Once a year, my family would drive several hours north to spend a week with my grandparents at my father’s childhood home. The house occupied a quiet suburb, a small white ranch nestled in the shade of an enormous oak tree.
The front door ushered you into the living room, a space darkened by walnut paneling, leather furniture, and carpet the color of pine needles. A large bay window overlooking the front yard provided adequate illumination by day; by night a pair of lamps in the corners gave off the barest amount of rusty light.
One end of the living room opened onto the kitchen, from which could be accessed the garage and the basement. The other end led to a narrow hallway lined with doors. The dining room stood directly across from the living room; farther down were the bathroom on the right, and the linen closet and master bedroom on the left. At the very end, a small table stood against the wall, adorned with ornamental flowers piled up to form a sort of pedestal, upon which sat a cloth doll. It wore a primitive gray dress. Its face, sewn from pale fabric and framed in straw-colored hair, was utterly featureless. Directly to the right of this display was the door to the guest room. It was here that my family slept whenever we came to visit—my parents in the double bed that filled most of the space, and I in a creaking old cot tucked against the wall.
And it was here, one crisp week in autumn, that my experience began.
It was the first night of our stay. I had woken in the middle of the night to a bedroom that was profoundly dark; the only source of light was a dim prick of orange marking the light switch by the door. At first I lay still, listening to my parents’ deep breathing and trying not to disturb the creaky springs of my cot. But soon an urge I could no longer ignore forced me to rise and grope my way toward that orange beacon. I managed to find the doorknob without bruising my shins on any furniture or luggage, then I carefully pried the door open and ventured out in search of the bathroom.
I didn’t mind the hallway so much in the daytime, or when the ceiling-mounted lamp provided its warming glow. But this was nighttime, and I dared not turn the light on for fear of waking someone. Under these conditions, the hallway seemed to grow in the darkness, the far end retreating with every step I took. Yet even this I might have ignored as a mere curiosity, if not for the nagging sensation that, as I stepped out of the guest room, I was not alone in that corridor. It manifested as a tickling up my spine, an ethereal pressure of eyes upon my back—but there was no space behind me for anyone to occupy; I would have bumped into them immediately upon emerging from the guest room. As it was, in that cramped hall, there was barely space enough for the table with its display of flowers and doll.
Logic, however, is weak consolation for a child afraid of nocturnal specters. I darted through the blinding darkness as quickly as I dared, and reached the bathroom with its promise of light and safety.
After finishing my business, I stepped back out into the hallway. My hand trailed behind me to switch off the light. In that briefest of moments before everything was once again pitch-dark, I noticed a movement at the far end by the bedrooms.
A human figure, shadowed beyond the reach of the bathroom light, stepping silently away—
Then the hall was plunged into darkness, and myself into panic. At first I scrambled back in search of the bathroom light switch, but then stopped myself. It was only Grandma returning to her room. She must have come out to use the bathroom, and turned back when she saw it was occupied.
But my heart still pounded in my ears, and so I reached back and switched on the bathroom light one last time.
The hallway, sketched out in merest outlines, was empty. The door to the master bedroom was shut; that of the guest room open as I had left it. And at the end, palely reflecting the meager light, the empty face of the doll on the table.
Grandma. That’s who it was. I recognized her nightgown.
Once my heart rate had sufficiently slowed, I made myself turn off the bathroom light and began the trek back to my cot. I still felt like I wasn’t alone, but now the ticklish sensation was in front of me, slowing my progress instead of hastening it. My hand swept across the right-hand wall until it found the opening to the guest room. There I paused, turned to face the opposite door. A cold thought whispered through my head, If it was Grandma, why didn’t I hear the door shut? Still, I softly cleared my throat, and said in a small voice, “I’m done in there, Grandma.”
Then I darted across the threshold into the guest room, shutting the door behind me as swiftly as I dared, and burrowed under the blankets of my cot.
We planned to spend the next day visiting the zoo near my grandparents’ house. It was a hectic morning. In all the hubbub of preparing to leave—showering, getting dressed, eating breakfast, brushing teeth, packing lunch—I somehow found myself, just as we were piling into the car, without my jacket. I thought nothing of it, as children seldom do, but my mother did—it was a chilly autumn morning, after all. She sent me back inside while they all waited in the car.
