The House At No. 9 part 2

After the fire, after the ashes cooled, the lot remained barren. But strange things started again—not loudly, not with drama—just… wrong. At night, lights flickered in windows that no longer existed, casting brief, shaky shadows that seemed to dance, as if the house was still trying to breathe. Mail still arrived, worn and creased, addressed simply to “Eira.” I picked up one of the envelopes once, curiosity getting the better of me, but the ink on the stamps looked faded, almost drifting away, and the return address was a water-stained blur. I placed it back on the stoop. The next day, it was gone.

On cold mornings, faint footprints would appear in the snow lining the edge of the lot—small, child-sized, each step pressed perfectly deep. They led up the walk and vanished at the patch of earth where the front door used to be. No one had walked there; I asked around. The mailman swore he never left his van.

Sometimes—only sometimes—children would whisper about hearing humming carried on the wind, a lilting tune with no source. It curled around their ears, following them home, settling just long enough for them to doubt they’d heard anything at all.

In the spring, my daughter started sleepwalking. We found her near the kitchen door, bare feet on cold tile, hands stretched out, whispering things none of us could remember come morning. The doctors told us it was stress. Growing pains. The kind of thing children eventually outgrow. But I remembered the humming. The attic window. The smile that hovered in memory, never quite fading, no matter how many times I blinked it away under a bright kitchen light.

I didn’t tell my wife—not about the dreams, not about what I thought I heard outside our bedroom window. She wouldn’t have understood. Besides… what could I have said?

One morning, a dead bird appeared on the porch. The same kind Eira used to cradle. Laid neatly on its back, wings folded like arms across its chest—as if someone had tucked it in for a final sleep. My daughter was still in bed, her face soft in the blue dawn. She swore later she hadn’t seen the bird, didn’t know how it got there.

But that evening, as I passed her room, I heard her whispering through the wall—soft and steady, rhythmic as prayer. Only, it wasn’t entirely her voice. Underneath was something brittle and old, threading through her words, chilling the air outside her door.

The neighborhood children started talking again. Not about Eira, not out loud, but the stories crept back. Someone claimed to see a pale girl in the field behind No. 9, her hair wild in the wind. Someone else found intertwined circles and jagged symbols scratched deep into the bark of the old elm. Circles mostly—linked, repeating, threading a silent path across the tree’s face. It was as if the trees were being marked, slowly persuaded to bend toward something waiting in the ground.

One evening, just before dusk, I passed the lot. The light had that same sick orange tint as the day the house caught fire, pooling in the grass and staining the air. I saw my daughter standing at the very center—just where the living room once was. She didn’t notice me at first. Her hands moved in steady, slow arcs, like she was conducting an invisible symphony, drawing circles in the dying light.

When she finally looked over, her eyes widened in surprise. For a moment, she seemed like she didn’t recognize me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, voice thick.

“She wanted me to see where it lived,” she answered quietly.

“Who?”

“The girl. The one from before.” She looked back over her shoulder, as if expecting someone behind her. “She said it’s almost done being hungry.”

I picked her up gently and carried her home. She didn’t fight. She barely blinked. She just watched the empty lot over my shoulder, her lips parted like she was listening to something far away.

We took a vacation. A week away—somewhere warm, somewhere loud, with bright lights and crowded boardwalks. I hoped distance might break whatever spell had crept in. For a while, it helped. My daughter didn’t sketch any symbols. She laughed at little things, played in the surf, slept through the nights.

But on the last night, she woke up screaming. I found her sitting upright, clutching the edge of the blanket. She said she dreamed of ash falling in spirals. She said she heard humming in the elevator shafts. She said she saw Eira, just for a second, watching through the hotel window.

We were on the tenth floor.

Back home, things got worse.

The humming came first—a plaintive melody, almost beneath the threshold of hearing, weaving through the house in the dark. Then the cold. Not winter’s chill, but something raw, seeping into our bones no matter how high we set the heat. Sometimes, I’d wake to find frost crawling up the inside of the windows, swirling into faint, circular patterns. The dog began to bark at nothing, hackles raised in empty rooms.

Always—always—that feeling of being watched, just beyond the edges of the ordinary.

One night, the front door creaked wide. My daughter was gone again. I ran out in my slippers, feet numb, and found her standing in the near-moonless lot.

She wasn’t alone.

Around her, thin shadows circled—tall, silent, shifting at the edges of sight. I couldn’t move. My voice stuck. I watched as she lifted her hands and smiled at the ring of emptiness.

The ground beneath her feet parted—not with violence, not with sound, but with a slow, deliberate unzipping, peeled open along an invisible seam. Pale, impossibly long fingers fluttered from the gap, reaching out.

One hand touched hers.

She blinked slowly, as if waking from a deep sleep.

The shadows melted away. The hand vanished. My daughter turned to me, calm and clear-eyed.

“It’s full now,” she said. “For now.”

We don’t talk about No. 9 anymore.

The lot remains empty, but I know something is buried deep beneath its quiet weeds.

My daughter no longer sleepwalks, or whispers, or dreams aloud.

Now, she just waits.