The Third Floor

The house sat on a bluff above the Oregon coast, a rust-bitten A-frame that had weathered a hundred storms. I was there with my boyfriend, Marcus, and his family—his parents, his younger sister, and her boyfriend—for two weeks. The first week was spent in a sterile beach condo; the second, in this relic of a house, rented from a man who smelled of brine and mothballs and warned us about the stairs. ‘The third floor’s off-limits,’ he’d said, jabbing a thumb at the ceiling. ‘Floorboards are rotten. Don’t go up there.’ We’d laughed it off, of course. Families on vacation don’t take kindly to rules from strangers.

The house was a maze of mismatched furniture and dusty sea-glass lamps. Our bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a long hallway, with a bay window that looked out over a churning gray sea. Across the hall was the bedroom Marcus’s sister, Lena, and her boyfriend, Derek, had claimed—a room with a single bed and a crib, even though they had no children. Marcus’s parents took the master, a cavernous space with a nautical theme that had faded to the color of old bruises. The first floor was all kitchen and living area, with a stone fireplace that swallowed logs whole. And above our heads, above the flickering fluorescent lights, there was the third floor: a cramped, cobweb-strangled crawlspace with a pull-down ladder in the hallway ceiling.

The second night, a storm rolled in. Rain lashed the windows like handfuls of gravel, and the wind moaned through the rafters. We’d played cards until the candlelight made our eyes ache, then one by one we’d retreated to our rooms. I couldn’t sleep. The storm had a voice—a low, keening thing that seemed to come from inside the walls. Around 2 a.m., I heard a thump above me. Followed by another. And then the slow, deliberate creak of footsteps crossing the third floor directly over my head.

I prodded Marcus awake. ‘You hear that?’ I whispered. He groaned, rolled over. ‘It’s just the wind, babe. Go back to sleep.’ He was snoring again within minutes. But I couldn’t shake it. The footsteps were too rhythmic. Too deliberate. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, and then I heard something else: a faint, high-pitched scraping, like fingernails on wood. It was coming from directly above the bedroom door.

I slipped out of bed, pulled on a sweater, and crept into the hallway. The pull-down ladder was tucked into the ceiling, a hidden door. I looked up, and in the dim hallway light, I saw that it was slightly ajar—a dark gap, a foot wide, revealing a black rectangle beyond. I knew the floorboards were supposedly rotted, but curiosity gnawed at me. I pulled the ladder down, and it extended with a shudder of metal and wood.

I climbed. Each step creaked like a dying thing. At the top, I pushed open the hatch and found myself in a narrow attic space, sloped ceilings, one small circular window at the far end, frosted with grime. The air was thick, cold, and smelled of salt and something else—something sharp and sweet, like decaying kelp. And there, in the center of the room, was a small, child-sized rocking chair, rocking back and forth on its own, as if the storm had set it in motion. But the floor was solid. Not rotten at all. And as I stood there, the rocking stopped.

A voice, thin and reedy, came from the corner. ‘You came.’ I spun, but the corner was empty. ‘Who’s there?’ I called, my voice cracking. No answer, but the rocking chair started again, faster now, faster than any storm could justify. A small door, cut into the sloping wall, swung open with a groan, revealing a crawlspace beyond. I knelt and peered inside. It was black, impenetrably so, and from it came that scraping sound again—fingernails on wood, on stone, on bone.

I scrambled back down the ladder, heart pounding, and slammed the hatch shut. I lay in bed for the rest of the night, clutching Marcus’s arm, listening. But the sounds didn’t stop. They followed me. In the walls, in the floorboards, in the hum of the refrigerator. And when morning came, Marcus found me huddled in the corner of the room, covered in dust, with scratches on my arms that looked like fingernail marks.

We told everyone it was a prank. That I’d sleepwalked. But I knew. And the next night, when I heard the footsteps again, I didn’t climb. I listened. And then I heard the hatch open above, and the soft, deliberate descent of the ladder. I sat up, my blood like ice, as a dark shape crawled down from the ceiling, its head tilted at an impossible angle, its eyes like the frosted window. It spoke, in that thin reedy voice, and it said, ‘The third floor is always off-limits. But you came. So now you stay.’

I screamed, and the lights went out. When Marcus flicked them on, I was gone. The hatch was open. The ladder was out. And from the third floor, I could hear my own voice, faint and fading, saying, ‘I’ll be right down.’