 I know what they always say about old houses. There's something inexplicably scary about them, something about the way the pipes creak and the sound of the house settling. The chipping paint and warped windows, the doors with rusted hinges and the floorboards that squeal with each step. And yet, as frightening as they can be, there's a magnetism that always seems to draw us back. I know I make it sound romantic, but I also know the real reason people do it. I'm not an idiot. The housing market is in shambles. People love a house with character, even when the character is pushed through a fresh coat of white paint and watered down with a new and improved open concept floor plan. I grew up in a neighborhood with old houses, watched one by one as each house lost its personality to a million dollar price tag. Maybe I'm the odd one out for thinking about old houses like this. I've always loved history. I've always loved architecture. It's like I was destined to my line of work. I work in restoration, specifically working with historic buildings. I love my work as slim pickings as it is. The clientele is small, but they pay well, and I live in a very old city. I'd been looking for a house to call my own, saving up enough money to hopefully buy my own house, but I knew it was a pipe dream. I'd end up in a townhouse at best, but I let myself dream. When I found that house, it was like any other day. It was windier than usual, bringing up a cold fall wind that whipped through my P coat and made me shiver. The house was at the end of a long road. I recognized the street. I remembered seeing the houses here get knocked down in favor of newer, more family friendly townhouses. It was a pity. I remembered how beautiful the old houses were. I wasn't looking for a house that day though. No, this was one I was called in to fix by the housing committee. I'd overseen the restoration of dozens of houses before I'd done work for the housing committee in this neighborhood before even. But the house before me was different, a true Victorian style monster, a winding wraparound porch with the paint chipping off the slats caught my eye first. I brought up a hand pinching at the wood and finding it soft from decay. I wiped my hand on my pants, turning my attention to its sickly pale brick walls. The brickwork was in good condition, though discolored and pallid with age, vegetation clinging to it like leeches on its body. The windows were boarded up shabbily, the interior squinting out at me trepidatiously. As strange as it was, the first thought that came to my mind when I looked at the house was an image of an abandoned pet, an animal that once belonged to someone, someone who's long since forgotten about it. So how long did you say again? I asked, nobody's lived in it since the late seventies. Quinn called back. I turned to face him. So what do you think? Well, wouldn't they have torn it down by now then? Ah, they said they tried a couple times, but he shrugged, a mischievous smirk creeping across his face. They say the construction workers backed out, said the place was haunted by a demon. I scoffed, rolling my eyes. Oh, come on, grow up. Come on, have a little whimsy, he pouted, strolling up to me with his hands stuffed in his pockets. Maybe there is a demon in there, so what? Just means one less historical building torn down, huh? I shrugged. I suppose so. I fished the key out of my pocket, walking up to the front door and unlocking it. It swung open with a low resounding creek. The foyer was a long hallway with a set of steep stairs leading up to the second floor, two doors on the left and one on the right. The walkthrough went just as usual, a powder room to the first left, a large living room to the right, then further down the hall was the dining room that led into the kitchen. The rooms were painted in pastel colors, gutted of all furniture that wasn't built in. A thick layer of dust had gathered on the ground cobwebs in the corners and cracks in the plaster. And yet there was a charm that magnetized me to this place. Up the stairs, there was a second bathroom, then a study, a bedroom and the master bedroom. The bathroom with its penny round tile, the study's intricate bookshelf, the master bedroom's gigantic window. I was absolutely spitten with the house, despite its imperfections. Quinn felt differently though, he grimaced at the state of it, shuffled through the rooms with his arms crossed to keep from touching anything. He frowned at the rusted bathroom taps, gagged at the dead rat that festooned the study's floor and shuddered at the dark brown stain smeared across the master bedroom's wall. Ugh, I mean, it certainly looks like it's been abandoned for forty-two years, Quinn mumbled as we walked down the stairs. There's some fixing up to do, but I paused. How much did they list it for again? He shrugged. I think it was around fifty thousand? Maybe forty-nine? Uh, don't tell me you're thinking of buying it. I held up my hands. Well, what's the harm? I've been saving up for something triple the price. It belongs to the city. All it needs is a little TLC. Quinn groaned, rolling his eyes at me. This place? Really? You know there's probably a reason nobody's bought it. What? Ghost? Demons? The scariest thing about this place is maybe black mold. Grow up, Quinn. There's no such thing as ghost. It was refreshing to not have to worry about outbidding anyone. It was a house nobody really wanted, but me. It struck me that people were surprised when I said I was buying it. I was regaled with stories of doors slamming shut, of construction workers being tripped off of roofs by seemingly nobody, of broken bones and whispers in the night. I didn't care. Ghost didn't exist. They still don't and never will. Even if they did, there was something beautiful about that house under all the dirt and vegetation. I oversaw the restoration of it myself. I felt protective of it. Whenever the contractors were there, I felt the need to watch over the place. I wanted