The Man in the Pinstripe Suit

The first time I saw him, I was six, standing at the foot of my grandmother’s staircase in our old farmhouse in Nebraska. It was a house that had a way of swallowing light, with rooms that stayed dark even at noon. I remember the smell of dust and apples, and the way the floorboards creaked like they were breathing. I had wandered away from the kitchen, where Mom and Grandma were arguing about money, and there he was, halfway up the stairs, a man in a pinstripe suit, his face a blur of shadows. He didn’t move, just stood there, and then he turned and walked through the wall at the top of the landing. I didn’t scream. I just stared at the spot where he vanished, and then I backed away so slowly my feet felt like they were stuck in mud. I told Mom that night, and she said I’d seen a tree’s shadow through the window, but we had no trees near the house.

The dreams started soon after. Every night, I’d wake in the dark of my room to see him standing at the foot of my bed, his features as clear as a photograph—a gaunt face, a thin nose, and eyes like coins. He never spoke, but he would point to the corner, where the dark gathered like water pooling. And in that corner, something would move, a shape of darker black, breathing. I’d scream, and Mom would rush in, switch on the light, and there would be nothing. But the fear stayed, a stone in my stomach, and I stopped sleeping alone. I’d drag my mattress into Mom’s room, but he still found me there, a silhouette against the glow of the nightlight, his finger always pointing to that corner.

By the time I was twelve, I had learned to live with him. He was a fact of my existence, like the constant ache in my bones. But then, in the summer before my fifteenth birthday, things changed. I was in the field behind our barn, counting fireflies, when I saw a woman by the old well, a half-collapsed stone structure that Dad said was a waiting mouth to the ground. She was dressed in white, a flowing gown that looked like it was made of moonbeam, and she drifted toward me, not walking but floating. Her face was porcelain, and her eyes were the green of new leaves. She stopped an arm’s length away, and I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the night air. ‘He’s coming,’ she said. ‘You must dig.’

I didn’t know what she meant, but the next day, I found myself behind the barn with a shovel. The ground was hard, but I dug until my hands blistered. At three feet down, I hit something solid. It was a tin box, rusted and sealed with tape. I pried it open to find a stack of photographs, all of a man I didn’t recognize, a young man with wild hair and a crooked smile, and on the back of the top photo, a date and a name: ‘Elias Hart, 1952.’ I brought it to Mom. She turned pale. ‘Where did you find this?’ she demanded. ‘Behind the barn,’ I said. She looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before—fear, not for me, but of me. ‘You need to stop digging,’ she said.

But I couldn’t stop. The woman in white started appearing everywhere, not just at the well, but in my room at night, beside the man in pinstripes. She would point at the ground, then at me, and mouth the words, ‘He’s waiting.’ I began to hear a sound, a low humming that vibrated through the floorboards at night. I told my father, and he laughed. ‘You’re just like your grandmother,’ he said. ‘She used to see things too, before she died.’ That’s when I knew I had to find out what happened to the man in the photographs. I went to the public library, the old one that smelled of mothballs, and searched newspaper archives. After hours, I found a brief article: ‘Local Man Missing Presumed Dead after Fire at Farm.’ The farm was ours. The man was Elias Hart, my great-uncle. And the cause of the fire, the article quoted, was ‘a lightning strike, though some locals murmured of foul play.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the tin box, and why it was buried, and why my mother had looked so afraid. Around midnight, I heard a scraping sound from the attic, right above my room. It was rhythmic, like something dragging itself across the floor. I crept out of bed and up the attic stairs, the wood groaning under my weight. The attic was a cavern of dust and forgotten furniture. In the center, under a bare bulb hanging from a wire, stood a trunk, child-sized, but old. It was locked, but the lock was rusty and yielded when I twisted it. Inside, I found a journal. It was Elias Hart’s. The entries started in 1950, filled with his hopes and mundane days. But then, in early 1952, the tone changed. He wrote of a presence, a ‘shadow man’ that followed him, and a ‘lady in white’ who warned him to leave. ‘I should have listened,’ he wrote. ‘The stones are not to be disturbed.’ And then, his last entry, dated September 12, 1952: ‘They are coming. I will bury the evidence where no one will find it. And if you are reading this, find the stones at the north edge of the property. Dig there. I’m sorry.’

