The Journal at Withrow Lane

by Jeffery Allen Tobin

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Her reflection no longer behaved. It paused after she did, blinked when she did not. It tilted its head differently. Once, she turned to leave the bathroom and watched her reflection linger a full second longer before following. She tried to laugh it off. A trick of light. Glass fatigue. But the laugh caught in her throat, dry and wooden.

When Jonathan returned that weekend, she didn’t tell him about the mirror. Or the journal. Or the voice she now heard in the walls: not words, just a pitch, a presence, something under the plaster like a hand waiting to push through.

He arrived without warning. The knock startled her. He stood on the porch in a blue blazer she didn’t recognize, holding flowers — lilies. She stared at them.

“You hate lilies,” she said.

He blinked. “No, you hate lilies. I thought maybe you’d stopped.”

She took the flowers anyway. Set them on the counter without water.

That night, he watched her too closely. Over dinner, he studied her with his wine glass hovering midair.

“You’re thinner,” he said.

She said nothing.

“Have you been sleeping?”

“Of course,” she lied.

“You look... different.”

He didn’t mean it kindly.

Later, when he was in the shower, she searched his suitcase. Receipts. A hotel brochure. A woman’s perfume sample folded in with his socks. Something cold and greasy slid over her heart — not quite jealousy. Not quite grief. Recognition, perhaps. She closed the suitcase quietly and went into the basement.

The basement had always repelled her. It smelled of oil and stone and slow decay. The walls sweated. A single chain hung from a bulb like a broken limb.

She walked with care, barefoot, the cement cool beneath her soles.

Behind the water heater, where a board jutted slightly from the wall, she found it. A narrow cavity, hastily plastered once, now crumbling with damp. She reached in and pulled out a tin box, rusted and heavy.

Inside: letters. Dozens.

Some sealed, some opened. Most addressed to a woman named Lydia. All written in the same forceful, slanted script. Not Jonathan’s. Not Miriam’s.

No. The letters belonged to someone else. She skimmed the top one, dated 1975.

My Lydia,

I know what they say. That you’re unstable. That you’re a danger. But they never saw how she clung to you after a nightmare. How you braided her hair even when she pulled away. They don’t know what it costs to stay sane in this house. In this life. I am sorry. I never should have left you alone with her.

Vivienne doesn’t know. I beg you: do not tell her.

Another, dated a year later:

They said you started the fire. I don’t believe them. But I can’t see you anymore. I’m sorry. You’re not the woman I knew. She’s gone. And our daughter—

The rest of the line was struck through violently.

Daughter. Eloise sat on the basement floor and let that word settle in her. Heavy. Familiar. Like something worn against the skin until the shape fits.

She returned upstairs in a trance.

Vivienne sits in the locked room, scratching lines into the wall with a doll’s shoe buckle. She’s not allowed pencils anymore. They say she writes lies. They say her stories upset her.

But stories are all she has now. The real things — the fire, the woman’s shriek, the thud on the stairs — those are fragments, like shards in a glass of water. The stories let her arrange them. Make sense. Or at least shape the fear into something she can look at without screaming.

She writes:

Once there was a house with no name. The girl inside had no name either. When she tried to scream it, the house swallowed the sound and gave her back silence instead.

She likes that ending better.

Jonathan confronted her two days later. “I checked your phone,” he said, pacing in the living room. “You haven’t called anyone in weeks. You haven’t responded to my messages. What the hell is going on?”

“I’ve been busy,” she said. “The house needs attention.”

“You’re acting strange.”

“You don’t know how I act,” she said, her voice calm, eerie even to her own ears.

He stopped pacing. “You’re not taking your medication, are you?”

“I haven’t been on anything in years.”

“Yes,” he said, voice hardening, “and it shows.”

She laughed. That startled him.

That night, he locked the bedroom door. She slept in the guest room again but didn’t sleep. She wrote instead.

Or — more truthfully — Vivienne wrote. The words came through Eloise, fast and wild, like electricity channeled through damp wires. They filled page after page. The voice now made demands:

He will not make you small again. Not this time. We know how to burn.

The house echoed not with sound. With knowing.

* * *

She woke at 2:43 a.m., sitting upright in the bed. No transition, no groggy middle-state — just awake, entirely, fully, as if something had plucked her consciousness like a harp string.

The guest room glowed faintly. Moonlight slid in through the slats in the blinds and cast long bars across the floor. At first, she thought that was all it was: the light. But then she saw them: footprints. Small. Bare. Damp.

They trailed across the hardwood floor, beginning at the doorway and ending at the foot of her bed.

Eloise didn’t move.

Her heart did something strange — slowed, not sped up, as if bracing itself.

She followed the prints with her eyes. Not muddy, exactly. The wetness glistened but left no soil, no smudge of earth. As if whoever had walked them had come from inside the walls.

