The Ragged Man on the Staircase

I was eleven, maybe twelve, when the house on Parchman Lane started to feel wrong. It wasn’t the peeling wallpaper or the draft that smelled of apples and rot. It was the way the staircase creaked in the exact same rhythm each night, as if something was climbing them just to see if I would look.

My parents, Gerald and Martha, had rented the place to escape the city. They were always tired, always whispering about bills and the war in the papers. I had a younger sister, Lily, but she was only a toddler and slept in the room next to mine. My own room was at the top of the stairs, the one with the slanted ceiling and a window that rattled in the wind.

One night, I woke to the sound of a dog crying somewhere far off. The moonlight slit through the curtains, painting a silver stripe on the floor. I lay still, listening to the house breathe, when I saw it at the foot of my bed: three black shapes, like wet tar that had pulled itself upright. They had no faces, but where their eyes should have been, there were two drops of blood that glowed like embers. The smallest one barely reached the doorknob, the middle one was around my height, and the tallest had to stoop slightly in the doorway.

My heart slammed against my ribs. I tried to scream, but only a whisper came out. The tallest shape took a step forward, and when it spoke, the voice was my mother’s, smooth and warm, saying, ‘It’s alright, baby. Come to Mommy. Don’t be scared.’ But my mother was in her room at the end of the hall; I had seen the crack of light under her door before I shut mine.

And the other two shapes raised their arms toward me, their fingers like black rags, and they began to mimic Lily’s babbling, and then my father’s chuckle. A chorus of my family’s voices, all wrong because they came from things with no mouths.

I pulled the covers over my head and squeezed my eyes shut. I recited every prayer I knew. Eventually, the room fell silent, and I peeked out. The shapes were gone, but the air smelled like damp earth and sulfur.

The next morning, I told my parents, but my mother laughed and said it was a night terror, and my father told me not to fill my head with nonsense. But at breakfast, Lily pointed at the corner of the kitchen and said, ‘Man.’ We all turned, but there was nothing.

We moved out two months later. My father had lost his job, and the landlord raised the rent, so we packed our things. I was glad to go, but on the last night, I woke again, this time to the sound of footsteps on the stairs. I knew it wasn’t my parents because they were both snoring in the next room. I cracked my door open. There, on the bottom step, sat a ragged man with no face, only a hollow where his features should have been, and in that hollow, three red points of light, like a trinity of eyes. He was wearing my father’s old coat, the one he’d lost at the laundromat a week before.

He tilted his head, and in my father’s voice, he said, ‘Don’t forget your old friends, son. We’ll be waiting when the apples bloom.’

I slammed the door and buried my head under my pillow.

We moved to a different apartment complex, but I never told my mother the full truth until I was fifteen. She only stared at me with her mouth open, then went into the kitchen and began to laugh. ‘Apples bloom?’ she said. ‘That’s from your grandfather’s folk tales. He used to say that the dead harvest apples in the autumn of a person’s life. I never believed him.’

But I knew what I saw. And sometimes, late at night, when the apartment is quiet and the wind rattles the windows, I still hear the stairs creak, even though there are no stairs here. I never look. I never answer. Because I know what waits at the bottom, wearing my mother’s voice, holding out its arms, and I’m not sure if it’s the memory of that house or something that followed me, waiting for the apples to bloom.