The Salted Wood

The house arrived on the back of a flatbed truck in the autumn of ’67, trailing red dust and the smell of pine resin from the old town it had left behind. My great-uncle Harold had bought it from the demolition list, a weatherboard cottage with a tin roof that had once stood in the shadow of the power station at Yallourn, and he had it hauled two hundred miles south to the edge of a salt marsh near a place called Blackwood Bay. The locals said the marsh swallowed things—fog, sound, and sometimes small animals—but Harold was a practical man who whistled while he worked, and he spent the first month re-setting the foundation on brick piers to keep the salt damp from rotting the floor joists.

The layout was simple: a kitchen and a sitting room at the front, then a straight hallway that ran to the back, with two bedrooms on the left, and a bathroom and a third bedroom on the right. The wallpaper in the hallway was a faded pattern of blue cornflowers, and there was a single lightbulb on a pull cord that cast a weak, yellow glow over the floorboards. My grandmother, Edith, said the house felt ‘listened to’, but she was a woman who talked to her plants, so no one paid her much mind at first.

It was my cousin Sarah who saw him first. She was seventeen, visiting for the summer, and she’d taken a bath in the claw-foot tub that Harold had salvaged from the old house. Afterward, she stood in the bathroom doorway, her hair dripping onto her shoulders, and she stepped into the hallway to walk the three paces to her room. The light was on, but the hallway seemed to have grown longer, and the cornflowers on the wallpaper seemed to have deepened in color, as if they were real petals holding the dark. In the middle of that hallway, between her door and the bathroom, stood a man. He was tall, thin, wearing a dark suit that looked wet, and his face was a blur, like he was standing behind a sheet of grimy glass. He didn’t move. He just stood there, and Sarah let out a scream that cracked the plaster in the sitting room.

Harold and Edith came running. They found Sarah pressed against the wall, her eyes wide and white, her body shaking so hard her teeth chattered. She pointed at the empty hallway, but the man was gone. She tried to speak, but the words stuck in her throat. They made her tea, but she wouldn’t go back to her room that night; she slept on the sitting room sofa with every light burning, and in the morning she told them, in a voice that had gone flat, that the man had been there, and that he had no face, and that he had been looking at her as if he knew her.

Harold dismissed it as a draft and an overactive imagination. But that night, he woke in the bedroom adjacent to the bathroom—the room that now belonged to him and Edith—to a sensation of being watched. He opened his eyes in the dark, and in the doorway, framed by the weak light from the hallway nightlight, stood a little girl. She was perhaps six, wearing a white nightgown that had a yellow stain down the front, and her hair was stringy and hung over her face. She was perfectly still, and Harold could see that her bare feet were wet, and that she was leaving a faint trail of water on the wooden floor. He blinked, and she was gone, but the smell of saltwater lingered for hours, and he lay awake, staring at the doorway until dawn.

The next night, Edith heard the boots. She was in the sitting room, darning a sock, and she heard the unmistakable sound of heavy, hobnailed boots walking across the kitchen floor. The kitchen was at the front of the house, right off the sitting room, and she could see the doorway. The boots walked from one end of the kitchen to the other, then back, as if pacing. Then there was a clatter of metal, as if a pot had been knocked, and the sound of water running. Edith steeled herself and walked to the kitchen door. The room was empty, but the kettle was trembling on the stove, and the tap was dripping. She turned off the tap, and as she did, she felt a cold breath on the back of her neck, but when she spun around, there was nothing. In the morning, she found the kitchen floor soaked in a long, irregular puddle that stretched from the sink to the back door, as if someone had dragged a wet sack across it. And in the center of the puddle, there was a single, salt-crusted boot print.

The three of them tried to hide their fears from each other, but the house was becoming a pressure cooker. Harold began sleeping with a shotgun under the bed, though he was a man who had never fired a gun in anger. Edith started leaving bowls of salt on the windowsills, a folk remedy her grandmother had used to keep spirits at bay. And Sarah, who had refused to enter the hallway after dark, began to see the man in her dreams. He would stand at the foot of her bed, his faceless head tilted, and he would raise one hand and point at her, and she would feel herself drowning. She started sleeping with the lights on, and one night she woke to find that the sheet was wet, and the little girl was standing at her bedside, dripping, and Sarah screamed until Edith came and held her, and the little girl vanished.

It came to a head on a stormy night in August. Rain lashed the windows, and the marsh behind the house had swelled to within a few yards of the back door. Harold and Edith were in bed, but Sarah was still awake, sitting in the sitting room with a blanket wrapped around her, listening to the storm. She heard the boots again, but this time they were coming down the hallway, and they stopped at the sitting room door. She held her breath. The door creaked open, and there in the threshold stood the man—and behind him, the little girl, holding his hand. The man’s face was still a blur, but Sarah could see that his suit was torn, and that his chest was caved in, as if he had been crushed. The little girl’s eyes were black, and she was smiling. Sarah tried to scream, but no sound came out. The man raised his arm and pointed at the hallway, and Sarah understood that he wanted her to follow. She shook her head, and the man took a step forward, and the floorboards beneath his feet began to rot and splinter, and the smell of salt and rotting wood filled the room.

Harold appeared in his underwear, shotgun in hand, shouting, ‘Get away from her!’ He fired into the doorway, but the shot passed through empty air and embedded itself in the wall. The man and the girl were gone. But something changed in the house that night. The hallway that led to the bedrooms began to smell of brine, and the wallpaper started to peel, revealing the raw, black timber beneath. The doors began to stick, and the windows would fog up from the inside, even in summer.

Three days later, Harold admitted defeat. He called a friend with a truck, and they spent a frantic day loading the furniture and belongings back into crates. Sarah had already gone to stay with her mother in the city, and Edith was sitting in the kitchen, packing the last of the china, when she heard a voice behind her—a woman’s voice, soft and sad. It said, ‘Please, don’t go. It’s so cold.’ Edith turned, and standing in the doorway was not the man, not the girl, but a woman in a long skirt, her face gray and aged, her hair dripping. She was holding a baby that had no face. Edith dropped the teacup she was holding, and it shattered on the floor. She walked out of the house without looking back.

They left the house where it stood, a battered weatherboard cottage with peeling paint and a sagging roof, on the edge of the salt marsh. The locals kept their distance, and the house eventually sagged into the ground, the salt eating at the wood until it was just a skeleton of joists and beams. But sometimes, on a quiet evening, you can still hear the tap of hobnailed boots on the empty boards, and the whisper of a child saying, ‘Come play with me.’ And if you look through the gap where the front door used to be, you might see a man with no face, standing in the hallway, waiting for someone to come home.