Pat had picked the house up for next to nothing. Nestled in a residential neighborhood on an oddly shaped lot jammed between an overgrown creek bed where it fed into a larger river, the place had been empty for decades. It was a tiny house. Just four rooms, but what more did Pat need.
He'd never been good at relationships. The last try a few years ago had been a disaster. Her constant cheating and proclivity to treat him as a platonic sugar daddy was relentlessly toxic and things just fell apart before they really got started. Since then, he'd just decided to go it alone.
The place needed a lot of work. The minimum had been done by the prior owners to keep it relatively weathertight, but it was old, pre-dating the rest of the houses in the area by a lot. It sat askew on the lot, out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. It was the out-of-character nature that had caught Pat's attention in the first place.
He'd moved things in from his apartment, made a run to the local big box for some odds and ends, and was settling down with a good book that first evening when the lamp flickered. Not surprising as the wiring was probably 100 years old. Add one more thing to the list.
Retiring to bed, he turned out the lights. The quarter moon shone through the window casting a dull glow that silhouetted the sparse furnishings. He was having a little issue falling asleep. Maybe a bit of paranoia as he felt somehow that there was another presence in the home. That something was somehow watching him. But that was impossible.
However, as the first few weeks had passed, the feeling that there was something or someone else there grew rather than dissipated. He found himself doing compensatory things that he wasn't fully aware of and couldn't fully explain to himself. Like sleeping on one side of the bed, rather than the middle of the mattress. Sitting on the same end of the sofa all the time. Things that didn't really make sense to him.
It was late at night when he first saw her. Just a shimmering outline that blinked into focus for a microsecond and then was gone. But the vision was indelibly etched in his mind's eye. A young woman in a simple rustic dress. Like something from colonial days. She was pretty and seemed... sad in a way that touched him. He blinked his eyes several times but she was gone.
There was no doubt in his mind that what he'd seen was real. Pat was a lot of things, but he wasn't prone to bouts of imaginary fantasy. And a week later, when he'd gotten up to get a drink of water. She was there at the kitchen table. Sitting placidly, a wistful look on her pretty face, her hands folded in her lap.
Suddenly in the silence he heard a feminine voice in his head.
"You're up late, Patrick." It seemed to say.
"Who are you. What are you doing here?" He whispered to the empty room.
"This is my house, Patrick. I've been here a long, long time." It replied.
"How did you come to be here?" Pat wondered.
"My husband and I came here. Before any of this...town was here. It was just wilderness then. We built this house to live our lives in, and to raise our family. But none of that ever happened." The voice explained.
"Why? What did happen?" Pat asked.
"It was the end of Autumn, and he'd gone on a trapping trip far away to the North country. He was gone a long time. Longer than planned and we'd run out of provisions. I was so hungry. I found some berries and ate them. Then I felt sick and fainted. And that's how he found me a couple weeks later." She explained.
