A Nightmare on Valleyfield Drive

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #180. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Now this.

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Three years ago, my wife and I left Boston in search of a dream – a city where we could afford to buy a house. For too long we rented apartments which felt like the landlords were stealing our money and giving us nothing in return except dripping ceilings and flooded basements. By the end of our time in Boston, what was our $2,500 a month doing for us? Lining some douchebag’s pocket while our stock pan collected rainwater dripping through the roof? We decided to move back to my home, St. Louis. Here, we could find affordable living.

We hid out in my parents’ home for a while, shuffling between my high school bedroom and the more spacious basement. My parents had long since taken down my posters of The Exorcist and The Thing and replaced them with some grotesque Thomas Kinkade hellscapes. As we spent more time there, starting our new life in an old town, we quickly realized that we needed a place of our own – a life outside of their benevolent, tentacled embrace.

We bought our “dream” home. A three-bed, one-bath mid-century ramble in the St. Louis suburb, Glennmeadow. It felt good to get out of that urban deathtrap where I grew up and into the safety of a street with a good school district and no sidewalks. I would never again have to face that fear of having random people walking by my house on a path safe from inhuman, earth-destroying, two-ton machines. No, I traded that all in for random people walking by my house on a path exclusively designed for these same monstrosities. But we were safe in our new house – safe from the eldritch horrors lurking in Boston harbor.

We bought our house during a torrential downpour, the type that is becoming ever more frequent during these days of climate collapse. We closed the deal, only $3k over asking, a steal according to all reports. For a while, it all felt a little surreal. We had moved plenty in our lives (all counted, I have personally lived in four different countries, four different states and 10+ different cities) and even though we actually purchased this house, it still felt like a rental.

But then everything changed.

All the small annoyances became symptoms of something more pernicious afoot. It started with the lights flickering, blinking on and off at seemingly random intervals. The loud, painful beeping of the carbon monoxide detector.

Not much later, we noticed a rather putrid smell coming out of the basement, like sewage, leaking out of a dank sewer. One lonely Friday, when my wife and kid were out of the house, I made it a personal mission to find the source. The drains were clear – the basement was dry. But then I saw them; crunchy but slimy, oozing but somehow too dry barnacles, blooming out of the sewage stack, growing thicker and more viscous by the minute. How had we missed this in the inspection? Yet there they were, slowly taking over the house from the stack on up.

When the plumber stood outside in the early morning dark, illuminated by a single streetlamp, I finally felt like we had found the cure, and after a hefty payday, he was able to rid our new abode of the pesky barnacles, clean from top to bottom by replacing the sewer stack. The holy priesthood of plumbers had truly saved us from this invasion.

But the curse was never truly lifted, just transformed. Only a few weeks after the barnacles had been cleansed, I saw the next incursion, crawling just out of the corner of my eye – creeping past the sink. Where could it have come from? Was there a crack in the wall? Was it the revenge of the barnacle somehow? After digging around, I found the answer much worse. There was a steady line of ants, streaming in through the front door, like they had always lived there. Once we found the source, we exterminated those intruders with a vengeance. Their bodies littered the threshold to my house, clustered by hundreds, filled with viscous poison, feeling their own death only after transferring it to the other. The ants kept swarming outside, but as I slowly traced sigils of white vinegar and poison across my door frame, I was sure I could keep them out, for the time being.

Then, things seemed to settle down. We fell into a routine. We even welcomed a new member into our family, a baby kitten found at the crossroads of a forgotten town, the ravages of deindustrialization. Her tiny meow stole our hearts and as we bundled her in our car, the kid declared her name: Lucien.

As we settled into our new life with our Lucien, something was clearly amiss. Her fur was soft, but her claws were sharper than razors, more like chainsaws on all four arms. Her purr was sweet, but her bite was fierce and unapologetic. We would often wake with her staring at us from our headboard, her yellow eyes lit with a black flame that felt like an ember from another world. One warm, summer afternoon, I walked in on her in the basement, pacing in the cool dark of the air conditioning, slowly tracing the floor. I watched, mesmerized, as she slowly moved from one point to the next. She had been repeating this every day. I asked the vet, but they responded this was typical for a cat adapting to a new house, and we just needed to be patient. She would become more amenable as she got older, and once she was spayed.

So, we waited, hoping that that fateful day in September when we excised her organs would alleviate the constant howling, scratching, and biting. But, as I tried to wrangle her into her cat carrier, her razors slit my wrists. I dropped her and she scurried back downstairs to resume her pacing. In a fury, I rushed after her, grabbing a crowbar. Ranting like a madman, I began prying up the floorboards, one by one, and slowly unveiled a black pentagram burned into the cement foundation.

It was then that I knew there was only one solution left. As I finished laying out the trail of gasoline, I could still see those black flames watching me from the window. I lit a match.

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Back, safely ensconced in the basement of my parents’ urban home, I knew my nightmare of suburban home ownership was over. But I also knew a new nightmare was just dawning . . . the millennial curse of living in your parents’ basement in your 30s.

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Noah Springer is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @noahjspringer.