The Tape That Vanished

I never kept a diary back then, so I can’t pinpoint the exact day Marcus appeared. He was just there one afternoon, sitting on the porch swing of my grandmother’s old house, grinning like he’d been invited. I was nineteen, housesitting for the summer in a town so quiet the library closed at noon on Wednesdays. Marcus looked about fifteen, with a face that was too smooth and eyes that crinkled too much when he laughed. He called himself a ‘guest of the wind,’ and I, being lonely and bored, let him stay.

The first prank was subtle. I was wrapping my sister’s birthday present in the upstairs study, the one with the cracked leather chair and the smell of old paper. Marcus was ‘helping’ by sitting on the windowsill, tossing a pebble from hand to hand. I needed scissors, so I went to the kitchen, a room that always felt smaller than it should. When I returned, the tape dispenser was gone. Not just moved—gone. I checked my pockets, the drawer, the floor. Marcus shrugged and said, ‘Maybe it grew legs.’ I didn’t laugh. I found another roll in the pantry and finished wrapping.

Three days later, I dropped a pen under the bed. When I bent to retrieve it, I saw the tape dispenser wedged between the floorboards and the dust bunnies, exactly where the bed leg should have been. It was empty. The core was bare, and the tape was nowhere. I pulled it out and held it up to the light. The plastic was warm, as if someone had held it for a long time. Marcus was in the hallway, leaning against the wall, his head tilted. ‘You found it,’ he said, and his voice was flat. ‘Tricks are like that. They hide where you least expect them.’

That summer, the pranks grew. He would move my keys from the hook to the freezer, and they’d be coated in a thin layer of frost. He would replace the sugar with salt, but only when I was making tea for my grandmother’s friend, Mrs. Albright, who always complained about the taste. He would unplug the grandfather clock at 3:15 every morning, and I’d wake to silence. But the most unsettling prank was the mirror. I had a small hand mirror in the bathroom, one I’d had since childhood. One day, I looked into it, and my reflection was not my own. It was me, but older, with deep lines and gray hair, and it was smiling—a smile that didn’t reach its eyes. I dropped the mirror, and it cracked. Marcus appeared in the doorway, and he said, ‘Careful. Glasses break, but mirrors remember.’

I started to lose track of time. Days blended into weeks, and the town seemed to grow quieter. People I passed on the street would nod but not speak, as if they were saving their words for something else. My grandmother called once, her voice crackling over the line, and she said, ‘Be careful of the boy. He’s not what he seems.’ I asked how she knew, but she had already hung up. I turned to confront Marcus, but he was standing in the kitchen, holding a jar of honey. ‘You want some?’ he asked, and his eyes were dark, too dark. I shook my head.

The final prank was on the last day of August. I was in the attic, searching for an old photo album, when I heard a hum from below. I went down to find Marcus in the living room, standing in front of the fireplace, which was cold. He was holding the empty tape dispenser. ‘You never asked me where I came from,’ he said. I said, ‘I thought you were just passing through.’ He laughed, and it was a dry, papery sound. ‘Passing through. I’ve been here longer than you think.’ He placed the dispenser on the mantel, and it began to ooze a black, sticky substance, like tar, but with the smell of rotting flowers. I stepped back, and he vanished—not in a puff of smoke, but like a reflection fading from glass.

The tape dispenser is still on the mantel. I never touched it. When my grandmother came back in the fall, she asked about Marcus. I told her he left. She nodded and said, ‘Good. He was always too good at hiding.’ But I know better. The pranks were never about hiding things. They were about showing me that the world is full of gaps, and sometimes, something else slips through. I still check under my bed every night. I’m waiting for the day I find the tape dispenser again, warm in my hand, and the mirror shows me smiling at myself from a face that isn’t mine.