The Unfinished Errand

My name is Eleanor, and I have lived my whole life on the quiet margins of what most people call reality. Little things, you understand. A misplaced object that turns up where it shouldn’t be, a cold draft in a sealed room, the sensation of being watched when I am utterly alone. I never made a fuss, never sought attention from those who study such things. I simply accommodated the strange, as one might accommodate a persistent but harmless neighbor.

A few years ago, my husband Robert and I moved into a sprawling Victorian house in the damp, fog-soaked town of Ashford, Oregon. The house was magnificent, the kind of place that wedding magazines love, with a wraparound porch and a turret that looked out over the Pacific Ocean, grey and churning even in summer. But it was too large for just the two of us, and we had a habit of joking about having more rooms than memories. For the first year, we delighted in the space, hosting dinner parties and filling the silence with laughter. Then the laughter faded, and the house settled into its own rhythms, and I began to notice the little things again.

It was a Saturday, the day I always set aside for errands. I had a routine: rise early, shower, drive to the farmer’s market, then the pharmacy, then home by early afternoon. Robert was a creature of habit, too, and he liked to have me back by then, even if we did nothing but sit on the porch and watch the gulls argue. That morning, though, the steam from my shower seemed to cling longer than usual, and I lost track of time. When I finally stepped out, I was surprised to see the digital clock on the bathroom shelf blinking 11:47. I had been in there nearly an hour. I called out to Robert, who I assumed was still in our bedroom, the TV murmur a low hum against the far wall. ‘Darling, are you up there?’ A voice, muffled but unmistakably male, answered, ‘Yes, what’s the matter?’ I sighed with relief and replied, ‘I’m almost done, I promise. I’ll be heading out soon.’

It took me only a few more minutes to dress and gather my market bags. I was halfway down the grand staircase, my mind already on the list of vegetables I needed, when I heard the front door slam. Robert burst in, his coat dripping with the morning mist, his cheeks flushed. ‘Eleanor!’ he called, and I froze. ‘Where were you?’ I asked, a knot forming in my stomach. He looked at me strangely. ‘I’ve been in the garden, pulling weeds. It’s damp out there, but the fussy roses need the air.’ My heart began to pound. ‘But I just spoke to you upstairs,’ I said. ‘You answered me.’ Robert’s face went pale. He swore he had been outside for the last hour, and he had not set foot in the house since breakfast.

That was the first time the house spoke back to me. But it would not be the last.

Over the following weeks, I began to note patterns. The voice, when it came, was always in the bedroom, always muffled by the fabric of the walls, and always answered with a reassuring ‘yes’ when I called. It never initiated conversation, only responded. And it never asked me anything about myself. It simply waited, like a listener on the other side of a door. I told Robert, and though he tried to be supportive, I could see the fear in his eyes. He started sleeping with a lamp on. I started setting a second place at the table, just in case.

One afternoon, I was in the attic, searching for a box of old photographs. The attic was vast and cluttered, full of yellowed newspapers from the previous owner, a man named Marcus who had died and left the house to his niece. I had never met him, but I felt his presence in the dust motes that swirled in the slanted light. As I dug through a trunk, I found a stack of letters, tied with a faded ribbon. They were addressed to Marcus from a woman named Iris, and they were love letters. I know I should have stopped reading, but the writing was so intimate, so raw, that I couldn’t help myself. In one letter, Iris confessed that she was afraid of the house, that she heard a child crying behind the walls, and that Marcus had told her it was ‘just the plumbing.’ In another, she wrote that she found the ghost of herself in the mirror, blinking out of sync. The final letter, dated only a month before Marcus’s death, said: ‘I have seen the other one. It wears your face but calls me by my sister’s name. I am going away before it learns my deepest secrets.’

