Catherine

The house Catie remembers is a dainty, Victorian structure with powder-blue siding that sits at the edge of a wood white with birches. There, she and her little cousins had plunged through crispy, fallen leaves in autumn, and blankets of wildflowers on dreaming, summer days when they’d been young.

Her memory bears little resemblance to the house now, its windows pitch-black and the birches crowding to either side, ghostly pale beneath the moon. The taxi’s vanishing headlights leave the street black; swollen with silence.

Her suitcase thuds up the porch steps. Catie expects to find the house barred against her, as if long abandoned, but the handle is unlocked, and the door swings open silently.

She clambers inside. Drops her suitcase and fumbles for the light switch. The lamp’s flickering glow reveals a living room crammed with cardboard boxes and a hoarder’s trove of stacked magazines and newspapers, the furniture shrouded in white linen. Otherwise, it’s as Catie remembers; the paintings of lilies that line the hallway, the family portraits that stand in silver frames over the brick fireplace. But the smell, the smell-

Catie doubles over, gagging. The smell of mold that lingers outside the house is nothing compared to the stench inside; meaty, and rotten. She almost pukes. Has to scrub tears from the corners of her eyes as she wades deeper into the house.

“Grandma?” she calls gently, hardly lifting her voice above a whisper. “It’s me, Catie. Mom sent me to check in on you.”

To live with her, in fact, and take care of her grandmother indefinitely. Mother must have seen something that scared her last time she visited. Something that prompted her to send Catie, the sole granddaughter - the favorite - who is, as her mother likes to remind her, still unemployed, and accomplishing nothing in the city aside from whiling away her parents’ money.

Well, they’ve found a use for me at last, Catie thinks grudgingly, and searches the first floor of the house. The guest bedroom, the library, the kitchen where Grandma had made her root beer floats in the glasses with the little blue fish on the sides.

As reluctant as Catie was to accept this burden, a horrid thought occurs to her. When her grandmother dies, she will inherit the house. A property that, with her job prospects and the current state of the housing market, she will never be able to afford otherwise. And it’s only fitting they share this house, just as they share the same name. Catherine. Only her grandmother calls her that.

It’s a beautiful house.  And someday, when the older generation finally makes room for the young people still waiting in limbo – waiting for their lives to begin – the house will belong to Catie, and Catie alone.

She grins, hardly noticing the cobwebs gathering dust like tomb-shrouds or the growing stench of rot as she climbs the staircase, but on the second floor, her steps slow, and falter.

The doors of the master bedroom stand open. Within, a form lies beneath the sheets, all phantom-white. Catie’s eye lingers on it before her gaze is drawn inexorably to the walls. To the sigils drawn there. Strange, gruesome symbols in a red so deep it’s almost black. Scribbled all across the merry, yellow wallpaper.

“Grandmother?” This time, it was a whisper.

Catie treads inside. Stands for a moment, breathless. Books sit open on the bedside table. Demons caper across the pages. Black candles have melted down to nubs, spilling over the silver. A goblet sits at the table’s edge half-full of a thick, dark liquid. A dead white hare sits on a platter beside it, its belly slit.

Catie stares without comprehension. This strange tableau is so outside of everything she knew of her grandmother – the gentle hippie, the woman who loved her family more than anything – that her mind refuses to accept what she sees and after a moment, Catie gags. The stench is overpowering.

Her grandmother lies in the neat sheets, bone-thin, pale lips peeled back in a rictus of pain, teeth stained black with the foulness of her final drink, and long, white hair spread loose beneath her.

“Oh Grandma,” Catie breathes. “Whatever it is you tried to do, it did not work.”

Catie backs out of the room. Closes the door behind her, her breath ragged in her ears.

She stumbles blindly through the black corridor. Shafts of moonlight pierce gaps in the curtained windows, dazzlingly white. Her feet take her to the second bedroom, where she collapses on the threadbare rug.

Starts to shake with laughter. Silently, at first. Then hoarse and low. Then a loud, cackling laugh that quakes in her chest and thrusts itself against the high ceiling.

She won’t be taking care of Grandma after all. The house will pass to her without a single moment wasted.

Still chuckling, Catie rises, slips from her clothes, and folds herself, naked, into bed. Let the body wait till morning.

Catie drifts off into deep, black dreams.

Hours later, a distant creak sounds in the house.

Still half-asleep, she hears the faint press of weight on wood.

There’s a sudden, distinct, shuffling noise, as of feet in the hallway.

Catie’s eyes fly open. Is that whispering, somewhere close by? The door eases open with a sullen squeal of hinges.

The floorboards shift. The stink of rot creeps into the room.

A nightgown swishes. A pale form presses from the darkness. Eyes sunken into black pits. Skin shriveled, almost translucent, the face skull-like. Long, white hair spreads loose over skeletal shoulders.

And a voice reaches Catie – creaky with age and dripping with subdued rage, as if the woman who bears it has peered beyond the threshold of the world, and returned with the black knowledge of death, seeing in every human heart its darkest secrets, its hidden sins – and speaks but a single word.

“Catherine.”