and the distorted pipes lent a grotesque but singular aesthetic to the walls. The house, evolving in my presence, felt more and more like home.
A different sort of mystery came to light when I visited the basement.
One dirty lightbulb with a pull chain lit the area near the stairs, and I used my pocketlight to illuminate my way around the darker depths and grottos. Motes swarmed the air but the air felt dead. The space was loaded with support beams, cobwebs, discarded furniture, moldering crates, broken tools, and dust-furred debris. All told, it was an especially decrepit but otherwise typical old basement. The ceiling joists were low and flooring nails jabbed downward only inches over my scalp. The walls were irregular concrete, studded with rocks and bricks and rusted metal, and several partial collapses of the foundation had been reinforced with makeshift buttresses.
The floor was also concrete, with cracks, swells, oily puddles, mounds of dirt, and powdery efflorescence. Much of the floor’s rear half was a patchwork of iron plates, welded trapdoors, and wooden platforms weighted down with boxes and scrap metal.
In the northeast corner, I illuminated a curious tableau. A black iron safe was riveted to the floor. The safe was three foot square, with an imposing handle and a combination lock, and was surrounded by what appeared to be a child’s furniture set. There was a tiny chair, a miniature table, and a steel-framed cot the length of my leg. On the table stood a coffee mug and a stalagmite of wax with an unlit, semi-melted candle on top. Beside the cot was a small wooden radio, the dial of which was tuned to my favorite station.
The radio played when I switched it on. The candlewax was pliably fresh. After determining the safe was locked, I went upstairs to call Mrs. Zabka on the phone and ask her if she knew the combination.
Mrs. Zabka informed me that everything in the northeast corner of the basement belonged to a man named Mr. Gormly. He alone, she assured me, knew the combination. When I asked who Mr. Gormly was and where he’d gone after abandoning his possessions, she said the man had lived in the basement for decades and, as far as she understood, was living there still.
I was astonished by the news and asked her why I hadn’t been informed about him earlier. Mrs. Zabka corrected me: I had been informed when I read and signed Addendum 7c of the Affidavit of Title, which guaranteed Mr. Gormly’s right to inhabit the northeast corner of the basement in perpetuity. She assured me Mr. Gormly was a quiet tenant who paid his rent, in cash, on the night of each new moon.
That explained the mint-scented envelope, containing a hundred-dollar bill, I’d found in my study the day I moved in. I had assumed some previous inhabitant had left the bill behind.
“This is fantastic,” I said. “He must have known my mother and Mr. Stick. Decades in the house—imagine what he’s seen and everything he knows! I’ve got to introduce myself as soon as possible.”
“No one’s ever seen him.”
“How does he live down there with nothing but child-sized furniture?”
“He must be very small,” Mrs. Zabka said.
“But what does he eat and drink? How does he come and go?”
“That’s not for me to say. In fact, I don’t know.”
Needless to say, I was eager to meet my mysterious tenant and speak with him directly. When I failed to encounter Mr. Gormly on subsequent trips to the basement, I resigned myself to waiting for the next new moon, when he would emerge to pay his rent, and tried not to take his apparent indifference to me personally.
The bedroom ghost was elusive, too.
I tried and failed to summon her with necromantic incantations, she didn’t speak via Ouija, and I was unwilling to perform any sacrificial rituals, not only for ethical reasons but also because she hadn’t seemed the type—or rather I hoped she wasn’t the type—who needed such inducements to interact.
I thought I sensed her sometimes, in a variety of ways. A sudden fascination with a corner of my bedroom, starting as an absentminded, daydreamy gaze that turned into certainty that somebody was there. A multihued scent I couldn’t quite name, like a link between otherwise unrelated memories. A fluctuating ringing in my blood-flushed ear.
Was I growing more attuned to hints of her existence, or was she growing more adept at making herself known? I often closed my eyes, covered my ears, and tried to feel her out. I spoke to her at night and waited patiently for answers. In the meantime, I explored the house, spent hours with my books studying other ways to contact the dead, and worried I had imagined her to counteract my loneliness.
One morning I woke and discovered a symbol, like a small crescent moon, had been drawn on the fogged glass of my bedroom window. There were three possibilities:
The ghost had attempted physical communication.
Someone—Mr. Gormly?—had entered my room while I was sleeping and written on the window.
I had sleepwalked and drawn the symbol myself.
Heartened, puzzled, and disturbed in equal measure, I dressed and went to the kitchen, where I mulled the symbol’s meaning and appearance. I ate a banana mashed with cinnamon, drank a cup of coffee, and returned to my bedroom with an idea.
Under the symbol on the glass, I wrote a little question mark.
Then I sat on the bed, sucked a cough drop, and waited for an hour in a meditative state. Eventually I went to my study to read a treatise called Fuliginous Semiology, hoping to expand my communication options with ethereal entities. Books were good friends that never disappeared, and yet for all their personality and telepathic strength—the ability of an author to speak to me directly, on demand, over time and space—the relationship was limited to what a book gave. I wanted to be needed back. I wanted conversation.
I struggled to concentrate because of my preoccupation with the ghost and, it must be said, my only halfhearted interest in the language of smoke. I went to my bedroom in the late afternoon with slumped expectations. My natural introversion, coupled with years of stillborn relationships, had led me to begrudgingly accept lonely solitude. I’d learned to fear connection as much as I craved it, avoiding bars and cafes and even social media, because the more I wanted contact, the more I felt its absence. This interminable loop afflicted me that day, and I entered my bedroom with the intention of wiping my question mark off the foggy glass, and with it any chance of further disappointment.
The ghost was in the room.
I immediately sensed her just beside the window, where she had traced a clumsy squiggle in the corner of the glass. The squiggle’s meaninglessness was moot. She’d returned. She had tried.
I walked to the window and stood next to her, happy to sense she didn’t disappear or move away. I wiped the window clean—the moisture felt warm but the glass felt cold—and then I leaned down and refogged the surface with my breath.
“Tabula rasa,” I said, feeling inwardly and outwardly the blankness of potential.
It seemed as if my whole day alone hadn’t happened. I drew a short mark, like the squiggle she had left me. Then I sidestepped, giving her room to stand in front of the window, and she drew a fresh line in answer to my own. Our squiggles intersected as a lowercase t. The point at which they crossed was intimately lovely with a teardrop of moisture clinging to the glass, exactly where our fingertips had alternately touched.
I wrote the word “William” above the “t” and moved aside again.
She took three minutes to write her own name. Her invisible finger trembled from the concentrated effort, and she paused after each completed letter—and sometimes mid-letter—like a person forced to write in an unaccustomed way. I imagined writing with my foot, or with a string instead of a pen. With each slow mark she made on the glass, I saw the evidence of care, doggedness, and need.
The finished word was poorly formed but wonderfully distinct.
I read her name aloud and she immediately vanished.
One second she’d