The waterline reached just beneath the second-story windows.
Bell Orchard had been under eight feet of floodwater for almost a decade, and when the reservoir finally drained this spring, the house surfaced like something that had been holding its breath.
I was sent to document its interior conditions before the preservation teams arrived.
The orchard itself was gone, replaced by a flat plain of pale silt.
The trees had rotted to black ribs.
I parked the truck on the cracked foundation of the old barn and walked the last hundred yards. Each step left a print that filled with water.
The house waited at the far edge, wood swollen, shingles flaking like bark.
Inside, the air smelled of limestone and mildew. Wallpaper peeled in soft curls, exposing plaster that glittered faintly with salt.
Along the first-floor hall, the walls bore shadows of missing furniture — faint silhouettes, darker than the paper around them.
A rectangle where a dresser once stood, an oval mirror without glass, and near the stairs, the outline of a person.
It reached from floor to shoulder height, arms at its sides, perfectly still.
I touched the wall. Damp.
The rest of the hall was dry.
I logged the anomaly as a moisture bloom from flood damage.
Still, the shape was too exact — even the slope of the shoulders looked deliberate, as if someone had stood there a long time while the house remembered them.
The second floor had fared worse. The plaster bubbled, and the floors bowed toward the center joist.
I set up my cot in the master bedroom because the window frames still held. The floor dipped just enough to pool a thin film of water near the far wall.
The first night, I heard slow dripping from somewhere overhead — irregular, heavy, like footsteps trying not to be heard.
When I checked the attic hatch, it was dry.
The house sighed with its own weight.
Every few hours, a bubble of trapped air rose through the wall cavities with a sound like a person exhaling.
I noted times, barometric readings, internal humidity.
The gauge read 10.22% before the needle jerked and reset to zero.
Instrument fault, I wrote.
At dawn, I walked the first floor again.
The outline near the stairs had changed.
The shoulders were broader now, the arms slightly bent, palms turned inward as if the figure were holding something unseen.
By the second night, new silhouettes had appeared.
One sat in the parlor, shaped like a person in a chair that was no longer there.
Another leaned near the kitchen doorway, head angled as though listening.
The stains glistened faintly even in darkness.
When I brushed my flashlight across them, they absorbed the light instead of reflecting it.
The smell of the place thickened — sour, organic, like damp hair.
I tried to sleep.
Somewhere between waking and dreaming, I heard the faint patter of water moving along the wallpaper, a trickling that traveled from room to room.
I kept telling myself it was the flood withdrawing from the wood, memory bleeding off into vapor.
In the morning, the outline beside the cot was new.
It faced the bed.
Its head stopped where my pillow began.
I checked the hygrometer: still zero.
On the third day, the humidity climbed again.
The camera I’d set in the parlor recorded condensation forming in precise arcs, tracing limbs and torsos out of thin air.
When played back at normal speed, the shapes pulsed as though breathing.
I pressed my ear to the wall. The plaster was warm.
Behind it, water moved in deliberate rhythm — not dripping, but circulating, drawn through the veins of the house like blood.
At dusk, I packed my equipment.
I planned to sleep in the truck.
Before leaving, I checked the main hall once more.
Every wall bore a human impression.
Some stood, some crouched, one on all fours. Their edges were darker than before, glossy with moisture.
The original figure near the stairs had stepped forward several inches; a faint trail of wet footprints glistened where there hadn’t been floorboards yesterday.
They ended where I stood.
I backed toward the door.
A soft sound followed, like someone peeling themselves away from wallpaper.
Outside, the air felt colder than it should have been.
Fog clung low across the field, thick and yellow-gray.
The orchard smell returned with it — not rot, but bloom. Apple blossom, though every tree was long dead.
I carried the camera in both hands, the strap biting my neck.
The house’s windows reflected no light, only their own shape, black within black.
Halfway to the truck, I looked back.
A dull sheen ran down the outer siding in vertical bands, as if rain had begun falling only on that one structure.
The moisture moved, following the lines of the interior walls I’d walked earlier.
It pulsed once, a shimmer that rippled outward and faded.
Then something behind the second-story window moved — not the curtain, which had rotted years ago, but the wall itself, swelling and relaxing like a chest drawing breath.
I kept walking.
The mud swallowed each step and gave it back in suction pops, a noise like lips parting.
I made camp in the truck that night.
Wind moved through the orchard plain, whispering over the old irrigation pipes.
I opened my field notebook to log the day’s data. The pages stuck together from damp fingers I hadn’t realized were wet.
At 23:00 I heard a slow tapping.
It came from the passenger side of the truck, steady and polite.
The glass fogged from the inside as though I were exhaling against it, but I wasn’t breathing.
When I wiped it clear, I saw only the reflection of my lamp and the silhouette of the house, small and patient across the field.
I left the engine running until dawn.
The fuel gauge needle didn’t move.
Morning brought wind and thin sunlight.
I returned to the house once, against every instinct, to retrieve the camera I’d left inside.
The air was cold, dry, empty.
The wallpaper had turned pale again.
Every silhouette gone — only faint rings where the moisture had been, outlines drying into memory.
In the master bedroom, my cot was gone.
Only a damp rectangle on the floor remained.
Its dimensions matched my body.
I packed the camera and left quickly, but the air outside felt heavier.
I could smell blossom again, faint as breath.
When I turned the ignition, the clock on the dashboard blinked once, frozen at 10:22, and refused to reset.
I filed the report that night from the field tent.
The data was incomplete.
The humidity reader still read zero, but my hands left wet prints on the paper as I wrote.
Something dripped behind me — slow, regular.
I told myself it was condensation on the canvas.
It kept perfect rhythm with my pulse.
I didn’t turn around.
I wrote until the ink thinned from moisture and the words blurred.
[End of recovered material]