House Rules
Kay Hanifen
Knock on the door before entering the room three times on each hand. It tells the ghost to leave so that the living can enter. If you don’t, the ghost will push you down the stairs.
When borrowing trouble, knock on wood, first with your left hand, and then with your right, three times each again.
Wash your hands every time after handling food or household cleaning products. Yes, even if it’s just potato chips. Yes, even if you didn’t actually touch any of the detergent. Your hands are unclean, and if you touch your face or mouth, you’ll absorb it, and your organs will crystalize like you drank a gallon of antifreeze. Wash until your hands are dry and cracked, always stinging at the first gust of winter winds.
Remember to turn all the lights off before bed or the house will burn down. You know how it feels to be a prisoner of boiling metal, the flames licking at you as you struggle to escape. Never again.
Check and recheck the front and back door three times, and if you hear a door rattling in the middle of the night, no you didn’t. It’s not her ghost coming home to haunt you.
Cover all the mirrors. Yes, even the one in the basement bathroom that no one’s used in months. Yes, even the one in the attic that belonged to your grandmother and has been gathering dust for years. They say that spirits can be trapped by them, keeping them from moving on. It’s a practice that isn’t even from your culture, but still, you do it just in case. They say to keep them covered for at least a week after the death of a loved one. It’s been almost a year. The mirrors cannot be uncovered no matter the circumstance. Ignore the whispers begging you to do so. They lie.
When getting into a car, say the Our Father three times to yourself. You haven’t gone to church in years—disappointing your parents by not even being a Christmas-and-Easter Christian—but there are no atheists in an obsessive-compulsive foxhole. It’s worked so far on the rare occasion that you get into a vehicle. But you won’t drive anymore on your own. Never again.
Three is a good number. There’s something satisfying about a trilogy. Four is also a good number. It’s square. In some cultures, it means death, but you still feel drawn to it. Perhaps it’s the part of you that’s haunted, the part that knows it should have been you. Eight is also good. It’s nice and round. Two cubed. Four and four. Do things in twos, threes, fours, and eights. These good numbers ward away bad luck.
If you hear something in the night, no you didn’t. Sing lullabies and Christmas carols to yourself to drown out the creak of floorboards as footsteps approach the bed—anything, as long as it’s not that song. Do not acknowledge the thing that lies down beside you. The unnatural warmth radiating from it won’t burn you even as it traces an ember-hot finger down your arm. This is not the kind of heat that burns.
When they tell you that a winter storm is brewing, don’t just salt the driveway. Salt all the doors and windows. The dead are cold. They want to be let in. Don’t invite them in.
Your world is shrinking even as you ignore concerned calls from your parents, your sisters, and what few remaining friends you have. It can be hard, sometimes, to tell the voices of the living from the voices of the dead. At some point, you’ve stopped trying. They’re all waves crashing on a beach.
Order your groceries online. It’s too dangerous to go outside, to drive. The last time you drove, someone died. Don’t let it happen again.
Sometimes, photos will fall from walls, the glass spiderwebbing over her face. When this happens, vacuum carefully. Some of the shards might find their way into your food. It’s never happened to you before, but you’ve heard of it happening to others, how murder victims would die slowly and painfully as the glass tears apart their internal organs. You wonder which death would be worse: that, or your organs crystalizing from ingesting antifreeze. Both those anxieties have been with you long before the accident, but now you wonder if someday you’ll find something sharp in your dinner and feel it slice your esophagus as it slides into your stomach. Or, perhaps, that your coffee will taste wrong and soon you’ll find yourself dying in a fetal position on the bathroom floor. The dead want company. Don’t forget that.
She always appears outside the house exactly as you remember her during snowstorms. When that happens, don’t go outside, even if every part of you screams to hold her in your arms once more. She wears her lesbian pride scarf that you knitted for her during your fiber crafts phase and dances in the snow. Sometimes, she lies down and makes snow angels. Other times, you find a small snowman outside your back door. The twig face is always smiling.
If you find the scarf you knitted her, let it be. Do not touch it. It isn’t real. The real one burned with her beyond recognition. This is a trick.
Sometimes, when cutting food to prepare for dinner, you have the sudden desire to slice into your wrists like another chunk of meat. That desire isn’t you. It never was, even before the accident. After you confessed to the sudden mental images of taking a knife and slitting her throat or taking a hot pan from the stove and slamming it into her face, she called them intrusive thoughts and said that people with OCD often have them. These thoughts repulsed you, but you couldn’t stop them. It’s like quicksand. The more you struggle, the faster you sink, and you were sinking, sinking, sinking until you came to her with tears in your eyes and confessed what you’d been thinking. You warned her that you weren’t safe to be around.
