About a month after Aaron ceased to exist, I got an unexpected package in the mail along with a letter from Pamela, the house’s previous occupant. The strange thing was, I’d read her obituary only a few weeks earlier.

I set the package on the front steps and began to read the letter.

Dear Claire,

I couldn’t help but notice that you are now the sole occupant of the House. As a previous owner, I have some slight recollection that you were once married, though the details are quite fuzzy. Since you’re the only one on the deed now, I suppose you find yourself in a similar situation to mine fifty years ago.

I don’t have much time left now, and I’ve taken to thinking about what legacy I’ll leave on this earth. Most of it is gone, unfortunately, consumed by the House. And perhaps most of that is for the best. I made plenty of mistakes here that are probably better forgotten.

But if I am to leave one lasting impact on this earth, I suppose it’s a bit of guidance for you, the house’s new, lone owner. And so before I go, I leave you with my story. My only legacy:

My husband, Robert Chung, was a bastard, but he hid it well. I should have listened to my father when he told me not to elope, but I was young and desperate to get away from my family’s petty dramas.

When my father saw that I wouldn’t listen to sense, he refused my siblings’ pleas to disown me. Instead, he bought us a house with only my name on the deed. Perhaps he believed it would afford me some measure of protection.

Ultimately, he was right. The house saved my life.

It also destroyed it.

It didn’t take me long to realize the house’s hunger. I remember waking the morning after our wedding night, ready to strip the sheet of my maiden blood, only to find it gone. Perhaps I had imagined it in the darkness, I thought.

But then there were more signs of consumption and decay. I had always been a fine cook, but here everything tasted faintly of rot. And then whole bags of rice and uncooked chickens began to disappear overnight. Even stranger, Robert never seemed to remember the groceries being in the house.

Whenever I brought it up, Robert called me superstitious. To him, I was inventing missing onions for attention. To me, he seemed a lunatic, bringing me a box of chocolates one day, and then swearing he’d never done such a thing the next. He was a man of that era, quick to dismiss a woman’s fears.

And so in those early years of our marriage, I began to learn the house’s powers alone.

I probably never would have truly realized the house’s gifts if not for a visit from Robert’s friend Tommy, his neighbor growing up. Now, Tommy was working for Boeing, making good money. Much better than Robert’s salary as a truck driver.

The two of them drank all night, until Tommy’s boasting pushed Robert past his breaking point and they came to blows. I don’t think Robert meant to kill him.

I’d been sleeping when I heard the commotion. I crept out of bed to find Robert crying over Tommy’s body as blood gushed from Tommy’s cracked skull. It must have caught the corner of the coffee table at just the wrong angle.

Robert could barely stand thanks to alcohol and his own wounds. I sent him to bed, saying we’d figure things out in the morning.

I hadn’t cleaned the house in months, as it always licked itself clean. Still, I had some alcohol and vinegar and a few clean towels in the laundry room. But by the time I came back with them, the blood was nearly gone. I screamed as the puddle shrunk before my eyes, all while I heard a strange lapping, scratching sound, like that of a cat’s sandpaper tongue.

For a moment, I felt the urge to run. To leave Robert to the demon house and sprint back to my parents’ place. I felt the fear building up inside, ready to bubble up, to consume me.

But then I reconsidered.

Yes the scene was gruesome, but that wasn’t the house’s fault. If anything, it was cleaning things up, making them better.

I sat spellbound as the rest of Tommy disappeared, first the flesh and organs, then the skin, which had pulled tight as old leather against his bones. And finally, just before dawn, even his bones became a dusty pile that slowly shrunk to nothing. All that was left were the coins in his pockets.

Of course, my hungover husband had no recollection of ever knowing anyone named Tommy the next day.

“I’ll never drink alone like that again,” he promised.

For a few years, we were happy, playing the perfect couple and producing two loving, intelligent children, Caroline, and little Robert Jr, who we called Bob.

It was Bob I loved the most. He was a brilliant boy, talking in full sentences at 18 months and easily memorizing every stray product jingle that played on TV. At night, he’d sing me little songs of hot dogs and hand soap as we went to sleep.

Of course, even then Robert would come home late, reeking of booze and other women. I suppose I accepted these transgressions as necessary evils.

As time went on, though, Robert became irritable, and finally violent. It didn’t take long to escalate from a slap to a black eye. I began to make plans. Plans that I could only tell the house. I hid knives in dark corners, pretending I’d never need to use them, secretly hoping I would.

I never thought he’d hit the children. Certainly not Bob. But then it happened in a flash. I came in from the kitchen to find him punching our son repeatedly, his fist closed, death in his eyes. Bob was only five. He’d gone limp after this first hit, and a line of blood was dripping from his nostril.