I didn’t tell my parents. I waited until nightfall, took a flashlight and the shovel, and walked to the north edge of our land, where the fence met the woods. The stones were there, arranged in a circle, half-overgrown with weeds. In the center, the ground was soft, and as I dug, I felt a tremor, a vibration that coursed up the handle. My shovel hit metal again—another box, bigger this time, and heavier. I hauled it out and opened it. Inside were not photographs, but letters, bound with twine. They were all from my grandmother, to Elias, declaring her love, but expressing her fear of something ‘ancient’ that slept beneath the farm. And there was a map, drawn on parchment, of a network of tunnels that ran under the property, with an X marking a spot near the barn.

A sound made me look up. At the edge of the woods, two green eyes glowed. And behind me, I heard a click, a sound of metal on metal. I spun around, and there he was, the man in the pinstripe suit, not twenty feet away, raising a rifle. I froze. The woman in white appeared beside him, her hand on his arm, but he shook her off. ‘You should not have come,’ he said, his voice a dry rustle. He aimed the rifle at me. I dropped the letters and ran, zigzagging through the tall grass, my heart pounding. I didn’t stop until I was inside the house, slamming the door behind me. I looked out the window, but he was gone.

I couldn’t sleep after that. I sat in my room, clutching the journal, my mind racing. The next morning, before dawn, I took the map and went to the barn. I found the trapdoor underneath a loose floorboard, hidden by hay. It led to a darkness that seemed to breathe. I descended, the air growing cold and thick with the smell of earth. The tunnel was narrow, and I had to crouch. The humming I had heard was clearer now, a thrumming from the ground itself. After what felt like an hour, the tunnel opened into a room, a circular chamber with walls covered in carved symbols that seemed to writhe in the light of my flashlight. At the center, on a raised stone altar, lay a figure, mummified, dressed in a pinstripe suit. And as I stared at the hollowed face, I recognized the man from my nightmares.

I heard a sound behind me, and I turned to see the woman in white, more solid than she had ever been. ‘He is bound here,’ she said. ‘You must set him free.’ But as she spoke, the ground began to shake, and the symbols on the walls glowed with a sickly green light. The mummified man twitched, and then his eyes snapped open—green, like hers. He sat up, and I saw that his hands were not withered, but strong, gripping the edge of the altar. He looked at me, and then at the woman. ‘You betrayed me,’ he said, his voice a shudder. She shook her head. ‘I gave you what you asked. I gave you a vessel.’ And then she turned to me, and her face was no longer gentle. ‘But you, child, you will do.’

I scrambled backward as he rose. The woman dissolved into mist and flowed into me. I felt a cold invade my body, a pressure like being pushed into a small box. And I saw, in my mind, flashes of my own memories, and then darkness. I woke on the barn floor, the trapdoor open beside me, the journal clutched to my chest. My mother was leaning over me, shaking me. ‘Where have you been?’ she cried. But I couldn’t speak. Because in that moment, I saw the man in the pinstripe suit standing behind her, but his face was my face, and he was smiling.

Since then, I have not been alone. He is always with me, a passenger in my mind, his voice a whisper at the edge of my thoughts. I know what he wants. He wants to come back fully, to push me out of my own body. And the woman in white, she is inside me too, her cold presence like a second heart. My family thinks I’m delusional, but they don’t know that at night, when I close my eyes, I see the green eyes of the thing that was once my great-uncle, waiting for me to sleep so he can scratch his way out of my skin.

The only thing that keeps me sane is the journal, and the letters. I keep them in the tin box, buried where I found it. But every night, I hear the humming, and I feel the dirt shift underneath the floor. I know that I must finish what Elias started. I must find a way to bind him again, or lose myself forever. But I am only fifteen. And tonight, as I write this, I see his reflection in the window, overlaying mine. He is growing stronger. And I am running out of time.