The House That Fixed Itself

When my new house started fixing itself, I thought I was lucky. I couldn’t have been more wrong. A short horror story.

It was awful being laid off so suddenly, but it didn’t take me too long to find a new administration job. The new job didn’t pay as well as my old job, but I hoped the salary was enough that I could keep my house. After racking up five thousand dollars in credit card debt over the next few months, though—even though it broke my heart—I decided I had to move. I called my realtor and told her that my daughter, Leela, and I needed to find someplace else to live.

I looked at houses all over the city, but even the houses I didn’t like were more than I could afford. I’d nearly given up when my realtor showed me the house on Maple Drive. Seeing it, I felt like my prayers had been answered. The house was in the same neighborhood as Leela’s and my old house. It was only a ten-minute walk to Leela’s school. It had two bedrooms, just like our old house, and a big basement for Leela to play in.

“It’s a bit of a fixer-upper,” my realtor said. “But it has a lot of potential. Is your husband good with his hands?”

“I’m single,” I said, a little offended he’d ask me that. “Who used to live in the house?”

“A nice, older couple, Martha and Rupert. Martha was a teacher here in town. Her husband, Rupert, worked as an auto mechanic.”

“Why are they selling their house for so little money?”

“They’re not selling it, the bank is. Martha passed away and then Rupert—from what I heard, he just disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“The neighbors hadn’t seen him for a while. They worried something had happened to him, so they called the police. The police searched the house, but he wasn’t there. They think he moved in with some of his relatives in Nebraska and just didn’t tell anybody. He stopped making his mortgage payments and the bank repossessed the house and put it on the market.”

The story seemed strange, but I didn’t think too much of it. If I were older and struggling to pay my mortgage, I could picture myself running from my bills, too. Who cares about good credit when you only have a few years left to live? The house was just too good of a deal to pass up.

I’m not that handy, but the repairs didn’t look too hard. I’d repaint everything. Change the doors and windows. Sand and re-stain the hardwood. I’d never done any work like that before but, nowadays, you can learn how to do everything on YouTube. Whatever repairs I couldn’t do myself, as soon as I managed to save some money, I’d hire a contractor to do the work.

The first few weeks after Leela and I moved into the house were great. We unpacked our things and settled in. But then I started noticing even more little problems I hadn’t noticed before. Water leaked out from the dishwasher whenever I ran it. The pipes creaked all night long. The bathroom light flickered whenever I turned it on, no matter how many times I changed the bulb. None of these problems were too bad, but they were enough to keep me up at night, worrying I’d made a big mistake by buying the house and not just renting an apartment.

“At night, I keep hearing scratching noises in the basement,” Leela told me.

“It’s an old house, sweetheart,” I said. “Old houses make a lot of noises.”

My next-door neighbor, Janine, was an older woman about the same age as my mom. Not much longer after Leela and I moved in, she introduced herself and asked how Leela and I were doing.

“The house is a big project,” I told her. “I thought I’d be up for it, but now I’m not so sure. Fixing everything wrong with this house is going to take a lot more work than I thought it would. I hope I didn’t make a huge mistake.”

“Do you have anybody in your family who’s handy?”

“All my family lives in Chicago. I’m the only one out here in Wisconsin.”

“I’m sure you’ll get the house looking the way you want it to sooner than you think. It’s a great house. I knew the old owners pretty well. That house was everything to them. They bought it brand new and lived in it for close to sixty years. The husband, Rupert, always had some kind of renovation project he was working on.”

“I heard he left to live with some family in Nebraska.”

“That’s what they said. What I think, though—I think they just haven’t found his body yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Rupert depended on Martha for everything. After she died, he wasn’t the same. He loved going for long walks on the trails in the State Forest. I think he went out for one of his long walks and just didn’t come back.”

I tried my best to ignore all the little problems in that house, but after another month of leaking water and flickering lights and creaking pipes, I couldn’t take it anymore. I watched a few YouTube videos and tried to start fixing things myself. I didn’t have much luck, though. No matter how easy the YouTube videos made it look, it was always harder when I did it.

Right as I was about to give up and beg the bank to take the house back, though, something strange happened. All the little problems in the house started fixing themselves.

I ran the dishwasher, and no water leaked out. I turned on the bathroom light and the light didn’t flicker anymore.

“It’s incredible,” I told Janine. “It’s like the house is fixing itself.”

Of course, I didn’t really believe that. I told myself the dishwasher had somehow managed to tighten its own pipes back together. The wires in the bathroom had miraculously uncrossed themselves. Looking back, I feel so dumb now.

