The House in My Dreams Had Started Receiving My Mail

The first letter was a reminder to book a dental appointment.

That was what bothered me afterward. I could have dismissed a warning written in blood. My mind had apparently gone to the trouble of inventing a prepaid return envelope.

I found it on the mat of a house I had been dreaming about for eleven nights.

The house stood at the end of a narrow lane between two brick walls. It had a gray front door, a brass knocker, and a kitchen that smelled faintly of boiled cabbage. There were hooks in the hallway for coats. All six were empty.

Nothing ever chased me there. I walked from room to room until I woke up. Sometimes I opened a cupboard. Once I spent what felt like an hour trying to get a bathroom window unstuck.

By the fourth night, I had started drawing the floor plan over breakfast. I read about recurring dreams and browsed the dream-analysis readers on PsychicOz, trying to decide how I would explain the place to someone else. I kept getting stuck on the ordinary details. Would anyone understand why an empty coat hook frightened me more than a nightmare?

Then the letter appeared.

My name was spelled correctly. So was the name of my dentist. Beneath my name, however, was an address I had never seen before.

14 Harrow Lane.

No town. No postal code.

I opened it because that is what you do with a letter bearing your name. Inside was the usual reminder that I was overdue for a checkup. There was even a photograph of the dentist smiling beside a plastic tooth.

When I woke, I found the same reminder on my real doormat.

It had my real address.

I put it on the refrigerator and went to work.

Three nights later, the house received my electricity bill.

I recognized the amount before I unfolded the paper. I had been arguing about it for a week. There it was, down to the disputed eleven cents, addressed to me at Harrow Lane.

This time, I left it unopened.

As I stepped away, something slid across the kitchen floor behind me. I turned just quickly enough to see the corner of the envelope disappear beneath the refrigerator.

On Saturday, my mother called to ask how I was settling in.

“Settling into what?”

“The house.”

I told her I hadn’t moved. She went quiet, then apologized. She said she must have mixed up a conversation.

Before we hung up, she asked whether the kitchen still had those awful yellow cupboards.

I hadn’t told her about the cupboards.

That night, there were five letters on the mat.

A bank statement. A store catalog. An offer for broadband. An envelope from my mother, thick enough to contain a birthday card.

The fifth was handwritten.

I picked it up. The paper felt warm, as though someone had been holding it on the other side of the door.

Inside was one sheet.

“We have forwarded everything. There is no need to return to the previous address.”

At the bottom, in smaller writing:

“Please remember that correspondence establishes occupancy.”

I woke with my hand clenched around a fistful of bedsheet.

For the first time, I searched for the house instead of the dream.

There were dozens of Harrow Lanes. Houses numbered fourteen in villages and suburbs I had never visited. I spent most of Sunday examining property photographs. Every time I saw a gray door, my stomach tightened.

None of them had the right knocker.

At four that afternoon, I opened my banking app to check a payment. My address had changed.

The customer service agent said I had updated it on Thursday.

“Through the app?” I asked.

“By post.”

“What did I send you?”

She put me on hold. When she returned, her voice had become careful.

“A signed change-of-address form. There’s a note attached asking us to make sure no further correspondence goes to your old residence.”

“Can you read the note?”

Paper rustled.

“It says, ‘He keeps going back there.’”

I stayed at my sister’s that night.

She made up the sofa and left a lamp on. I hadn’t told her everything. I said there had been some trouble with my mail, and I didn’t want to be alone.

She understood that much.

I dreamed of the house anyway.

Something had changed in the hallway. A coat hung from the third hook. My coat. One sleeve was turned inside out, exactly as I had left it over my sister’s dining chair.

The kitchen table had been set for breakfast. There was a soft-boiled egg in a cup, a spoon, and a mug with a brown ring drying inside it.

Someone had eaten before I arrived.

I backed into the hall.

From upstairs came the sound of a drawer opening. Then a drawer closing.

A woman called my name.

She sounded like my mother through a bad telephone connection.

“Your things are up here.”

I tried the front door. It opened without resistance. Outside was the lane, the two brick walls, a strip of pale sky.

And my sister’s sofa.

It stood lengthwise between the walls, blocking the way. The lamp beside it was still on. Beneath the blanket, a person lay facing the back cushions.

I could see the small patch of scalp where my hair had started to thin.

Behind me, the woman began to come downstairs.

I woke so violently that I pulled the lamp off the side table.

My sister found me crawling backward across her living room.

She looked from me to the blanket.

Then she asked who had been lying beside me.

The following day, I went to a post office.

I brought the reminder from my dentist. I had carried it in my pocket since Sunday, checking the address whenever I needed to reassure myself that it still existed.

The woman at the counter examined the envelope while I explained that somebody was redirecting my mail.

“Does this person actually live at your address?” she asked.

“It’s my name.”

“Right. So you’re the person being moved.”

I asked how to stop it.

She gave me a number to call. I wrote it down, although I already knew what the person answering would tell me. A form. My signature. A note somebody had helpfully attached.

As I turned away, she handed an envelope back to the man at the next counter.

“Write ‘Not at this address,’” she told him. “Then put it back in the mail.”

That night, I went to bed holding a black marker.

I found it in my hand when I arrived at the house.

The hallway was crowded now. Shoes beneath the hooks. My umbrella in a stand. A framed photograph from my sister’s wedding hung beside the stairs.

In the photograph, I stood between the newlyweds.

Something behind the glass was slowly turning its head toward me.

I kept my eyes on the mat.

There was one envelope. Heavy cream paper. My full name, including the middle name I never used.

I crouched and wrote across it.

NOT AT THIS ADDRESS.

Upstairs, a drawer slammed.

I turned the envelope over and wrote it again. Then I pushed it through the brass letter slot in the front door.

It stopped halfway.

Someone outside had taken hold of the other end.

For a moment, we held it between us.

“You opened the first one,” the woman said behind me.

I pushed harder.

“You answered to the name.”

The paper slipped out of my fingers.

The house went quiet.

When I looked up, the coat hooks were empty. The shoes were gone. There was a pale rectangle on the wall where the wedding photograph had hung.

I woke in my own bed.

For several minutes, I cried with relief.

I haven’t dreamed of the house again.

There have been difficulties since then.

The bank couldn’t find my account. My employer had no record of me. My sister answered her door with the chain on and asked whether I needed her to call someone.

I told her about the lamp. The sofa. The person beside me.

She shut the door before I finished.

The apartment keys still worked, but there were children’s shoes in my hallway. A man came out of the kitchen holding a dish towel. He wanted to know how I had got in.

I left the keys on his table.

I’m staying in a hostel now. They took cash. Yesterday, I went back to the post office with the envelope from my dentist.

The address was still printed on it. The space above it was blank.

I asked whether they could trace the person it had been sent to.

The woman examined it under her desk lamp.

“There’s no name,” she said.

I told her there used to be.

She looked at me for a long time. Then she reached beneath the counter and brought out a plastic tray.

It was full of envelopes. Hundreds of them, perhaps. All with addresses. All with an empty space where the name should have been.

She pushed the tray toward me.

“Is there one you recognize?”