She laughed and asked, “Do you want to hurt me?”
“No,” you replied vehemently.
“Then you won’t. You are not the fucked-up thoughts that your brain conjures to torture you.” She said it so simply, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. The sun was yellow, the sky was blue, and you would never hurt her.
And you believed her.
But you were both wrong.
On the nights when you wake up to the sound of screaming and screeching wheels, she will stand on the edge of the bed looking desolate. She mouths something to you, but you never hear it. You want to believe it’s a kind message. Go out and live. It could just as easily be, Get out, killer. When this happens, say the Our Father three times with your eyes closed. She will be gone when you open them.
In some ways, the pandemic is a blessing, because now everyone’s doing what you’ve been doing. No one questions why you’ve barely left the house since the accident, because everyone is at home. No one questions why you scrub your hands raw. No one treats you as though your grief is a burden on everyone else. We’re all grieving something even if we haven’t lost someone. At least now, no one’s expecting you to just get over it.
Virtual therapy sessions will help both your OCD and your PTSD. Your therapist is frustrated by your lack of progress, and you feel guilty for wasting her time. What is the point in therapy if you don’t actually try to help yourself? But you know she won’t believe you if you tell her the truth.
When you look for her, look over your left shoulder. You forget where you heard that it makes it easier to see spirits, but back when ghosts were nothing more than a curiosity, you read it and remembered. One session, your therapist cranes her neck, looking past you for a moment before smiling. “I didn’t realize you had someone else over,” she says. “Are you sure you don’t want your headphones in?”
“I’m alone,” you reply, and she blanches.
“I swear I saw a woman behind you.”
You look over your left shoulder and see her standing in the doorway. Grabbing a wedding photo, you ask, “Is this the woman you saw?”
“Y-yes,” she says, looking as though she’s about to faint.
But now you can talk about what’s really triggering your OCD.
When you decorate for Christmas, always ask her where your Santas, carolers, and other knick-knacks should go. If they’re in a spot she doesn’t like, they will be knocked off their perches. Some will ask why you decorated for the holiday when you won’t be hosting anyone. You can’t tell them that you woke up one morning to find a stuffed Santa at the edge of her bed—a sign, you assume, that she wants you to be festive. Christmas was always her favorite holiday, even with the rampant commercialism and the political debates about Starbucks cups that happen every year. She loved the warmth, the cheer, and finding the perfect gift. You decorate because, otherwise, she might become angry.
On the anniversary, say the Our Father three times in every room in the house, salt the doors and windows, and knock three times with each hand on every door. It will not keep her away. You know it won’t. But you hope she won’t take her revenge for that night after a full year of haunting you.
When the song “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” blasts through Alexa, you will no longer be in your home. You will be back on the road with her at your side, laughing and singing along to the song as you wind through the snowy mountain road. She shrieks and you swerve to avoid hitting a deer. The car flips over the guardrails and rolls to the bottom of the hill.
When you wake up, you’re covered in your own blood. Your arm and leg are both bent at the wrong angle, and you’ve been impaled by glass in several places. The final verse of the song is playing. In the span of just three minutes, your life has changed irreversibly. You smell gasoline, and she must too, because her concussion-glazed eyes widen. Thankfully, the car landed on its wheels, so you don’t have to worry about escaping injured and upside down, only injured. The engine ignites, and the flames lick at you as she unbuckles your seatbelt. You manage to get the door open and drag yourself out, but her seatbelt is stuck, and the fire is spreading.
You try to drag yourself to your feet, to help her cut away the seatbelt with a shard of glass, but the moment you put weight on your broken leg, your entire body erupts in agony. You scream and fall to the ground. Something lands beside you. Her phone. Picking up your head, you see her smile weakly one last time before the car erupts into flames. You call 9-1-1 and tell them where you are as you stare at the burning body still inside the car. It isn’t right. You were injured worse. It should have been you that died on that night.
And you know that this is why she haunts you. It’s your fault she died while you got to live.
The song ends and you’re back in your living room. Your face is raw from the tears you shed, and she stands over you looking heartbroken. You thought ghosts were supposed to be cold, but her touch burns like the flames that stole her life away. You hiss and her eyes widen. She pulls back her hand as though she’d been the one burned, and vanishes.
The rest of the anniversary will be quiet, and you won’t see her again for a week.
Your therapist might tell you to try not to knock three times with each hand whenever entering a room or borrowing trouble. “It’s a test,” she’ll say, “to see if she actually wants to hurt you.”
