The Journal at Withrow Lane

by Jeffery Allen Tobin

part 1

The house stood at the edge of a narrow, unpaved road that had once been called Withrow Lane, though no sign marked it now. The gravel cracked beneath the tires as Jonathan guided the rented moving van up the weed-choked path, headlights brushing the crooked porch columns and the hulking shape of the Victorian standing behind them.

Eloise stared through the windshield as if the house might lurch forward on its haunches and greet them. It looked like it hadn’t been lived in for a long time. That, Jonathan said, was the appeal. He didn’t ask if she agreed. He rarely asked anything anymore.

Inside, the air smelled of lavender and mold: an oddly intimate scent, like perfume decaying on old linens. The two moved through the rooms in silence, Eloise trailing her fingertips along the faded wallpaper. Jonathan moved quickly, as if inventorying a possession. “It needs work, obviously. But the bones are good. My aunt lived here till a few years ago. Died in hospice. Alone, I think.”

“Did you ever visit her?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said. “She wasn’t close with the family. Had... issues.”

He didn’t elaborate, and Eloise didn’t press. Instead, she wandered the perimeter of what once had been a parlor. A mirror over the fireplace had clouded with age; someone — maybe the aunt — had etched little stars and circles into its lower left corner, childish and strange. The wallpaper there had peeled in long strips, revealing water damage that had warped the wood beneath.

They slept in separate rooms that first night. Jonathan said it was to avoid her “restless tossing,” but she knew he liked space, increasingly so. The master bedroom — his room — had thick velvet curtains and a narrow canopy bed with iron bed posts like spears pointed at the ceiling. Her room, the smaller guest room, had only a twin mattress and a bare bulb hanging from a cracked plaster ceiling. She didn’t mind.

That night, she lay awake listening to the house. She counted creaks. Wind moved through the eaves like breath. At one point — though she would never tell Jonathan — she heard footsteps in the hallway. A slow, deliberate tread. Not heavy. Almost curious.

She got up and opened the door. Nothing. No one. The hallway stretched dim and hollow to the staircase.

A painting hung there. A girl in white, about twelve, standing before a lake. Her mouth was a hard line, her eyes dark and too large for her face. Eloise blinked and looked again. The expression hadn’t changed, but she felt unsteady, like the floor under her had dipped.

She closed the door and locked it.

In the morning, over coffee, Jonathan talked about renovations. The floors needed sanding, he said. He could rip up the linoleum in the kitchen himself. There was a locked room upstairs. He’d found a key among his aunt’s things, but it didn’t fit. “Probably storage,” he said. “We’ll call a locksmith.”

Eloise didn’t reply. Her hand trembled slightly as she lifted her mug. She hadn’t mentioned the footsteps. Or the child in the painting. Or the vague ache in her temples that had started the moment she stepped into the house.

Instead, she asked, “What was her name? Your aunt.”

Jonathan paused, just briefly. “Miriam,” he said. Then added, “She was never married. Lived alone here for nearly forty years. Some people just prefer that.”

He looked at her when he said it. Not cruelly. Not exactly.

But Eloise felt it, that low and growing pull beneath the surface of things. A hum in the walls. A knowing. The house wasn’t empty. Not entirely.

And something in her, something old and dormant, had begun to stir.

* * *

The arrangement, as Jonathan called it, began without discussion. A suitcase by the door, a printout of an itinerary left on the counter. Chicago, then St. Louis, then Baltimore. “Meetings,” he said. “New clients.” He always kissed her on the forehead before he left, like she was a child or a favored dog. Never the mouth. She hadn’t tasted him in months.

“I’ll be back Thursday,” he said that first week, and she nodded.

The second week, it was Friday. The third, he didn’t return until Sunday, long after dark, with cologne on his collar that wasn’t his. She didn’t ask. Not because she didn’t know. Because she did.

While he was gone, the house grew louder. Settling, he had called it, as if it were a thing with bones that cracked and ligaments that pulled tight in the night. But it wasn’t just the creaking of floors or the wind raking across the roof tiles. It was motion. It was presence.

Once, late in the evening, she heard laughter — high, brief, girlish — and ran downstairs only to find the living room empty, the front door locked from the inside. Another time, she returned from a walk to find the hall rug rolled up, as if someone had dragged something long and heavy across the floor and then tried to hide the marks.

She told herself it was nerves. She hadn’t lived in isolation before. Cities had always swallowed her: university libraries, tiny apartments, packed subways, cafes with the hum of espresso machines and conversations overlapping like waves. This was different. Here, she existed alone within the house’s breath. Her own heartbeat began to feel like a trespass.

Still, she tried to impose routine. Morning tea. Afternoon walks. She read paperbacks she’d already read twice. Sometimes she wrote, though the words came strange and crooked now — half-poems, fragments. Once she woke up and found a page on her nightstand in her handwriting that read:

a girl is not a ghost until someone names her
don’t name her don’t name her don’t name her —

She hadn’t remembered writing it. But she hadn’t thrown it away, either.

