The Pencil Marks Behind My Door Kept Getting Taller

Before anything else I want to do the math for you, because every single person I have ever told this story to has asked the same question at the same point, which is why didn't you just move, and the answer is a number, and I'd rather you have the number up front than think I'm the kind of person who stays in a bad situation out of some horror-movie stubbornness. In the fall of 2018 I was a second-year graduate student in linguistics at Ohio State. My TA stipend came to $1,478 a month after the fees they took back out of it, which is a thing universities do, they pay you and then charge you a few hundred dollars a semester for the privilege of being paid, and if you want to hear more about that there was a whole union card drive that fall that I'll get to, or mostly won't. Out of the $1,478: $211 went to my undergrad loans, $86 to insurance on a 2006 Corolla with 174,000 miles on it, $45 to my phone, about $130 to utilities in winter because the basement had electric baseboard heat, and $495 to rent. That last number is the whole story, honestly. Four ninety-five, water and trash included, in a city where every other listing I could find that wasn't a bedroom in a stranger's house started at $700 and went up fast. The difference between $495 and $700 was groceries. It was not an abstraction. So when people ask why I didn't just move, I want them to picture me at the kitchen table with the calculator app open, running it again, because I ran it probably forty times between October and December, and it kept coming out the same, which was: you can afford to stay somewhere that scares you, or you can afford to leave and be hungry. I picked wrong for a while. That's the story.

The apartment was the basement of a house on Delling Avenue, on the west side of Columbus, a couple blocks off Sullivant. If you know Columbus you know roughly what I mean and if you don't, it's a neighborhood of small houses from the forties and fifties, chain link, above-ground pools, some blocks kept beautiful and some not, everything a little tired in a way I found restful after two years in the student neighborhoods east of campus. The house itself was a story and a half, pale green asbestos shingle siding, built in 1954 by the parents of the man who still owned it. His name was Edward Halloran. I'm changing the street and I thought hard about changing his name too, but he's gone now, I checked, he died in the spring of 2023, and the name matters to how I tell it, so. Mr. Halloran. He was seventy-four when I met him and he did not look it, or he looked it only in the hands.

I found the listing on Craigslist in July 2018. My previous living situation, a four-person house on Chittenden that I'd been in since I started the program, had come apart in the ordinary way, one girl graduated, one moved in with her boyfriend, and the two of us left couldn't cover it and didn't like each other enough to try. I had about three weeks to find something. The listing was four sentences and one photo of the outside of the house, and it said, and I remember this because it was such a specific thing to promise, QUIET TENANT UPSTAIRS AREA, SEPARATE ENTRANCE, NO ONE WILL BOTHER YOU. All caps his. When I called, Mr. Halloran answered on the second ring like he'd been sitting next to the phone, and we had a conversation that was mostly him asking whether I was quiet, whether I smoked, whether I had a dog, and then a pause, and then he asked how tall I was.

I want to be careful here, because I know how memory works, I study language for a living and I know that people revise their own transcripts constantly and sincerely. So I'll say it this way: I remember him asking how tall I was, on that first phone call, in July, before I'd ever seen the house. I remember thinking it was a strange question and deciding it was about the ceilings. Basement apartment, old house, low ceilings, of course, he's asking if I'll be banging my head. That's the file I put it in. I said five seven, and he said, and this part I'd swear to, he said "that's fine, that's fine," twice like that, and moved on to asking whether I owned a bicycle, because there was a side yard I could keep it in. The ceiling explanation held up fine when I saw the place. Six foot four in the main room, lower under the ducts. A tall man would have hated it. I'm five seven and I cleared everything except the one duct by the bathroom door, which I hit my head on approximately every day I lived there anyway, because it was exactly at the height where you stop registering an obstacle and start absorbing it.

