The House on Wexler Street

It began with the postcards.

Every autumn, without fail, one appeared in my mailbox. No return address. No postmark. Just my name, written in looping ink as though the pen had been guided by a hand unwilling to stop. The pictures were never cheerful cityscapes or beaches. Instead, they showed the same house from the same angle: a gray two-story with shutters like narrowed eyes, a porch sagging under invisible weight.

Each year, a small difference. One shutter missing. A window cracked. A light glowing faintly in an upstairs room.

By the tenth postcard, the house looked nearly derelict. The siding peeled. Weeds clawed the porch. The upstairs window’s glow had turned red, as though lit by a coal.

I never told anyone. Some things feel too much like a curse to hand to another person.

The year my mother died, the postcard arrived a week after her funeral. This time, someone had scrawled a message across the bottom margin: It’s time to come home.

But I had never lived there.

And yet—when I held the card at arm’s length, the cracked porch boards, the tilt of the roofline, stirred something like déjà vu. I’d seen that house, though I couldn’t remember when. My chest tightened as if I’d swallowed a secret I wasn’t ready to digest.

I told myself I would burn the card. Instead, I tucked it into the kitchen drawer where old keys and dead batteries go to be forgotten.

By November, the house started visiting my dreams.

I’d walk down a street littered with brittle leaves. The air was always heavy, smelling faintly of rain on stone. When I reached the house, the red light pulsed behind the upstairs window. I’d wake before the front door opened. Every time.

Until the night it did.

I dreamed myself standing at the foot of the porch steps, staring up. The door creaked wide, and the red light washed across the threshold like a tide. From inside came a woman’s voice—my mother’s voice, though stretched thin and warbling, like a recording played at the wrong speed.

“Don’t let it in.”

I woke, sweating, and the next morning I booked a bus ticket to Wexler Street.

The town was two hours south. A place my mother had never mentioned, at least not while sober. She’d grown up hard, bouncing between relatives who passed her around like a half-forgotten heirloom. If she had roots, she’d ripped them out long before I was born.

But there it was: Wexler Street, tucked between a hardware store and a boarded-up bakery. A row of modest houses hunched under gray sky. Halfway down, I stopped.

The house from the postcards.

It sagged exactly as pictured. Paint peeled in ragged strips. The shutters clung on like rotten teeth. And yes—upstairs, a faint red glow.

I should have walked away. Instead, I pushed through the squealing gate and climbed the steps.

The porch groaned under my weight. The door—warped, splintered—swung open before I touched the handle.

Inside, the air was colder than November should allow.

The house was empty. No furniture, no dust sheets, no signs of squatters. Just floorboards warped like waves underfoot. Wallpaper peeled in strips. A smell clung to the air, metallic and sour, like pennies left too long in the rain.

I wandered room to room. The kitchen sink was stained brown. The living room had a fireplace stuffed with old newspapers, their ink bled to gray smears.

Everywhere, silence.

Until the stairs creaked.

I froze. The sound came from above, deliberate, one step at a time. The red light brightened, spilling faintly down the stairwell.

“Hello?” My voice cracked. “Is someone here?”

Silence.

I climbed.

The upstairs hall stretched longer than the exterior of the house allowed, lined with closed doors. The glow seeped from the farthest door, pulsing in rhythm, almost like a heartbeat.

I reached for the knob. My fingers trembled.

Inside was not a room. It was a place.

The walls fell away into endless dark, stitched with veins of red light. Shapes moved within the glow, vague and human-shaped but stretched, blurred, wrong. They whispered. Thousands of whispers braided into a single sound: Come home. Come home. Come home.

In the center floated a shape more solid: a woman, hair tangled, eyes hollow. Her face flickered between my mother’s and a stranger’s.

“Why did you leave me here?” she asked. Her voice was every dream I’d ever had of her, every fight, every silence.

I stepped back. “You’re not real.”

Her mouth split too wide. “Neither are you.”

And then I remembered.

The postcards. The déjà vu. The way my mother had looked at me sometimes, as if measuring whether I truly belonged to her.

I had been here before. Not in dreams. In childhood. A memory I’d buried: standing on this porch, holding her hand, while someone inside screamed.

I had lived here.

The house wasn’t showing me a ghost. It was showing me myself.

The whispers surged, flooding my head until thought collapsed. I stumbled backward. The door slammed, trapping me inside the hall.

Every door along the corridor burst open.

Children poured out—dozens, maybe hundreds. Their faces blurred like smeared photographs. Some carried toys melted into grotesque shapes. Some dragged teddy bears that wept red stuffing.

All of them looked at me and called the same word: Mommy.

“No,” I whispered. “No, I’m not—”

But part of me knew the truth.

My mother hadn’t escaped this place. She had left it behind, left me behind, and built a new life. The postcards weren’t invitations. They were reminders.

The house hadn’t been waiting for her return. It had been waiting for mine.

I ran. Down the endless hall, through the choking whispers, down the staircase that bent impossibly into new angles. I burst out the front door, stumbling into cold night air.

The house behind me loomed larger than before, swelling as though breathing. Red light oozed from every window. The children’s voices echoed from within.

I ran until my lungs burned.

Back in my apartment, I tore the postcards from the drawer. I meant to burn them, but when I shuffled them together, a sick pattern revealed itself. Each year’s image hadn’t just shown the house deteriorating. They’d been guiding me room by room—front porch, kitchen, living room, stairwell, hallway—until the last card, which had shown the upstairs window blazing red.

A map, drawing me back step by step.

The final card was already on my doormat when I returned from Wexler Street.

No house this time. Just words.

Now you remember. Now you’re home.

The twist?

I haven’t left the house. Not really. I’m writing this from the upstairs hallway, on paper that looks like my old stationery but smells faintly of mold. I can hear the children breathing behind the doors.

They are patient.

They know sooner or later, I’ll open the right one.

And when I do, I will finally be home.