The Methane Man

My name is Cole, and I’ve never believed in the supernatural. That changed the winter I spent a week at my sister’s newly purchased farmhouse in the dusty plains of West Texas. The house itself was charming in a derelict way, but something was off from the moment I stepped through the door. The air was thick and earthy, like the basement had been left open to the wind, and every time I breathed in, I tasted something metallic and faintly rotten.

My sister, Dana, and her husband, Roy, had bought the place cheap, eager to escape the city. They’d laugh off my unease, blaming it on paranoia and the isolation. But the first night, as I sat on their sagging couch, I saw it: a low, loping shape that scurried across the far wall, just at the edge of my vision. I snapped my head to look, but nothing was there. Dana and Roy exchanged a glance. ‘Oh, that’s just The Duster,’ Roy said with a shrug, as if it were a stray cat. ‘He’s been with the house since we moved in.’

I pressed them for details, but they waved it off. ‘You’ll get used to him,’ Dana said. ‘He’s mostly harmless, just likes to run around at night. He never bothers us.’ I wanted to believe her, but as I lay in the guest bedroom that night, I heard a relentless, rhythmic thumping from the attic above, like heavy boots on a hollow floor. The sound continued for hours, and no matter how I covered my ears, I couldn’t drown it out.

The next morning, I tried to ignore it. But the strangeness only escalated. That night, I woke to a terrible thirst and stumbled to the kitchen. As I passed the hallway mirror, I caught a reflection: a tall, too-thin figure standing behind me, its face pale as chalk. I spun around, but the hallway was empty. I nearly screamed, and Dana appeared, still in her nightgown. ‘He does that,’ she said calmly, as if she were talking about a neighbor’s dog. ‘He likes to peek at people. Try not to be scared.’

I couldn’t sleep after that. The next day, I asked Roy about the house’s history. He said it had been built in the 1920s on a natural gas pocket. ‘They used to call this area the Hollow Grounds,’ he said, ‘because the land can’t keep anything down. Even the fences rot in a year.’ He laughed, but I noticed his fingers were steepled, his knuckles white.

That night, I decided to dig into the attic. I found a hatch in the ceiling of the closet in my room. With a stepladder, I pushed it open and climbed into a dusty, cobwebbed space. The only light came from a bare bulb hanging from a rafter. In the corner, I found an old, leather-bound journal. It belonged to a man named Ephraim, dated 1933. The pages were brittle, but the handwriting was clear. It told of a ‘presence’ that had latched onto the house after Ephraim’s wife died in a fire. The presence would ‘run’ through the walls, ‘dance’ in the corners, and ‘stare’ at him from mirrors. Ephraim wrote that he tried to appease it with small offerings of meat and milk, but it only grew more restless.

Then I saw the final entry: ‘He is not the soil. He is the gas. He rises from the well. He runs through the walls. He is in my breath. He is in my blood.’ I dropped the journal as a wave of dizziness hit me. The air in the attic seemed to thicken, and I heard that same thumping, but now it was directly behind me. I scrambled down the hatch, slamming it shut, and ran to Dana, my heart hammering. ‘We have to leave,’ I shouted. ‘There’s something in this house, and it’s not a ghost. It’s a gas.’

Dana looked at me with a strange, hollow smile. ‘We know,’ she said. ‘Roy figured it out months ago. The gas seeps up from the ground, and it coats everything. It doesn’t hurt us, but it makes us see things. When we moved in, we checked the carbon monoxide detectors, and they went off immediately. So we opened all the windows, but you can’t get rid of it. It’s always here. We’ve just gotten used to it.’

I stared at her. ‘That’s insane. You’re living with a gas leak that’s causing hallucinations?’

‘We never had hallucinations before you came,’ Roy said, stepping into the hallway. ‘We thought it was normal. But now that you mention it, we’ve never seen the things you see. Maybe it’s you, Cole. Maybe you’re sensitive to it.’

I didn’t wait to argue. I packed my bag and drove through the night, leaving them behind. But as I drove, my hands shaking, I realized I could still feel the thumping in my ears, and the metallic taste in my mouth. I pulled over and checked my phone. I had a message from Dana, sent just before I left: ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be with you soon. He likes new bodies.’

I haven’t been back to Texas since. But sometimes, when I’m alone, I catch a whiff of that earthy, rotting scent, and I swear I hear a low loping run. Just at the edge of my vision, a shape darts across the wall. And I know, in my bones, that he followed me home.