just shook her head and said, ‘They probably fell out again.’ But I knew they were still there, in the walls, in the floor, in the very fabric of that house, waiting for the next person to sit down.