She swung her legs out from the covers and stood. The air was cold, colder than it should have been; the thermostat had been set to a comfortable temperature. Her breath fogged slightly as she crossed the floor, barefoot, following the trail into the hall.

The house held its breath with her.

Down the corridor, past the bathroom, past the locked room — always the locked room, humming like a toothache in the back of her skull — the footprints turned down the stairs. She followed.

At the bottom of the steps, something waited. Not a figure. A sound.

A girl’s voice — soft, tuneless, humming. Just like the woman in the kitchen used to hum. Hummed eggs and lavender and lies.

Eloise moved toward it.

The sound led her to the front door, where something small and cloth-wrapped lay on the floor. She stooped and picked it up. A doll. One she hadn’t seen before.

Its face had been cut. Not violently, but precisely — across the mouth, which had been sewn shut with red thread in neat, ruthless stitches.

She held it in her palm and stared. Something shifted under her ribs — not horror, not even surprise. Recognition.

She carried the doll back upstairs and placed it on the windowsill of the guest room. It sat there without slumping, perfectly still, its thread-mouth grinning toward the glass.

Vivienne had once held this doll tight to her chest while the woman shouted downstairs, a sound that filled the whole house the way fire fills a chimney.

“She’s not normal,” the woman hissed. “She watches me. She listens at doors. I don’t feel safe.”

Vivienne had pressed her ear to the floorboards to listen back. Not because she cared what the woman felt, but because she wanted to hear her lose.

The next morning, the doll was gone.

Eloise didn’t mention it. Jonathan had taken a work call and locked himself in the study. He seemed calm again, overly so — as if performing normalcy in case someone was watching. She caught him watching her instead. His gaze had changed. It no longer carried irritation or contempt. It held calculation.

He thought something was wrong with her. He wanted her to act crazy. Wanted it documented.

She waited until he left for lunch, saying he needed “air.” As soon as the front door closed, she went into the master bedroom. She opened the drawer where he kept his watch. Inside: the doll.

Tucked beside the leather band. Eyes open, red thread mouth still stitched. Sitting upright. Waiting.

She didn’t touch it.

The next night, thunder woke her. She hadn’t remembered falling asleep.

The windows rattled. Branches scraped the siding like fingers dragging across skin. She rose and moved to the hallway, drawn not by curiosity, but by certainty.

The door to the locked room stood wide open. Inside, the mirror flickered with lightning. The bed looked slept in.

On the writing desk, the journal lay open. But the ink didn’t shine black anymore — it gleamed red. Fresh.

She stepped toward it.

You know what she did.
You know what he allowed.
You know what has to happen.

Eloise touched the page. The ink smudged. It smelled of rust.

Her head ached suddenly: sharp, bright. She staggered and gripped the dressing table to steady herself. Her reflection in the mirror twisted briefly: face elongating, eyes too wide, too dark. Then it snapped back.

She vomited in the hallway.

Vivienne curled in the closet, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around herself. The woman had taken her brush again. Said she didn’t deserve nice things. Said she needed to learn respect.

Vivienne thought about the matches in the drawer downstairs. About the way her father used to light them, quickly, casually, one-handed, when he smoked.

She didn’t want to hurt the house. Just her.

Jonathan stood at the kitchen counter, reading the journal.

Eloise entered and stopped dead. He looked up slowly, caught.

“You left it open,” he said. “I thought it was one of your poems at first. But then I read more. You wrote about me. About this house.”

She said nothing.

“Eloise, this... this isn’t healthy. These aren’t stories. These are symptoms.”

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

“Believe what? That the house is haunted by your childhood alter ego? That the furniture rearranges itself at night? That dolls bleed?”

She didn’t remember telling him about the doll.

He stepped closer. “I’ve talked to a doctor. Just a consultation. They said you might be having a dissociative episode. You need rest. Real rest. Somewhere supervised.”

“You mean committed.”

“I mean cared for,” he said. “Goddamn it, Eloise. I’ve tried to be patient.”

“You locked me out of my own bedroom.”

“I had to. You were pacing at night. Talking to yourself. Talking to a dead girl.”

The walls creaked. One long, groaning exhale, like the house sighing in disgust.

He didn’t notice.

But she did.

Later that night, the power went out.

She lit a candle and walked the halls. The house welcomed her. Every step felt warmer. The walls pulsed softly. The mirror in the locked room no longer reflected her at all — just showed the bed, and a girl’s shape curled beneath the quilt, fast asleep.

The girl wore Eloise’s nightgown.

She didn’t knock. She didn’t enter. She simply closed the door.

Vivienne watched the woman fall down the stairs, arms pinwheeling, hair wild like weeds in wind. The silence afterward rang louder than the scream.

She hadn’t pushed her. Not quite. She had been there. That was all.

