Mile Marker Seventeen

There was a house once, at the bend where Bonewater Creek almost touched the road, but never did. It’s sort of unassuming, and I assume the boring white peeling paint and greasy windows have something to do with the reason the cars drive by without any interest.

There are bones beneath its floorboards.

You’d miss it if you blinked between mile markers 17 and 18, but if you didn’t blink, and if you were the right kind of broken, you’d see it.

I saw it.

They said it burned down in ‘86. Arson, they whispered, though who’d want to torch a house no one lived in (a house no one even remembered) was another matter.

Except I did remember. And now I’m going to tell you what happened there, in that slouched carcass of a house, in a town that’s been missing from maps since I was twelve.

This was before the fire, before the town dissolved into ash and river fog, and before my life started smelling like cigarettes and mold.

--

The town was called Clatterick, population 361 if you included the dead, which we did. (You had to. They didn’t stay put otherwise.)

Clatterick squatted at the bottom of a fog bowl, hemmed in by steep pines and the shale teeth of the Cradle Range. We had one church, one school, one bar, and no gas station. You had to fill up before the descent or hope someone had a siphon and no scruples. We were somewhere around twenty years behind everywhere else—if you ask me, it’s because time doesn’t run right down there. Most people don’t ask. Maybe they already know, too.

My mother and I moved into the house at Bonewater Curve when I was ten. She inherited it from a cousin she’d never met who’d died in his sleep—or so the official line went. She wouldn’t talk about him. She wouldn't even go into the east room.

That room was sealed when we arrived. A deadbolt on the outside, a thick iron key dangling from a nail above the door frame. I remember touching that key the day we moved in, but my mother barked at me to let it go, so I released it and let it be.

Clatterick folk were practically made of river silt. They had moss behind their ears. They wore mourning like a second skin. You’d walk into the general store and see half the town whispering at shelves. Not to each other. Just…whispering. I refused to go to the store alone until my mother finally told me to man up on my twelfth birthday.

Right after hating the general store, the school was second on my list of worst places to be in Clatterick. I was the new kid at school, which meant bruises and being called "Crow Boy" after I made the mistake of mentioning I liked watching the birds perch on the chimney at dusk. But I didn’t care. I had the house.

Because the house—listen close now—the house was alive.

Not in the horror film kind of way. I mean it knew me. It knew when I was sad and would sigh with wind through the walls to comfort me. It knew when I was angry and would slam a door just before I could. It remembered things I forgot—like where I left my toy truck or what page I was on in The Hobbit.

And once—just once—I heard it laugh. A low, breathy exhale when I made a joke to myself while brushing my teeth.

I loved the house. Maybe others would have been scared, but to me, the town couldn’t be so picky as to exclude the house from its measly list of residents, and it would be my only friend for a very long time.

--

There was a girl in the woods behind Bonewater Creek, but she was not made of flesh anymore. She only showed up when it rained hard enough to make the trees scream, and most of the time, the residents of Clatterick–especially the schoolteacher–would give you a harsh look if you acknowledged her.

Her name was Elsie, and she wore a dress that dripped lakewater and dead leaves. She never stepped onto the porch when she visited us, only stood at the edge of the fog like she was waiting for permission to come in. I didn’t give it.

(Not for a long time, at least.)

But I did wave to her once. She smiled, all crooked teeth and hollow cheeks, and the storm stopped mid-roar.

That’s the thing about Clatterick. Nothing dead stayed dead if you loved it hard enough.

--

At some point before my thirteenth birthday, the east room started knocking at night.

Soft at first. Just one knock. Then two. Then five, in patterns like Morse code I didn’t understand. I asked my mother about it one morning before school, and she slapped the cereal box out of my hands.

But the house, of course, knew I was curious. It whispered to me through floorboard creaks and the whispering of mice in the walls.

"She’s not gone," it said.

"She’s waiting,” It said.

“Why do you ignore us all?”

One night, I got up, barefoot and covered in goosebumps. I tiptoed out of my room, down the hall to the east bedroom–and I reached for that iron key.

I remember thinking: if I turn this, everything changes. The house, the girl, my mother, even the town—all of it. But at twelve, I was starting to think I should be brave about things like this, and I didn’t quite understand the whole concept of consequences or risks, so I turned it anyway.

The door creaked open to reveal a room preserved like a reliquary. Toys scattered in a circle around a small rocking horse. A tea set half-filled with brown dust. And on the wall, scratched in crayon:

I’M NOT DONE YET.

And then, the whisper: "Finally."

--

The next week, the creek overflowed its banks. Bonewater rose like the dead. The townsfolk gathered on porches and hills, watching the water creep into their boots, their homes, their skin.

No one tried to stop it. They just watched.

The house began to rot from the inside out. Mold spread like ink in milk. My mother screamed at the walls, at me, at things I couldn’t see. She wouldn’t sleep and wouldn’t eat.

Elsie stood in the rain again. Only this time, she was closer. One foot on the porch step.

“I didn’t mean to,” I told her.

She only smiled.

--

When the fire came, I was in the east room, hiding under the bed with the ghost of someone I never met.

I didn’t start it. But I didn’t stop it, either.

The house burned like it had been soaked in moonshine. The flames weren’t red—they were white and silver, like bones catching light. I saw Elsie one last time, laughing as the roof collapsed. My mother was already gone by then. Or maybe she’d never been there at all.

Those last few weeks were hazy. Eventually, so became the years.

And so is my memory of her, now, most days.

Clatterick’s gone now. Wiped clean. You won’t find it on GPS or in old census records. Folks who lived there either vanished or pretend they didn’t. The river rerouted. The fog never lifted. Maybe it never will.

And even on the nights where I can't remember the way Clatterick whispered in the general store or the nickname they called me in school or the way my mother looked in the years we lived there, some part of me still remembers it in the way I jolt at the smell of mold and rot and smoke. The smell of cigarettes is enough to make me go mad sometimes, even. Sometimes all it takes is the feeling of my car key pressed between my thumb and my forefinger, and soon enough, I end up driving that stretch of road between mile markers 17 and 18.

And on those days, in those moments between the mile markers, I still see the bend in the creek where the water almost kisses the asphalt.

And if I don’t blink—

I see the house.

And I swear it’s waiting for me to come home.