to move in as soon as possible. After the deep cleaning, the fresh coat of paint, the electricians and the refinishing of the floors. And after they made sure there was no asbestos or black mold, I moved myself in. The appliances went in the same day as I did, along with my furniture. I remember the first night I fell asleep there. I felt warm. I drifted off to sleep quickly, practically instantaneously. I was so exhausted from all the work I put in, all the worry about not being able to move in on time, but it went off without a hitch. And then I was startled awake in the middle of the night. I felt something jump on me. I flailed in bed, letting out a yelp and reaching to turn on my bedside lamp. Something hit the floor with a thud and a squeak. I peered down over the side of the bed. A rat, fattened and greasy, wriggled off its back and onto its feet, chittering and sending a shiver down my spine. It scampered away, disappearing under the antique radiator. I gagged. I always hated rats. My skin crawled, feeling unclean and disgusted by the fact one had been in my bed. I had trouble getting back to sleep, but still I managed it. When I woke up, the smell of iron hit me first, metallic and hanging thick in the air. I sat up, reaching to my bedside and putting on my glasses. And that was when I saw it. Sitting in the center of my bedroom floor was a pile of dead rats. The blood clumped and dried in their fur and into the floorboards, all piled on each other. I'm not ashamed to say that I screamed. There must have been about 10 of them, all fat and greasy and disgusting. It was like they were presented to me. Like a cat bringing its owner a gift, but I didn't have a cat. Nor had there been any cats around the property. But still, there was a pile of rats on my bedroom floor. I did my best to clean up the mess, wearing rubber gloves to lift them into the garbage bag. I scrubbed at the floor and got out most of the stain, figuring I'd find a carpet to put over it later. I brought the bag of rats out to the trash and dumped it into the bin. I didn't have the appetite for breakfast, so I drank coffee instead, sitting on the couch and cracking open the novel I'd been reading. I've never believed in ghosts. I know why people are so afraid of old houses. It's the frequency of 19 hertz, the one that causes discomfort or nausea. It's easy to disprove the existence of haunted houses. But I still felt as though I was being watched. I still felt myself tense up at every minuscule sound from outside. But most of all, I felt like I wasn't alone. It's difficult to explain. It wasn't so much that I felt someone's eyes on me. It wasn't so much that I felt like I could hear someone breathing down my neck. It felt like there was something there. Like I like the house itself was watching. I pushed the thoughts away. I kept myself from thinking about it. I sank my money into this home. I gave it time. I gave it care. I wouldn't leave over some rats and an odd feeling. I found the best way to keep it off my mind was to stay busy. I unpacked my books into the study and hung my clothes in the closet. I spent the first week unpacking, keeping busy as I could. When I was occupied, I didn't notice the crawling feeling of being watched. When I was occupied, I could keep from thinking about the festering pile of rats I'd found. The pile of rats that felt not like a threat, but a show of affection from a creature that had been alone for so long. In the second week of being there, I got something to work on. I was thankful for that. It meant I didn't have to feel watched all day. When I went to leave in the morning, the door jammed. I tugged and rattled the doorknob, twisting and pulling as hard as I could. But no matter how hard I yanked at the damnable door, it wouldn't budge. It felt less like the door was stuck or painted shut and more like someone on the other side was holding onto it like something was trying to make me stay. I don't know what compelled me to shout at this stupid thing, but when I did, I yelled, I have to go to work. Let me go. The silence I got in return was expected, but unease still settled into me. I twisted the knob again, and the door swung open. When I got home from work, the house was different. It still stood tall, the porch was still under construction, and the brick, though now alive, was still pallid and yellow. But the windows, from the corners of the sealed windows, they're trickled something, brackish and thick, like mascara-filled tears oozing from the brick around the window. I stared at it for a long time. No house I'd ever come across had oozed black liquid, no matter how old. No matter how strange. I suppose if you were to have watched this period of my life, like a horror movie, you would have screamed at me to move away, but I didn't. I walked inside. I wandered inside and saw the lights flicker and heard the floorboards jubilantly creak at my arrival. I pulled up a rag from the kitchen and walked around to the front of the house, sinking to my knees and wiping away the house's brackish tears. I felt sick to my stomach when the viscous liquid gathered on the cloth, but I diligently cleaned its walls either way. A few nights later, I was jolted away. It wasn't by a rat this time, nor by a sound, but I think I must have had a nightmare. But either way, when I woke up, the room was warm, not warm from air conditioning or warm from a space heater, but I held my hand up to the wall. It was like holding your hand just a few millimeters above someone's arm, feeling the warmth radiating off them. But it was my house. I got out of bed, staring at the wall in disbelief before hesitantly pressing my hand against it. Warm as skin and below the plaster, I could feel pumping like a heartbeat. I ran my hand along the wall, patting at it as if to check if it was real. But it was all too real. I began to hear it to the quiet, deep, rhythmic thud of a heartbeat murmuring ever so slightly. I felt queasy. That feeling of being watched