The house showed her how. Not in words. Not in instructions. But in dream. The basement again. The gas line. The strike of a match. A cleansing. Not a destruction. Not an ending. A reset. A return.

The girl wanted out. And Eloise — whatever was left of her — wanted the same.

* * *

The house had grown tender.

It no longer creaked beneath her feet — it sighed. It no longer chilled her in the dark — it exhaled against her skin. It remembered her steps, anticipated her weight. The floorboards adjusted. The shadows gave way.

Jonathan, by contrast, had hardened. His gestures became economical, his words clipped into medicalized suggestion: sleep cycle, chemical imbalance, early intervention. He stopped calling her Eloise. He called her “you.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said on Friday morning, slinging his bag over one shoulder. “I’ve arranged for someone to come by. Just a wellness check. Don’t be alarmed.”

She nodded. Calm. Smooth. As still as a painting.

He left.

She waited. And then she began.

From the hall, Vivienne watched her father sleep.

He looked younger when unconscious. Less like himself. Less like the man who had stood aside and let things happen. She had once pressed her face into his chest and wept there, believing in him.

She did not believe anymore.

She held the matchbook in one hand. The blue one. The hotel name printed in gold. Not this house. Somewhere else. Another life. Another lie.

Eloise stood in the basement, barefoot on concrete that felt warmer than usual. The gas line sat exposed behind the dryer. It took very little effort to loosen the valve. A hiss whispered into the dark, slow and steady.

The box of matches trembled in her hand, not from fear but from memory. The scent of sulfur always brought her back to childhood, to her father lighting the stove and telling her to “step back, that’s not for little girls.”

But the house did not tell her to step back.

The house waited.

She held the match unlit. For now.

She moved room to room, taking a kind of inventory. The bedroom where she hadn’t slept in weeks. The kitchen drawer where she’d hidden the letters. The windowsill where the doll had vanished and reappeared again. The locked room, now open like a mouth in the hall.

In that room, the bed was freshly made.

A new page waited in the journal.

She didn’t pick it up. She didn’t need to read it. The words were already in her.

Instead, she turned to the mirror. It no longer flickered. No longer distorted. It showed her as she was — tired, hollow-cheeked, but utterly clear-eyed. No madness in that gaze. No delusion. Just inevitability.

Vivienne didn’t think of it as murder. Not really. Fire was cleansing. It lit up the dark. It made you see.

And what she saw, as the smoke curled under the door, was the shape of herself on the bed, already gone, already free.

She lit the match. It flared in her hand, alive and hungry.

She held it long enough to feel the burn at her fingertips. She wanted that moment, the proof she still existed and still felt pain. Then she dropped it gently into the waste bin filled with paper and dry cloth.

The fire took quickly. Fire always does when invited.

She didn’t panic. She walked slowly back up the stairs. The house was breathing hard now, heat rising through the floorboards, licking the air. The smoke alarm did not sound. The house had decided not to warn.

She paused at the front door. Opened it. The night outside looked pale and hollow, moonlight washed in smoke.

She stepped through the threshold, barefoot.

The house did not try to stop her.

She didn’t run. She didn’t look back. She didn’t watch the house burn.

She walked away from it with the wind at her back and the scent of gas and lavender curling into her hair like old perfume. Smoke billowed upward behind her, a long black stalk growing out of the past. No sirens yet. No shouting. Just the hush of trees and the sound of her bare feet moving steadily toward the edge of the woods.

She didn’t turn to look. She didn’t need to. It was done.

* * *

She came to on white sheets.

The smell of antiseptic hovered faintly in the air, sharper than lavender, less honest. Voices murmured beyond the door. One high and sympathetic. The other measured, neutral, male.

“She hasn’t said a word since they brought her in.”

“She knows her name?”

“She’s given two.”

She closed her eyes. Tried to steady the movement in her chest. Tried not to hear the fire crackling in the folds of memory.

A knock came gently, then a figure entered — a woman in soft gray. No clipboard. No questions, not yet.

“Eloise?” she asked, cautious.

A pause.

“Or is it Vivienne today?”

The woman smiled as if this were only a game, and not a riddle scraped raw across two lifetimes.

She didn’t answer. Not with words.

Instead, she turned to the window. The glass was clean. Outside, the light held no flicker of flame. Just wind through the branches, and the suggestion — almost — of wings.

That evening, the nurse brought her a spiral notebook.

“For writing, if you want,” she said. “You used to be a writer, I heard.”

She didn’t correct her.

She opened to the first page. The pen trembled slightly in her hand.

The house is gone now. But she isn’t.

She learned the trick. If you burn it, they can’t bury you in it. If you burn it, they have to listen.

She closed the notebook and slid it beneath her pillow.

Outside, a bird landed on the sill. A small, black thing with glossy feathers. She watched it tilt its head, once, and then take off into the dusk.

She smiled. Not wide. Not kind. Just sure.