When I was much younger, before my sister was born and before we all moved to live with my step-dad, my mother and I moved in to an old house. Like any old house, it made strange noises that while easily explained - floorboards bending, wooden beams creaking, pipes clanging, the boiler rumbling - were especially disconcerting of a night, in the dark, when everybody was tucked away in bed. At least they were to seven year old me. I'd get scared by a noise, go find my mother, she'd tell me not to be silly, that there was nothing wrong and nothing to worry about and send me back to bed. Or at least she did until it reached the point where she no longer believed that to be true.
Slowly but surely, the noises of a night became more frequent and more distinct. After a while, the noises settled in to a routine. Every night at around the same time, we'd hear what sounded like footsteps coming up the stairs and every time it happened I'd run in to my mother's room and hide in her bed. After a few weeks of this, I think she was as scared as I was. Every night we'd try to sleep, and every night we'd be awoken by the footsteps on the staircase. Or what sounded like footsteps anyway. After a while we'd wait up for them, they'd come, and we'd count them. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Always twelve. Slow, plodding steps. Twelve of them. Around 9pm every night. Like someone drunkenly scaling the stairs, only our staircase only had eleven steps. Strange, but not really the strangest thing about the ordeal, so it wasn't something we dwelled on.
Some nights, we'd summon the courage to actually sit atop the staircase and wait for the noises to see if anything was actually visible. There wasn't. Thankfully. But like clockwork, the footsteps would come. And then they just stopped. After a while, things settled down to the way they'd been before. The house would still make noises of a night but compared to the footsteps, the sound of water running through old pipes or a creaking door didn't seem so scary any more. And then shit went crazy. One night I woke up to what sounded like not one person walking up the stairs, but a whole group of people, one after the other. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. And whereas before that night, it had sounded like someone slowly making their way upstairs, this was different. Whoever, whatever, was coming up the stairs wasn't walking any longer. It was running. They were running. After a solid minute of this (that I had heard, I don't know how long it had been going on before it woke me up) I heard my mother scream - and this scared me even more than the footsteps - "LEAVE US ALONE!" with this horrible, desperate pleading in her voice that I had never heard before, and thankfully have never heard since. And then it stopped. And this time, it never started again. At least not while we lived there.
A few years after that, when we were getting ready to move, we had to fix some things up. One of which was fixing the pipes that ran underneath the floorboards. Someone came over and ripped the floorboards up to get to them, right at the foot of the stairs. And there, lying underneath where the floor had been, was what my mother flat-out refused to acknowledge at the time (much to the confusion of the guy fixing the pipes), and refuses to discuss to this day, but that still managed to turn her white as a sheet when she saw it - a step. A twelfth step. Or more accurately, the first of twelve steps. Twelve steps. Twelve footsteps. I just made this up. Or did I??
