The Paper Flower Keepsake

Our house on Mulberry Lane was a crumbling Victorian, painted a sickly green that peeled like sunburned skin. It had a wrap-around porch that groaned underfoot, and a turret that looked like a crooked finger pointing at the sky. My parents, Margaret and Arthur, had bought it for a steal, lured by the cheap price and the promise of a project. I was six, my twin brother Theo was six, and the house felt like a mouth full of rotten teeth.

The first oddity was the cold. A draft that slithered through the halls, even in July. Then the whispers. Margaret would swear she heard us, Theo and me, chattering away in our nursery at night, our high, piping voices a constant murmur. But when she’d creep upstairs, we’d be fast asleep, our chests rising and falling in unison. Sometimes she thought she saw a third shape in the dark, a deeper shadow that leaned over our cribs.

Arthur began seeing the dogs. He’d be in their bedroom, reading, and a flicker of movement would catch his eye. He’d turn, and there would be a shape, half-formed, like a panting silhouette with glowing eyes and teeth like needles. It would slink along the wall and vanish into the wainscoting. He never mentioned it to Margaret, not at first. He thought it was stress, the house, the endless renovations.

The disappearances started small. A silver spoon, a book, a hairbrush. Margaret would scold Theo and me, but we were innocent. We’d watch her search the house, her face pinched, and she’d find the objects in impossible places: the bathtub, the top shelf of a closet, inside the refrigerator. Once, she found her grandmother’s cameo in a bowl of apples in the cellar.

Then my grandmother came to visit. She was a sprightly woman, always with a candied ginger in her pocket. She’d brought me a paper flower, a delicate pink and white blossom she’d made herself. I adored it. I kept it on my nightstand. After she left, I noticed it was gone. I searched everywhere. I cried. Margaret blamed me for losing it, said I wasn’t careful.

A month passed. The house grew colder. The whispers louder. The dogs more bold. One night, I woke up to find Theo standing by the window, his face pale in the moonlight. He pointed to the glass. There, taped to the outside of the pane, was my paper flower. It was faded, the edges curled, as if it had been left in the sun. But it was there.

I told Margaret. She came, saw it, and her face went white. She opened the window and snatched it, bringing it inside. She turned it over. On the back, in spidery, childlike handwriting, was a name I’d never seen before: ‘Eliza.’

The whispering that night was not our voices. It was a low, lyrical hum, a lullaby I didn’t know. And in the corner of our room, a shadow took shape. Not a dog. A child. A little girl, thin, with hollow eyes, holding a paper flower identical to mine. She smiled, and her mouth was full of needles.

The paper flower is still in my jewelry box. I don’t know why I kept it. Sometimes, late at night, I hear that lullaby drift through the vents, and I can almost see her, standing in the corner of my room, waiting for me to come play. I’m thirty now, and I still check under my bed for shadows that wear the shape of a child. But she’s not under my bed. She’s in the walls. She’s in the dust. And I can feel her winding around my heart, patient as a spider.