The Broken Sconce

My grandmother used to say that some houses are like skin—they stretch to accommodate what lives inside, but eventually, they split. Our house in the fading mill town of Ashford was such a place. It had a crooked spine of a staircase, windows that wept condensation, and a cellar that breathed. I never liked the cellar, but as a child, I didn’t know why. I just knew that the dark at the bottom of those stairs was thicker than it should be, and that sometimes, when you stood at the top, you could hear something down there breathing back.

I was seven when I first met the girl in the white dress. She called herself Fern. She was taller than me, with hair the color of wet straw, and she never quite looked at me—her eyes always slid to a point just over my shoulder. She liked to play in the hallway upstairs, where the old sconce hung crooked on the wall. The sconce was a twisted iron thing, shaped like a claw, and it had never held a candle in my lifetime. Fern would stand beneath it and hum tunes I didn’t recognize, and I would sit on the floor and listen, feeling the cold seep through my pajamas. She didn’t like my brother, Leo. She said he had ‘mean eyes.’ I didn’t understand, because Leo was just a baby, but Fern would hiss whenever he crawled near.

One afternoon, Leo spilled my milk on purpose, and I yelled at him. He laughed, that gurgling baby laugh, and I felt a hot spike of anger. ‘Fern is going to pinch you,’ I said, echoing something I’d heard in my own head. That night, Leo woke up screaming. My mother rushed in, and there, on his back, were three thin red lines, like from tiny fingernails. They weren’t deep, but they were bright, and Leo wouldn’t stop crying. My mother looked at me, her face pale in the lamplight, and I wanted to tell her about Fern, but the words stuck in my throat like dry bread.

The second time, it was the sconce. My parents were fighting again—something about bills, about the mill closing—and they were yelling at us to stop shrieking. We were in the living room, and both of our cats, Mica and Coal, were on the rug. Suddenly, the cats flattened their ears and hissed, their fur standing on end. A low thump came from upstairs, then a crash. My father took the steps two at a time, and we followed. The sconce was on the floor, its iron petals bent, and the wall where it had hung was gouged, as if something had ripped it out with tremendous force. My father said it must have been a loose screw, but I saw the scratches in the plaster—three parallel lines, like the ones on Leo’s back. That night, I dreamed of Fern standing under the empty hook, and she was smiling.

As I grew older, I tried to forget Fern. I told myself she was a product of childhood loneliness, a phantom of my own making. But twelve years later, when I returned to Ashford to pack up the house after my parents died, Fern was waiting for me. I was in the attic, sorting through boxes, when I heard the humming. It was the same tune, drifting up from the hallway below. My blood went cold. I walked to the top of the attic stairs and looked down. There, at the end of the hallway, stood a figure in a white dress, but it wasn’t a little girl. It was taller, gaunt, with limbs that bent at wrong angles. Its face was smooth, featureless, except for a mouth that was too wide, and it was pointing at the wall where the sconce used to be.

I fled, stumbling down the stairs, but the house seemed to twist, and I found myself in the hallway. The figure was gone, but the air was cold, and my breath fogged. The spot on the wall where the sconce had been was now a dark, weeping hole, and from inside, a whisper, not a voice, but a pressure in my skull: ‘You’re back.’ I backed away, and the floorboards creaked under my feet, but the creaking didn’t match my steps. Something was walking with me. I turned, and Fern was there, inches from my face, her eyeless face tilted. ‘You let them hurt me,’ she said, and her voice was like a nail scraping concrete. ‘You let them forget.’

I ran, and I didn’t stop until I was in the yard, gasping for air. The house loomed behind me, its windows dark, and I knew that what I had summoned as a child was never imaginary. It was hungry, and it had waited twelve years for me to return. I never went back inside. But sometimes, late at night, I hear that humming, and I know Fern has followed me. The sconce was just the beginning; now, she’s in the walls of my new home, and I see her reflection in every mirror, always just behind my shoulder, waiting for me to cast her out—or to join her.