Chapter 1: Entry 1: The Esther House

Entry 1: The Esther House

October 26th.

Dr. Evans calls this "narrative exposure therapy." Says if I write it all down, give the ghosts a name and a shape on a page, they’ll stop having so much power over me. Says it will help fill the gaps. My memory is a block of Swiss cheese—the holes from Afghanistan I understand, but the ones from before… they’re older. Deeper.

She told me to start with the first thing I remember feeling afraid of. Not the war. Before the war.

I’ve been staring at this blank page for an hour, the blue lines like a cage. My fist is clenched so tight my knuckles are white. A familiar ache. Relax the hand, Jordan. Breathe. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. Useless.

The first thing.

It always comes back to Hogeye, Texas. It always comes back to Derrick. And it always comes back to the Esther House.

---

We were ten years old, which meant we were kings of the dust-choked cul-de-sacs and rusted-out skeletons of cars that littered the trailer park. Derrick was scrawnier, but he had a reckless grin that made him seem bulletproof. I was the quiet one, the planner. Together, we were an army of two.

Hogeye wasn't a town so much as a slow-motion collapse. A place that time, and the highway, had decided to bypass. Our world was circumscribed by the cracking asphalt of the park roads and the dark, impenetrable line of pines that swallowed everything beyond. And in the heart of that world, sitting at the dead end of the oldest, most overgrown lot, was the Esther House.

It wasn’t a house. It was a trailer, a long, single-wide model from the seventies, the color of old mustard and rust. The windows were gone, either shattered or boarded over. The aluminum siding was peeling away like sunburnt skin. Everyone knew the story. Every kid in Hogeye was weaned on it.

Years ago, the Esther family lived there. Harland, his wife, and their two little kids. The official story, the one the grown-ups muttered when they thought we weren’t listening, was a gas leak. A tragic accident. But the kids knew the real story. The better story.

The story was that Harland Esther went crazy one night. The kind of Bible-thumping, heat-stroke crazy that festers in places like Hogeye. He killed his wife and kids with a hammer, then walked out into the woods behind the trailer and was never seen again. They said you could still see the dark stains on the floorboards if you were brave enough to peek through the busted door. They said the trailer was a grave.

And they said things happened there.

Kids would dare each other to touch the door, to throw a rock at a window. But no one ever went inside. Not until Derrick got the idea.

“Bet you five bucks and my whole collection of Desert Storm trading cards,” he’d said, his eyes gleaming with that dangerous, magnificent light. “We stay inside till the sun goes down.”

My stomach had turned to ice, but I couldn’t back down. Not in front of Derrick. Not when he was looking at me like I was the only other soldier he could count on.

That afternoon, with the Texas sun beating down and turning the air into a shimmering soup, we pushed our way through the waist-high weeds and Johnson grass. The smell hit us first. Mildew, rot, and something else. Something vaguely metallic and sweet, like old pennies. The front door hung crooked on a single hinge. Derrick, with his stupid, fearless grin, gave it a shove. It groaned open into darkness.

The inside was worse than I could have imagined. Wallpaper patterned with faded yellow flowers was peeling in long, leprous strips. A threadbare couch sagged in the middle, its guts of yellow foam spilling onto the floor. Flies buzzed in lazy circles in the shafts of dusty light slanting through the boarded windows. In the corner of the small living area was a pile of trash—old cans, newspapers, and what looked like filthy bundles of rags. No, not rags. Stuffed animals. A faded teddy bear with one button eye, a floppy-eared dog, a small plush lion. All of them were covered in grime and damp-looking stains.

“See? Nothing,” Derrick whispered, his voice too loud in the dead quiet. He kicked at a loose floorboard. It made a hollow, unsatisfying thud.

“People leave stuff,” I whispered back, my eyes fixed on the pile of toys. “Offerings.”

It was part of the legend. That you had to leave something for the spirits of the kids, so they wouldn’t follow you home.

“It’s just trash,” Derrick said, though he didn’t sound so sure anymore. He walked deeper into the trailer, towards the back where the bedrooms would be. I stayed put, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. The silence in that place felt heavy, like a physical weight pressing in on my ears. It wasn't empty silence. It was waiting silence.

“JD, you coming?” Derrick’s voice echoed from the dark hallway.

I didn’t move. My feet felt nailed to the warped linoleum. “We should go. It’s getting dark.”

“Scaredy cat,” he taunted, but his voice was thin. He came back into the living room, standing in the middle of the floor. “We just gotta listen. That’s the real dare. Listen for the knocks.”

That was the other part of the story. The part that made your skin crawl. They said if you were quiet enough, you could hear the Esther kids, still trapped in the house, knocking from inside the walls, or under the floor, trying to get out.

So we stood there. Two ten-year-old boys in the belly of a monster, holding our breath, listening. The sun dipped below the treeline, and the inside of the trailer plunged into a deep, murky twilight. The air grew cold.

Then we heard it.

Knock.

It was soft, but perfectly clear. It didn't come from the walls or the door. It came from directly beneath our feet. From under the floor.

Derrick and I locked eyes, his bravado instantly gone, replaced by pure, animal terror.

Knock.

Slower this time. More deliberate. A solid, woody sound. Like someone rapping their knuckles on the underside of the floorboards we were standing on. My blood went cold. This wasn't the house settling. This wasn't the wind.

Knock.

The third one was the loudest. Hard and final. It vibrated up through the soles of my sneakers.

We didn’t scream. The fear was too deep for that. It stole the air from our lungs. We just turned and ran. We crashed through the groaning door and sprinted through the overgrown lot, the weeds clawing at our legs, not stopping, not looking back, not until the rusted metal of the Esther house was swallowed by the twilight and the sounds of the cicadas drowned out the memory of what we’d heard.

I never saw Derrick after that summer. My family moved away a month later. The memory of those three knocks got buried under a decade of military discipline, sand, and gunfire.

Until now.

---

My pen has torn a small hole in the paper. My jaw aches from clenching it. My apartment is silent, a world away from the humid decay of Hogeye. It’s a clean, sterile box on the third floor of a complex that smells of fresh paint and air freshener. Safe. Controlled.

I wrote it down, Doc. The whole thing. I feel… hollow. Unsettled. Reliving it hasn’t caged the ghost; it feels like I’ve just let it into the room. The silence is too loud again. It’s a waiting silence.

I stand up, my chair scraping against the floor. My gaze sweeps the small living room. The locked door. The closed windows. The empty kitchen. Nothing is out of place. It’s just nerves. An echo of an old fear. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.

KNOCK.

The sound is hard. Solid. Resonant.

It’s not from the hallway door. It's not from the neighbors upstairs.

It came from inside my apartment. From the closet door, less than ten feet away.

One single, deliberate knock that is identical, in every terrifying way, to the ones from under the floor of the Esther House.