The Third Cup

It was a Tuesday morning, the kind of gray, damp February day when the house seemed to hold its breath. I was twenty-three, living alone in the old farmhouse my grandmother had left me, out on the edge of a town that barely qualified as a town. The house had been in the family for over a century, and it had a way of settling into your bones. I never minded the creaks or the drafts. But that morning, I woke with a strange taste in my mouth, like copper and old pennies.

I decided to make coffee, something I rarely did, preferring tea, but the chill had seeped into the floorboards and I craved something darker and hotter. I filled the glass carafe with water, scooped in the grounds, and flipped the switch on the old percolator. The machine wheezed to life, and I left the kitchen to check my email in the small study at the back of the house, a room I usually avoided after dusk because the window faced the overgrown orchard and the trees always seemed to be watching.

I got lost in a chain of forwarded emails from my aunt, then in the news, and then in the quiet hum of the house. Time slipped away. I must have sat there for twenty minutes before I remembered the coffee. I pushed back from the desk and walked toward the kitchen, expecting to smell the bitter aroma of fresh-brewed coffee, but the hallway was silent. When I stepped into the kitchen, the coffee maker was off. The carafe was full. The switch was in the down position. I hadn’t touched it. The machine required a manual push to start the brewing cycle after the water heated. I knew this because I had read the manual out of boredom one rainy afternoon. It did not switch itself.

I stood there, staring at the dark liquid, the surface still and opaque. I called my neighbor, old Mrs. Kravitz, who had a key to the house for emergencies. She said she hadn’t been over. I called my brother, who was at work forty minutes away. He hadn’t come by. I called my best friend, who lived in the city. She laughed and said maybe I had a ghost roommate. I laughed too, but the sound was hollow.

I poured a cup. I took a sip. It was cold. Not lukewarm, not room temperature, but cold, as if it had been brewed hours ago and left to chill. I spit it out in the sink and dumped the rest down the drain. The coffee maker was warm to the touch, but only on the base, not the carafe. I tried to rationalize it. Maybe I had switched it on out of habit without thinking. Maybe I had drifted into the kitchen without noticing. I was tired. I let it go.

But that was only the beginning. The next morning, I woke to the smell of fresh coffee drifting up the stairs. I came down, and there it was: a full pot, hot and steaming. The switch was off. No one else was in the house. I checked the locks. The doors were bolted. The windows were sealed. I poured the coffee down the sink and did not drink any.

Over the next week, the coffee maker would turn on at odd times. Sometimes I would catch it from the corner of my eye, the little red light blinking as if eager to start. I unplugged it. I still found it warm to the touch in the middle of the night. I threw it in the trash and drove to town to buy a new one. But the new one, a simple drip machine, did the same thing. It would brew on its own, always at three in the morning, always a full pot. I would wake to the sound of the gurgle, and by the time I reached the kitchen, it would be done, sitting there like a dark invitation.

I started sleeping in the living room, on the couch, with all the lights on. I stopped using the kitchen altogether. I ate cold cereal and canned soup. But the presence, if that’s what it was, seemed to shift. I began to find coffee cups arranged on the counter, not just one, but two, sometimes three. One day, I found a cup with lipstick on the rim. I don’t wear lipstick. I never have.

I called in a priest, a friend of the family, to bless the house. He walked through every room, sprinkling holy water, muttering prayers in Latin. He stopped in the kitchen, stared at the coffee maker, and went pale. He told me to get rid of it. I told him I had, twice. He shook his head and left without taking any money. That night, I lay in bed, listening to the wind. At exactly three a.m., I heard the coffee maker click on. I heard the water drip. I heard the machine hiss and gurgle. And then I heard something else: a soft, muffled sound, like a woman crying in the next room.

I got up. I crept down the hall. The kitchen light was off, but the coffee maker’s red light cast a glow over the counter. There, on the counter, was a single mug, already filled with black coffee. And beside it, a small, wet spot on the floor, as if someone had been standing there for a long time, crying over the machine. The crying stopped when I entered. I stood there, my heart pounding, and I said, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ But there was no answer. Only the coffee, growing colder and colder, and the faint smell of something like dust and old perfume.

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat in the living room, watching the door. The next morning, I decided I couldn’t stay. I packed a bag and drove to my brother’s house. I stayed for two weeks, trying to convince myself I had been imagining things. My brother offered to drive back with me to pack up my things and put the house on the market. When we arrived, the house was silent. The coffee maker was gone. The counter was bare. I thought, maybe it’s over. I started to relax.

But that night, at three in the morning, I woke up in my old bedroom, my brother asleep in the guest room, and I smelled coffee. I crept downstairs. The coffee maker was back. It was the old one, the one I had thrown in the trash. It was sitting on the counter, covered in rust and grime. The switch was on. The carafe was filling with liquid that was not coffee. It was thick and black, like oil, with a sheen of green. I screamed. My brother came running. He saw it too. He threw the whole machine out the back door, into the yard. We watched it land with a thud. It lay there, in the moonlight, its cord still trailing, its light still glowing.

We left that night. I never went back. I live in a small apartment now, in a different town. I don’t drink coffee anymore. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up with the taste of copper in my mouth, and I hear the faint gurgle of a coffee maker, and I know it’s still out there, waiting for me to come back, to pour me a third cup.