The Seams Have Splintered, Too.

Episode 1.

She had said the house was haunted, her weathered voice crackling like a flame against my eardrum.

“I’d not move in to that house, dear, unless you’re absolutely desperate.”

I believed in ghosts. Used to sleep with the lamp on all throughout college - an endless ward against the long, low creaks the old dorm building seemed to cough out only in the darkest of hours. It never failed to stir my heart up, hearing them. Didn’t matter that my roommate, always distantly friendly toward me, was sleeping not ten feet away. If she wasn’t disturbed by the sounds as I was, didn’t brace at the clarity of a footfall or a knock outside our door, she may as well have not been there at all.

The woman’s warning sent me straight back to that era. To all those hours of peacefulness lost in a battle to sleep against an ancient unknown. But horrified as I was at the idea of a haunting, I was, in fact, absolutely desperate. More desperate, at least, than superstitious right then.

“I’ll take it,” I responded, my conviction through the phone no doubt weaker than she had been hoping.

“Oh, my dear…” she croaked, each word straddling a pause.

She was targeting my courage. I could clearly see that. But I grew impatient.

“I’ll take it,” I repeated.

She only sighed this time. “You’re certain?”

“I’m certain.”

Her breath suddenly came so noisily at the speaker I had to hold the phone several inches away. “Don’t rip the seams on the curtains,” I heard her murmur from this distance.

I hurriedly drew the phone closer again, certain I had misheard. “What?”

“And don’t rip the seams on the mirror.”

She hung up then, never to pick up her own phone again, leaving me so curious as to the conversation’s conclusion that I was only assured I had successfully purchased the house when the paperwork arrived in my inbox the following week.

I moved in shortly after.

There was nothing particularly off-putting about the place when I first stepped inside. I will admit, though, it was full daylight then, and I could easily hear Kombucha, my little companion dog, clicking comfortingly at my heels as I traipsed through each gaping doorway.

It was old, that much was obvious. But it wasn’t horrifying. Well, certainly not horrifying enough to warrant the degree of paranoia the woman revered it with.

I didn’t have many belongings with me to alter the aesthetic much in any case. In all of thirty minutes, it seemed, everything that had been living in my car with me for the past several weeks was easily absorbed by the old, empty furniture I’d inherited with the place. I had to laugh at this a little, to be honest - if it weren’t for my rusting Prius out front, one might suppose I had never moved into the house at all.

The speed in which I’d finished my unpacking left me wildly without a place to put my attention for the remainder of the afternoon. Just the odd, half-hesitant routine of forcing familiarity - trying far too hard too quickly to find warmth in every notch and nick in the walls and railings, memory in the long-softened wears of the kitchen hardwood. These imperfections must have meant home to someone before…to a life outside my own…

It was strange this time; moving in all alone…

I’d managed to pick up a router on my way in so immediate use was made of the internet bill I’d barely managed to start paying the day before. After an unremarkable round of Netflix and take-out, or at least only remarkable in the novelty of my environment, I let Kombucha out into the little backyard one last time, locked the patio door, and headed upstairs for the night.

I’d only just managed to settle into the stiff, squeaky queen bed left behind by my predecessor when my mind began to knock on its own walls. I remembered:

Don’t rip the seams…

Had I encountered any covered mirrors or curtains since my arrival? It was far too late an hour to investigate with any sort of rationality, so giving in to a night full of nagging curiosity, I drifted off fitfully, waking every hour it seemed from the discomfort of my mind until I finally turned the bedside lamp on again, reached down to make sure Kombucha was beside me, then reassured by her drowsy little lick, nestled in for good and slept through to morning.

In absence of an instant solution to the mystery, it was as if my brain had trickled through every possible location of the woman’s warning while I slept. I woke up knowing it was in the attic. It was the only room in the house that I hadn’t properly checked.

I waited until I’d walked and fed Kombucha to investigate. I don’t know why I was putting it off. Even the oldest, most trauma-ridden homes fail to invoke fear in me in the full flush of summer daylight. But regardless of the sun’s accompaniment, I was scared in a way I did not want to acknowledge.

The entrance to the attic was in the closet of my bedroom after all.

I steeled myself around lunchtime, persuaded in part by an intense desire to prove no such mirror or curtain existed within the house at all. I very much wanted the old woman to be wrong. Even better, I wanted her to be a little insane. So climbing back upstairs with Kombucha at my side, I opened the closet, released the attic hatch inside and carefully made my way up.

It was not what I had expected. A couple of old, dusty paint buckets and trays in the corner…a long-vacated hornet’s nest by a thick, uncovered window…cobwebs and a musty chill over everything, but not much else. There were no mirrors up here. No curtains. No seams. There weren’t even any forgotten boxes - no ancient trunks to rifle through, no photos, no yellowed wedding dresses. It was as empty as any tucked-away storage space could be. So completely empty that I had to squat and laugh at my own certainty in my presumptions before climbing back down the ladder to a patiently waiting Kombucha.

“There is nothing here,” I whispered cooly to the both of us, scratching behind her silky ears. “We’ve found an empty slate, my girl.”

The weeks thereafter I lived and slept soundly, boldly even, I could say. At least, boldly enough to turn the bedside lamp off without hesitation each night, or to think nothing of waking suddenly in the “witching hours” more than a few times each week. I was too content with my arrangement to pay any attention to its shadows, too relieved in its refuge to see it as anything but. It was far more space than I had ever imagined I could afford, and it had come with far more peace than I had ever allowed myself to dream of.

It was quickly becoming mine, a safe and private reprieve from the chaos of my previous life, and one that suited the often spatially consumptive needs of my escalating grind as a seamstress and costume designer. My business had surprisingly taken off since I’d moved in. I figured the neighbors must have been unusually helpful in spreading word of my trade around town.

I should have recognized the fairy tale of the situation then and there. Everything about my life was lining up far too perfectly, on a track that was convincingly going somewhere at that. But I chose to trust exactly what I was seeing once more, and what I was seeing, then, was only golden summer…only gentle good…

And then I stepped aboard that ship.