Other strange things started happening around the house, too. I swore I’d closed my bedroom door before leaving for work (I hated Leela going into my room), but when I got home, the door would be open. I never misplaced my clothes but, every now and then, a shirt or a pair of my pants would go missing. Every time I went to the basement to do a load of laundry, I’d swear I turned the lights off, but then I’d look downstairs later that night and all the lights would be on.

Then, right as all the little problems to finally be gone, an even bigger problem appeared. After a big storm, I woke up Friday morning to find a big puddle of water on my kitchen floor. Rain had dripped through the roof and made its way right through the kitchen ceiling.

Seeing all the water damage made me feel sick. I imagined mold spreading through all the wood and drywall in the house, Leela breathing all the mold particles into her tiny lungs. I called every roofer in Madison until I finally got someone to come over right away and look at the damage.

“I can fix your roof,” the roofer said. “And your kitchen ceiling, too. But it’s going to cost a few thousand.”

I could have paid a few hundred, maybe, but not a few thousand. I told the roofer I’d think about it, but I couldn’t pay. I didn’t know what to do.

Friday night, I couldn’t sleep. I just lay in bed, imagining the mold spreading through the house, rotting the wood until the house finally collapsed in on itself.

Around two am, I was finally drifting off when I heard what sounded like someone banging a hammer on my roof.

I ran outside. The moon was shining. I could see the roof clearly. There was nobody up there. No people, no animals. Strange, I thought.

Even stranger, on Sunday it rained again, and nothing happened. I stood in the kitchen with a bucket, nervously waiting for the water to start dripping through the ceiling again, but it never did. I crawled up to the attic with a flashlight and shone the light over the underside of the roof. Somehow, the roof wasn’t leaking anymore. I noticed a step ladder right above the kitchen ceiling where the water had gotten through two days before. I swore the attic was empty when the house inspector went up there. But I told myself the step ladder must have always been there.

I got my laptop and looked through the report the inspector had sent me. I found the pictures of my attic, and I was right. The ladder wasn’t there. How did it get there?

I called the police.

“You’re saying that somebody is breaking into your house and fixing things?” the officer asked.

“Well, I didn’t fix the leak myself,” I said.

“And you’re sure the roof was leaking?”

“Look at this big water stain.”

I pointed at the big brown stain on the ceiling. I explained that I didn’t know anybody—family or friend—who would have come by to fix the roof for me. But the officer didn’t believe me. He talked to some neighbors, and they hadn’t seen anybody coming in or out of my house either, and so he went on his way.

I bought a security camera and put it over my front door. For the next few weeks, I checked the camera footage every day after work, trying to figure out if anybody was stalking me. The people I saw in the footage were all neighbors, though. Nobody seemed out of place.

I started to relax again. I know it sounds dumb now, but I told myself that maybe the roof wasn’t leaking. It was just a really bad storm that somehow caused water to get under the shingles that one time. I was losing my mind from all the unfinished renovation stress and making little problems worse than they actually were.

As soon as I started to relax again, though, another problem appeared. The thermostat went crazy. The temperature in the house shot up to 104 degrees. No matter how many times I lowered it back to 72, the temperature climbed back up to 104.

I called an electrician to look at the thermostat but, just like the roofer, he wanted more money to fix it than I could pay. So, I decided Leela and I would just have to live with the heat. We slept on top of our sheets, sweating through the night.

Then on our third night trying to sleep in that horrible heat, I woke up to Leela screaming. “There’s someone in the living room!”

I ran into the hallway. Leela stood next to the kitchen, looking toward the basement stairs. I grabbed her arm, carried her into the bathroom, locked the door and called the police. Two police officers arrived fifteen minutes later.

“Where did you see this man?” one of the officers asked.

Leela pointed at the thermostat. “He was right there. He wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

On the floor in front of the thermometer, I noticed a rusted screwdriver. The number on the thermometer was back at 72. The thermometer was working again.

The police officers searched all through the house, but they didn’t find anyone. The doors and windows were still locked. They checked my camera, but nobody had gone anywhere near the front door or my front lawn. There was just the thermostat, somehow fixed, and then that screwdriver.

“Maybe this house is haunted,” I told Janine, the next morning while we drank our coffee.

“At least you have helpful ghosts,” she said. “Ones that want to fix things. I wish I had ghosts like those.” She leaned closer to me. “You’re sure someone isn’t stalking you?”

“I’m a paranoid person. I’d notice if someone was following me around.”

“Someone from work maybe?”

“I see the same four people every day, and they all seem normal.”

