The Tally Marks of Cypress House

I leased the attic room at Cypress House in the fall, drawn by its cheap rent and the promise of quiet isolation. The structure, a Victorian relic from the 1890s, had been converted into a labyrinth of cramped rooms, each one cluttered with the debris of a hundred years of decay. My landlady, Mrs. Gable, was a sparrow-thin woman with rheumy eyes and hands that trembled like leaves. She spoke little of her past, but her current paramour, a stoic carpenter named Tom, once told me over a shared bottle of whiskey that her late husband had been ‘a man with a soul blacker than the coal they used to burn in the basement.’ He died of a heart attack, nursed by Mrs. Gable in the very room I now slept in, though she never said much about it.

I’ve always been what you might call a sensitive—an emotional sponge. I absorb the feelings of rooms like a sponge soaks water. From the first week, I felt a wrongness in Cypress House, a low thrum of dread that vibrated beneath the floorboards. The clutter seemed to breathe, pressing in from all sides. At night, when Mrs. Gable visited Tom, the house would groan as if in pain. I began to avoid the downstairs altogether, terrified of what I might feel there.

One night, my thirst overcame my fear. I crept down the creaking stairs, the wooden steps protesting each footfall. As I passed the living room, the air grew thick, like drowning in syrup. A pressure settled beside me, a suffocating presence of pure malice. I didn’t see anything, but I felt a hand, cold and clammy, brush my shoulder. I turned and fled, heart hammering, not stopping until I slammed my bedroom door and piled furniture against it.

The next morning, I confronted Mrs. Gable. She was in the kitchen, boiling water for tea, her back to me. ‘There’s something in this house,’ I said. She didn’t turn. ‘My husband,’ she replied, her voice a dry rasp. ‘He never left. He never will.’ That was all she said.

Driven by morbid curiosity and a desperate need for answers, I descended into the basement the following afternoon. The stairs were concrete, cold, and the air was thick with mildew. In the corner, half-buried under a mountain of rusted tools, I found a wooden crate. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a journal. The pages were filled with the same spidery handwriting. It was her husband’s diary. The entries were a litany of abuse—emotional, physical, psychological. But the last entry made my blood run cold: ‘She thinks she can hide from my anger, but I will find her even after death. Every wound I gave her, every bruise, I have carved into the basement floor. Blood will follow blood.’

I spent the next hour on my hands and knees, sweeping away the grime. Underneath a pile of coal sacks, I found them: tally marks, thousands of them, scratched deep into the concrete. Each one, I realized, represented a cut or a beating. And among the talies, in crusted brown stains, were the words: ‘BLOOD’ and the beginning of a curse I dare not repeat.

That night, I packed my bags. As I hurried down the stairs, I saw Mrs. Gable standing in the living room shadows, a faint smile on her lips. ‘He’s been restless lately,’ she said. ‘I think he wants company.’ A cold wind swept past me, extinguishing the candle in my hand. In the darkness, I felt a presence behind me, the faint whisper of a voice: ‘Sit with me.’ I fled without looking back.

Months later, I heard that Mrs. Gable had taken a new boarder. A young man. Last week, a letter arrived at my new address, bundled with a key to Cypress House. There was no note, but the key was covered in a dark, rust-like substance that smelled of iron and old blood. I don’t know if I’ll ever return, but the tally marks have burned themselves into my mind. They count out a legacy of pain that no amount of distance can erase. The house is waiting, patient, and its walls have long memories.