The Long Porch

My aunt left me her place on Hensel Lake when she died last September. I had visited once as a boy and remembered almost nothing about it, so I drove up alone on a Friday afternoon to see what I had inherited. The road in was a dirt track with a spine of grass down the center, flanked by old tamaracks that had gone the color of tobacco. The cottage sat at the end of the track on a low rise above the water, and the porch was the first thing I noticed about it, because the porch was longer than the cottage had any reason to support.

It ran the full width of the front wall and then kept going. A plank walkway wrapped the left side of the house, turned the corner, and extended past the corner in a straight line for another forty feet before ending in a railing that looked out over nothing in particular. I thought, at first, that my aunt had built an addition out there and later torn it down. The posts looked the right age. The wood was silvered and cupped. When I stepped onto the boards they held me without a sound.

Inside, the cottage was small and tidy and smelled of pine sap. There was a single bedroom, a kitchen with a hand pump at the sink, and a note on the counter in a handwriting that was not my aunt’s.

The note said: After dark, do not look down the porch. It keeps going.

I looked at the note for a long time. Then I looked through the cupboards for more notes, because that is the kind of person I am. There were none. There was a box of tea, a jar of honey, and six matching coffee cups hanging from small brass hooks. I made tea. I carried the note out to the porch and read it again in the afternoon light.

The porch ended where it had ended an hour earlier. Past the railing, the ground sloped into a tangle of ferns and the lake sat below that, gray and unreflective. A fly landed on the railing and walked the length of it and took off again. I put the note in my pocket and went inside and forgot about it until dusk.

At dusk I was washing the cup when I heard a chair rock.

It was the soft, hollow knock of wood on wood, the specific sound of a rocking chair tipping onto its forward runners and then back. It came from the direction of the side porch, past the corner of the house. I held very still. I was not a nervous man. I had lived alone for eleven years and I knew the sounds my own body made in a quiet kitchen. The rocking went on for six or seven beats and then paused.

Then it started again, but further away.

I stepped out of the kitchen and onto the porch. The sun was almost down. The air smelled of the lake. I told myself I would walk to the corner and look, and that whatever was there I would deal with the way a reasonable adult deals with things.

I walked to the corner. I looked.

The porch kept going.

It kept going in a way that was not possible, because I had seen it end that afternoon at forty feet, and this porch did not end. It stretched away from me under a ceiling I could not see, lit by no light I could identify, and along its left railing sat rocking chairs. Not many at first. Three, then four, then, as my eyes adjusted, a dozen. Each chair held a person. The person closest to me was a woman in a flowered dress, her hands folded in her lap, her face turned toward the railing. She was rocking. So was the man behind her. So was the figure behind him, and the one past that, all the way down the long impossible porch, so that the knocking of the runners was not one sound but a slow soft thunder that rolled away from me into the dark.

None of them looked up. I do not know how I knew that none of them would look up even if I screamed, but I knew it. I backed into the kitchen and closed the door and slid the bolt and stood with my back to the wall.

The rocking continued through the night. I listened to it until the sky grayed at the windows, and then I listened to it stop, one chair at a time, from the furthest away to the nearest, until only the closest chair was still moving, and then that one stopped too, and the porch was quiet, and when I looked through the window the side porch ended at forty feet and the sun was coming up over the lake.

I drove back to town that morning and rented a room at the motel by the highway. I called a realtor. I told her I wanted to sell the cottage sight unseen to the first buyer who would take it, and I told her I was willing to lose money on the sale, and she said she would do her best. She called back two days later to say that the listing had been pulled from the system. She said this as if the system had done it on its own.

That night, at the motel, I heard a chair rock at the foot of my bed.

It was the same sound. The same runners, the same tempo. When I turned on the light there was no chair, but the sound did not stop. It moved, during the following week, from the motel room to my car on the drive home, from my car to the hallway of my apartment building, and from the hallway into my own kitchen. Last Thursday I woke to find a thin strip of silvered porch plank running along the floor beside my bed, as though a carpenter had laid it there in the night. It was warm to the touch. It smelled of pine sap and lake water. I pried it up with a butter knife and threw it into the dumpster behind the building, and when I came back upstairs there was a second plank beside the first.

I am writing this from the cottage. I drove back here yesterday because I did not know where else to go. The porch is longer today than it was when I arrived. I have measured it. It was forty feet and now it is forty-eight, and the new eight feet has a rocking chair on it, and the rocking chair is mine from my apartment in the city, the one my mother gave me when I was nineteen, and I do not know how it got here.

I have made tea. I have put the note back on the counter exactly where I found it, because whoever comes here next is going to need it more than I did, and because I am beginning to understand that the note was not written by my aunt either. It was written by whoever was here before her. The handwriting changes a little every time I look at it. It has begun to look like my own.

The sun is almost down. I can hear the runners on the far end of the porch already, starting up their slow knock. I do not think I will be able to stay away from the corner tonight. I do not think any of us could, in the end. That is how the porch fills.

If you are reading this in the drawer of the kitchen where I am about to leave it, do not go to the corner. Do not count the chairs. Do not look for the one that is empty. There will be one. There is always one. It is the chair that is still warm.

Credit: StoreMan

Please note the author of this Creepypasta does NOT give permission for it to be reproduced on any medium