“Just be careful.”

Leela and I were both pretty shaken by what had happened. As frightening as the whole experience was, though, it was great to have the house back to a normal temperature again. The next few nights, I slept in Leela’s bed with her, until she felt safe again. After she started normally again, I went back to my old bed, but unlike Leela, I couldn’t sleep. All night, I just lay awake, listening to the sounds in the house. The pipes contracting. The house’s walls, moaning. The overgrown tree branches rattling against the windows.

A few more months passed. October to November and into December. The temperature dropped to ten degrees Fahrenheit and then one of the worst things that could have happened in that house happened. In the dead of winter, January 10, the oil furnace went dead. The house couldn’t heat itself anymore.

I bought a few electric heaters from Walmart and put them in every room in the house but, still, I was worried Leela and I were going to freeze to death while we were sleeping.

I called about thirty furnace repair companies, but they all told me the same thing. It would cost at least twenty grand to fix it. I had no idea when I’d be able to get that much money saved. Ten years? Twenty years?

“Could I pay in installments?” I asked them.

But they all told me the same thing. Cash or cheque.

I called my parents in Chicago. I hate asking them for money, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can,” I promised them.

Mom and Dad said they’d see what they could do. I knew they’d probably be taking out a loan for it. I would have done that myself if my credit wasn’t wrecked. I felt horrible. Embarrassed and dumb.

The next night, I lay in bed, regretting every decision I’d made, feeling like my whole life was falling apart, when I heard a loud bang in the basement. It didn’t sound like pipes contracting. It sounded like someone banging metal against metal.

I sat up, my heart racing.

Maybe it is just the pipes, I told myself. Maybe they’ve frozen so bad they’ve started to crack.

Then I heard the sound again.

I got out of bed and put on my slippers. I picked up my phone, turned on the flashlight, and went into the hall. I checked on Leela first. She was sleeping in her bed.

The sound rang out again.

Clang! Clang!

It was coming from the basement—from the furnace room. I tiptoed downstairs. The furnace room lights were on. Leela and I were never down there. Why were those lights always on?

“I’ve called the police,” I shouted. “I have them on the phone with me. Whoever you are, you better leave now.”

I’d never thought I’d be so hopeful to see burst water pipes.

I poked my head into the furnace room, praying I’d see water everywhere. I didn’t see any water, though. The pipes were fine.

A decrepit-looking old man knelt next to the furnace, holding a rusted wrench. He wore nothing but filthy underwear. His skin was caked with dirt. The ends of his fingers were bloodied. He looked at me, smiling. His lips parted over his stained yellow teeth.

“Sorry if I woke you, Samantha” he said. “I’m just trying to get this furnace up and running again. It’s so cold outside. If I don’t get this fixed soon, all these pipes are going to freeze and burst.”

He knew my name. How the hell did he know my name?

I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I was frozen. Too terrified to move.

He stood, his hammer in his hand, and walked toward me.

“Who are you?” I managed to ask him.

“My names’ Rupert. This is my house. It’s been so lonely here since Martha died. It’s so good having other people around the house again.”

Still smiling, he took another step forward.

“I thought I’d die here alone,” he said. “When you and your daughter moved in, though, I was so happy. I noticed you struggling, though. It must be hard on your own with no man in the house to take care of you. This is an old house. There’re so many problems. You really need a man around to help.”

He took another few steps forward. Now, he was close enough to me that he could hit me with his hammer now. That’s all I could picture. His hammer coming down on my head.

“What do you want?” I stuttered.

“I want you and your daughter to enjoy this house as much as I have,” he said. “I want you to be happy here.”

I thought of Leela sleeping upstairs, and I finally snapped myself out of it. I screamed as loud as I could and then ran upstairs, woke up Leela, rushed her out of the house, and called the police.

The neighbors’ lights lit up, one after the other. Janine came outside to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, the whole street was filled with police cars.

It turned out that the old owner, Rupert, never left the house after his wife died. When the bank started sending him letters about missed mortgage payments, he moved his mattress underneath the basement stairs. Made himself a little bedroom and closed it off with some drywall. He was able to sneak out of the room by squeezing behind the drywall, eventually coming out into the dry storage room. The cops searched his room and told me they’d found all my missing clothes, along with a few half-eaten mice carcasses and some bottles of piss.

I sold the house as soon as I could find a buyer. Then Leela and I moved in with my parents in Chicago.

If I learned anything from this experience, it’s that I’m never going to buy a fixer-up again. I don’t care how good of a deal the house is. No price is worth the headache.