The Wainscot Thump

In the autumn of 2011, I agreed to watch over my uncle’s antique shop in the small, fog-shrouded town of Millbrook. The shop occupied the ground floor of a three-story building that had stood since the 1880s, its walls saturated with the smell of old paper and dust. My uncle had gone to visit his sister in another state, leaving me with a list of instructions and a warning: ‘The place has its moods. Don’t mind the sounds.’ I laughed it off, but the first night, I understood.

I slept in a back room that had once been a parlor. The building creaked and groaned as it settled, and the wind outside rattled the windows. Around 3 a.m., my estranged husband, a man with a temper fueled by whiskey, began calling my cell phone. He was furious that I had left him, and his voice was slurred with threats and pleas. I finally turned off my phone and unplugged the landline in the shop. The silence that followed was heavy, almost tangible. Then, from the third floor, I heard a phone ringing. The old rotary phone in the upstairs office, the one my uncle kept for nostalgia, began to ring with a dull, mechanical clatter.

I sat up in bed, my heart rate quickening. The ringing continued, unabated, for what felt like an eternity. Then it stopped. A moment later, there was a loud, deliberate thump from directly above me. It was not the creak of old wood or the settle of the foundation. It was a heavy, rhythmic pound, as if someone were stomping on the floor. I held my breath, listening. The thump came again, followed by a dragging sound, like something being pulled across the floorboards. My uncle had assured me that no one else had keys, but the sound was unmistakably human.

I grabbed a flashlight and crept to the stairwell at the back of the shop. The stairs were narrow and steep, leading to a landing that had been sealed off years ago. I had never been up there. The door at the top was ajar, and a sliver of darkness seeped through. As I began to ascend, the phone in the office rang again. I paused, my legs trembling. The ringing stopped as abruptly as it started, replaced by a low, guttural whisper that seemed to emanate from the walls. ‘You shouldn’t have answered,’ it said, though I hadn’t.

I hurried back down, my mind racing. I tried to call my uncle, but my phone was dead. The landline was dead too. The only light in the shop came from a flickering neon sign that cast an eerie red glow. I sat in the back room, clutching a heavy brass letter opener, and tried to convince myself it was all my imagination. But the thumping continued, moving from the third floor to the second, and then down to the ceiling above me. Each thump was louder, closer, more insistent. The pattern changed: three quick beats, a pause, then a drag.

The drag moved down the hall toward the back stairs. I could hear the footsteps creaking on the wooden steps, slow and deliberate. When they reached the bottom, there was a moment of silence. I stared at the door to the back room, my breath shallow. The doorknob began to turn, slowly, with a metallic squeak. I screamed and threw a heavy book at the door, but it didn’t stop. The door creaked open, revealing nothing but empty darkness. The thumping echoed again, now from inside the room, from the floorboards beneath my feet.

I fled the shop, running out into the foggy night, not stopping until I reached the all-night diner at the end of Main Street. The waitress, an old woman with tired eyes, saw my pale face and said, ‘You saw him, didn’t you? The restless one. He comes for those who fight alone in the dark.’ I never went back. When my uncle returned, he found the shop in disarray, the phone in the upstairs office off the hook, and a single word scratched into the dust of the floor: ‘MINE.’ I never told him what I heard, but every now and then, in the dead of night, I still hear that thump, three times and a drag, right outside my bedroom door. It’s a sound I’ll never forget, a sound that follows me, whispering that no matter where I go, I’m never truly alone.