The Carpet in the Hall

When I was fourteen, my parents went on an anniversary trip to the coast, leaving me with my grandmother in her new apartment on the third floor of a converted schoolhouse. The building had been a Catholic school for girls until the 1970s, and the halls still smelled of floor wax and old chalk dust. The apartment itself was odd: the main room was once a classroom, so the windows were tall and narrow, and the bathroom door had a frosted pane with a brass handle that said ‘GIRLS’ on it in faded letters. I never liked that place. It was always too quiet, and the walls seemed to breathe with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.

On the first night, my grandmother made up a cot for me in what used to be the corridor, now converted into a lounge with a pull-out sofa. She said it was the only spot with a working TV, and she wanted to watch her shows. My little cousin Jasper, who was four going on five, begged to stay up with me. My grandmother gave in, setting a bowl of popcorn between us and switching on a late-night sitcom. By midnight, Jasper had dozed off, and I was half-watching reruns when I noticed he was awake again, sitting bolt upright, his face pale under the flickering lamp. He wasn’t blinking. He was staring at the hallway that led to the bedrooms.

I nudged him. ‘What is it?’ He didn’t answer. His whole body trembled, and then he whispered, ‘Call my mom.’ I asked why, and he said, ‘There is a little boy in the hall, watching me. He has angry eyes.’ I looked down the dark hallway, expecting to see a trick of the light, but there was nothing. Still, a wave of nausea hit me, and I pulled the blanket up to my chin. I tried to laugh it off, told him it was just a shadow, but he kept staring, his small hand gripping my sleeve. I picked up the phone and called my aunt, but she said Jasper had said the same thing every night for a week, and she thought it was night terrors. She told me to put him back to sleep and not to worry.

I hung up, but my heart wouldn’t slow. I turned off the TV, and the silence swallowed us. Jasper’s eyes were still fixed on the same spot, his lips moving as if he were talking to someone I couldn’t see. I forced myself to look again, and then I noticed something on the floor at the foot of the hall: a small, dark patch on the faded blue carpet, about the size of a child’s hand. It hadn’t been there before. I squinted, and it seemed to shift, just a little, like a stain that was creeping closer. I yanked Jasper onto the sofa with me, and he finally closed his eyes, but I stayed awake, watching that patch, until dawn.

The next morning, I told my grandmother everything. She frowned, then went to the hall and knelt. She ran her fingers over the carpet, and her face went gray. ‘This was here when we moved in,’ she said. ‘The landlord said it was just a coffee spill, but I always thought it looked like a child’s shadow.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘They say a girl died in this building back in the sixties. She was locked in the music room as punishment, and she fell out the window. But they never found her shoes. Some think she still walks the halls at night, looking for them.’ I didn’t sleep for the rest of my stay, and I made Jasper sleep with me in the living room, the lights on.

On the last day, before my parents came to pick me up, I was packing my bag when I heard Jasper crying from the kitchen. I rushed in, and he was pointing at the back door, which led to the fire escape. ‘He’s out there now,’ he sobbed. ‘He’s wearing my shoes.’ I looked out the window, and on the landing of the fire escape, there was a pair of small, muddy sneakers, exactly like Jasper’s, but I knew he had his on. And for a second, I saw a shape between the rails, a little boy with pale, furious eyes, staring at us. Then it was gone. I didn’t tell anyone else, not even my parents, until years later. But to this day, I can’t set foot in a hallway without checking the carpet for a shadow that doesn’t move with the light.