Horror

by Scribe Leaf Library · 5 min read · 2 views

The invitation had said twelve for dinner, and Marguerite counted the place settings twice before the guests arrived, the way she always did, because an odd number at her table felt, to her, like an unfinished sentence. Twelve settings. Twelve chairs. A dinner party at Aldermere House, the old manor she'd inherited from an aunt she'd barely known, hosted mostly to prove to herself that the place could still hold warmth and laughter after decades of standing empty. The guests arrived in the usual scattered way guests do, coats taken, drinks poured, the low murmur of a party finding its rhythm. Marguerite counted heads out of habit as she moved through the room and stopped, mid-count, at thirteen. She counted again. Twelve guests. Herself made thirteen, which was fine, expected, the head of the table always was. But she recounted the guests alone — not herself, just them — twice more, and both times arrived, impossibly, at thirteen, though she could name every single face in the room and account for every invitation she'd sent. She said nothing. It was, she told herself firmly, simply a counting error, the kind anyone makes in a crowded room with wine already flowing. She sat down at the head of the table and dinner began. It was somewhere around the second course that she noticed the place setting at the table's far end — a spot she was certain she hadn't set, a chair she was certain she hadn't counted among the twelve — occupied by a woman in dark green, engaged in what appeared to be a perfectly pleasant conversation with the guests on either side of her, both of whom seemed entirely unbothered by her presence, laughing at something she'd said, refilling her wine without a second thought. Marguerite asked her housekeeper, quietly, in the kitchen between courses, who exactly the woman in green was. The housekeeper, an older woman named Sibyl who'd worked at Aldermere for longer than Marguerite had been alive, went very still. "What does she look like," Sibyl asked, in a voice carefully stripped of alarm. Marguerite described her: dark green dress, old-fashioned in cut, hair pinned the way women hadn't worn it in decades, a quiet, watchful smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. Sibyl set down the tray she was holding with great care, as if any sudden movement might break something more important than china. "That was your aunt's dearest friend," she said slowly. "Before your aunt inherited this house, before she was even born to it. A guest at every dinner party held at this table for two hundred years, as far as the old records go back. She doesn't attend often. When she does, it's never anyone's choice but hers." "That's not possible," Marguerite said, with the particular firmness people use when trying to convince themselves rather than anyone else. "She's sitting right there. She's talking. Everyone can see her." "Everyone can," Sibyl agreed. "That's rather the point of her. She's not hiding. She's simply always been here, whether the guest list accounts for her or not. The house remembers its own count even when the living forget to." Marguerite returned to the dining room unsettled but unwilling, in front of a table of guests, to make a scene over what still might, she told herself, be some elaborate misunderstanding — a friend of a friend, uninvited but harmless, slipped in amid the chaos of arrivals. She resolved to ask the woman directly, politely, who had brought her. But when she reached the far end of the table, chair thirteen sat empty. Not recently vacated — undisturbed, napkin still folded, wine glass still full, as if no one had ever sat there at all. She asked the guests on either side, the two who'd been laughing with the woman in green not five minutes before, and both of them looked at her with polite, faint confusion, insisting there had only ever been twelve at the table tonight, that they hadn't noticed an empty chair because there had never been thirteen to begin with. Marguerite did not sleep well that night, long after the last guest had gone and the house had settled back into its old, patient silence. She lay awake turning it over, unable to decide whether she'd imagined the entire thing or witnessed something the house itself had arranged for reasons of its own. She hosted another dinner party three months later, twelve guests again, counted meticulously, place settings checked and rechecked before a single guest arrived. Halfway through the meal, she made herself look down the length of the table, bracing for what she half expected and half dreaded to find. Chair thirteen was empty. Genuinely empty this time — no extra place setting, no extra guest, nothing but an empty chair Marguerite was certain she hadn't set out at all, sitting at a table built, she now remembered reading somewhere in her aunt's old papers, for exactly thirteen from the very beginning, a table shortened at some point in its long history down to a more conventional twelve. She has hosted six dinner parties since inheriting Aldermere House. The woman in green has joined three of them, always uninvited, always perfectly at ease, always gone the moment anyone tries to look at her directly rather than simply alongside her. Marguerite has stopped trying to explain it to her guests, who never seem to remember the extra face at the table once the evening ends, and has stopped, mostly, trying to explain it to herself. She has taken instead to setting thirteen places every time, whether the guest list calls for it or not, on the theory — offered to her once by Sibyl, and never quite disproven — that a house this old keeps its own accounting of who belongs at its table, and that it's generally wiser, when a house has strong opinions about its numbers, to simply set enough places and let it decide who, on any given night, chooses to fill the extra chair.