One gray Tuesday, someone knocked on the back door. She stood frozen in the kitchen, the knock coming again: soft, insistent; a rhythm more curious than aggressive. When she opened it, a woman was standing there: early sixties, white hair pinned up, wearing a floral blouse under a long raincoat. She was carrying a covered dish and smiled too quickly.

“Mrs. Lang?” the woman asked, peering in like she’d already decided she belonged.

Eloise hesitated. She rarely thought of herself by Jonathan’s name. “Yes?”

“I’m Mrs. Ambrose. I live just down the lane — you can’t see the house from here; all that brush.” She leaned past Eloise and sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “Old place. Soaks up the years like a sponge.”

Before Eloise could respond, the woman stepped inside and placed the casserole on the counter without waiting for permission. “I thought I’d come say hello. Not many people stay here long, after all.”

Eloise blinked. “Sorry?”

Mrs. Ambrose smiled again, tight and too rehearsed. “Oh, well. I just mean the place tends to turn over. Renters, mostly. Never lasts. Strange energy in a house like this. Too much history soaked into the walls.” She looked at the ceiling, as if listening. “You know.”

“No,” Eloise said slowly. “I don’t think I do.”

Mrs. Ambrose clicked her tongue and patted Eloise’s hand like a nurse checking a pulse. “Well, you’ll find out. Houses tell their stories eventually. You just have to be quiet enough to hear them.”

That night, Eloise couldn’t eat the casserole; it smelled of cloves and meat, which reminded her of a funeral home luncheon. She placed it in the fridge and never touched it again.

Three nights later, Eloise sleepwalked for the first time since childhood.

She awoke to find herself standing at the base of the stairs, barefoot, clutching something. It took her a full minute to realize it was the old porcelain door knob from the locked room upstairs. It had snapped clean off. Her fingertips were red, as if she had scraped them raw trying to force it loose.

When Jonathan returned that Sunday, she didn’t tell him. He looked sun-tanned and brisk, as if he’d been away on vacation instead of work.

He unpacked quickly, muttering to himself about the weather, the traffic, the absurdity of Midwestern cuisine. He didn’t ask how she’d been. He didn’t notice the missing doorknob, either.

But that night, as he slept — mouth slightly open, arms flung wide like someone who owned the bed — Eloise crept into the hallway and stood before the locked door.

The room behind it was still. The knob gone, the wood warped where her hands had scraped it. She felt something on the other side, waiting.

She put her ear to the door.

Silence.

Then, unmistakably: a sound like someone shifting in bed. A creak. A sigh.

She turned and fled without thinking. Back to her room. Locked the door. Pulled the blankets up to her chin.

The next morning, the doorknob was back in place. Clean. Shining. Untouched.

She checked her hands. Her fingers were healing, but the scrapes were real.

So, then, was the door.

So, then, was the thing behind it.

* * *

The door opened on a Wednesday.

It had rained for three days — sheets of it pouring down the windows, soaking the lawn, swelling the house’s creaking wood until Eloise thought the walls might buckle. Jonathan had flown to Dallas that Monday morning. Before he left, he’d stood in the hallway beside the locked room and given the doorknob a little twist, performative and amused.

“Still jammed,” he said. “Don’t go prying at it. There could be asbestos in there. Or worse, mice.”

“Mice don’t scare me,” Eloise had murmured.

“No, of course not,” he said. He kissed her forehead again — dry, almost brisk. “But houses like this... they can play tricks. Just stay on the first floor. It’s better that way.”

That had been Jonathan’s refrain for years, in one form or another: It’s better that way. He’d used it when she lost her university job after budget cuts. When she’d gone off birth control without telling him, and he’d discovered it by accident. When she stopped writing, and he’d said nothing except, “You’ll come back to it, or you won’t.” No comfort. Just conclusion.

Eloise waited until Wednesday evening. The rain had just stopped. The house still glistened with it, as if it had been sweating. She stepped into the hallway barefoot. Something felt different — an airless stillness, like a held breath.

The door was ajar. Just slightly. Less than an inch. But it was open. No splinters, no broken latch. As though someone had finally, politely, invited her in.

She didn’t hesitate.

Inside, the room smelled of wet plaster and lavender gone to rot. The walls, once pale pink, had blistered with moisture. Mold had crept across one corner like bruising. A narrow iron-framed bed stood under the slanted ceiling, its lace coverlet yellowed and clinging to the mattress like skin.

A cracked mirror hung above a dressing table. Its surface had bloomed with silver-black decay, but not enough to hide her reflection: pale, thin, eyes too wide. Hair loose, mouth parted. She didn’t recognize herself — not entirely. Her face looked like it had listened to something no one else had heard.

On the dressing table sat a child’s brush, a chipped porcelain dish, and a journal bound in blue linen with a small brass clasp. It opened easily.

Inside: careful, slanted handwriting in ink that had only just begun to fade.

June 3rd.
He brought her again. Says she’s going to stay this time. She sits at the kitchen table like she belongs here. I hate the way she looks at me. I hate her hands. I hate her smile. I hope she drinks bleach.

