The House on Kettle Creek Road

The house sang at 3:03.

Not loudly. Not even, at first, in a way Imogen could be sure of. A low, sustained note, somewhere beneath the floorboards, like a finger drawn around the rim of a glass the size of a room.

She had bought the place for the verandahs. Deep, wraparound, shaded by a jacaranda that dropped purple into the gutters every October. The agent had called it full of character. The previous owner had left a kettle on the stove, a calendar on the wall still open to a month nine years gone, and a single line in pencil on the inside of the pantry door.

Don’t answer it.

---

She found the source on the eleventh night. Under the house, among the stumps, where the air smelled of dust and old rain, there was a pipe she couldn’t account for. Copper, green with age, rising out of the earth and disappearing into the joists above. She laid her ear against it.

The note was coming from the ground. And under the note, so faint she had to hold her breath to hear it, there was a rhythm. Not mechanical. Patient. The rhythm of something that had learned, a long time ago, how a heart is supposed to sound, and was practising.

---

The next night she did not sleep. She sat at the kitchen table with the lights off and the jacaranda moving against the window, and at 3:03 the house began to sing, and Imogen, who had never been good at leaving things alone, hummed back.

The note stopped.

The silence that followed was the largest she had ever heard. It filled the hallway. It pressed against the windows from the inside. The kettle on the stove, which she had never once used, began very slowly to tick as if it were warming.

Then, from beneath the floor, in perfect imitation of her own voice, something hummed her note back to her. Softer. Closer.

Pleased, she thought, and could not have said how she knew.

---

She still lives there. The verandahs are beautiful. The jacaranda flowers every spring. She has learned not to stand too long by the pantry door, and she has added a line of her own beneath the pencilled one, in ink, in a hand that grows a little less like hers each year.

It only wants company.