The Last House on Red Clay Road

My grandfather built the place before the war, when the only sounds were wind through the pines and the occasional cry of a loon on the marsh. He was a surveyor for the old artillery range, and he chose the spot because it was flat and dry and close to the only spring for miles. By the time I was born, the base had grown into a sprawling complex of bunkers and firing ranges, and our house sat just outside its southern fence, a hundred yards of scrub and rusted barbed wire separating us from the exclusion zone.

Grandpa was a quiet man, a widower who kept to himself, but he knew the land like the back of his hand. He could imitate the call of a mourning dove so perfectly that one would land on his outstretched palm, and he used the same trick to lure rabbits and quail within rifle range. When he died, he left the house to my mother, and we moved back after living in the city for a decade. The neighborhood had grown up around us by then—clapboard houses and paved streets, streetlights that hummed at night—but our property remained an island of tall grass and wild blackberry bushes, and the fence behind our yard was always dark, even on the brightest days.

It was my twelfth summer when I first noticed the hole. It was in the fence, just a few feet from the back corner where the gate had rusted shut, a gap barely wide enough for a child to wriggle through. My friends and I would dare each other to crawl under and stand on the other side, where the base’s training grounds began. We’d find spent casings and bits of orange flagging tape, and once a boot that looked brand new, but we always returned before the floodlights came on at dusk. Then my friend Danny disappeared. He went in one afternoon, said he wanted to see the old bunker we’d heard about, and he never came out. The soldier who found him said he’d slipped into a maintenance shaft and broken his neck, but I knew better. I’d seen a figure in an olive drab uniform standing just inside the tree line the day before, waving at me with a slow, deliberate motion, and when I waved back, it vanished into the shadows.

The adults talked about military drills and expired warning signs, and the neighborhood kids were forbidden from going near the fence. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that figure, and about the way the ground hummed at night, a low vibration that traveled up through the floorboards of our house. My mother dismissed it as the base’s generators, and my father, a retired sergeant, said it was just the wind in the drainage pipes. But one night, a storm knocked out our power, and I saw a light moving through the trees beyond the fence, a bobbing yellow orb that cast no shadows. I grabbed my flashlight and ran to the back window, and there, in the gap between the boards, I saw a girl my age, her face pale and streaked with dirt, her eyes wide with fear. She pressed her hand against the fence, and I pressed mine against the glass, and then she mouthed three words: ‘They’re coming back.’

The next day, I told my father, and he laughed and said it was probably a stray from the base’s orphanage, though I knew there was no orphanage. But he also went to the fence and inspected the hole, and for the first time in my life, I saw fear cross his face. He called the base’s security office, and they sent a young lieutenant who took notes and frowned a lot. The lieutenant said they’d found no sign of trespassing, but as he left, he glanced back at our yard and said, ‘Sir, if I were you, I’d move that birdbath at least twenty yards from the fence.’ My father asked why, but the lieutenant just shook his head and walked away. That night, I set up a lawn chair at the edge of the property, just beyond the birdbath, and I waited.

Around midnight, the hum grew louder, and the air began to smell of creosote and burned sugar. I saw them then—five figures in drab uniforms, dark berets pulled low, moving in single file along the inside of the fence. They stopped at the hole, and the one in front knelt down and spoke in a voice that wasn’t quite human, a sound like gravel sliding down a chute. The other four nodded, and they began to crawl through the fence. I should have run, but my legs wouldn’t move, and I watched them spread out across our yard, stepping silently through the grass. They paused at the birdbath, and the leader touched its rim. Then they turned toward our house, and I saw their faces—blank, smooth, with no eyes, only sockets that seemed to drink in the moonlight.

I ran. I burst through the back door and slammed the deadbolt, and I yelled for my parents, but they were already awake, standing in the kitchen with the lights off. My father held his old service pistol, and my mother clutched a cast-iron skillet. ‘They’re not human,’ my father whispered. ‘I saw them at Chosin, in the winter of 1950. They never leave.’ The door rattled then, a knock that came from inside the wood itself, and the windows began to frost over from the outside. I looked out the kitchen window, and the yard was full of them, dozens now, all facing the house, their headless silhouettes dark under the stars.

The phone line went dead, and the lights flickered once before dying completely. My father fired a shot through the door, and the bullet stopped in midair, clattering to the floor like a spent casing. The knocking grew softer, then rhythmic, like a heartbeat, and I felt the floor tremble with each beat. My mother dropped the skillet and began to murmur a prayer, and over it, I heard a girl’s voice, clear as a bell, coming from the backyard. ‘They want to come home,’ it said. ‘They’ve been waiting since the last war.’ I ran to the back window, and through the frost, I saw her standing by the birdbath, the girl with the pale face, and she was smiling now. Behind her, the fence was gone, replaced by a wall of darkness, and beyond that wall, I could see row after row of soldiers, standing at attention, their empty sockets fixed on our house.

The last thing I remember is the sound of a single bugle, playing a call I’d never heard before, and then the world went white. When I woke up, the sun was rising, and our house was gone—not destroyed, but simply absent, as if it had never been there. I was lying in a field of tall grass, and the fence was whole, rusted and silent. The neighborhood was empty, and the base was silent, the checkpoint abandoned. I walked for miles before I found a road, and the first person I saw was an old man in a uniform from a long-dead army. He looked at me with the same blank face as the others, and he said, ‘You’re the one who let them in.’ I ran again, and I didn’t stop until I reached the city, but I knew it would follow me.

Now I live in a high-rise apartment with no windows on the fence side. I never go near parks or unpaved roads, and I sleep with the lights on. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear the hum and smell the creosote, and I look into the mirror and see a shadow move behind my own reflection. And last week, I found a small hole in the drywall, just big enough to see through, and on the other side, there was a pale face with dirt-streaked cheeks, and she pressed her hand against mine and mouthed three words: ‘We’re still coming.’