The Seventeenth Stroke

The house on Cinder Lane was a crooked little bungalow with a basement that smelled of wet paint and old newspapers. My parents had bought it right after my sixteenth birthday, and I’d claimed the basement bedroom because it was the only place where the radiators didn’t hiss at me. The stairs from the kitchen led down into a short hallway, my door at the far end, a guest room on the left, and a closet that never quite closed. That day, I was painting the walls a deep forest green, humming along to a song on my phone, when a voice slid down the stairs: ‘Avery.’ I paused, brush mid-air. My mom was upstairs, probably slicing tomatoes for lunch. I set the brush in the tray and climbed up, expecting her to ask about dinner. She was at the counter, knife in hand, and she looked up with a frown. ‘I didn’t call you.’ I shrugged. ‘Must be the pipes.’ Back down I went, dipped the brush into the can, resumed the careful strokes. The paint was thick and smelled of copper. Fifteen minutes later, the voice came again, this time from right outside my door, as close as a breath: ‘Avery.’ I dropped the brush, splattering green across the floorboards. I ran up the stairs, a cold sting at my neck. My mom was flipping a grilled cheese, and she didn’t turn around. ‘That wasn’t me either.’ I felt a pinch on my ear, like something had flicked it. I spun, but the hallway was empty. The basement door stood open, and I could see the top of the stairs, dark as a mouth. My heart was hammering. I told myself it was the old house settling. But that night, as I lay in bed, I heard a clock tick seventeen times. I didn’t own a clock. The next morning, I found a stray paintbrush in my bed, bristles wet, the color a reddish brown that wasn’t in my palette. I haven’t slept with the lights off since. That was last spring. Last week, I moved back after my junior year, and the first thing I saw was a fresh stripe of green paint on the inside of my closet door, and the air in the basement is colder than it should be. My parents say I’m imagining it. But last night, at 3:33 AM, the phone on my nightstand rang. When I picked it up, there was only static, and then a voice—my own voice—whispered, ‘I’m still here.’ I’m writing this from the guest room upstairs, and I hear the basement door creak open on its own. And I know that whatever called my name isn’t my imagination. It’s been waiting for me to come back, and it knows I’m alone.