I saw the apartment on a Saturday morning. Mr. Halloran met me in the driveway, and my first impression was that he was the most carefully dressed landlord I'd ever met, pressed slacks, a short-sleeved button-down ironed to a shine, one of those thin old-man cardigans even though it was July. He smelled like pipe tobacco. I'm putting that here, in the first scene, because it matters later and I want it established honestly: the smell was on him the first day, sweetish, a little like raisins burning, and I noticed it and thought my grandfather, because my grandfather smoked a pipe until my grandmother made him stop, and the smell has only ever meant safety to me. Keep that in mind for later, when it stopped meaning that.

The basement had its own entrance around the side, down four concrete steps into a little well that flooded lightly every time it rained hard, which he showed me himself, pointing at the drain, telling me to keep leaves out of it, an honest man about his property's faults. Inside, the door opened into the kitchen, which had a doorway into a short hall, and off the hall a main room, a bedroom barely bigger than the bed, a bathroom with a shower stall, and at the end a utility room with the water heater, the electrical panel, my breaker box, storage shelves, and the furnace for the upstairs unit, which meant, and this is a normal arrangement in old converted houses but I didn't love it, that technically the upstairs tenants' heat lived behind a door in my apartment. There was also, in the utility room, low in the wall that faced the back of the house, a plywood panel about two feet square, painted the same yellowed white as everything else, with a little wooden turn-latch painted over so many times it had become a lump. I asked what it was and Mr. Halloran said the crawlspace, the house was only dug out under half its footprint, the other half sat on a crawlspace, dirt floor, and the panel was the access. He said, "You'll never need to go in there," and I said great, because I never wanted to go in there, and we both meant it and neither of us knew we were saying something important. Or he did. I've gone back and forth on that for years, whether he knew that early. I don't think he let himself know things, is where I've landed. I think he was a man with a system for not knowing something that lived in his own house, and the system was old and worked well.

Rent was $495, first month plus $400 deposit, and he didn't run a credit check, he called my department office to confirm I worked there, which mortified me because the office administrator, Renata, told everyone, and for a week people I barely knew were asking me about my new landlord who telephones. He had me sign a lease he'd clearly typed decades ago and photocopied ever since, the font had that softened look, and clause eight said the tenant shall keep the utility room accessible to the landlord for furnace maintenance with 24 hours notice, and clause eleven said no alterations to walls, doors, or trim. Trim. I remember reading "trim" and thinking it was a funny thing to specify. You'll see.

I moved in on August 4th, 2018, with my sister Dana's boyfriend's pickup and six trips up and down those concrete steps in the rain, and the drain worked, I'll say that. Dana lives in Dayton, she's three years older, she manages a dental office and she is the person I text when anything happens, so she's all through this story in quotes that I'm reconstructing from memory because I lost that phone in 2021 and the backups didn't go back that far, which I know, believe me, I know how that sounds. The texts I quote are close. They're the gist. The first one I remember from move-in day was me sending her a photo of the kitchen and her replying something like "it looks like where a hostage lives but in a cozy way," which was fair. Concrete floor painted brick red, cabinets from the Johnson administration, a window over the sink at ground level so my view was the underside of a hosta. I loved it. I want that on the record too. For two months I genuinely loved that apartment, the coolness of it in August, the quiet, the little well of green light at the kitchen window, the feeling of having a door that was mine, which at twenty-six, after years of roommates, was a physical sensation like a warm bath. The apartment had its own weather. Sixty-six degrees in August without trying. The water heater refilled after a shower with a long swallowing rumble I could hear from bed, and the baseboard heat, once the weather turned, ticked down the length of the main room and always pinged once, hard, near the bookshelf, ten minutes after I shut it off. Painted concrete under socks is its own specific feeling, smooth and cold, gritty at the edges where the paint had worn, and under everything the place smelled like cold cement and, on Sundays, fabric softener, the neighbor's dryer vent exhaling warm Bounce-smelling air across my window well. I'd sit at the kitchen table grading intro linguistics quizzes with the window open, listening to the sprinkler tick around the yard next door, and I felt like I'd gotten away with something. Four ninety-five. I told everyone the number. It was practically my personality that August.