June 14th.
He says I need to stop sulking. I told him I hope she dies. He slapped me. Said I don’t understand anything. But I understand this: she’s not my mother. She never will be.

June 30th.
They made me take the photograph. They said, “Smile, Vivienne.” I didn’t smile. I hope the camera breaks.

Vivienne. The name struck something deep in Eloise’s chest, like a memory she hadn’t lived but had always known. She flipped forward, faster now, the entries growing more erratic.

July 11th.
She made the lavender tea again. I poured it into the radiator. She cried when he got home. He told me I was impossible. He took her out for dinner. Left me here. Alone. Like always.

August 2nd.
She went into my room. She moved things. The dolls were all wrong. She touched the blue one. The one with the ribbon. I know what to do now.

The last entry was followed by blank pages, dozens of them.

Eloise sat on the bed and held the journal in her lap. The lace coverlet crunched beneath her like brittle leaves. She ran her hand along the wall. Behind her, the mirror caught the movement and bent it oddly. She turned to look.

In the reflection, the door was closed.

She stood. Turned.

The door was still open — but only just. Not the wide invitation it had been. As if the room had changed its mind.

Later, downstairs, she sat at the kitchen table and opened her own notebook. Words poured out, without pause, as if she had unblocked a dam. But the voice wasn’t hers. Not exactly. It was higher. Angrier. A girl’s voice, but sharp-edged. She wrote for hours, until her hand cramped. A poem came out whole:

There was once a house with no inside.
It swallowed a girl and coughed her up strange.
The walls wore teeth. The bed wore a face.
The mother laughed and called it love.
No one laughed back.

She stared at the page, trembling. She didn’t remember writing that.

Two days later, Mrs. Ambrose came back. This time, Eloise invited her in. The woman sat stiffly on the edge of the living room armchair, as if the cushions might bite. She hadn’t brought a casserole.

“I wanted to ask,” Eloise said. “You said people don’t stay here long. Why?”

Mrs. Ambrose sighed, twisting a tissue in her lap. “Well, dear. It’s just not a happy house, is it? You must’ve realized that by now. Even the birds don’t nest in the eaves. Look out there, do you see any?”

Eloise looked. The eaves were bare. The gutters sagged with wet leaves, but no birds. No sound.

“There was a girl once,” Mrs. Ambrose said. “A long time ago. She didn’t go to school. We thought she was sickly. But I think... I think she was just forgotten. Locked away. Her father remarried. A much younger woman. Some said she was cruel, others said she tried her best. Doesn’t matter now.”

“What happened to the girl?” Eloise asked.

“She died,” Mrs. Ambrose said softly. “There was a fire, later on. Before Miriam inherited. The timeline’s all murky. But no one talks about her now. Not really. Mostly, people just don’t know.”

“She had a name,” Eloise said. “Vivienne.”

Mrs. Ambrose blinked, startled.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Vivienne. That’s right. Lord, I haven’t heard that name spoken aloud in decades.”

They sat in silence for a while. Then Mrs. Ambrose stood and reached for Eloise’s hand. Her palm was cool, papery. “You seem like a gentle soul, dear. But gentle doesn’t always mean safe. Not in this place. If the house starts speaking to you, don’t answer.”

“Why not?”

“Because it never tells the truth.”

That night, Eloise returned to the room. The door still opened for her — no more, no less. The journal remained where she’d left it. A new entry had appeared:

August 19th.
He said I should be grateful. She made me soup and watched me eat every bite. My stomach feels strange. I think there were things in it. I think she wants me weak. I think she wants my room.

Eloise dropped the journal.

She hadn’t read that entry before. It hadn’t existed. She was certain.

And the handwriting... was her own. Identical. Down to the looped y and the slanted s.

She stood very still, heart hammering. Then, slowly, she picked up the journal again and turned to the last page.

Blank.

She looked at her hands. Her fingers were smudged with ink.

* * *

The journal no longer stayed in the room.

Eloise found it on the armrest of the sofa, half-tucked under a cushion. Another time, on the bathroom sink, beside her toothbrush. Once, she awoke to find it nestled on her chest, as if it had climbed into bed with her, placed itself there like a cat in the night.

She stopped writing in her own notebook. No need. The journal absorbed her voice. It anticipated. It responded. She would think something — half-formed, an emotional knot — and, later, she would find the words in Vivienne’s hand, unwinding.

The handwriting still flickered between the two of them.

Vivienne watches from the stairwell as the woman makes eggs. The woman doesn’t see her; she never looks up anymore. Vivienne counts the curls in the woman’s hair, trying to decide if they’re real or just something you glue on with money and lies.

The woman hums. The sound makes Vivienne’s skin ache. It isn’t the tune — it’s the false comfort. Vivienne used to hum. When she was little. When she still believed someone might come for her.

Now she waits until the woman carries the plate to the table, humming all the while, and walks away.

Then she spits in the eggs. Not because it will do anything. But because it makes her feel like she still exists.

Eloise began avoiding mirrors, not because she saw things but because she didn’t.

Proceed to part 2...