I didn’t think twice. I took a long kitchen knife from its hiding place and stabbed Robert in the back as hard as I could. I must have gotten lucky on the spot, because he went down right away, barely able to mutter a word.

Caroline was in the corner screaming, “You killed him! You killed daddy.” I told her to close her eyes and let the forgetting take her.

Sure enough, by the next day she couldn’t remember him ever existing.

Bob was never the same boy after that. Something dimmed in his eyes. He didn’t sing anymore, and grew frustrated with his picture books. He threw tantrums and hurled blocks at me. And I cursed myself, because I’d let it happen. Because I should have stabbed Robert the minute he laid a finger on me, before he ever got to our son.

“Please,” I asked the house. “Please fix him. I’ll feed you steak every day. Please make him right.”

But of course there was no answer. The house could no more fix Bob than I could. All it could do was eat.

The years passed, and Bob grew into something horrible.

He had his father’s looks and tastes, both darkly magnified. He must have thought I was an idiot. At sixteen, he’d bring girls to the basement and defile them. He was not gentle with his conquests, and I saw never the same one twice–they were too smart for that.

Perhaps I should have stopped it there, just as I should have stopped Robert. But I didn’t. Maybe I thought that Bob’s appetites were my fault.

Then one day I heard a scream and ran down to find Bob looking down at a dead girl’s body. He’d choked the life out of her.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Tell her I’m sorry.”

Then he walked past me up the basement stairs and disappeared.

“Don’t,” I told the house as I began to hear the sound of sandpaper, but it didn’t listen. I watched as the girl disappeared, one pound of meat at a time.

Upstairs, I found Bob lazily watching a baseball game in the living room. I slapped him hard across the face.

“Murderer!” I shouted, but he just looked at me like I was crazy.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, and I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t lying, that the house had eaten the girl and all memory of her. Except for mine.

“Never mind,” I said, retreating to my bedroom.

The next day he killed another. I watched paralyzed as the house ate her and Bob promptly forgot again. It happened three days in a row. Every time, I’m sure he thought it was his first time going through with the act. Perhaps he’d been working up to it for years.

Every day, I tried to summon the strength to stab him, just like I had his father. And every day I failed.

Then, on the fourth day, I woke up to the sound of Caroline’s screams. They didn’t last long. By the time I reached her bedroom, she was already gone. Bob sat at her bedside, a knife in hand.

“Why am I like this?” he asked. “Why was I born this way?”

“Because of your father,” I said, tears streaming down my face.

He shook his head. “I never had a father.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Think harder. Everyone has a father. What do you see in your mind when you think of him?”

He shook his head.

“I see a gray void,” he said. He breathed in. “It stinks. It stinks of saliva and rot. And there is a man there, but I can’t see him. And he’s not alone.”

“That’s him,” I said. “Go to him.”

I reached my arms around my son, giving one last embrace. And then I plunged my knife into his back, right in the spot where I’d killed Robert years before.

After that, it was just me and the house. I suppose I became a bit less of a caretaker. A few things went to rot. At night, I’d heard its stomach rumbling. It was never happy with the meager meals I fed it. And though it loved me, I know it missed the kind of food that only Robert and Bob might bring.

Over the years, I thought about leaving a hundred times, but the would-be buyers were always the same: men with knives in their eyes, eager to feed the place. I suppose that’s also the reason why I kept living. I knew if I died, a man like that would take possession of the house and do unspeakable things.

And yet I must admit, there were many nights when I stayed up thinking how glorious it would be to disappear into the gray, how light that must feel. And I know Robert is there. But there are Caroline and Bob too–and somewhere deep in my soul, I think that there must be some kind of cleansing that happens as you fall down the house’s throat, that our sins dissolve in acid.

And maybe, somewhere in the gray, I’ll find little Bob, the way he once was. I can almost imagine him singing now.

In the package shipped with this letter, you’ll find what little remains of me. A small container of ashes, no more than a few minutes work for the house to chew on. I know that it’s no small request, asking you to erase another person, but perhaps it’s best you get used to it sooner than later.

I do hope you’ll bring me and let it take me off into the gray. My boy is waiting.

Sincerely,

Pamela Chung

I sat on the doorstep for a long while, reading and rereading the letter. I wondered if she was right, if the erased all ended up together somehow, deep in the house’s gut. I supposed Aaron was there too, maybe even Aaron as he’d once been before we’d moved here.

“Mom?” asked Derek as he walked up behind me. “You okay? You going to bring that package in?”

I picked up the brown parcel and examined it in the fading sun. I hadn’t expected it to be so light.

Then I told him, "I'm not sure," and we headed back into the house together, leaving the package on the porch.

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