The Stranger Upstairs: A Novel

by Lisa M. Matlin

Genres: Horror; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Most people wouldn’t buy an infamous murder house to renovate for fun . . . but Sarah Slade is not most people.
 
“This debut novel deftly explores our shadows—the dark parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. I couldn’t stop reading.”—Julia Bartz, New York Times bestselling author of The Writing Retreat

A therapist and self-help writer with all the answers, Sarah Slade has just bought a gorgeous Victorian in the community of her dreams. Turns out, you can get a killer deal on a house where someone was murdered. Plus, renovating Black Wood House makes for great blog content and a decent distraction from her failing marriage. Good thing nobody knows that her past is just as filthy as the bloodstain on her bedroom floor.

But the renovations are fast becoming a nightmare. Sarah imagined custom avocado wallpaper, massive profits, and an appreciative husband who wants to share her bed again. Instead, the neighbors hate her guts and her husband still sleeps on the couch. And though the builders attempt to cover up Black Wood’s horrifying past, a series of bizarre accidents, threatening notes, and unexplained footsteps in the attic only confirms for Sarah what the rest of the town already knew: Something is very wrong in that house.

With every passing moment, Sarah’s life spirals further out of control—and with it, her sense of reality. But as she peels back the curling wallpaper and discovers the house’s secrets, she realizes that the deadly legacy of Black Wood House has only just begun.

Release date: September 12, 2023

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 278

Reader says this book is...: emotionally riveting (1) haunting (1)

Sample

Chapter 1

April 26

Welcome to Black Wood House.

This is the front door Janet Campbell burst out of. This is the barren yard she ran across, fleeing for her life. Those are her cries echoing down the lonely street for forty years now.

Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me.

Upstairs is a bedroom with bloodstained floorboards. This is where Susan Campbell bled to death, and this is where I’ll sleep. Some people think that’s messed up.

I am not some people.

I carry a stack of moving boxes up the long stretch of dirt driveway snaking through the yard like a scar. It’s silent except for the musical warble of a lone magpie and the half-hearted squabble of the cockatoos in the blackwood tree.

My eyes drift past it to the house. Not for the first time I wonder, Why the hell did someone build a Victorian Gothic in a stuffy country town like Beacon?

Black Wood House is sharp and strange and utterly silent. Its flaking paint reminds me of peeling skin, and the steeply pitched spire looks like a towering black sword. There’s only one window on the front of the house: a pointed arch overlooking the lounge room and matching the front door. Whoever built Black Wood clearly did not want anybody peeking in.

A private, sprawling estate. That’s how the probate realtor described it. It sounds beautiful, and it would have been. Back then. I can imagine it—pea-green lawns large enough for a dozen families to picnic on.

But after forty years of neglect, all that’s left are stark, flat grounds ravaged by kangaroo shit and echidna burrows and choked with knee-high weeds. The property has a barren feel to it, like the very ground is grieving. Like it’s stuck in the memory of that day.

And yet the house itself seems detached from the misery. Like it doesn’t give a shit what happened here all those years ago. Like it wouldn’t care if it happened again.

I haul the boxes inside, up the stairs, to my new bedroom. The murder room.

I don’t know what’s more sinister about this room, the faded bloodstain by my bed or the concrete-gray wallpaper. Corpse skin—that’s what it reminds me of. And worse.

Etched into the wallpaper is a massive forest. The black trunks are taller than me, and high above the canopy is a sky dotted with stars. Back in the day, I bet it was a peaceful scene. I imagine Susan propped up in her bed, sipping a hot cup of tea and staring at the forest after a long day of cooking, cleaning, and whatever the hell women did back in the seventies.

Maybe she even felt like she was inside it, breathing in the clean air, far away from the pressures of motherhood and her soon-to-be homicidal husband. It would have been dove gray then. Pretty.

I dump the boxes on the floor and reach up on tiptoe to trace my index finger over a diamond-shaped leaf. It instantly flakes off and death spirals to the floor.

Nestled in the crook of a low branch is a family of blackbirds, staring at me with dead eyes. The baby birds look underfed and frightened; their rib cages seem to poke through their papery skin. The mother bird hovers over her children, her eyes sad and desperate. But she can’t help them, because both her wings are missing.

My husband heaves our marriage bed against the back wall, then straightens up and wipes his hands like he’s touched something filthy. He stopped sleeping with me months ago, and our queen-sized velvet bed stares at him reproachfully. Instead, he sleeps quite happily on our couch, though I never once asked him to. He plays the Xbox until the early hours, while I lie awake at 3 a.m., reflecting anxiously on all the things I need to fix. Like my marriage.

I don’t like sleeping alone, but God, it’s better than the crushing loneliness of sleeping next to someone who doesn’t want you night after night.