My jacket, I knew, hung on the inside doorknob of the guest room. In my eagerness to retrieve it and depart for the zoo, I didn’t consider the path down which this brief quest would carry me—not until my rush through the living room was pulled up short by the glimpse of someone else entering the hallway ahead of me.
The glimpse was brief. Barely had I registered their presence before they had disappeared behind the intervening wall. I stood there for a moment in stunned silence, my joints unable to decide if they were iron or water. Memories of last night’s encounter stirred—like a sickly black dog raising its head…
Then the sunlight from the bay window warmed and emboldened me; I crept the rest of the way forward and peered into the hallway.
Empty. The dining room across the way, likewise. All the doors were open or shut as we’d left them, and I’d heard nothing to indicate they’d been tampered with.
I came here for my jacket, I reminded myself. Just grab it and get out of here.
I paused as I passed the bathroom, just long enough to confirm that it, too, was empty. Then again, when I reached the end where the doll waited on its throne of flowers, flanked by the two bedrooms. There, I stopped and listened for signs of movement behind either of the doors.
Silence.
Placing my hand on the knob for the guest room, I twisted it. Cautiously pushed it open. The room beyond was empty. I slipped inside.
My jacket was hanging on the inside knob; to retrieve it, I had to shut the door slightly behind me. I picked up the jacket, slid my arms into it, settled it properly upon my shoulders. Then I raised my hand to the door, rested it on the knob—
And then I froze.
Because I heard, from just behind the door, someone breathing.
Long, shaking breaths, as if drawn with great difficulty into shriveled lungs.
My eyes fixed themselves upon that gap between the door and its frame. I could see the corner of the doll’s table outside, the gray threads of its dress falling over the pastel flowers. The table’s polished brown leg reaching down to the floor. Anything else, including the owner of those softly rattling breaths, was hidden by the door.
I don’t know how long I would have stood there, paralyzed, if I hadn’t heard the front door open and mother’s voice calling me. In the wake of her summons, the sounds from the hallway ceased, and I finally worked up the courage to pull back the bedroom door and peek out.
Mother stood at the far end of the hall, fixing me with an impatient look, and between us: empty air.
My experience that morning distracted me all day. The animals at the zoo could barely hold my attention.
At noon, we sat down at a picnic table for a lunch of cold chicken sandwiches. I sat next to my grandmother so I could ask her the question that had been nagging me all morning.
“Grandma, was someone supposed to be in the house while we were gone?”
She shook her head. “No. Why?”
“I thought I saw someone when I went in to get my jacket.”
“Oh? What did they look like?”
It was only then that I realized I couldn’t form a clear picture in my head. “It was a girl, I think. I mean, I thought I saw a dress and long hair. I didn’t actually get a very good look.”
“Hm,” said Grandmother. “Maybe your imagination played a trick on you.”
“But I didn’t imagine it!”
“I’m not saying you did,” she replied in a conciliatory manner. “If you say you saw something, then you saw something—but maybe not a girl. I’ve known it happen that a car driving by, at certain times of day, can reflect the sunlight through the living room window so that it creates a stripe of sunlight moving across the wall. Perhaps you saw that, and your imagination made it into a girl.”
Could that have been all? I would have sworn, in the moment, that I’d seen more details than could be accounted for by a stray sunbeam and an overactive imagination; but try as I might, I couldn’t now conjure those details. All that filled my memory was a pale shape drifting out of sight into the hallway. The harder I tried to picture it, the less distinct it became, until I was forced to nod in acceptance of Grandmother’s theory.
As I returned to my lunch, I noticed my father watching our conversation from the other end of the picnic table. He hastily buried himself in his sandwich when he saw me looking at him, but not before I’d marked his curious expression.
My inability to adequately describe what I’d seen bothered me so much that, when we got back to the house late in the afternoon, I immediately set about trying to draw a picture. I reasoned that, since my memory was of something visual, a visual method of communication might be more effective. I could see what my crayons had committed to paper, compare that with the hazy impression in my mind, and make corrections as necessary.
