The Silhouette in the Linoleum

The linoleum in my sister’s kitchen was a relic from the 1970s, a splatter of rust and avocado that had seen more arguments than meals. I’d sit on the cracked vinyl stool, nursing cold tea, after my nightly visits to Mum’s hospice room three streets over. The house itself was a squat brick bungalow on a cul-de-sac that smelled of damp soil and old newspapers, and every bulb in it hummed at a frequency that made my teeth ache.

That particular night, I was watching the flicker of the streetlight through the window when I saw it: a small dark shape, no bigger than a cat, scamper across the floor near the pantry. It was quick, but unmistakable. I turned my head so fast I nearly cricked my neck, and my sister, Nell, who was doing dishes with her back to me, asked, ‘Did you see something?’ I described it, and she went still. The plate in her hand clattered into the sink.

She told me then, in a low voice, about the other things. About her partner, Roy, who’d been checking under their son’s bed one night because he’d heard a thump, and had seen a small figure crouched in the shadow, back curved, head tilted. ‘What are you doing?’ Roy had called, and the thing had slithered out of sight before his eyes adjusted. About her youngest, Mia, who would sit on the stairs and murmur to herself, asking ‘Who are you?’ but never getting an answer. About the nights Nell would wake with a crushing weight on her chest, like a small body pressing down on her sternum, and once, when she finally forced her eyes open, she was nose-to-nose with a pale oval face, featureless except for a dark mouth that opened and closed silently.

I laughed, nervously, and said, ‘You’re scaring yourselves.’ But I started watching my own feet as I walked through their hallways. The house had a particular layout, a long central corridor with doors on either side, and at the far end, a window that looked onto a small, overgrown courtyard. One evening, as I passed the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of something in the frosted glass of the shower door—a small, hunched silhouette, like a child sitting with its chin on its knees. I yanked the door open, and there was nothing but the damp tiles and a spider in the corner.

Then Roy had his incident. He was in the backyard, burning leaves in the old barrel, and he saw a shadow slip along the fence line. It wasn’t quite human, but it moved with a skipping, halting gait, like a video glitching. It stopped at a patch of bare earth where Nana’s rose bush used to be, and it seemed to be digging. Roy shouted, but it didn’t run; it just turned its head—and there was no face, just a smooth darkness—and then it vanished into the ground as if it had never been.

We decided to investigate, because what else were we to do? We set up a small camera in the corner of the kitchen, aimed at the pantry, and another in the hallway. For three days, we watched hours of footage of our own mundane lives: Nell arguing with her eldest, Carl, about his messy room; Mia doing handstands against the wall; Roy scratching his belly as he moved from fridge to couch. And then on the third night, at 3:03 a.m., the kitchen camera showed a small hand, impossibly thin and pale, reach out from the gap beneath the pantry door, and leave a single, small object on the floor—a belt buckle, tarnished and missing its prong.

Nell recognized it. ‘That’s Dad’s,’ she whispered. Dad had been dead for eight years. He’d died in a car crash on the highway, and his belt had been cut off by the paramedics. No one had ever found the buckle.

The next night, at the same time, we watched as the pantry door creaked open a few inches, and something small, with a bald head and skin like old parchment, slipped out. It moved in the dim light, pausing to look directly at the camera, and I swear it was smiling, though its face had no mouth. Then it shuffled down the hallway, and the hallway camera caught it stopping outside Mia’s door, laying a small, gray hand on the wood. Mia, inside, was awake. She later said she heard a voice, thin and rustling like dry leaves, that said, ‘Let me in, little one. I’ve been waiting.’

We thought about burning sage, calling a priest, anything. But then Nell noticed something weird: the linoleum in the kitchen, that old splatter pattern, had started to change. The avocado and rust colors were shifting, forming a shape, like a fingerprint. And as we watched, the shape began to crawl. It wasn’t on the floor anymore; it was under the floor, a dark stain spreading, moving toward the hallway.

We went to the hospice that night, to see Mum. She was barely conscious, but she opened her eyes and grabbed my sister’s hand. ‘You’ve let him in,’ she rasped. ‘Your father… he was never quite right. When you were little, he would… he would hide in the walls. He watched you. He wanted to be little again, to crawl through vents. He buried something in the backyard. Did you find his buckle?’ Nell broke down, because she hadn’t told Mum about the buckle. Mum smiled, toothless, and said, ‘He’s just a shadow now. But he remembers the shape of you. He wants to wear you.’

We drove back to the house, my hands shaking on the wheel. The streetlights were out, and the whole cul-de-sac was dark except for a single flickering light in the kitchen window. As we walked in, the linoleum was gone. In its place was a gaping hole in the floor, a tunnel leading down into black earth. And from the hole came a sound—not a whisper, but the dry, sucking sound of something pulling itself out of the soil.

We never slept again in that house. We moved to a small apartment on the other side of town, but sometimes, at night, I feel a small pressure at the foot of my bed, as if something is curling up. And on the windowsill, there’s a smear of mud that wasn’t there before. Nell said she saw a small shape on the fire escape last week, just a silhouette, but it waved. I don’t know what it wants. I just hope it doesn’t remember the belt.