The Tenant of Larkspur House

I didn’t choose Larkspur House; it chose me. After my roommate’s church made it clear that my presence was an affront to their delicate sensibilities, I packed my bags and fled the sterile suburbs of East Memphis for the bohemian sprawl of Midtown. I found a listing for a top-floor apartment in a crumbling Victorian mansion that had been chopped into units. The building was called Larkspur House, a name that sounded almost poetic, but the peeling paint and sagging porch whispered of neglect. The landlord, a man with rheumy eyes and a handshake like damp clay, showed me the place. The rooms were spacious, with high ceilings and tall windows that looked out over the city, but there was a heaviness in the air, a smell of old wood and dust and something else, something faintly sweet and rotten.

I told myself it was the charm of an old building. I was alone for the first time in my life, and I reveled in the silence. But the silence was never quite silent. The building had its own sounds: the groan of settling timbers, the skitter of mice in the walls, the distant whisper of traffic from Poplar. At first, I dismissed these as normal. But then came the footsteps in the hallway at night, slow and deliberate, stopping outside my door. I’d open it to find nothing, only the flickering light of the old wall sconces. And the humming. Soft, barely audible, a lullaby I couldn’t quite place, emanating from the walls themselves.

I tried to ignore it, threw myself into my work as a freelance illustrator. But the images I drew began to change. A sketch of a park bench would become a shadow stretching towards a figure. A portrait of a friend would gain a third eye, or a mouth too wide. One night, I woke to the sound of my own name whispered directly into my ear. My name, ‘Marion’, spoken in a voice that was not mine, but old and cracked like dry leaves. I sat up, heart pounding, but the room was empty. The only light was the ghostly glow of the streetlamps filtering through the blinds.

That’s when I noticed the wall. A section of the plaster was damp, streaked with brown, forming a pattern that looked almost like a face. I ran my fingers over it; the surface was cold and slimy. I tried to scrub it off, but it only grew clearer. The face seemed to be shifting, its mouth contorting into a rictus of despair. I called the landlord, but he just muttered about ‘damp conditions’ and hung up. I thought about calling Kari, but what would I say? That my apartment was haunted by a moldy ghost?

Then I found the letters. Wedged behind the radiator in the kitchen, yellowed and brittle. They were addressed to a woman named Eleanor, who had lived in this very unit in the 1950s. The letters were from her lover, a man named Arthur, who was pleading with her to run away with him. ‘Dear Eleanor, I cannot bear another day without you. Your sister’s husband is a monster. He will destroy you if you stay. Meet me at the station at midnight, as we planned, or I fear we shall never see each other again.’ The letters were undated, but the last one was stained with something brown that flaked off in my fingers.

I became obsessed with Eleanor. I scoured the building for more traces of her, and I found them: a faint name scratched into the window glass of the bedroom, ‘Eloise’ instead of Eleanor, but close. A hairpin rusted in a drawer. A portrait of a woman with a serene face and sad eyes, hidden behind a loose plank in the closet. In the portrait, she was seated by a window, and behind her, the same room I now occupied. But there was a shadow in the corner of the painting, a darkness that seemed too solid. It took me a moment to realize the shadow had a face, a man with hollow eyes.

That night, I had a dream. In it, I was Eleanor, standing in the kitchen with the gas stove on high, a pan of milk simmering on the burner. I felt a presence behind me, a hand on my shoulder, cold and insistent. A voice, the same voice that had whispered my name, said, ‘You cannot leave. You are mine.’ I struggled, but I was trapped. When I woke, I was drenched in sweat, and the air was thick with the smell of burnt milk.

I knew then that the house was holding me. Every time I tried to pack my bags, I would find an excuse to stay. My car keys would be missing, only to be found under the sofa. My phone bill would arrive with an extra charge for a call I never made, to a number I didn’t recognize. The portraits I painted grew darker, and in every one, a shadowy figure lurked in the background. I started seeing the man in my peripheral vision, a tall, gaunt silhouette with his head tilted, as if listening.

The climax came on a stormy night, fittingly enough. The power went out, plunging the house into darkness. I fumbled for candles, and in the flickering light, I saw him. He was standing in the corner of the living room, a man in an old-fashioned suit, his face obscured by shadow. He raised a hand, and pointed to the floor. I looked down, and saw that the floorboards were shifting, revealing a gap. Something beneath the floor was moving, like a nest of snakes.

I grabbed my flashlight and shone it into the gap. What I saw made me scream. It was a body, or what remained of one, mummified in the dark, dressed in a tattered dress and clutching a handful of letters. And the face, despite its decay, was the face from the portrait: Eleanor. I stumbled backward, and the ghostly man lunged. But instead of attacking me, he vanished into the floor, and the house lurched as if the earth itself had moved. The walls groaned, and I heard a sound like a thousand whispers, the voices of all the lonely souls who had ever lived there.

I ran. I grabbed my keys and my wallet and fled down the stairs, out into the storm, not stopping until I was blocks away. I passed the rest of the night in a 24-hour diner, my hands shaking around a cup of coffee. In the morning, I drove by the house. It was still there, but the windows seemed like vacant eyes. The landlord was standing outside, and he looked at me with his rheumy eyes. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said, with a strange smile. I told him I was moving out. He nodded, as if expecting it. ‘That unit’s had a history of tenants leaving early,’ he said. ‘Before you, there was a man who stayed for three months and left all his things. Before him, a young couple. They said the place hummed at night.’

I moved that afternoon, leaving behind everything but my sketchbook and my clothes. To this day, I still draw, but I can never draw the same things. Sometimes, a hand seems to guide mine, and I’ll sketch a scene of a room I’ve never seen, with a shadow in the corner. And at night, when the world is quiet, I can still hear the faint hum of Larkspur House, and the whisper of my name, a sound that will never be silent, no matter how far I run.