was stronger than ever, like a vice pressing in on me. I crawled back into bed, praying it was only a dream, just a figment of my imagination, my trepidation about moving in, my anxiety about my newest job, something else, anything, but the house itself. I slipped in and out of sleep, hardly getting any rest. Too much happened in those next three days. When I woke in the morning, the house's heartbeat had subsided, only to be replaced by a constant wheezing, dragging breath. It was louder at the vents. I didn't have the heart to cover them, even as the sound bent my mind and grated on my nerves. When I turned on the taps to wash my hands, the pipes groaned before spitting a lump of fleshy, wet sludge into the basin of the sink. It was gelatinous, the fat cap of a pallid gray steak, but pink and wet and throbbing with timorous life. I threw up, and then I cleaned it out and threw it away, washing my face and the kitchen sink instead. I used the landline to call Quinn about our client when my cell phone had died. I made it about halfway through the conversation. When his voice turned to static and the receiver drooled out, thin, clear, slime. I mopped it off the floor and all throughout, even through wiping away sludge and flesh and hearing its desperate gasping breaths and heartbeat, I pretended it was normal. I tended to it. I showed it care, even as the dark circles grew under my eyes, even when my head throbbed from lack of sleep, even when my hands shook and my jaw grew sore from grinding my teeth with stress. I was tender to it, and I grew accustomed to my grim macabre home. When I would leave for work, it would hold its front door shut. It would wait for me to beg to leave. When I would return, the sludge would be there. It would mourn my leaving, and I would dry its tears. I never thought a house could miss someone. When it would rain, the house would creak, the lights would flicker and dim, and the rooms would grow cold. I'd press myself against the walls, surrendering myself to the house's mercy for the unnatural warmth of its walls, so I wouldn't freeze in the chill. And then one day, it must have been months into living there, when the quiet insanity of the house became normal. But that day was the straw that broke the camel's back. It grew to fully trust me. The foyer of the house was a hallway with stairs leading up to the second floor, two doors on the left and one on the right, and at the very end of the hallway, well, at the very end of the hallway, a door that wasn't supposed to be there, a door that had never been there before, a door that I must have passed by dozens of times, a door so innocuous my eyes must have just slipped past it each time I walked down the hallway. I stared at it, I felt like if I took my eyes off of it, it would disappear again. I felt my lower eyelid twitch, I felt my eyes quaking in my skull, I walked towards it, and I reached out and took its doorknob. The metal was warm under my hands. It shouldn't have been warm, but then again a house shouldn't breathe, a house shouldn't have a heartbeat. The door swung open easily. It's funny really, to think after nearly four months of living in that house, I never thought it was strange that it lacked a basement or crawl space. Before me were the stairs leading down into the basement. The heartbeat was louder than ever here. I stiffly walked down the stairs, I felt less like I was walking down the stairs and more like a lemming walking off a cliff. By the time I reached the basement, I finally saw it. The boiler hot and rusted a parasitic tumor of red raw pumping flesh clinging to its side. The house itself had grown roots, vile fleshy roots that burrowed into the unfinished cement floors and wound around the rusted metal shelves. The tumor was nearly as big as the boiler, but its roots were even bigger, nearly becoming a carpet of thudding pounding flesh. I stepped off the last stair and the house itself greeted me with a low rumbling creak from the boiler. I knew what this meant. The house was showing me its belly rolling over and exposing itself, showing its trust. It expected me to be happy, to feel thrilled. It expected me to surrender myself to it. After years of being abandoned, I had tended to it. I'd made it better. I'd fixed it and made it whole again, given it a purpose. But I wasn't happy. I wasn't thrilled. I was exhausted. I felt its roots wrap around my ankles, creeping slowly upwards, waiting for me to rush forwards and become a part of it. I felt sick. I didn't move. A house without a tenant is empty. A house with no one to tend to it and make it a home is incomplete. But this house had been abandoned so long, it became something else. A house that haunted itself, it had found its tenant. In me, I should have been happy. Wouldn't it be thrilling to surrender yourself completely to a home that loves you so much, it would show you its darkest corners. But I wasn't happy. And this house was not a home. I shuffled backwards from the pumping tumor of the house itself. It wasn't angry. It understood. I walked up the stairs, ignoring my quaking hands. This house was not a home. But this house was a burden I had to bear. If I wasn't there to tend it, who would be who? But me would keep it happy enough not to feed on them. Who else would tend to it and keep it passive? It was perinatural. It was symbiotic. I tended to the house and the house kept me safe. In a way, isn't that just how any house is? Maybe it was only its abandonment that drove it to its monstrousness. I know I'll have to learn to love my house. I'll have to learn to call it a home. Because although my house is not angry, the house is always learning. Although my house is not angry, my house will hold the fact I do not call it a home against me like a loaded gun. As long as I live in this house, I will have to live in fear that its mercy will run short. And just a few weeks ago, when I opened my refrigerator to find the shelves empty, I knew my house had learned how to eat.