It seemed to work. Once I was finished, I took a moment to examine my drawing: a girl, about my age, wearing a gray sleeveless dress; white stockings ending in a pair of dirty black shoes; a head topped with shoulder-length blonde hair. Only her face dissatisfied me; in fact, there was no face at all—only a blank patch of pale, pinkish skin. But I couldn’t think of any addition that would bring the drawing closer in line with my memory, and so I decided to leave it as it was. I packed up my crayons, then took the finished drawing to the kitchen where Grandma was preparing dinner.
Once I had her attention, I thrust the paper into her hands, and was about to explain—
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “I’d quite forgotten about that picture! Your father drew it when he was about your age. Where did you find it?”
Never before had I dreaded bedtime as much as I did that night. The very thought of walking down that hallway made my joints freeze up in protest. But it couldn’t be helped; all I could do was make sure I spent as little time in that shadowy corridor as possible. So my bedtime routine was one of quick dartings between the guest room and the bathroom and back again. I dreaded the unfortunate glance that might cause me to see something I’d rather not.
During one such excursion, my darting wasn’t quick enough. For a heart-stopping moment, I saw it again—no, it was just the doll sitting on its table at the end of the hall. But how striking the resemblance! The gray dress, the blonde hair, that empty, faceless face—
One last darting, and I was past it, shut safely inside the guest room. I buried myself in the blankets of my cot and—most blessed of mercies—quickly succumbed to sleep.
But not for long. I don’t know what time it was when I awoke. Only that Mother and Father were asleep in their bed. As always, the room was so completely black that I couldn’t at first tell whether I was facing the room or the wall. It was the dim orange of the light switch that eventually oriented me, and once I’d fixed myself upon that lone source of light, I couldn’t tear my gaze away. I knew that if the light switch was there, then the door was just to the left of it, and outside that door was the pitch-black hallway, and it was from that unseen space that those swift, soft footsteps came.
At first they were muted by the wood of the door. Then, a stealthy click, a change in the pressure of the room. Without seeing, I knew that the door was now open.
A muffled padding crossed the floor and approached my cot. I held my breath. The sound became a sliding, and I bit back a whimper as my cot shook, as something wiggled its way underneath.
Then it went still. I lay curled in a knot of aching limbs, one hand clamped over my mouth to stifle my own breathing, the better to listen.
To listen as, beneath my cot, something else drew in a faint, struggling breath.
I remained frozen like that for minutes that felt like hours. I imagined the figure from my crayon drawing; I imagined the doll from the hallway; I imagined something closer to human, yet that was all the more horrible for it.
What was it?
I had to look. Somehow, I knew I had to face this thing.
Slowly, I reached toward the head of the cot, where I had a bag full of travel supplies—including a small flashlight. This I clutched in my sweaty hand. Pointed it at the floor. Switched it on.
My circle of light revealed the bedroom carpet. I gingerly swept it closer to the void beneath the cot, dragging myself right up to the edge so I could crane my neck out and down. I cast the light back and forth.
There was nothing down there. From one end to the other, nothing but bare carpet. In fact, I noticed that the breathing had stopped. Whatever it had been, it was gone now.
I levered myself up from my inverted posture, switched off the flashlight, and rolled back into my usual nighttime position.
But couldn’t.
Because I had rolled up against something cold and yieldingly solid. Something that responded with an eager pressure of its own.
I vaulted screaming from the cot and flung myself at the orange beacon of the light switch. As yellow light flooded the room, I spun, still screaming, to see my parents rising in a panic, Mother scrambling her way over to me asking, “What is it? What’s wrong?” And beyond her encircling arms, my cot, completely empty.
When I was a few years older, I asked my grandmother where she got that doll. She told me she found it at a thrift store when my father was young. It reminded her of a doll she’d once had as a little girl, and so she bought it, and it had occupied that table in the hallway ever since. Neither she nor Grandfather had ever noticed anything strange.
When I asked my father, however, a dark look fell over his face. “Old things like that,” he said, “you never know what sort of history you’re getting in the bargain. And that’s all I have to say on the matter.”