The Scratch and the Itch

The first thing I noticed about the house on Hemlock Lane was the floorboards. Not the creak of them, but the feel of them, slightly rough underfoot, as if someone had sanded them down with something coarser than grit. It was a small thing, easy to dismiss. This was Canada, and I was miles from the wet, grey streets of Manchester. Here, the air smelled of pine and damp earth, and the sky was a big, blue bowl above the Rockies. My new job at the sawmill was a welcome distraction, and the house, a two-bedroom bungalow with a porch that leaned a little too far to the left, felt like a fresh start.

For the first few months, the house was just a house. I’d come home from work, the sharp smell of cedar and cut pine clinging to my clothes, and the place would greet me with a silence that was comforting, not eerie. I’d drink my coffee on the porch and watch the elk graze in the meadow at the edge of the treeline. It was peaceful, a world away from the cramped terraces and constant drizzle of back home. I even started to call it mine. The mortgage was a weight, yes, but it was a familiar one, a burden I chose to bear.

It started, as these things often do, with the walls. Not the paint itself, but what was under it. I was watching the hockey game one night, the TV flickering in the dark, when something caught my eye near the baseboard. A faint, crosshatched pattern, like the kind you see in old woodcuts. I ran my fingers over it—it was smooth, but there was a texture to the paint, a subtle ridging that my fingernails could scratch. It was almost like someone had drawn something in the wet plaster and then covered it over, and the paint, thin as it was, had begun to sink into the grooves. The lines formed a crude shape: two bodies interlocked, their limbs impossibly tangled, faces blank and featureless. I stared for a long time, a cold dread pooling in my stomach, before I told myself it was just a trick of the light, a shadow from the tree outside.

But it wasn’t. Over the next week, more lines appeared, crawling up the wall like ivy. They weren’t the same crude shapes—they were words, or something like words, scrawled in a spidery, frantic script that looked like it had been etched with a needle. Most of it was nonsense: ‘the fungus remembers,’ ‘please don’t eat the eyes,’ ‘all the pretty horses have gone to the slaughter.’ But other phrases were darker, more direct: ‘you will rot here,’ ‘the wood knows your name,’ ‘dig under the house and you’ll find the truth.’ I tried to ignore them, to paint over them, but the paint wouldn’t take. It beaded and slid off the wall as if it were coated in grease. I scrubbed with bleach, with vinegar, but the lines remained, pale and mocking beneath the surface.

I asked around at the local diner. The owner, a weathered woman named Margery, told me about the previous owner: a kid named Caleb. ‘Troubled,’ she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Used to get into fights, set fires, that sort of thing. His parents finally moved out and left him here with his aunt. She didn’t last long. Took off after about a year.’ I asked if Caleb was still around. Margery glanced out the window, as if expecting to see him in the parking lot. ‘He’s around,’ she said, and that was all.

Things escalated after that. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of scratching, nails on wood, coming from inside the walls. At first, I thought it was mice, but the sound was too deliberate, too rhythmic, like a code being tapped out. I’d press my ear against the plaster and hear breathing on the other side—slow, patient breaths that synced with the ticking of the clock. I started seeing a figure out of the corner of my eye, a small, hunched shape that vanished when I turned to face it. I told myself it was just my mind playing tricks, but then I found the chewed holes in the corner of my bedroom closet, small and neat, like something had been gnawing its way in.

One night, I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed a flashlight and a crowbar and went down to the basement. The basement was unfinished, just dirt and cobwebs and a water heater that groaned like a dying animal. The scratching was louder down here, I realized with a shiver. It was coming from under the floorboards. I knelt down and pressed my ear to the ground. I heard a voice, faint and thin, like a radio signal lost in static. It was whispering a string of numbers and letters, a lottery sequence. That wasn’t what haunted me. What haunted me was that it was my lottery ticket, the one I’d bought three days ago and kept in my wallet.

I tore up the floorboards. The dirt underneath was dark and wet, thick with the smell of rot. My hands shook as I dug. I found something hard and white, and I thought, Dear God, and tried to stop, but my body wouldn’t obey. I cleared the soil away and there it was: a child’s skull, the jaw missing, a single, perfect incisor tooth stuck in the brow ridge like a fossil. And, in a manila envelope beside it, a diary. I don’t know why I opened it. I wish I hadn’t.

It was Caleb’s diary. The earlier entries were childish, full of drawings of monsters and feelings about school. But later entries turned dark. ‘The wood talks,’ he wrote. ‘It tells me secrets. It shows me how to make the walls bleed. The pores in the wood are like eyes. They see through me.’ Then, the last entry: ‘She said she’d take me away, but she never did. I’m going to live under the house now. I’m going to plant myself in the dirt and grow roots. When you move in, I’ll be here, waiting. I’ll grow around you, and you’ll never get out.’

I got out of there that night. I packed a bag and drove to a motel, but I couldn’t sleep. The images of the skull and the diary wouldn’t leave my mind. I called my friend Tim, who knew a thing or two about land, to ask if he knew anyone at the city who might have records of the property. He didn’t, but he said something that chilled me to the bone: ‘Did you ever notice how the trees are arranged on that lot? Like they’re growing in a circle, all leaning inward. Almost like they’re watching something.’

I went back the next day, in the daylight, to gather my things and put the house on the market. But when I stepped inside, the air was thick with the smell of fresh earth and cut wood, and every wall was covered in the drawings. Not just the bedroom, but the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom—all of them, from floor to ceiling, covered in the same frantic lines. The figures were everywhere, now, not just two but dozens, all with their faces turned towards me, and their eyes were holes, and where the holes were, wet specks of dirt were beginning to fall, as if the house itself was raining dust. And in the corner, where the baseboard met the floor, a small hand, impossibly thin and grey, was reaching out from the plaster, fingers wiggling, sensing the air. The voice from the basement was right behind me, no longer muffled. It was clear and young and cheerful: ‘There you are. I’ve been waiting for you to come back. Don’t worry, I’ll make you a part of the house. You’ll be beautiful.’

I ran. I didn’t look back. I’m writing this from a motel room in Edmonton, a hundred miles away. But the itch is still there, under my skin, all over my body. It started as a faint tingling, and now it’s a burning, crawling sensation, as if something is moving along my nerve endings, marking me. I’ve tried scratching, but it only makes it worse. Last night, I looked in the mirror, and for a split second, I could have sworn I saw a line, faint and grey, running along my cheekbone—a line that looked just like the ones that had appeared on the walls. I’ve tried ringing the police, but every time I describe the house, the line goes dead. I’ve tried talking to my father back in England, but he just says I’m homesick, that I should come back. But I can’t go back. I don’t know if it will follow me. I don’t know if anywhere is safe. All I know is that I can still feel the wood under my skin, and the floorboards are always there, just beneath the surface of my mind, waiting. And somewhere, far away, a boy made of roots and soil is humming a tune I’ll never forget.