The House on Milton Road

By Chidera Udochukwu-Nduka

It was 9 p.m. Our parents were not back yet. Father had called around five to say his marketing presentation had taken more time than expected. Mother called an hour later to tell us that her shift at Milton District Hospital had extended when emergency patients from a multi-car accident on Highway 7 filled the trauma ward. This wasn’t unusual because their jobs often kept them out late. Tonight, though, the empty house seemed to echo with more than just silence. We lived in a three-bedroom house on 48 Milton Road. Our street was sparsely populated. The houses sat far apart from each other, separated by overgrown lots and low cut shrubs. It was that house at the end of the street, however, that made everyone uneasy, the one that seemed to watch us even in the daylight.

The whole neighborhood whispered about that house at the end of our street. Mrs. Kaminski next door, with her perpetually worried eyes and hands that never stopped fidgeting with her rosary beads, swore she had seen flickering lights in the house’s windows at midnight though the electricity had been cut off years ago. The mailman refused to deliver anything past 46, crossing to walk on the opposite side when he had to pass it. Children at school dared each other to touch the rusted gate, but nobody ever made it past the overgrown hedge. Old Mr. Peterson, who had lived here since the 1960s, claimed the Hartwell family had vanished one winter night in 1987, leaving behind half-eaten dinners on the table and children’s toys scattered across the living room floor. “Just up and disappeared,” he would tell anyone who cared to listen. This strange house was boarded up at the windows with a door that had hung limp from its hinges after a huge storm swept through the city last winter.

I opened the fridge, hoping to find the leftover pancakes from this morning’s breakfast, but Sandra had already finished them off along with most of the good snacks. The radio was belting mellow tunes as a sullen sun sank into the clouds.         

“Let us go out and play,” Sandra suggested, a mischievous smile playing at the corner of her lips. She was my younger sister but with less innocent eyes: twelve years old with wild curly hair that refused to stay in the ponytail Mother forced her into each morning. She lived for moments like this when our parents were both working late, and she could prove she was braver than anyone expected. I knew she meant we should go out and explore the houses that were under construction, and it was my duty to shoot down all the crazy ideas that came into her head.

“Daddy and Mummy will be back soon. We can’t leave the house after sunset.” I said, crossing my arms and trying to look as authoritative as my round, soft face would allow.

“Quack, quack, quack! Sonia is a little chicken.” She broke into the song we normally sang when someone was too afraid to take up a challenge. It was the familiar taunt we had inherited from playgrounds, the song that had gotten us into trouble before. Last month, it was the abandoned construction site on Elm Street. Before that, it was ringing the doorbells of neighbours and running away. Each time, I had eventually given in to prove I wasn’t scared, and each time we had come home with scraped knees and stories we couldn’t tell our parents. She flapped her arms like wings and hopped in a mocking circle around me.

“Sister Sandra, you have to listen to Sister Sonia. We don’t go out after sunset,” Sister Serayah said. At nine years old, she had a pale face, Mother’s delicate features and Father’s stubborn chin. With dark hair falling in waves past her shoulders, she sat cross-legged in her pink nightgown clutching her teddy bear. 

But Sandra turned to her and stuck out her tongue. 

“There goes baby Serayah. All she knows is playing with her teddy,” she cooed rhythmically.  

Serayah’s face went chalk-white with annoyance, making her red freckles more obvious. I could bear Sandra’s taunts, but she and Serayah were like different pages of the same book. I was always separating their fights and stopping their arguments .  

Serayah’s face began to crumple, tears threatening to spill. For months, Sandra had called her a baby whenever she refused to join our games or adventures. Last week, Sandra wouldn’t let her help build the treehouse because she was “too little.” Yesterday, she had been excluded from our late-night ghost story for the same reason.

“I am not a baby,” Serayah whispered, then louder, “I am NOT a baby!”

Sandra’s eyes lit up with mischief as she seized the opportunity. “Oh yeah? Prove it, baby Serayah. I dare you to go to that scary house at the end of the street. All by yourself. Touch the front door and come back.” She crossed her arms with a smug smile. “Unless you really are too much of a baby.”

Serayah clutched her teddy bear tighter, her face flushing red. “I… I am not scared of some stupid old house.”

“Then do it,” Sandra challenged, her voice sing-song and taunting.

“And I will prove it.” She clutched her teddy bear tighter. “I can go to that scary house all by myself. Then you will see I am brave enough for anything.”

Before I could grab her arm, she bolted toward the door, her small feet slamming against the hardwood floor. I frowned at Sandra before running after Serayah.

We stopped in front of the strange house, almost running out of breath. 

The Hartwell House stood three stories tall–its gray paint peeling like diseased skin. A wraparound porch sagged in the middle, and boarded windows stared out like blind eyes. It stood gloomy and dark with a fruitless oak tree as company; its bare branches reached toward the house like gnarled fingers. Sandra and I stood there, observing the house with our mouths wide open. It looked like something from a fever dream, a place where nightmares lived.  There was Serayah–small and defiant–on the sagging veranda, her pink nightgown a bright splash of color against the house’s decay. She clutched her teddy bear with one arm while the other hand rested on the peeling paint of the front door. With a determined push, she stepped over the threshold, her small footsteps echoing through the empty hallway.  