The upstairs tenants were three undergrads, Tyler, Devin, and a third one whose name I heard variously as Cam, Kam, and once Cameron, and I never got it settled in fourteen months of living under him. They were juniors, business majors I think, and they were fine. I want to be fair to them because for a stretch in October I was building a whole case against them in my head, and they turned out to be exactly what they looked like, which was three twenty-year-olds who owned one couch, a TV the size of a door, and a grill they used in ways that violated several municipal codes. Their noise was normal noise. Footsteps, the TV bass, the toilet, laughing at 1 a.m. on weekends. Twice that fall they had real parties, and both times Tyler came down the next day and apologized, and the second time he brought me a six-pack of a seasonal beer I didn't like, and I mention the apologizing because it tells you what kind of kids they were, and I mention the beer because it sat in my fridge unopened for three months and became, later, one of my little markers, a thing I knew the exact position of. But that's ahead of where I am.

August, then. The first thing I noticed, and I've tried to date this and the best I can do is the third week of August, was the pipe tobacco. I came home from campus on a Tuesday or Wednesday around six, unlocked my door, and the kitchen smelled faintly like Mr. Halloran. Sweet, raisiny, unmistakable if you know it, and gone almost as soon as I noticed it, the way smells are, you get one clean read and then your nose spends it. My first thought was not alarm. My first thought was the furnace clause, he's been in for the furnace, and my second thought was that he was supposed to give notice, and my third thought was that he was old, and old landlords treat their buildings like their houses, because the buildings usually were their houses, and I decided it wasn't worth being the new tenant who makes a thing out of clause eight in her first month. I didn't even text Dana about it. That's how minor it was. A smell, a shrug, dinner.

The dish rack was the second thing, and the dish rack I can date, because it was the Friday before Labor Day, August 31st, because I'd been at the department picnic and I remember scraping potato salad off a paper plate into my trash before I saw it. My dish rack lived to the left of the sink. I'd set it there on day one without thinking, the way you do, and my kitchen habits calcify fast, I'm the kind of person who has a mug and a bowl and washes the same four things in a rotation. It was on the right side of the sink. Everything in it undisturbed, the mug, the bowl, the pot from Wednesday's rice, the water spots on the chrome all dried in place, but the whole rack was sitting to the right of the sink, square and settled, like it had always been there. I stood there with my trash bag in one hand doing the thing you do, which is run the tape backward. Did I move it. Could I have moved it. I could reconstruct washing the pot Wednesday night and setting it in the rack on the left, I had a body memory of turning left from the sink. But body memories are cheap, I know that, I'd been reading about proprioception for a seminar, your body will testify to anything if it makes the story smoother. So I filed it as: I moved it and forgot, or I bumped it and slid it and forgot, even though it had sat there like it had been placed by somebody with a level. I moved it back to the left. I did text Dana that time, something like "either I'm losing it or my landlord rearranges dish racks," and she said something like "landlords don't do dishes, you're losing it," and we let it go. I want to keep being honest about the pace of this. Nothing about August scared me. The scale of everything was so small. A smell. A dish rack. You cannot call your sister in Dayton and tell her you're frightened of the position of a dish rack. There is no version of that conversation that leaves you sounding like a person doing okay.