“Thank you,” I tell him awkwardly. “For bringing it up here.”

My husband’s eyes drift to the pillow-sized bloodstain on the floor. It’s impossible not to stare at it. I wonder if he’s imagining it—the morning after the murder, the blood all glossy red like lipstick.

Maybe it’s Maybelline.

Or maybe it’s murder.

“We’ll need to replace these floorboards.” He steps back, grimacing. “For now, just buy a rug to cover it with.”

I nearly snort my laughter. That’s him. Let’s throw a rug over the issue. If you can’t see it, then maybe all that ugliness isn’t even there.

Maybe it’s why he can’t stand looking at me.

I follow him toward the door, thinking of the moving truck waiting outside, jammed full of our five-year life together. We’ve spent nearly everything buying this house, and the renovations will have to be spread out over the next year. And even though we’ve lived in Melbourne for two years, we don’t exactly have any close friends we can stay with while we renovate…. Well, maybe Joe does, but I certainly don’t. The fact that he was willing to make this move with me meant a lot. He’s still here. Still willing to invest in this house and, more importantly, us. I haven’t lost him yet.

I pass by the only window in the room, about the size of my laptop screen. It’s a fixed window, so there’s no way to open it unless I smash my fist through it. And I’m sure I’ll be tempted after breathing in this stale air every night.

I stop and squint through the grime, looking out to my backyard, and the first thing I see are the graves. They’re draped in ivy, stained sickly green, and covered with little scabs of moss and mold. Susan. Bill. Twin headstones for the former owners of Black Wood House. I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to bury Susan Campbell next to her husband. Her killer. But there they are, out my bedroom window, side by side for eternity.

I asked the realtor about it, but he didn’t know who buried them. No one knows what happened to poor Janet Campbell after she fled the town. She could be dead. All she is now is a piece of folklore. A ghost story before she even died. Poor girl.

“Are you sure you want this room?” Joe asks. “What about the others?” He nods in the direction of the hallway, where three other garage-sized bedrooms lie dormant.

I shake my head and move to brush past him. He stopped kissing me this year, but he still lets me hug him sometimes. I have to time those coveted hugs correctly, or he’ll rear back like a pissed-off horse.

A year ago, I would’ve tackled him to the bed. Or maybe I would’ve just thrown my arms around his neck, looked him full in the face, and said, “I’m so proud of us, Joe. Look how far we’ve come.”

Now I slink sadly past him, a goddamn ghost of a wife.

I pad down the staircase, a spiraling black masterpiece that made me gasp the first time I saw it, and made Joe wince and murmur, “Bloody hell, what a nightmare.” It’s wrought iron, cool to the touch, and every time I descend, I feel like a Disney villain.

I adore it.

Joe calls down, “Don’t you want a bedroom a bit less…I dunno, murdery?”

I reach the second-to-last step, breathing through my mouth. The house has been shut up for decades, and it smells like a sweaty sheet. “I’m good, thanks.” I don’t know how to tell him the truth, because it’s strange even to me.

I didn’t choose that room. It chose me.

Just like the house.

I pull open the front door, grunting from the weight of it. It’s heavy oak, and once we get some linseed oil into it, it’ll look like a flame-red candle in the dark. My flat-faced cat, Reaper, bolts out before I can stop him. He screamed the whole forty-minute car ride here while Joe turned up the radio and yelled, “Do we have to bring him with us?”

I ignored them both. Joe’s been trying to get rid of Reaper ever since I stubbornly brought him home five years ago. I wandered around an adoption center, staring at wire cages and reading cutesy taglines: Meet Lynny, a quiet and sweet cat! Jack is the loveliest boy!

I stopped in front of the last cage, and the tagline simply read, Free. Underneath that in apologetic text, it said, This cat doesn’t like kids, dogs, loud noises, being picked up, and he’s been known to get into fights with other cats. He’s very possessive of his blanket and his food.

I smiled and peered through the cage bars. And there he was—a silver-haired Angora cat wrapped in a filthy blanket, staring at me with angry blue eyes. I loved him instantly.

I step onto the porch and watch as Reaper climbs the blackwood tree in our yard. He’s six now and still hates everything with an inexhaustible passion, and I really admire him for that. My boy.

I wrap my arms around myself, cold in the morning sun. You can’t even see the road from here, and it’s quiet now except for a lone cockatoo chattering in the tree. Reaper glares at the cockatoo murderously but makes no attempt to climb higher up the deeply fissured bark. I reach into my pocket for my phone and snap a picture of Reaper and the bird nestled in the bony branches. I quickly tap in a caption:

Moving Day at Black Wood House! These gorgeous guys approve! Head to my website for all the renovation updates! #BlackWoodHouse #cockatoo #Melbourne #reaper #murderhouse

I hesitate, wondering if I should use that last hashtag. It’s a bit much, I suppose. But it would definitely drive in some much-needed traffic and maybe a sponsor or two. There’s already interest in my website again, now that I’ve promised to document the renovations.

