The Porcelain Tulip

The rental car smelled of stale coffee and the previous driver’s desperation. I knew the trip was a mistake as soon as the headlights cut through the prairie dark, but my brother, Leo, had that manic gleam in his eye that I’d learned to dread. My fiancée, Mira, squeezed my hand, her knuckles white. ‘We can turn back,’ she said, her voice a thin thread over the hum of the engine. ‘It’s just a house,’ I lied. Airdrie, despite its growth, still held pockets of that old Alberta bleakness. We turned down a street of identical two-story boxes, all vinyl siding and fake brick, and there it was: 44 Maplewood Crescent. The house we’d rented for three horrible years in the ’90s. The house where Kevin, our mentally unstable uncle, had, in a fit of paranoia, nailed every window shut and painted the interior of every room a different shade of red. The house where he’d died, they said, of a heart attack, but we knew from the condition of the drywall that he’d been searching for something in the walls, clawing through the plaster with his bare hands until they were bloody stumps. The porch light was on, and a pale, thin man with a child’s face stood on the steps, waving at us as if he’d been expecting us.

The man introduced himself as Gerald, the current owner. He had a nervous habit of licking his lips and blinking too rapidly. ‘I bought it from the bank,’ he said. ‘They got it real cheap. But I’m starting to think I got a deal with something else.’ He invited us in, and despite Mira tugging at my sleeve and Leo’s whispered ‘This is so cool’, I felt a cold, oily dread pool in my gut. The inside was worse than I remembered. The red paint was gone, replaced with a fresh, sterile white, but there were dark, blooming stains on the ceiling, as if something had bled through from the upstairs. The air was thick with the smell of damp plaster and a strange, sweet floral scent, like rotting lilies. Gerald showed us around, but his eyes kept darting to the walls. ‘I found something,’ he said. ‘In the laundry room. Under the floorboards. I think it’s a curse or something.’

He led us to the laundry room, a cramped space at the back of the house. He’d pulled up a section of the linoleum, and in the dirt, lying in a crumpled nest of what looked like rat fur, was a small, porcelain tulip. It was exquisitely painted, with veins of gold running through the petals, but one petal was chipped, and the paint was flaking in a way that looked disturbingly like dried skin. ‘I touched it,’ Gerald said, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘And since then, I hear things. At night. Coming from the walls. Scratching. And sometimes, I see a man. In the corner of my eye. Always pointing at the walls. He’s always pointing at the walls.’ As he spoke, I heard it too: a faint, rhythmic scratching, like nails on plaster, from somewhere above us. Leo’s face went pale. Mira pressed closer to me. ‘We should go,’ I said. ‘Now.’ But Gerald grabbed my arm. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘You lived here. You know him. The man in the walls. Tell me how to make him stop.’

I didn’t know. All I knew was that Kevin had been obsessed with the idea that there was something hidden in the walls, something that would grant him infinite wealth and power if he could just find it. He’d spent months tearing the place apart, and when he died, the coroner found splinters under his fingernails and plaster dust in his lungs. He’d literally choked on the house. But standing there, staring at that porcelain tulip, a memory surfaced. Kevin had a thing for tulips. He had a garden out back, but he always complained that the flowers were ‘wrong’. He wanted to grow a flower that was ‘pure red, like blood’. The tulip in front of me was exactly that, save for the chipped petal. And suddenly, I knew. The tulip was the key. It wasn’t a curse; it was a lock. And the man in the walls wasn’t Kevin. It was something else. Something that had been waiting for someone to find the tulip and break the seal.

The scratching grew louder. The walls began to bulge, as if something large was moving behind the plaster. A faint, high-pitched keening rose from the floorboards. Gerald started screaming, clawing at his own face. ‘Make it stop! Please! Make it stop!’ I grabbed Mira’s hand and pulled her toward the front door, but Leo stood frozen, staring at the tulip. ‘Leo!’ I shouted. ‘Move!’ But he didn’t move. He reached out, almost in a trance, and picked up the tulip. The moment his fingers touched the porcelain, the scratching stopped. But then, a sound like a sigh of relief came from the walls, and the house let out a groan. The windows rattled. The floor shook. And a thin, black fluid began to weep from the cracks in the corners of the room. Leo held the tulip up to the light, his eyes wide. ‘It’s warm,’ he said. ‘It’s like it’s alive.’ And in that moment, I saw his reflection in the small mirror on the laundry room wall. And behind him, standing in the doorway, was a figure. Tall and thin, with skin the color of old cheese. It had no face, just a smooth, featureless expanse where a face should be. But it was pointing at Leo. Pointing at him with a finger that was the exact same porcelain white as the tulip.

I screamed. I grabbed Leo’s arm and tried to wrench the tulip away, but he held on tight. The figure glided forward. The walls behind us began to ooze that black fluid, which pooled on the floor and started to crawl upward, like sentient vines. Mira was crying, pulling at my jacket. ‘Run!’ She shouted. We ran. We burst out into the cold night air, and I could feel the tulip in Leo’s hand, a cold, numbing presence even through his jacket. We didn’t stop running until we reached the car. I fumbled with the keys, got in, and floored it out of there. The car shuddered and skidded onto the main road. I checked the rearview mirror. The house was dark, but for a moment, I could have sworn I saw a silhouette standing in the porch light, waving goodbye.

We drove in silence to the hotel. We didn’t speak of what had happened. We didn’t even look at Leo. But when we got back to our room, Leo put the tulip on the bedside table, and we all just stared at it. It sat there, innocently, a pretty piece of porcelain with a chipped petal. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was looking back at us. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and the distant sirens of the city. And then, I heard it. A soft, rhythmic scraping from the direction of the tulip. I turned to look, and in the dim light, I saw the tulip’s shadow on the wall. But the shadow was wrong. It wasn’t the shadow of a tulip. It was the shadow of a hand, with long, thin fingers, slowly opening and closing. And at the base of the shadow, I saw words, etched in the plaster, in a child’s handwriting. ‘Let me out.’

I woke up with a start. The room was silent. The tulip was still on the table. Leo was asleep in his bed. Mira was breathing softly beside me. I told myself it was just a nightmare. But then I noticed that the table, the table where the tulip sat, was wet. And there was a small puddle on the carpet, just under the table. And in the puddle, there was a tiny, red petal. Not from a tulip. From something else. And I realized, with a cold, creeping horror, that we hadn’t left the house behind at all. The house had come with us. And it was hungry.