September I mostly remember as busy, which is its own data point, because the things that happened in September happened around the edges of a life that was full and ordinary and, honestly, pretty good. I was TAing two sections of Intro to Language, which meant a hundred and ten freshmen and a hundred and ten weekly quizzes with my Sunday nights, and I was supposed to be narrowing my thesis topic, which at that point was somewhere in the neighborhood of vowel mergers in central Ohio speech, which meant I spent hours listening to recordings of people from Circleville saying "cot" and "caught" until the words stopped meaning anything. I mention the thesis because it's why I was home so much at night, headphones on, at the kitchen table, and it's also why I can tell you with some confidence what I did and didn't hear, because I spent that fall professionally listening to things, marking tenth-of-a-second intervals in Praat, and I want that on my resume for this story. My ears were in shape. The rest of the job was less flattering. Quiz grading worked out, if you did the division, which I did once and regretted, to about eleven dollars an hour, less if you wrote comments, and I wrote comments, because I was twenty-six and still believed in them. Groceries were $25 a week at the Aldi on West Broad, $30 reckless, and I knew that store's prices cold, the 89-cent flour, the $1.19 eggs. Beth kept telling me to donate plasma, forty-five dollars a visit, and the one time I tried it I got lightheaded in the parking lot after, from skipping lunch, not the needle, and never went back.

There was also the union thing, which I said I'd mostly skip, and I will, but it was the background hum of that whole semester. A group was trying to get TAs to sign cards for a graduate employee union, and a woman in my cohort, Priya, was one of the organizers, and she was relentless in a way I admired and dodged. Coffee meetings, hallway ambushes, a group chat that I muted and felt guilty about. I signed my card in October at a table outside the library mostly so Priya would stop looking at me with that particular disappointment, and then nothing happened, the drive stalled out sometime in the spring for reasons I never followed, and the reason I'm telling you about it at all is that for about two weeks I wondered, seriously wondered, whether the weirdness in my apartment was connected to it. Whether somebody was getting into my place to rattle me because of a union card. Write that down as the first fully stupid theory I built, there are more coming. At the time it felt almost rational. It was the only thing in my life with any conflict in it. When strange things happen, you go looking for your enemies, and my entire enemies list was: the university, abstractly. So for two weeks in my head the university was moving my dish rack. The brain would rather have a dumb story than no story. That is the single most important thing I learned that fall, and I learned it from every direction.

Also in September my bike got stolen, which has nothing to do with anything, and I know it has nothing to do with anything because I got to watch it having nothing to do with anything, but for a few days it felt connected, because everything was starting to feel connected, which is a sentence that should have alarmed me more than the bike did. It was a green Schwinn hybrid I'd had since undergrad, locked to the chain link in the side yard like Mr. Halloran had suggested, and on September 16th, a Sunday, the lock was cut and the bike was gone. Cable lock, so, my fault, everyone online will tell you a cable lock is a suggestion. I filed a police report on the non-emergency line, the officer typed with the phone audibly against his shoulder and told me bikes go to two places in this town and neither has an address, and that was that. Tyler upstairs saw me looking at the cut cable and said a bunch of stuff had been getting taken on the street, somebody got a leaf blower out of an open garage, and this made me feel weirdly better, being part of a general local misfortune instead of a specific one. Mr. Halloran, when he heard, came by and put a new hasp and padlock on the side yard gate, unasked, and wouldn't take anything for it, and stood there in the yard turning the old cut cable over in his hands with an expression I didn't understand at the time and think about a lot now. Not anger. Something more like relief that it was only this. Like a man triaging.

The smell came back twice more in September, both times on days I'd been out until evening, and the second time it was in the hall, not the kitchen, and by then I'd stopped being philosophical about it. I know the lease said furnace access with notice. I'd gotten no notice. And some things had moved. I'm going to list the September things all together even though they were spread across weeks, because the list is what eventually moved me to act, and I want you to see it the way I saw it, accumulating. The dish rack again, left to right, same neat placement. My shower curtain reversed on the rod, the seam that had faced the wall now facing out, which is such a nothing detail except that I knew, I knew the way you know your own handwriting, that I hung it seam-in. A kitchen chair, I always tucked both chairs fully under the table because the kitchen was small, found angled out, not dramatically, angled out the way a chair is when someone has just gotten up from it. And my books. This one bothered me the most and is the hardest to explain. I kept a stack on the table, thesis stuff, library copies, maybe six books, and the stack was always in the order of use, most recent on top. I came home on the 25th and the stack was reordered by height. Tallest on the bottom, shortest on top, a perfect little ziggurat. Nobody does that by accident. But here's the thing, and I remember saying this out loud to Dana on the phone, standing in the kitchen looking at it: a burglar doesn't do it either. Nothing was ever gone. Nothing was ever damaged. My laptop sat in plain view through all of it. Whatever was happening in my apartment, its only visible activity was a kind of light, patient tidying, and Dana said, and this is close to verbatim because it became a joke between us for a while, she said "so call the police and tell them a poltergeist is organizing your books by height, see if they send the SWAT team," and we laughed, and I hung up, and I did not laugh again for a while after that, because that night was the first time I heard the chair upstairs.