“There is something about this house. We should go home now,” I remarked.

“We can’t leave without Serayah,” Sandra reminded me. She was already running into the house after Serayah. The door looked like a portal carved from darkness: its frame twisted and warped from years of neglect, leading into a void that seemed to swallow light itself. I watched as it gulped them whole. I took a deep breath before taking a step into the yawning dark corridor. 

The interior was like an abandoned museum. A chill clung to the air that made me shiver despite the warm evening outside, and the musty smell of decay and old wood filled my nostrils. Dust particles danced in weak light that filtered through cracks in the boards. To my left was a living room with antique furniture draped in white sheets. Tall bookcases lined the walls; their shelves mostly empty except for forgotten volumes with cracked spines. The floorboards creaked under my feet with each step. Somewhere in the walls, I could hear the faint scratching of mice. Family portraits hung crooked on faded wallpaper, faces obscured by age. Through the grime, I could make out stern faces from decades past––a man with a handlebar mustache and severe eyes; a woman in high-collared lace with her hair pinned in tight curls; children in sailor suits and ruffled dresses who stared out with the unsmiling gravity that old photographs demanded. 

I walked until I came to the grand stairs that spiraled upwards, their mahogany banister thick with dust. To the right, a hallway led deeper into the house past doorways that hung open. I could hear Sandra’s voice echoing from somewhere ahead.

With its dampened walls, the house swallowed up almost every morsel of sound, our voices were reduced to low frequencies. We had to scream a little to hear one another. It consumed the scuffling of our feet down the corridor, and the panting of our breath disappeared as we ran deeper into its belly. The only sound I could hear very well was the loud thumping of my heart. I heard Sandra recording the house. 

I found a grand dining room where a dust-coated crystal chandelier swayed, clinging to its shattered bulbs. The wooden table was set for six; plates and silverware arranged as if the family had just stepped away. When I finally caught up to Sandra, she was in what looked like a child’s bedroom, filming a porcelain doll that sat in a rocking chair.

“This is the room with that ugly doll with red clothes tied all around it. Maybe it is to conjure evil spirits like in the movies,” she snickered, amused by her discovery. 

I was scared out of my wits by the odd-looking doll. 

“I don’t know what is wrong with my phone, it keeps shutting off by itself,” she complained. 

A cold dread settled in my bones. In all the horror movies I watched late at night when our parents thought I was asleep, this was always the first warning: technology failing when you  needed it most.

“Drop the camera, Sandra, and help me find Serayah or…”

 “Or what?” she challenged me again with that familiar defiance flashing in her eyes. Sandra had always been the rebel of the family, the one who questioned every rule and pushed every boundary. Even though I was older, she acted like my opinions didn’t matter, like being fourteen meant nothing if you weren’t brave enough to prove it. She ran out of the room before I could finish my sentence, leaving my half-formed protest hanging in the air. 

I soon heard a burst of laughter and recognized Sandra and Serayah’s voice. I rushed up the stairs, following their voices to the second floor. Every step into the house made me feel more like we were walking into the belly of some enormous beast slowly digesting us. I saw a master bedroom where the bed was still made. Children’s toys lay scattered in the hallway, a wooden horse missing its tail, building blocks spelling out words I couldn’t make sense of in the dim light. The paint here was different––a bright yellow that had faded to a sickly mustard colour, chipping and peeling where moisture had seeped through the walls. In what must have been a nursery, a mobile horse still hung from the ceiling, tiny painted animals spun slowly in the stale air even though there was no breeze.

“Sandra, Serayah,” I called. But my voice fell flat. Not even an echo as the house swallowed it up. I paused, listening for any sound that might guide me to them. The silence stretched on until I began to worry they were lost.

Then, I heard a muffled thump from somewhere below, followed by Sandra’s excited whisper. I traced the sound back toward the main staircase and noticed a narrow stairway I missed before, leading down into what must be the basement.

“We have found a hidden door!” Sandra yelled.  I ran in the direction of her voice.

I found them in a storeroom in front of a closed door ridden with locks. I grew cold all over. I had watched enough horror movies to know that locked doors were precursors to doom. They always meant something horrible was waiting behind them. The pale-faced Victorian children from The Others. The writhing mass of tentacles from The Conjuring. Or worse, something like the twisted thing that crawled out of the well in The Ring, all black hair and broken limbs. Standing here, with my heart hammering against my ribs, I realized how different it felt when you weren’t safely curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn. People always talked about hidden doors, comparing them to Pandora’s Box which held great evils of the world, and now I understood why those stories existed, why we told them over and over again.

