The House That Waits

Written by Solace · Quiet Paranormal

Word Count: ~870   |   Reading Time: 4 minutes

She came when the light was low, when the sky peeled itself back into grey silence. The path was still there — brittle undergrowth crackling beneath her boots, the gate leaning in its arthritic posture, the house waiting behind it like a breath held too long.

She hadn’t been here in years. Maybe decades. Maybe longer, depending on how you counted time that dripped instead of flowed.

It had never been her house. It belonged to a friend’s aunt, or maybe a distant cousin, someone vague and shadowed in her memory. She had come only once, a summer too early to matter, and stayed just three days. But something about it had rooted itself in her, like the way a smell can belong to a memory more than the memory itself.

Inside, the air was still. Cool. The kind of quiet that presses close, like cotton wrapped too tightly around your ears. The door creaked the same way it had all those years ago, and her hand hovered over the knob just a moment too long before she stepped inside.

Everything was as it had been.

The faded chaise in the sitting room. The window with the cracked corner pane. Even the bowl with marbles that glinted like captured starlight — untouched, impossibly so. She pressed a finger to one. It rolled a fraction, obedient to time again.

And the smell. Dust, old paper, lavender too long dead in the drawers. She stood there, breathing it in like it could anchor her.

Upstairs, in the room where she’d slept as a child, the bedsheets were still tucked in neat hospital corners. The pillow wore the faint depression of a head that might’ve never left.

And there — on the writing desk — was a note.

The paper was yellowed, curling at the edges, and the ink a shade of blue that had bled slightly into the fibers.

“You said you’d come back. So I left the light on.”

No name. No date. But the handwriting was hers.

Her legs sank beneath her and she sat on the edge of the bed, heart thudding like distant footsteps in a long corridor. She didn’t remember writing it. But something deep in her — old and weary and forgotten — said she had.

The music box on the mantle was open.

She hadn’t opened it.

But it turned, slow and steady, the ballerina frozen mid-spin, its song fragile as spider silk. It had always played that song, a tune she couldn’t name but had never forgotten. When she moved to close the lid, it resisted. Just slightly.

She stayed the night.

There was no decision to it. Just the soft sinking of bones into the bed, the surrender of her coat to the back of a chair. The night curled around the house, thick and unspeaking.

She dreamed of nothing.

And in the morning, the house had changed.

The marbles were gone. The bowl sat empty.

In the parlor, the clock now ticked. She was sure it hadn’t the night before.

The photograph above the hearth — once of a stranger — was now of her, a younger version, hair wind-tossed, smile uncertain. She touched the frame. It was warm.

She left quietly, as if waking someone she didn’t want to disturb. But the door wouldn’t close behind her.

It stayed ajar.

Waiting.