I'll come back to the chair. I'm trying to keep things in order and the chair doesn't get bad until later. In September it was one sound, one night, barely a sound at all: I scooted my chair back from the table, wooden legs on painted concrete, that specific dry scrape, and overhead, maybe half a second behind, the same scrape. Same duration. Same little hitch in the middle where my chair always caught its bad leg. I sat there and then I said to the empty kitchen, "coincidence," out loud, like an idiot, because Tyler and them had chairs too, and upstairs floors carry everything, and two people can move chairs at 11:40 on a Tuesday. That's true. It stayed true right up until it didn't cover the facts anymore, and I'll get there, but I want it noted that "coincidence" was correct for a long time, or at least unfalsifiable, and I clung to it with both hands, because the alternative theory had no name yet.

By the end of September I'd decided it was Mr. Halloran coming in, and honestly the decision was almost a relief. A creepy landlord is a known genre. There are subreddits. There is a whole folk technology for it, and I deployed all of it with the grim satisfaction of a person finally doing something. On October 1st, and I know it was the 1st because I did it the same night I paid October rent, I set up what the internet calls telltales. A little tab of Scotch tape low across the seam of my entry door, inside, where you'd never see it. A single long hair, mine, licked and stuck across the gap of the closet door in the bedroom. And in the utility room, because that room had the other door, the one to the crawlspace panel, and because the furnace clause meant it was the room he had the best excuse to enter, I did the flour thing: a fine dusting of flour on the concrete just inside the utility room door, a patch maybe two feet deep, invisible unless you were looking, sifted through a tea strainer, which took three tries to lay right, because pouring from the bag left drifts, ridges, an obvious trap, and I had to wet-mop, wait for the concrete to dry, and start over, and the colander made polka dots, and finally the strainer, tapped from waist height while I walked backward toward the hall so I wouldn't step in my own work, put down something even. Gold Medal all-purpose, if you want the brand, because it was what the canister held. I photographed the patch from the doorway with my phone so I'd have a before. I felt insane doing it and I felt insane in a competent way, like a TV detective, and I texted Dana a photo of the flour patch and she replied something like "CSI: Delling Avenue," and then, a minute later, "if it's the old man just get a chain lock, don't make it weird," which was good advice aimed at the wrong universe.

Here is what the telltales did over the next three weeks, and I'm going to state it as flatly as I can because this is the hinge of the whole thing, this is where my story stops being a story about a landlord and I lose the ability to say what it's a story about. The tape on the entry door was never broken. The hair on the closet was never disturbed. The flour in the utility room doorway kept its texture, my little sifted moonscape, untouched, and I checked it against the photo, zoomed in, matched individual clumps like fingerprints, because by then I was matching individual clumps of flour like fingerprints on a Tuesday night instead of grading quizzes, which, yes, I can hear it too. Nothing crossed my thresholds. And inside, things went on changing. Small, patient, tidying changes. October 9th, the dish rack, again, left to right, tape intact. The night of the 13th or 14th, the six-pack Tyler gave me moved from the bottom shelf of the fridge to the top, all six bottles, labels rotated to face out, which I would absolutely have blamed on myself except that I had not opened that fridge since the morning, I'd eaten on campus at a colloquium reception, mini quiches, I remember the quiches, I remember them because when I saw the bottles I did an inventory of my entire day like a deposition witness and the quiches were load-bearing. Tape intact. Hair intact. Flour intact.