“Look what I found tucked behind this old crate,” Sandra said, pulling out a leather-bound journal from the shadows. The book was thick and heavy-looking. Its dark brown cover cracked with age and embossed with symbols I didn’t recognize–spirals and crosses that seemed to shift in the dim light. Yellowed pages peeked out from between the covers, and when she opened it, I could smell something musty and old, like dried flowers. Sandra began flipping through the pages, her eyes wide with curiosity. “Listen to this,” she said, and started reading aloud the strange words she found: “Ghost of the past, channel your powers into the present! What does that mean, I wonder?”  She asked no one in particular. 

We didn’t wait long to find out. Suddenly, the sunset plunged the storeroom into violet shadows. At that moment, the knob turned by itself with a soft click. 

I froze as I watched the impossible unfold before my eyes. The heavy iron locks were turning by themselves, each one clicking open in sequence; first the modern padlock, then the old brass one, then three others turned in quick succession. The metal groaned and scraped as if invisible hands were working each mechanism. Behind the opening door, there was nothing but impenetrable darkness. I blinked hard, hoping I was dreaming, but the sound of creaking hinges and the growing void remained.

Sandra dropped the book, screamed and stumbled backward, knocking Serayah down in the process. I joined her, hands raised, screaming for Serayah to stand up and run. Serayah sat motionless on the cold basement floor, but it wasn’t fear that held her, it was recognition. The thing emerging from the darkness wore the face of a child–pale and beautiful–with eyes that seemed to understand her completely. It smiled at her the way she had always wanted Sandra to smile, the way she had dreamed of being adored. “Come play with me, Serayah,” the thing whispered in a voice like her own. She knew she should run. Every instinct screamed danger. But for the first time in her nine years, something wanted her first, wanted her most. “Come and play…” it whispered again, and I could feel the word crawling across my skin like ice. I saw Serayah’s eyes light up as if the words wrapped around her like a warm embrace she had been craving her whole life. Here was someone, something, that didn’t call her “baby” or “too little.” Here was a voice that said “play” the way she had always wanted Sandra to say it: without conditions or exclusions, without having to prove she was old enough or brave enough or good enough. The loneliness that had gnawed at her heart for so long began to quiet, replaced by the intoxicating feeling of finally, finally being wanted.

A pale hand emerged from the darkness, fingers too long and joints that bent the wrong way. It gripped the door frame, and I watched in horror as whatever was behind that door began to pull itself into our world.

Serayah still hadn’t moved. She sat transfixed, as if the thing had cast a spell over her.

“Serayah!” I screamed, but she didn’t even blink. The thing in the doorway was becoming more solid, more real, and I knew if I stayed another second, I would see its face and that sight would destroy whatever was left of my sanity. I couldn’t stand to see whatever thing was fully emerging, so I ran, terrified, leaving Serayah .

Sandra and I rushed out of the house into the chirping of crickets and cool air. We sat, shaking on a pile of hibiscus. Sandra dropped her face into her hands and wept, pointing to the blurry window where we saw Serayah trapped, beating her tiny hands on the window. She was screaming but we couldn’t hear her. We saw a pale outline of her teary face with a pale hand resting on her shoulder. For a moment, a face appeared. It was so close to her, its eyes were like dark bottomless wells and its mouth, wide open with the hunger of many decades, looking for what to swallow. Then, it disappeared. With Serayah.

***

When our parents’ headlights finally swept across the driveway at 10:47 PM, Sandra and I were still sitting on the front steps, holding each other. Mother’s heels clicked rapidly across the pavement as she hurried toward us, her nurse’s uniform wrinkled from the long shift.

“Girls? What are you doing outside? Where is Serayah?”

Father was right behind her, loosening his tie, his presentation materials scattered in his haste to get out of the car. “Is everything alright?”

I looked at Sandra, her face streaked with tears and dirt, her purple hoodie torn. I looked at the empty lot at the end of Milton Road where moments before had stood a three-story house with peeling gray paint. The crooked sign, the rusted gate, the oak tree all gone as if they had never existed.

“We were just waiting for you,” I whispered, the lie tasting like ash in my mouth.

But Mother’s eyes were already scanning the street, counting her daughters and finding one missing. I knew that somewhere between this moment and tomorrow morning, I would have to find the words to tell them that Serayah was gone, and that it was all my fault for not holding her hand tight enough when the darkness came calling.

Chidera Udochukwu-Nduka is a Nigerian-Igbo writer, pharmacist, and creative professional. She won second prize in the 2024 Dissolution Climate Change Essay Contest (Litfest Bergen, Norway) and first prize in the 2025 LIGHT Trust Issue. A runner-up in the 2024 South African Bloody Parchment Horrorfest, she has also received the Illino Media Writing Residency and was shortlisted for the 2024 Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. Her work has appeared in Midnight & Indigo, Libre Lit, Lagos Review, Fortunate Traveller, Non-Profit Quarterly, and many anthologies. She continues to explore themes of climate, identity, migration, and resilience through fiction and nonfiction.