The Thaumatrope

Lenore Whitten had lived in this house for one hundred and fifty years. Or, at least, that’s what she would claim if anyone ever asked her. But, in reality, there was little left here from her time. All the furniture had gone when her parents sold the home in 1888. At the end of the century, the porch had been replaced when the owners’ little terrier fell through rotting boards. In the twenties, the plumbing had been redone. Then, a young couple had moved in and arranged for the wall between the kitchen and parlor to be removed. It opens things up, they’d said. Thirty years later, the downstairs office went through intense renovations, the pine walls replaced with brick. For several weeks in the early 2000s, some men in coveralls had gutted and rearranged the kitchen. Those were all the major things, but there’d been smaller edits made in between: fresh paint jobs, new carpets, updated hardwood floors, fancy electric lights. This was the Ship of Theseus, and Lenore would answer that age-old question with a simple: yes, it is the same vessel. 

Though, in fairness, those who pose Theseus’s paradox never figure phantoms into the equation. 

The truth was that Lenore saw the house’s history in a way nobody else did, in a way that nobody else saw her. Here and there, she’d witness the afterimage of what had been, the lingering presence of inanimate ghosts. The house was like a confused mirror, at times reflecting things it had captured centuries ago— even when there was nothing left to touch or hold. Sometimes Lenore drifted through the kitchen and there was the familiar silver coffee urn the maid had used each morning. She could hear the faded chirps of her parents’ voices praising breakfast and her own requests for more buttered rolls and marmalade, all as she floated into the parlor and tried to picture the old hearth. There, she’d once licked her thumb and ran it across the andiron, using the soot to draw pictures on the brick. About once a week, upstairs where the nursery had been, the spectral melody of “London Bridge” bounced off music box pins, clear and dulcet. Some days, her bed flickered back into place, barely visible, laid overtop the wire wastebasket that stood there now. Lenore loved seeing her old quilt and the cloth jester doll she’d loved from the day of her birth to the night of her death, fourteen years later. 

The memory was strangely sweet now, her feverish face pressed against dear Jester’s colorful clothes. She recalled her mother beside her, combing her hair with cool fingers. There came the recitation of stories and prayers and nursery rhymes. Lenore’s pain had burned away with death and time, and only words of love remained, only whispers of gratitude for the little time they’d had together. That was what kept her here. She had no business to finish, no wrong to right, no vow to keep. All that remained now were her dreamy wanderings and the recollections which sometimes superimposed themselves onto the real world. It was like playing with a thaumatrope, spinning the card stock and watching two distinct images overlap. 

But, one winter day, Lenore sensed something eerie about the old, new house. She was leaning over a bassinet— insubstantial, and now partially cutting into a nightstand— where her baby brother had once fidgeted with rattles and a stuffed bunny named Bromley. Lenore could see the little creature there now, tucked between blanket and pillow. She hummed to herself, about to finish so she could wander into the garden, when her last note was sliced in half by a sharp scream. 

Lenore had no muscles to tense, no nerves to feel the shock, but her essence quivered. The noise had been brief, but keen as a needle. She listened. The house was quiet, leaving Lenore with not much to do but remain still and imagine things into pockets of shadow. She tried to shake off her fright. The garden, she remembered. Yes, the garden. Maybe there she would be able to watch some cardinals, like rubies, alighting on snow-covered branches. 

Day melted into evening without much trouble. Lenore skipped across the upstairs hallway runner, thinking about how Christmas was only three weeks away and how excited she was to see perhaps a few flickers of the gifts that had once filled the parlor. She’d see toys surrounding the tree and stockings filled with oranges and chestnuts. Some years she even caught old, warped glimpses of herself in the ornaments. Her hair in curls. The special white frock she’d rarely been allowed to wear looking so darling on her. 

When she turned the corner, she slowed to a stop. The hallway lighting was all wrong, and it didn’t take her long to notice that it was because there was a lamp lying sideways on the floor, throwing intense yellow light at all the wrong angles and casting shadows where they shouldn’t be. It had fallen off a table and the base was cracked. Lenore peered down at it and saw markings on the ceramic, as though someone had picked it up after finger-painting. With red paint, Lenore tried to tell herself, knowing how naïve that sounded. 

She drew away from the broken lamp, trying to will the house to show her something pleasant, to let her listen to her mother’s voice, calling for the family to come see Lenore’s brother taking his first quavering steps. The new house had never bothered her before, never saddened or scared her— she’d embraced it, cherishing the fresh experiences and new people alongside the long-ago recollections. Now she wanted the shades drawn. She wanted to block out this hallway, its uncanny yellow light, and its misplaced shadows. Please. 

Lenore saw an open door before her, and was lured to it against all instinct. She drifted to the threshold. Her gaze crept across a stained carpet and upwards to the skirt of the bed, then a bit higher. She could see a hand, nails painted Caribbean green. The drip, drip, drip of scarlet off the wrist. 

When she shrieked, it was like a spasm of her being. An echo of wind. She retreated back to the hall. Her home, her lovely, lovely home— what had happened to it? What had come and set up shop here? The house briefly returned, entirely, to its original state, as if understanding Lenore’s panic and entertaining her for only a moment. She saw a hallway filled with portraiture and sepia photos of her family, the gentle glow of oil lamps, and warm colors. Then it flicked back to the new house, as quick as the flip of a switch. 

There stood a man, carved up by shadows and odd light. She recognized him as the person who’d bought the house four weeks ago, but she’d only glimpsed him since then. Now he stood before her in full, frightening detail— cropped hair, broad shoulders, and a knife clenched in one hand. Lenore released another spectral wail and darted away. The man stiffened and stared, perplexed, in her direction but then continued into the bedroom. 

Such horrors need only happen once to damage a mind irreparably. This was true of Lenore who now wandered her old haunt with caution, afraid of the things she might see. She spent hours trying to forget what she’d witnessed, but always her thoughts returned back to it. Once, just once was enough for the paranoia to take root and change things forever. But it didn’t just happen once.

Young women entered and never left. Lenore heard pleas and screams and splitting flesh. It all happened in flashes, interruptions to otherwise normal nights. She was plagued by these images and, on the worst of days, she’d find herself stepping into a room and nearly passing through the plague rat himself as he went about his work, carrying diseases of the spirit.

She endured, weighed down by the brutality which leapt forth without warning. Sometimes she’d go days without seeing much of the man or his evil pastimes. Then, just as she was on the cusp of regaining some peace, the next atrocity would be there— violence on the kitchen floor, in the bathtub, by the back door. And she was Sisyphus watching his boulder roll back downhill. The worst was when the thaumatrope spun fast and long, and these awful sights bled into her happy memories of the cozy house she loved. But what could she do? Leave her home, flee the demon? Run out into the unknown and hope to pass to the life that came next? It all frightened her. She pondered fighting back, haunting back. Could she hurl her screams through the corridors? Cause some grief of her own? If she’d been a different sort of spirit, then maybe so. But, just as not everyone is compassionate in life, not everyone is vengeful in death. And not everyone has dark, terrible malice within. 

Lenore had liked stories when she was young and had continued to read them over the shoulders of the house’s new residents. She’d been enthralled by the first TV she’d seen, its picture staticky and weak but there, moving and speaking. She knew short rhymes to cast away naughty ghosts, and that salt could ward off devils. When John Seward had had trouble with the dead, he’d called upon Van Helsing. But Lenore could not think of someone she could call, someone to expel this rotten soul from her home, someone to keep her from being haunted by the living.