The flour became a discipline of its own. Every Sunday night I re-laid it, wet-mop, dry, sift, photograph, and I learned things nobody sane knows. Gold Medal lays heavy and holds. The Aldi flour, Baker's Corner, 89 cents, is fluffier and drifts, and for the two weeks I used it, it recorded every movement of air in that room as fine combed furrows near the door, parallel, deliberate-looking lines that bought me ten very bad seconds, until I worked out that they appeared whenever the upstairs furnace fired and pulled air under the utility room door, and proved it with a lit match held at the door gap, watching the flame lean. I tried cornstarch once, finer, shows more, showed too much, the house breathing, and anyway I ruined it the second night, shuffled in half asleep to flip a tripped breaker and put my right foot dead in the patch, and stood on one leg swearing with my toes in my own evidence. Sock prints smear soft at the edges. A dry mop leaves crisp lines. A draft combs. A drip from the water heater's relief pipe leaves a little crater with a clean rim, same spot, that one's plumbing. The point of the taxonomy: eleven weeks of Sundays, two flours and a cornstarch, and the patch showed my foot, the mop, the draft, the drip, and not once anything else. In November I laid a second strip along the base of the crawlspace panel itself, figuring if anything so much as breathed on that panel I'd have it, and it lay there perfect until the day I moved out. Whatever kept the chart did not use the floor.

I want to describe what that does to a person, because I'd always assumed fear was a jump-scare economy, a thing that spikes. This wasn't that. This was more like a slow change in the pH of my life. The apartment still looked like my apartment. I still paid $495 for it. I graded in it, slept in it, microwaved in it. But every single object in it had acquired a second question hanging off it, which was, is that where I left you, and you cannot ask that question of every mug and chair and shampoo bottle all day without it costing you something metabolically. I started photographing rooms before I left in the morning. Casually at first, like it was for insurance, and then systematically, kitchen from the doorway, table, counter, rack, then hall, then bedroom. Fourteen, fifteen photos a morning. I'd review them at night against the actual rooms like a returning ship's captain. And mostly, I want to be fair, mostly nothing had changed, day to day. The changes came maybe once, twice a week, and they were always the sort of thing that sat exactly on the line between evidence and paranoia, a chair angle, a label rotation, and I know now that the ambiguity wasn't a bug. I don't know how to say this next part without sounding like I'm assigning intent, so I'll just sound like that: the changes were calibrated. They lived in the exact size range where a reasonable person can't act on them, can't call anyone, can't even tell anyone without editing herself down to sound less crazy. Whoever or whatever chooses sizes chose that size. That is the most frightening sentence I know how to write about October, and it has no ghost in it. Just a size.

I found the marks on October 10th. Here's exactly how, because the how matters and it's dumb: I was carrying my laundry basket from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I'd stage it before hauling it up to the laundromat on Broad, and I clipped my elbow on the doorframe between the hall and the kitchen, the way you do a hundred times in a tight apartment, and I said something unprintable and stood there rubbing my elbow, and my eyes were exactly at doorframe height for once instead of passing by it, and there they were. Pencil marks. On the kitchen side of the frame, the flat of the casing, faint, the kind of faint where graphite catches light at one angle and vanishes at another. Short horizontal lines, very level, maybe a dozen of them, and beside each one, small and neat, numbers. I remember thinking, before anything else, oh, like a growth chart, because that's what it was, formally speaking, that is exactly the genre of artifact it was. My parents had one on the pantry door in the house I grew up in, me and Dana in two columns of ascending ticks, and there is no object in the world more benign than that pantry door. So the shape of it read as sweet for about two full seconds, some family's kids, decades of birthdays, and then I did the thing you shouldn't do, I looked closer.