The Inventory of Unfinished Rooms

My brother Marcus had been carrying something with him for years, something only he could see. After our mother passed, he started talking about a woman in a floral dress who would stand at the foot of his bed, humming a lullaby I didn’t recognize. He said she never spoke, just watched, and sometimes she would point at the door as if telling him to leave. We thought it was grief, then stress, then a trick of the light. But the visions persisted, and Marcus grew thin, his eyes hollowed by sleepless nights. When he told me she had been absent for three weeks, I suggested he come to my new place in the high desert, a sprawling adobe house I was restoring before my family moved in. I thought the dry air and the project of packing up my old life might give us both a distraction. He agreed, and I picked him up from the train station, his suitcase light, his smile a little too quick.

For the first few days, it was almost normal. My two boys, Tomas and Elias, took to Marcus like he was a second father, and he helped me wrap dishes, haul boxes, and paint the trim in the hallway. He seemed lighter, almost cheerful, and he stopped glancing over his shoulder. We talked about old times, about fishing trips and our mother’s cooking, and the woman in the floral dress was never mentioned. Then came the night we finished packing the kids’ toys, a mountain of action figures and building blocks, and put the boys to bed. We collapsed on the couch, the television flickering with a muted documentary, and a bottle of cheap whiskey between us.

I brought up the subject gently, because I wanted to hear that he was free of her. ‘You haven’t seen her in a while, right?’ I asked. Marcus swirled his drink and shook his head. ‘No, not since I got here. I think she’s gone for good.’ I felt a surge of relief, but I also remembered our mother’s advice: never let a spirit linger. I leaned forward and said, ‘You have to be firm with her, Marcus. Tell her she’s not welcome here or in your life. Say a prayer and command her to leave. She’s not good for you.’ As the words left my mouth, one of the boys’ toys—a plastic dinosaur—fell from the shelf behind us. It clattered to the tile floor, and we both jumped. Marcus laughed nervously. ‘That’s just the cat.’ But we didn’t have a cat.

Later that night, I couldn’t sleep. I padded to the kitchen for water and passed the hallway where we’d stacked the boxes. I saw a light coming from the spare room, where we’d stored the unpacked items. I pushed the door open and found Marcus standing in the middle of the room, staring at an open box. Inside were our mother’s old possessions, things I’d been meaning to sort. He turned to me, his face pale. ‘She’s here,’ he whispered. ‘She’s been here all along, in the boxes.’ He pointed to a photograph of our mother as a young woman, standing in front of a house I didn’t recognize. In the background, a figure in a floral dress was half-hidden behind a tree. I felt a chill crawl up my spine. ‘That’s just a stranger,’ I said, but I didn’t believe it.

The next morning, Marcus was worse. He refused to leave the bedroom, and he kept muttering under his breath. My boys were scared, and I was losing what little patience I had. I decided to take charge. I marched into the spare room, determined to burn the photograph and everything else that might be tainted. But when I opened the box, the photograph was gone. Instead, I found a stack of index cards, each one with a handwritten note: ‘Room 1: closet,’ ‘Room 2: staircase,’ ‘Room 3: attic.’ They were inventory lists, but for rooms I’d never seen. The handwriting was our mother’s. I called Marcus in, and he turned even whiter. ‘I had a dream,’ he said. ‘She was leading me through a house, and she was showing me rooms that were unfinished, like a blueprint. She wants me to finish them.’ He grabbed my arm. ‘You have to help me. She’s here, in this house. She came with us.’

That afternoon, I found a door in the hallway that I had never noticed before, a narrow door painted the same color as the wall, almost invisible. It was locked, but the key was in the lock, rusted and old. Marcus was standing behind me, breathing hard. ‘Don’t open it,’ he said. But I did. The door swung open to reveal a stairway descending into darkness, and a breath of cold air rushed up, carrying the faint smell of mothballs and dust. At the bottom, a light flickered. I called out, ‘Hello?’ and a voice answered, a woman’s voice, humming a lullaby. It was the same tune Marcus had described. I slammed the door shut and turned to Marcus, who was crying. ‘She’s not leaving,’ he said. ‘She found us.’

I tried to rationalize it. I told myself it was a draft, a trick of the house, my imagination. But that night, we both heard footsteps in the halls, slow and deliberate, as if someone was walking from room to room, taking inventory. The next day, my boys refused to go into their playroom. They said there was a lady in a pretty dress standing in the corner, and she was counting their toys. I flew into a rage. I grabbed a hammer and stormed into the spare room, intending to smash the boxes, to burn the house down if I had to. But the room was empty, stripped bare. The boxes were gone. The furniture was gone. The walls were bare adobe, and in the center of the room, there was a fresh hole in the floor, as if something had been dug up.

Marcus was behind me, his voice a hoarse whisper. ‘She’s not attached to me anymore,’ he said. ‘She’s attached to this place. You brought me here, and now she’s attached to you, to the boys.’ I turned to him, and for the first time, I saw something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before: a calm, almost serene acceptance. ‘I have to go back,’ he said. ‘I have to finish the rooms.’ He walked past me, out of the house, and I followed him, shouting his name. But when I reached the yard, he was gone. There was no tracks in the dust, no sign of him. Just the door of the house standing open, and behind me, from the hole in the floor, I heard the sound of hammering, as if someone was building something, or unpacking something, and I knew that the inventory had only begun.