The House on Blackreed Lane

My cousin, Damian, rented a place far upstate, a run-down farmhouse on Blackreed Lane. He and three of his college buddies were studying agricultural engineering at the state university, and the old farmhouse with a half-finished second story seemed like a bargain. The land was wild, overrun with weeds and dead trees, and behind the house, a murky, boggy fen stretched out like a dark mouth. I never liked the place from the first time I saw it. The porch sagged, and the windows on the second floor were boarded up, giving it a blind, staring look. My husband once went inside to help Damian carry a couch, and he came out pale as paper. When I asked what was wrong, he wouldn’t say, just told me to never set foot in there.

Damian’s brother, my other cousin, Lila, used to visit him sometimes. She said the inside was a wreck, with dishes piled in the sink and clothes strewn everywhere, but that wasn’t what bothered her. It was the sounds, she said. Footsteps pacing across the ceiling of the second floor, even though no one went up there. And every night, around three in the morning, she’d hear a low, wet sloshing sound, like something dragging itself through the marsh behind the house. She told Damian to move, but he laughed it off, said it was just the old pipes or the wind in the reeds.

One evening, Lila gave me a ride to the farmhouse to drop off Damian’s forgotten laptop. It was getting dark, and the mist was rolling in from the fen. The house loomed ahead, its windows reflecting the grey twilight. I stayed in the car while Lila went to the door. She knocked, and after a moment, the door creaked open, but no one was there. She called out, ‘Damian? You there?’ Her voice echoed in the hollow hallway. She stepped inside, and I watched her silhouette disappear into the gloom. Then the door slammed shut, so hard the whole frame shook. I screamed, but there was no answer. I ran to the door, but it was locked. I pounded and yelled, but all I heard was a faint, wet sound from inside, like a body being dragged across the floor.

I called the police, but by the time they arrived, the door was unlocked and the house was empty. There was no sign of Lila or Damian or his friends. The only thing they found was a puddle of dark, sludge-like water in the middle of the living room, and a single footprint on the dusty floor, but it was too large to be any human foot, and it had long, webbed toes. The police searched the marsh and found nothing, just the thick, black mud. They eventually wrote it off as a disappearance, but I knew better.

Three weeks later, I was back in my apartment, unable to sleep. I kept thinking about that footprint, and the sloshing sound. I went to the window to get some air, and down on the street, under the flickering streetlamp, I saw a figure. It was tall, gaunt, and dripping with black water. It stood there, motionless, looking up at my window. And even from three stories up, I could see its eyes, white and pupil-less, staring straight at me. I stumbled back, and when I looked again, it was gone. But I knew it had claimed this place now. The house on Blackreed Lane was just the beginning. It had followed me here, and it would follow me wherever I ran.