The Tremor in the Lathing

In the fall of 2009, my wife and I moved our family into a sprawling Victorian house in the hills of North Carolina, desperate for more room after the birth of our twins. My mother-in-law, a frail woman of seventy from the old country, was coming to live with us to help with the children. The day we moved in was chaotic; boxes everywhere, furniture shoved into rooms, and my wife’s mother, Anh, sat in a corner of the living room, silent, watching the ceiling as if expecting something to fall.

The first night, after the children were asleep, my wife, Sarah, and I collapsed into bed in the master bedroom, a room with a large bay window and peeling floral wallpaper. Around 2 a.m., we were both jolted awake by a sound like claws scrabbling on the wooden floor beneath our bed. We froze, hearts pounding. I grabbed a flashlight and peered under the bed, expecting to see the neighbor’s cat that often wandered onto our porch. But there was nothing. I checked the porch; the cat was indeed there, lounging on the railing, looking at me with indifferent eyes. We dismissed it as a rat or the house settling, and went back to sleep.

The next night, I woke alone in the darkness to a strange sensation: the bed was vibrating gently, a low hum that seemed to come from the floor itself. I lay rigid, my eyes open, trying to convince myself it was the old pipes or the wind. When I turned to nudge Sarah, she was dead asleep, and I didn’t want to alarm her. I never mentioned it, fearing she’d think I was losing it.

A few nights later, as we lay in bed, Sarah suddenly whispered, ‘I have to tell you something. This is going to sound crazy, but I’ve been waking up every night feeling the bed shaking, like a low vibration. Is it me? Am I going insane?’ I felt a chill run down my spine. We lay there in silence, and then we both felt it at the same time: a deep, rhythmic thrumming from below, as if something was pulsing in the crawlspace under the room.

We decided to investigate. The next day, I went down to the basement, a damp, musty place with exposed joists and a dirt floor. I noticed a section of the floorboards under the master bedroom was slightly warped and discolored. There was a strange, circular etching on the wood, like a spiral, and a faint, sweet smell, like rotting flowers. I had a handyman come in to check the foundation, but he found nothing. However, he did mention that the previous owner had been a reclusive woodworker who had a stroke and died in that very room. He also said that the old man had a superstition about ‘spirit lines’ – natural energy currents, he called them – and had built the house to align with one.

That night, the vibrations were stronger. Sarah and I woke to find the bed shaking violently, and the mirror on the dresser rattled. I lunged to turn on the light, but it flickered and died. In the sudden dark, I heard my mother-in-law’s voice from the hallway, speaking in Vietnamese, a low chant. When the light finally came back, she was standing in the doorway, her eyes wide, trembling. She pointed at the corner of the room and said, ‘He is here. He wants to finish.’

We pressed her for answers, and she told us that in her village, there were tales of ‘earthbound spirits’ – people who died with unfinished business, their energy clinging to the physical plane. The old woodworker, she said, had been carving a statue of a woman, his lost wife, and had died before finishing it. His spirit was now using our bed as a ‘loom’ to weave the vibrations, trying to draw energy from the living to complete his work. She said we had to find the statue and finish it for him, or the vibrations would never stop, and he would eventually drain us.

Despite our skepticism, we searched the house. In the attic, buried under old newspapers, we found a wooden statue, half-carved, of a woman’s face, beautiful but featureless. The wood felt warm to the touch, and the spiral pattern on its base matched the one in the basement. That night, we placed the statue on the nightstand, and as we lay in bed, the room filled with a strange, soft light. The vibrations ceased, and we heard a deep, sighing breath. The statue seemed to glow.

In the morning, we decided to burn the statue, thinking it was the source of the curse. But as I carried it to the fireplace, my mother-in-law stopped me, her face stern. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He will not rest. He will follow you.’ She took the statue and placed it on the mantel, saying, ‘He just wants to be remembered. Be kind to him.’

We never finished the statue, but from that night on, the vibrations stopped. However, occasionally, I’d catch a glimpse of the statue from the corner of my eye, and I could swear its features had shifted, as if it was watching us. And sometimes, late at night, I’d feel a gentle, rhythmic pulse from the floor, not threatening, but like a heartbeat, as if the house itself was alive, waiting for us to acknowledge its secret. We lived there for three more years, and not once did the terror return. But every time I looked at that unfinished face, I wondered if the old woodworker was truly at peace, or if he was simply patient, biding his time until we, too, left our own work uncompleted. The trembling never really left me; it just buried itself deep, like a splinter I couldn’t dig out. And sometimes, when I lie in my own bed now, in a house far from that Victorian, I swear I can still feel a faint, familiar vibration under the floorboards, as if some part of that spirit followed me, waiting for me to finish what he started. But I never will.

And maybe that’s why, on quiet nights, I hear a distant, rhythmic knocking, like a carpenter’s hammer, coming from the walls. But when I press my ear to the plaster, there is only the sound of my own heartbeat, echoing in the hollow spaces, answering the tremor in the wood.