That night, I lay awake, Robert’s breathing a steady rhythm beside me. The TV was off, the house wonderfully quiet. I was just beginning to drift when I heard it: a faint, muffled voice from the other side of the bedroom wall. ‘Eleanor…’ it said, drawing out my name like taffy. My blood turned to ice. I knew I should not answer, but the sound was so pathetic, so pleading. ‘What do you want?’ I whispered. There was a long pause, and then the voice replied, ‘I want to go home. You have my body.’

Robert did not hear it. He slept through it all. But the next morning, I found a bird dead on the foyer floor, its neck snapped, as if it had flown into a mirror that was no longer there. And when I looked at my own reflection in the bathroom glass, for a split second, I saw a face that was not mine. It was a man’s face, gaunt and sorrowful, with eyes that held the grey of the ocean outside. Then it was gone.

I began to research the history of the house. I learned that Marcus had died in the bedroom, of a sudden heart attack. But I also learned that his niece, the one who had inherited the house, had claimed the house was haunted, and she had sold it to us for a song. She wrote in her deposition that she believed her uncle had been ‘taken’ by something that lived in the walls, something that mimicked the living to lure them into the shadows. She said that the last time she visited, she heard her own voice calling for her from the attic, and she fled.

I should have fled then, too. But I was stubborn. I wanted to understand. I started carrying a voice recorder with me, and late at night, when Robert was on the phone with his brother, I would walk the halls and ask questions. ‘Who are you? What do you want from me?’ The recorder often returned with only static, but sometimes, buried beneath the hiss, I could hear a voice. And the voice was always mine.

Once, I was in the library, and I felt a cold hand brush the back of my neck. I spun around, and there was nothing. But the air was thick with the smell of lavender, a scent I had not worn in years. I went to the drawer of the writing desk where I kept my grandmother’s letters, and I found it ajar. Inside, the letters were in perfect order, except one. It was a photograph of me, taken on my wedding day, and my smile was blurred, almost as if the camera had caught me mid-scream. On the back, in handwriting that was not mine, were the words: ‘She is not what you think.’

I finally snapped when, one afternoon, I was on the phone with my sister, and she mentioned that I had called her the night before to tell her a rather strange story. I told her I had not called. She insisted I had, and that I had sounded fine, but that I had said, ‘The house is hungry.’ I ended the phone call, trembling, and I walked into the kitchen, where Robert was chopping vegetables. ‘Robert,’ I said, ‘we need to sell this house. Today.’ He looked up, and his eyes were wrong. They were hollow, like a doll’s. ‘Oh, but Eleanor,’ he said, in a voice that was not quite his, ‘this is my home. I’ve been here for a hundred years.’

The knife slipped, and Robert’s hand came down on the counter. He didn’t cry out. He just stared at me with that dead gaze, and then the edge of his mouth curled into a cruel smile. ‘You shouldn’t have answered me that day, Eleanor,’ he said. ‘Now I know your name, and I know how to wear it.’

I backed out of the kitchen, my heart pounding so loudly it drowned out every other sound. I ran to the front door, but it was locked from the outside. I ran to the phone, but the line was dead. And from the bedroom above, I heard my own voice, calling down to me: ‘Honey, are you there?’

It was a trap. It had always been a trap. The voice that answered me that first Saturday, it was not a kind impulse from the house. It was the creature learning my rhythms, my tone, my fears. And it had learned to mimic Robert, and then to mimic me. Now it was wearing my husband’s face, and it was wearing my voice, and I was trapped in a house that had no exit.

The last thing I remember is the sound of my own footsteps on the stairs, climbing to meet myself. The creature wore my face, and it held a kitchen knife, and it smiled. I didn’t feel the blade, only a cold that spread through my chest. And as my vision faded, I heard a whisper in my ear, in Robert’s voice, but softer, more tender: ‘Don’t worry, dear. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll finish your errands for you.’

Now I am the one who waits behind the walls. I watch the living, and I learn their routines. And when they call out to their loved ones, I am there to answer. I have learned to speak in their voices, to taste their fears. And I am hungry. The house is hungry. And I am learning to feed.