The Painted Gate

The basement of our rented house on Kettleby Lane always smelled of damp earth and old wood, even in the middle of a dry Ontario summer. I was twelve, three years younger than the boy who lived there before the accident, and I spent most of my free afternoons down there, building model ships on a wobbly card table. The light from the single bare bulb cast long shadows that I ignored, because I was a rational kid, and I knew shadows were just shadows.

That particular evening, my mother had called down that dinner was in twenty minutes. I was lying on the old floral couch, my model of the HMS Victory half-assembled on my chest, my eyelids heavy from the lazy heat. I wasn’t asleep, but I was drifting, and in that fuzzy place between waking and dreaming, I saw it: a face, but not a human face. It was woven from the grain of the wooden wall panels, like a face hidden in the knots, but it was sharp and clear, not a trick of the eye. Its eyes were the colour of dried blood, and its hair—thick, dark, bristling—seemed to flow upward, as if caught in an inverse wind.

I snapped my eyes open, my heart hammering. I sat up, and the face was still there, now imposed on the concrete floor’s cracks, a malevolent mosaic. I scrambled for the stairs, but my legs felt like lead. I didn’t run to the window to let in the light; I ran to the one spot of hope in the room—the old rusty floor drain, where a single beam of setting sunlight fell. But when I looked up, the face was there too, peering through the small ground-level window, and this time it was real, a physical manifestation of my terror. It pressed against the grimy glass, its features distorting, its hair flowing upward, and it raised a pale hand and tapped twice, as if knocking.

I took the stairs three at a time, screaming nonsense, but by the time I reached the kitchen, my voice was gone. My mother was stirring pasta, my father was reading the paper, and I stood there, jaw working soundlessly, pointing at the basement door. They looked at me with that mixture of annoyance and concern that only parents can muster, and told me to calm down, that it was just a bad dream. But I wasn’t asleep. I was awake. I was twelve. And I knew what I saw.

We moved two months later, to a house in the city, and for years I convinced myself it was a hallucination, a panic attack, a childish imagination run wild. But it came back in my dreams, and twice more in waking life. Once, when I was nineteen, in a dorm room, I looked out the fourth-floor window and saw him floating, suspended mid-air, wearing a black top hat and a long coat, his hair still defying gravity, his red eyes boring into me. He wanted something. He mouthed a word I couldn’t understand. The second time was three years ago, at a lakeside cottage, where he stood at the foot of my bed at 3 AM, now dressed in a tattered suit, his hair slicked back, a thin smile on his lips.

But the worst was not when I saw him. It was when I learned his name. Last summer, I returned to Kettleby Lane out of nostalgia, only to find the house was abandoned, a decaying skeleton with boarded windows. An old neighbour, a woman in her eighties, shuffled out and told me the history. ‘That house was built over the old Kettleby Foundry,’ she said, her voice a dry rattle. ‘The boy who lived there before your family—he went missing in the basement. Searched for days. They found him in a crawlspace, under the floor, face down, his hands over his ears. They said he’d clawed at his own ears until they bled, trying to block a sound no one else heard.’

I asked her if the boy had a name. She looked at me with something like pity. ‘Thomas Painted. Folks called him Tom.’ She paused, staring at the house. ‘But there was a story that his mother used to call him ‘Tommy, Tommy, don’t you go down to the painted gate.’ There’s an old iron gate in the basement, leads to a storm drain. They bricked it up after he disappeared.’

That night, I dreamed of the gate. It was rusted, half buried in dirt, but behind it, a deeper darkness pulsed. And in the dream, I heard a voice, not words but a wet, chittering sound, and I knew it was the thing from the basement. It had wanted me that day, but I was too young to understand. It wasn’t a demon or a ghost. It was something older, something that lived beneath the house, a tenant of the foundry’s ashes, a thing that wore faces like costumes. And it had wanted me to open the gate.

I woke screaming, but I didn’t see his face this time. Instead, I saw the ceiling of my bedroom, and for a moment, I thought I was safe. But then I realized my feet were cold, and when I looked down, they were wet. The floor was slick with a black, viscous liquid that smelled of burnt metal and rotting silk. And on the wall, where there had never been anything before, was a newly plastered archway, and in its centre, a small, unopened gate. I have not told my wife. I have not told my children. I have only tried to keep them away from that room, but I know what he’s waiting for. He knows I remember now. And he knows patience.