So, you stop for just a day. You will have a pit in your stomach the whole time and your brain will itch like ants crawling inside your skull, but you do it. And nothing happens. You see her occasionally out of the corner of your eye, but that’s it. After that, you find yourself knocking less and less.
The next suggestion that your therapist will give is to uncover all the mirrors in the house. This will make you more anxious because even if she is benign, other darker entities have been known to visit the homes of the bereaved. They come in through the mirrors. So, you start with uncovering one a day. First, it’s the mirror in the attic. It’s so covered in dust and grime that you can’t even see your reflection anyway. When a day passes without activity, you uncover another one. And another. And another. By the end of the week, they’re all uncovered.
When you remove the black cloth from the final mirror, you find yourself staring at your reflection. There are bags under your eyes so dark that you look as though you’ve been punched. Your hair is lank and greasy and new scars run up and down your body. It’s been more than a year, and you’ve lost weight, but you don’t look healthy. You look sickly and half-dead. You look like a corpse.
Warmth snakes around your waist. You watch in the mirror as she wraps you in her arms and rests her chin on your shoulder. She looks more alive than you do. Her cheeks have color and her eyes sparkle with a familiar humor. You want to turn around, to kiss her and tell her you love her, but she vanishes before you have the chance, leaving only phantom heat in her wake.
When they predict another snowstorm, you will decide not to salt the windows and doors without any prompting from your therapist. You watch her as she plays in the snow, her scarf billowing in the wind.
Some things will not change. You will still feel the urge to wash your hands after handling anything that could be remotely considered dirty, knock on wood sometimes, and some part of you will always be paranoid about glass and poison in your food, but you are getting better day by day. You feel less of an urge to do things in threes, fours, and eights and have practically given up the rituals to prevent her from appearing.
One day, your therapist will say, “Why don’t you ask what she wants? Clearly she has unfinished business.”
Though you’ve grown used to her presence after all this time, the idea will still frighten you. If she isn’t really herself, then it’s an invitation for something darker to take over the house. You’ve seen enough horror movies to know how this works. As soon as you acknowledge the ghosts haunting the house, they escalate into more violence. If you’re particularly unlucky, you might even get possessed.
So, you think on it, and think and think until the weather forecasts a snowstorm. She will not be inside the house, meaning that you can speak more safely. Just in case, you also procure yourself some holy water and you wait for the first flakes to fall.
It’s dark when she finally appears, illuminated by the snow glow like an angel. You will steel your nerves, put on a coat, and go outside to greet her. When she sees you, she gives you the most radiant smile. But she still doesn’t speak.
You ask, “Why are you still here? Do you blame me for what happened?”
She emphatically shakes her head.
“Then why are you here?”
She opens her mouth to speak but no sound comes out, so she points to herself, makes a heart with her fingers, and then points to you. I love you.
A lump will grow in your throat as you reply, “I love you too. Is there a way to help you find peace?”
She takes your hand and, removing your glove, spells out on your palm with burning fingertips, You need to live.
You will be confused. “I am alive.”
Shaking her head, she spells it out again.
Live. She wants you to live more than this haunted half-life. You have been as much a ghost in the past year as she has. Perhaps more of one. You are a soul trapped in a hell of your own making, held prisoner by the pain and the guilt. Tears fall down your cheek, burning hot against the stinging cold of the snow. “You don’t blame me for killing you?”
Again, she shakes her head and reaches up to wipe a tear away with her thumb. The heat of her hand burns against the wind. Never, she mouths, enunciating carefully, Was not your fault. Though the anxious parts of your brain still disagree, you understand now that she was never a danger to you. Her final act was to throw you her phone, which saved your life. It was an insult to her memory not to live to the fullest.
“I love you,” is all you can think to say.
She presses a kiss to your cheek and writes on your palm, Will you live?
You nod, hardly able to speak, and she’s glowing like an angel in the snow as she smiles. “I will live,” you promise.
Her radiance is almost blinding as she vanishes into the night, leaving you alone again in the dark. But this time, when you enter your home, you won’t knock three times. You will text your sister, asking her to come by tomorrow and drive somewhere fun with you. Maybe the movies. It’s been a long time since you’ve last gone to one.
As with all mental health issues, your OCD is not cured. You still feel the urge to wash your hands too often and still find yourself paranoid about what might be put in your food, but you are alive. And that is all that matters.
Kay Hanifen was born on a Friday the 13th and once lived for three months in a haunted castle. So, obviously, she had to become a horror writer. Her work has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines. When she’s not consuming pop culture with the voraciousness of a vampire at a 24-hour blood bank, you can usually find her with her two black cats or at kayhanifenauthor.wordpress.com.
“House Rules” by Kay Hanifen © 2023