I hit the post button and automatically scroll through my feed, full of painful-looking yoga poses, watermelon salads, and a tutorial on how to fake a lip job with one million likes. My thumb hovers over the screen, and I surprise myself by clicking off my phone and tucking it into my pocket. There’s something incongruous about standing on this hundred-year-old porch and scrolling through the atrocities of social media. It doesn’t feel right. It’s like the house disapproves. Like it wants me back inside, cutting apple slices and smiling adoringly at my shiny-haired children. Or maybe it wants me asleep in my bed so my husband can murder me.

Finally I step off the porch, head to the truck, and busy myself with the moving boxes. We have a surprising amount of crap, and most of it’s mine. I have a shopping problem. And a bit of an alcohol issue. And oh, everything else. Doesn’t take a therapist to realize I’m filling up the voids in my life with a whole lot of shit.

For the next few hours, my husband and I work together, unloading and unpacking. Reaper sneaks inside the house as soon as we unload the couch and spends the rest of the afternoon propped on a cushion, watching us lug the rest of our furniture in.

When the truck’s empty, I pull out a six-pack from under the driver’s seat. I really shouldn’t be drinking on anti-depressants, but there are a lot of things I shouldn’t be doing. Last week, I went up to a double dose, but Joe doesn’t know this. There’s a lot of things he doesn’t know. Doesn’t even care to.

He thanks me, reaches for the beer, and we walk in ear-splitting silence to our front porch as I chug mine. My doctor’s voice rings in my head. He was scribbling out my prescription, raising an eyebrow. “You know not to mix these with alcohol, right?”

“Of course!” I scoffed.

Tentatively, Joe taps his beer against mine with a reserved little clink. “Well…” he begins awkwardly, looking out to our gloomy front yard. “We did it.”

“Yes,” I say firmly. “We certainly did.”

Silence. We’re not used to communicating anymore. If we could still speak, what would we say? Perhaps I would finally admit the truth: Buying this house wasn’t just about building my brand and making a huge profit. I thought that renovating this house might help repair us too. I saw us working side by side, painting walls in amiable silence or sharing a beer as we pored over color charts.

After a while, Joe strolls off the creaking porch and disappears inside. I watch him go, wondering if I’m allowed to follow.

I lean over the porch railing instead, all bone dry and bleached from the sun. A bloated magpie lands with a squawk to my right, peering at me with dull red eyes. He tilts his head, waiting for food. I narrow my eyes at him. Nobody’s occupied this house for forty years. Who’s been feeding him?

“Sorry, mate. I got nothing for ya,” I tell him.

I step off the porch and head inside. The magpie watches, still and disapproving. I’m close enough to touch him, and he doesn’t even flinch. The neighbors must feed him.

Reaper perches on the back of the couch, watching Joe fiddle with the cords of his Xbox. It’s the first thing he insisted on before he agreed to move in: Get the electricity and Wi-Fi going for the bloody Xbox. It delayed our move-in day for two weeks, but hell, at least he’s here.

He switches the TV on, and the gigantic piece of modern technology clashes violently with the Brady Bunch kitchen and linoleum floor. The last time anyone lived here was the early eighties. It’s been frozen in time ever since. All our sleek, contemporary furniture is laughably out of place, and even Joe notices.

He smiles a bit guiltily. “I s’pose the house has never seen an Xbox before.”

I take a sip, swallow it down. “Shit, did they even have TV then?”

Joe reaches for the remote, adjusts the volume, and frowns. “Yeah, but only a few channels, I think.”

“Maybe that’s why he killed her.”

He snaps his eyes shut like he can’t believe I just said that, but his shoulders shake with guilty laughter. My heart glows. I haven’t made him laugh in a long time. I study him quietly, looking at him properly for the first time in ages. My husband’s handsome in a bland way. Average height, slim build—too slim, I think. I always have to remind him to eat, and if I don’t cook for him, he either makes two-minute noodles or simply goes hungry. He has phobias of flying, large crowds, talking on the phone, and any TV show with a laugh track. I suspect he has generalized anxiety disorder, but he’ll never get diagnosed, because the idea of picking up the phone and making an appointment terrifies him. Which is why I make all the phone calls. Which is why he needs someone like me: I get shit done while he wrings his pale hands and panics.

His eyes are watery blue, and his hair is thick and shiny black. We dyed it in a truck-stop bathroom when we fled Queensland, and we re-dye it every six weeks to cover up the roots. He’s fair-haired naturally, with pale lashes that blinked a lot and hair so blond it was almost silver. Black hair is too heavy for him. Everything is too heavy for him these days. ...