The Tally in the Attic

Three years ago, we moved into a sprawling farmhouse on the edge of a deciduous forest. The house had stood empty for a decade, and its bones were sound, but the previous owner had been a reclusive antiquarian whose collection of clocks, barometers, and other instruments of measurement cluttered every room. My father was on a long-term assignment in another hemisphere, so it was just my mother, my younger brother, and I. I was a graduate student in a city a few hours away, so I only came home on weekends and holidays.

To ease my mother’s anxiety about the isolation, we all slept in the master bedroom on the ground floor. The room was vast, with a high ceiling and a bay window that overlooked the overgrown garden. My brother, Derek, had just turned twelve, and he was at that age where he noticed things but couldn’t articulate them. On my first weekend back, he asked, ‘Why does the house count us?’ I dismissed it as childish fancy, but he insisted: ‘At night, I hear a ticking, like a clock, but it’s not the clocks. It’s like the house is keeping track.’

That night, I heard it too. A soft, rhythmic ticking, not from any of the hundreds of clocks (which we’d mostly stopped), but from the walls themselves. It was irregular, sometimes pausing for a second, then resuming. I chalked it up to old pipes or insects, but the next morning, Derek showed me a row of tally marks scratched into the window frame of the master bedroom, just below the sill. They were fresh, deep gouges in the wood, and there were ten of them. ‘There were nine yesterday,’ he said. My mother told him to stop playing with knives, but I saw her face go pale.

The night after, I set a trap. I sprinkled flour across the floor of the hallway outside our room, knowing that any intruder would leave footprints. At 3:15 a.m., I woke to the ticking louder than ever, and it seemed to be coming from inside the room. I turned on the lamp, and the ticking stopped. In the flour outside, there were no footprints. But on the inside of the window, there was an eleventh tally mark, as if drawn by a ghostly finger.

I decided to investigate the house. The attic was filled with the old man’s journals, and among them, I found a ledger titled ‘The Cost of Time’. It was filled with columns of numbers and names, each with a date of death. The last entry was for ‘C. Whitaker’, the owner, who had died in this house. But the ledger wasn’t finished; there were empty lines beneath. As I flipped through, I noticed a pattern: the names were all previous owners or their family members. And then I saw it: a single line, in fresh ink: ‘D. Marsh’ – that was Derek’s name. And next to it, a date: the following week.

I tried to convince my mother we should leave, but she was stubborn, saying we had paid for the year. So I took matters into my own hands. I burned the ledger in the fireplace, but the ashes formed a number on the hearth: thirteen. That night, the ticking was like a heartbeat, and I could feel it in my chest. Derek began to sleepwalk, and I found him standing in front of the grandfather clock in the hallway, his finger tracing the glass, saying, ‘It’s almost time.’

On the morning of the date, I woke up to silence. The house was still, no ticking. I rushed to Derek’s bed, but he was gone. Panic set in, and I ran through the house, calling his name. I found him in the attic, sitting on the floor, surrounded by the old man’s instruments. He was counting aloud: ‘Ninety-nine, one hundred, one hundred one…’ I asked what he was doing, and he looked up with hollow eyes and said, ‘Counting the seconds until the house is full.’

I grabbed his arm, but he wouldn’t move. The ticking resumed, but it wasn’t from the walls – it was from the grandfather clock below, and it was counting down. I dragged Derek out of the attic, down the stairs, and out the front door. The moment we crossed the threshold, the clock struck thirteen times. We drove to a motel and slept in the car, too afraid to stay.

The next day, we returned with a realtor, determined to sell the house. But the entire property was overgrown with vines, as if a decade had passed overnight. The windows were dark, and the front door was locked. When we finally got in, the master bedroom was exactly as we left it – except the window sill now had a hundred and one tally marks. And in the attic, the ledger was back, with a new line: ‘E. Marsh’ – my name – with a date that was a century from now.

We sold the house to a developer, who planned to demolish it. But the day the bulldozers arrived, they found the house empty except for a single grandfather clock, ticking in the center of the main hall. The workers refused to touch it. The house was torn down that afternoon, and the rubble was taken away. In the town, they say that on certain nights, if you stand where the house once stood, you can hear a faint ticking, and if you listen closely, it sounds like counting. And sometimes, you’ll find a small, fresh tally mark carved into a nearby tree. The tally in the attic, it seems, is never finished.