The realtor called it a “handyman’s dream.” That’s the phrase they use for places with bad foundations and a smell of damp that no candle can mask. My wife, Sarah, saw potential. I saw a price tag we could barely afford, and a staircase that didn’t look entirely attached to the wall.
“It has good bones, Leo,” she said, running a hand over the peeling floral wallpaper in what would be the nursery. Her eyes were bright with the future. I kissed her temple, smelling the dust and her perfume. We signed.
The first week was all sweat and demolition. We tore out rotting carpet, revealing scarred oak floors underneath. We punched a hole in a false wall in the kitchen and found a old porcelain sink, stained a permanent tobacco brown. And behind it, tucked into the lath and plaster, was a small, wax-sealed jar.
Inside the jar, coiled like a sleeping snake, was a single sheet of paper. Unfolding it carefully, I read the three words written in a tight, spidered script:
Let them go.
Sarah laughed, a nervous sound that bounced around the empty kitchen. “Creepy. Victorian kids playing at witchcraft, probably.” She took the paper from my hands, crumpled it, and tossed it into the debris pile. “This is our house now. No ghosts allowed.”
I should have listened to the cold knot that formed in my stomach. I should have paid attention to the way the shadows in the hallway seemed to deepen just after she said it.
The noises started that night. Not creaks or settling, but soft, wet sounds. Like clay being worked by hand. Squelch. Pull. Squelch. It seemed to come from inside the walls. We told ourselves it was the pipes.
Then Sarah began sleepwalking. I’d find her standing in the unfinished nursery, perfectly still, facing the wall where we’d found the jar. One night, I woke to an empty bed and followed the sound of her voice. She was in the kitchen, her back to me, whispering into the plaster where the sink had been.
“I can’t,” she was murmuring. “I don’t know how.”
“Sarah?” I said softly.
She turned. Her eyes were open, glassy and full of moonlight. “He wants me to let go,” she whispered, her voice not quite her own. “But I’m holding on so tight.”
The next morning, she remembered nothing. But the house did. The message began to appear elsewhere.
It was scrawled in the condensation on the bathroom mirror after her shower. It was etched into the layer of sawdust on my workbench. It appeared on the back of a photograph of her mother, the words bleeding through the paper like a watermark.
Let her go.
Sarah’s vibrant energy began to leach away. She moved slowly, as if walking through deep water. She stopped talking about paint swatches and instead spent hours staring at her hands, turning them over and over as if they were foreign objects.
The final straw was the mud. I came home from work to find the kitchen floor tracked with it—thick, black, loamy mud that smelled of a deep, cold place. It led from the back door, through the house, and up the stairs. To the nursery.
Sarah was inside. She was on her knees in the center of the room, her beautiful hands plunged wrist-deep into a mound of that same black earth that had somehow been placed on the new floorboards. She was crying silently, tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
“He’s in the ground,” she whispered, not looking at me. “And he’s so cold. He says I’m warm. He says I have to let go so he can get in.”
I rushed to her, pulling her up, pulling her filthy hands from the dirt. It was shockingly cold. She collapsed against me, sobbing. “Make it stop, Leo. Please.”
That was last night. Today, I am alone in the house. Sarah is at her mother’s, sedated, a shell of the woman I married. A contractor is coming tomorrow to rip out the walls of the nursery. An exterminator is coming to check for animals. A priest is coming because I am out of rational options.
But right now, as the sun sets and the house groans its long, tired groan, I am standing in the nursery. I am holding a sledgehammer. And I am staring at the wall.
Because the mud has dried. And in the cracked, gray surface, new words have formed, as if fingers have written them from beneath.
They don’t say Let her go anymore.
They say Let me in.
