The Weight of the Commonwealth

The antique shop was a dusty mausoleum on the edge of town, a place where forgotten marriages and obsolete occupations went to ossify. My father, a man with a magpie’s eye for the tragically ornate, had dragged me there on a whim. I’d felt it before I saw it—a pressure behind my eyes, like the onset of a migraine. It sat on a velvet cushion, a statuette of a bloated man in a tricorn hat, his red coat straining over a prodigious belly, blue breeches stretched taut. His face was a mask of jovial cruelty, and his eyes, painted with unnerving precision, seemed to follow me. My skin crawled, and I told Dad to put it down, but he just laughed, calling it ‘a piece of the Revolution.’ He paid the exorbitant price, and the thing came home to our creaking Victorian house, a house that already hummed with the quiet static of other lives.

Weeks passed, and the statuette seemed to leach warmth from every room it was placed in. Denise, the little girl who had taken to playing with the dolls I’d set out for her, started crying during the night. She whispered to me in that faint, echoing voice that the ‘fat man’ was watching her, that he wanted to sit on her chest. I tried to convince myself it was just her imagination, but the air in the house grew thick, and I’d catch my father staring at the thing with a strange, hungry look.

That Saturday, my friends Ruby and Marcus came over. Ruby, with her tarot cards and sage, was always up for a thrill, and Marcus, with his nervous energy, was easily swayed. I told them about the statuette, about Denise’s complaints, and they insisted we try to contact whatever was attached to it. ‘We’ll just talk to it, see what it wants,’ Ruby said, her eyes gleaming with excitement. I hesitated, but the idea of confronting the source of the oppressive negativity was oddly tempting. We set up a single black candle on the dining room table, the statuette glaring at us from its center, and held hands.

We didn’t need to call out to anyone; a presence pressed in on us immediately. The candle flame bent away from us, flattening as if under a great weight. Then Denise’s voice, but colder, fuller, spoke through me. ‘You shouldn’t have brought him here,’ she said. ‘He’s not like the others. He was a man in life, but now he’s only hunger. He feeds on joy, on laughter, on the breath of children.’ The floorboards groaned above us, and I felt the statuette’s painted eyes boring into me. Marcus was trembling, and Ruby’s face had gone pale. ‘He’s been here since the Revolution,’ Denise continued. ‘He was a tax collector, a man who took everything from the poor, and when they rose up, they hanged him. But his greed wouldn’t let him die. He’s been bound to that likeness ever since, stealing warmth from every home he’s in.’

Suddenly, my father appeared in the doorway, his face slack, his eyes fixed on the statuette. He moved as if in a trance, his hands reaching out to grab it. ‘He’s mine,’ he muttered. ‘He understands the weight of power.’ I shouted for him to stop, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. As his fingers touched the base of the statuette, the candle extinguished, and a terrible cold flooded the room. I heard Denise let out a high, thin wail, and then all of us—my father, Ruby, Marcus, and I—were thrown back as if by a physical force. The statuette toppled to the floor, and the face, I swear, was grinning.

In the darkness that followed, our screams filled the air, but they weren’t the only sounds. There was a creaking, like old wood under immense pressure, and the floorboards beneath us began to buckle. We scrambled away, and just as the lights flickered back on, I saw it—the paint on the statuette’s face had wet, fresh cracks, and its belly seemed more distended than before, as if it had swallowed something. My father was on the ground, clutching his chest, gasping for breath, and the statuette sat upright, its weight somehow heavier, more solid.

We never spoke of that night again. The statuette is back on the mantle, my father calls it his prized possession. But since then, he’s lost weight, his clothes hanging off his frame, and there’s a pallor to his skin, a subtle yellowing in his eyes. And at night, I hear it—the slow, wheezing sound of something breathing, heavy and greedy, and I know it’s not Denise. It’s the man in the red coat, and he’s settling in for a long, long meal.