The Pattern in the Linoleum

I was seven when I first noticed the crack in the kitchen floor. It ran from the back door to the pantry, a thin, dark vein in the yellowed linoleum. My parents said it was just the house settling, but I knew better. It was a path, and something used it.

We lived in a farmhouse built in the 1950s, out past the edge of town where the gravel road turned to dirt and the telephone poles ran out. The previous owner had been an old woman who’d kept to herself, and the house still smelled of her—of camphor and damp wool. My father was stationed at the air base, and my mother spent her days painting watercolors of the empty fields. I was left to my own devices, and my devices always led me to the kitchen.

That’s where I saw her the first time. Not standing in the doorway or floating in the hallway, but lying on the floor, her head tilted to follow the crack. She was a girl about my age, with hair the color of the mud outside and a yellow dress so faded it was almost white. She didn’t move when I came in, just kept her eyes on the floor, tracing the line with her finger. I stood there with a glass of water in my hand, and she slowly turned her head to look at me. Her eyes were the same color as her hair, and they didn’t blink.

I told my mother, of course. She laughed and said I had an overactive imagination, the same thing she said when I claimed I heard scratching in the walls. The scratching was real, though. It started that same week, a dry, rhythmic sound from behind the pantry shelves, like something trying to get out. My father said it was mice and laid out traps, but the traps were empty every morning, and the scratching only got louder.

I avoided the kitchen after that. I stayed in my room, in the small bedroom at the top of the stairs that looked out over the back field. But she found me there. I woke up in the middle of the night, and she was sitting on the edge of my bed, her weight barely making a dent in the mattress. She was still wearing the same yellow dress, now with dark stains on the hem that I didn’t want to identify. She stared at me with those unblinking eyes, and she spoke. Her voice was like the sound of the old radio when it was between stations, all static and whisper. ‘You can see the path,’ she said. ‘You have to follow it.’

The scratching was in the walls all around me then, closing in. I pulled the covers over my head and stayed like that until morning, when the sun finally came through the curtains and I could convince myself it had been a dream.

But the dream didn’t stay in the night. I started seeing her in the daytime, always near that crack in the linoleum. She would be kneeling beside it, tapping the floor with her fingers in a rhythm that matched the scratching. She would look up at me and smile, and her smile was too wide, showing teeth that were too small and too sharp. ‘Come closer,’ she’d say. ‘See where it leads.’

I told my father about her, finally, and he frowned. He said he’d seen something too, in the shadows of the barn when he went to feed the horses. A little girl in a yellow dress, watching him from the hayloft. I hadn’t told anyone that she wore yellow, and the look on his face made me wish I hadn’t told him at all. That night, he and my mother talked in the kitchen in hushed voices, and I heard the words ‘previous owner’ and ‘daughter’ and ‘well.’

The next day, I followed the crack. It led to the pantry, and behind the pantry, through a gap in the wall, I found a door I’d never noticed before. It was painted the same color as the wall, and it opened onto a narrow staircase going down. The air was cold and smelled of earth and rust. I went down, my heart pounding, and found a dirt floor with a single bare bulb swinging on a wire. And there, sitting in the corner, was the girl.

She was holding a small tin box, rusted and dented. She held it out to me, and I took it. Inside were a few strands of hair, a child’s tooth, and a photograph of a little girl in a yellow dress, standing by a pump house on the edge of an empty field. On the back, in faded handwriting, were the words: ‘The path leads home.’

The scratching stopped the moment I touched the box. The walls went silent, and the silence was worse. The girl was gone, but I could feel her presence behind me, watching from the shadows. I ran up the stairs, out of the house, and didn’t stop until I was at the edge of the field. I looked back, and she was standing at the kitchen window, her face pressed against the glass, her hand raised in a wave.

My parents moved us out a month later. The house was sold to a young couple who didn’t last a year. I heard they left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. They said the house was haunted by a little girl who wanted to show them something in the floor.

I’m an adult now, but I still think about her. Sometimes, when I’m in an old building, or when I’m lying in bed at night, I see the crack in the linoleum, and I hear the tapping of her fingers. And I wonder if the path was ever meant to be followed, or if it was just a warning to stay away. But the other day, I was at a garage sale and I found a small tin box, rusted and dented. Inside, there was a single strand of brown hair, tied in a knot. And I knew, without opening it, that there was a photograph beneath it, and on the back, someone had written my name.