The Thirteenth Step’s Lodger

In my youth, I dwelled with my kin in a sagging, antebellum house in the lowlands of the Mississippi Delta. The structure had seen better days, its paint peeling like sunburned skin, its porch groaning under the weight of memories. My immediate family occupied the upper floor, while my aunt’s brood claimed the ground level. A narrow, winding staircase at the rear of the house connected our domain to theirs, its steps crooked and uneven, as if the house itself had been built by the trembling hand of a fevered carpenter.

That night, my incessant teasing had roused my sisters and cousins from their slumber, and my parents, red-faced with fury, banished me to the back hallway where the staircase loomed. I was told to sleep on the floor at the top of the stairs, as punishment. I cried myself to sleep, my sobs swallowed by the creaks and groans of the old house settling.

I awoke in the dead of night, the dim moonlight casting long shadows through the grimy window. My eyes, still blurry with tears, focused on the staircase. There, on the thirteenth step from the bottom, stood a figure. It was tall and gaunt, with the silhouette of a middle-aged man, his shoulders stooped as if bearing an invisible burden. His face was obscured, but I could feel his gaze boring into me, a cold, unblinking stare that made my blood run cold. I lay frozen, unable to move or cry out, as he simply stood there, not advancing, not retreating, just watching.

After what felt like an eternity, the figure faded, and I eventually fell back into a troubled sleep. The next morning, I told my sister Elspeth about the apparition. She laughed, dismissing it as a nightmare. But her eyes told a different story. That night, we both resolved to sleep at the top of the stairs, a thin blanket spread over the cold, dusty floorboards. I was to be her witness, and she mine.

We lay there in silence, the house breathing around us. I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew, I was awake, and Elspeth was not beside me. My heart lurched. I called her name, and then I heard a muffled sob. I turned towards the corner of the landing, and there she was, crouched in the shadows, her face buried in her hands, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Elspeth!’ I rushed over, my hands on her trembling shoulders. She looked up at me, her eyes wide with terror, and pointed a shaking finger at the staircase.

I turned slowly, dread pooling in my stomach. The figure had returned. He was now on the twenty-seventh step from the top, his form more distinct, his face slightly clearer. I could see the hollows of his cheeks, the lines of his brow, the faint glimmer of his eyes. He seemed to be beckoning. And then, he spoke. His voice was not with sound, but a bone-deep resonance that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards, ‘There are no more steps.’

I grabbed Elspeth’s hand, and we scrambled as fast as we could down the stairs, past him, his presence washing over us like a cold river. We stumbled into my parents’ room, sobbing incoherently. They hushed us, but we saw the fear in their eyes, the manner in which they glanced towards the back stairs as if they too had seen something in the night.

The next day, we learned from my aunt that the house had been a boarding house in the 1920s. A man, a traveling salesman, had fallen to his death on that staircase. He had been found at the bottom, his neck broken. They said he’d been counting the steps, as he always did, and had miscounted in the dark. But the family had kept it a secret, fearing the stigma. They had never counted the steps until my sister and I, in our innocence, had meddled.

We counted that night. There were forty in total. The figure stood on the thirteenth from the bottom and the twenty-seventh from the top. But the thirteenth from the bottom was the twenty-eighth from the top, and the twenty-seventh from the top was the fourteenth from the bottom. There was no step that matched both counts. The house, in its crooked age, had somehow gained a step that was not there, a step that existed only for the dead. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that the lodger would remain until the counting was made right.