The Sunroom’s Accounting

My great-aunt Edna’s house, a cramped, two-story saltbox built in 1931, had a peculiar geography. It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a town that time had forgotten, with a sunroom tacked on the rear that faced the encroaching woods. My mother and her cousins had grown up running its narrow halls, and every one of them swore to the same unnerving phenomenon: the stairway to the second floor, a steep and creaking ascent, was a gauntlet of dread. About halfway up, a cold knot would form in your stomach, and an undeniable, suffocating presence would press against your back, as if something waited at the top, just out of sight, hungry for you to turn around. We children learned to sprint those steps, taking them two at a time, our hearts hammering until we slammed into the safety of the farthest bedroom.

The second floor was a tripartite puzzle: two proper bedrooms and an open nook at the landing that served as a study. The walls were thin, the floors slanted, and the air always smelled faintly of dust and old lavender. My great-aunt’s room, the one overlooking the front yard, was the only one with a lock, though she never used it. She said the house liked to ‘sort things out’ on its own.

Aunt Edna and her husband, Uncle Bert, moved in during the summer of 1934, newlyweds with modest furniture and high hopes. One sweltering August afternoon, while Uncle Bert was out running errands, Aunt Edna was in the kitchen, canning peaches. The kitchen opened into the sunroom, a glassed-in porch where they kept a primitive adding machine, a curiosity of brass and steel that Uncle Bert used for his small accounting business. As she stirred the bubbling syrup, she heard the unmistakable clatter of the machine’s keys, a rhythmic *tick-tick-tick* that mimicked the old clock on the mantel. She paused, spoon in hand, and called out, ‘Bert, is that you?’ No answer. The ticking stopped.

She shrugged it off, attributing the sound to the house settling. But the next day, when she went to the sunroom to dust, she found the adding machine’s paper roll hanging with a single line typed: ‘5678.’ She showed Uncle Bert, who laughed, ‘I must have left it. Or a mouse learned arithmetic.’ He tore the paper and carried on. Yet the occurrences persisted. Every few days, a new number would appear: ‘112’, ‘9’, ‘4444’. They were always printed in perfect alignment, as if by a careful hand. Aunt Edna began to leave the machine unplugged, covered with a cloth, but the numbers still came.

Weeks later, Uncle Bert was out late, and Aunt Edna went to bed early, exhausted from the heat. She had not climbed the stairs to the second floor in days, choosing to sleep on the parlor sofa because of a persistent headache. In the middle of the night, she was jolted awake. The adding machine was clattering at full speed, a frenzied, mechanical staccato that filled the dark house. She lit a candle, her hands trembling, and crept into the sunroom. The machine was unplugged, the cloth thrown aside, and the paper roll was spewing out a continuous stream of numbers, faster than any human could type. She watched, mesmerized, as the numbers formed a pattern: ‘1… 2… 3… 4…’ counting upward. At the count of ’13’, the machine jammed, and a piece of paper tore free, fluttering to the floor. She bent down, and in the flickering light, she read: ‘HELP US.’

The next morning, she called the county records office and asked about the house’s history. A clerk, after some digging, told her that the house had been built by a man named Gordon Pierce, a reclusive bookkeeper who had lost his wife and two children to a fire in the very room that now served as the upstairs study. The fire had started, reportedly, from a faulty lamp, but the family had been trapped because the only staircase had collapsed. Pierce survived, and he retreated to the sunroom, where he kept his adding machine, obsessively tallying the days since the tragedy. He died there, alone, in 1928, and the house had passed through several owners before Aunt Edna and Uncle Bert.

Aunt Edna felt a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. She returned to the house and, for the first time in weeks, walked up the stairs, determined to face the presence that had always loomed behind her. The steps groaned, and the cold knot tightened in her chest. At the top, she stood at the landing, the study’s door slightly ajar. She pushed it open. The room was bare except for a scorch mark on the floor in the shape of a rectangle. She knelt and touched the soot, and her fingers came away black. A whisper, dry as old leaves, seemed to rustle from the walls: ‘You have to count them.’

The numbers, she realized, were a tally. The machine had been counting the days since the fire, but it was stuck at 2,191—the exact number of days between the fire and the day she and Uncle Bert had moved in. And now it had started counting anew, moving toward the day she would leave. She felt a cold hand on her shoulder, and she spun around, but no one was there. Only the chills running down her spine, the same chills every family member would later know.

Aunt Edna and Uncle Bert sold the house a year later, moving to a brick bungalow across town. But the adding machine followed them. It sat on a shelf in their new garage, silent and harmless, until the day Aunt Edna passed away in 1972. As the paramedics wheeled her out, Uncle Bert noticed the machine had begun to click, and the paper roll, still attached, printed a single, final number: the date of her death.

Years later, when my own mother inherited a box of Aunt Edna’s belongings, she found the adding machine at the bottom, wrapped in an old quilt. She set it on the kitchen table, and for a moment, it seemed to hum with latent purpose. But it never typed again. Yet every time I visit my mother’s house, and I climb the stairs to the guest bedroom, I feel that same icy presence behind me, and I can’t help but wonder if the machine is, somewhere, still counting.