The Carved Alphabet

I met Marcus at a coffee shop during a rainstorm, the kind that turns streets into rivers. He was reading a battered copy of ‘The House on the Borderland’, and I commented on it. We talked for hours, and something about him felt familiar, like a song I’d heard in a dream. A year and a half later, I know that familiarity was a warning.

Our apartment is on the third floor of a converted warehouse, all exposed brick and high ceilings. It’s a beautiful space, but it has a strange geometry. The hallway that leads to the bedroom is longer than it should be, and there’s a door in the living room that opens to a closet, but sometimes, when I look at it, I see a sliver of darkness that doesn’t belong. Marcus never mentions it, but I’ve seen him pause in front of that door, his hand hovering over the knob, before he turns away.

The first time I saw the marks, I thought he was a self-harmer. Three parallel scratches, angry and red, ran down his back, from his shoulder blades to his waist. He told me he’d woken up with them, that it happened all the time. ‘I’m used to it,’ he said, pulling on his shirt. ‘It’s like having an invisible roommate with sharp nails.’ I laughed, but the laugh died in my throat. The scratches were too precise, too deliberate, like the work of a clawed hand, not a bout of itching.

Marcus’s childhood was a catalogue of oddities. He once told me about sitting in a parked car with a friend, Dawn, discussing ghosts. He said he gets uncomfortable with such talk, because whenever he does, something happens. The car was off, the keys in his pocket. But then the rear window motor started humming, a low, insistent drone that rose to a shriek. The window didn’t move, but the hum was so loud they had to cover their ears. Then it stopped, as abruptly as it started. Dawn refused to speak to him for a week.

I started taking notes. It felt insane, but I needed a record. The scratches appeared in places he couldn’t reach: the middle of his back, the back of his calves, even once on his scalp, hidden under his hair. They varied in intensity. Some were shallow, fading in a day. Others were deep, leaving scars that formed patterns. I traced them once, connecting the dots. They looked like broken letters, a half-finished alphabet. ‘Marcus,’ I said, ‘these are words.’ He looked at me, his face pale. ‘I know,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve been trying to read them for years.’

One night, I woke to the sound of breathing. It wasn’t Marcus’s. He was asleep beside me, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. The breathing was slow, wet, and coming from the closet door. I lay frozen, listening. It was as if something large and patient was waiting behind it, taking long, drawn-out breaths of the stale air. I didn’t dare move. I stared at the door, and for a moment, I saw the handle turn, slowly, a quarter inch, then stop. Then the breathing stopped, too. I didn’t sleep again that night.

The scratches became worse. New ones appeared on his chest, his stomach, even his face. He started staying home from work, nervous and jumpy. He said the presence was getting stronger, that it was angry. ‘It’s like it wants something,’ he said, his eyes darting to the closet. ‘It’s always been there, but it used to be passive. Now it’s active. It’s trying to communicate.’ I asked him what it was trying to say. He just shook his head.

I found the book in the back of the closet. The closet that shouldn’t be a closet. It was an old leather-bound journal, the pages yellowed and brittle. The handwriting was spidery, slanted. It belonged to a woman named Eliza, who lived in this warehouse in the 1920s. She wrote about a spirit, a ‘visitor’ that came to her at night, leaving marks on her skin. She tried to decipher them, believing they were a language. The last entry was dated March 14, 1923. It said: ‘I have learned the alphabet. The words are forming. The door will soon open.’ The rest of the pages were blank, except for one, which had a single word written in a shaky hand: ‘AWAKE.’

The door was open. I don’t know how, but when I turned from the journal, the closet door was ajar. A blackness, deeper than any shadow, spilled out. There was a smell, like damp earth and rust. And a sound—a low, guttural breathing, now coming from the room itself. I could see something in the darkness, a shape that was all angles, too many limbs, too many eyes that glinted with a sickly green light. ‘Marcus,’ I called out, my voice a broken whisper. He was at the bedroom door, staring at the shape. He looked at me, and his eyes were not his own. They were black, like voids. ‘It’s too late,’ he said, in a voice that was not his. ‘I’ve been reading the marks. They were instructions. It needs a door. I was the door.’ The shape lunged.

I am writing this from a motel room, miles away. I left that night, running barefoot down the stairs, out into the rain. I never looked back. I don’t know what happened to Marcus. But every night, when I close my eyes, I see the shape, and I hear that breathing. And sometimes, in the mirror, I see scratches on my own back, forming letters I don’t yet understand. I think I’m being taught the alphabet now. And I’m terrified of what words I’ll learn to read.