The Cedar Frame

My cousin Lena and I were sorting through our grandmother’s attic when she found the photographs. They were tucked inside a brittle leather album, the pages smelling of mothballs and cedar. The house in the images was not our grandmother’s. It was a sprawling, dark Victorian that seemed to lean into the fog that always clung to the coastline of our town, Port Blossom. I remembered it instantly—the old Millbrook place on Thornwood Lane, abandoned for as long as I could recall. Lena and I had dared each other to peek through its windows as kids, but we never went inside. The photos were from a real estate listing, dated nearly a decade ago. They showed peeling wallpaper, a grand staircase with a crooked banister, and a long hallway lined with doors that were all slightly ajar. In one photo, a figure stood at the end of the hall—a pale shape, barely distinguishable from the shadows. I thought it was a trick of the light, but Lena pointed out that the figure was in every picture, standing in different rooms, always facing away from the camera. We decided to visit the house. It had been vacant for years, and the town had a reputation for forgetting things. We drove out on a gray afternoon, the sky heavy with the promise of rain. The house looked larger than I remembered, its windows like empty sockets, and the wraparound porch sagged under the weight of ivy that had woven itself through the railings. We found the front door unlocked, hanging slightly ajar, and the smell of damp wood and old dust washed over us. The hallway matched the photos, but the wallpaper had peeled further, and the floorboards creaked with every step. We walked slowly, our footsteps echoing in the silence. I noticed that all the doors were closed now, but as we passed, each one seemed to shift, as if something behind them was listening. We found the room from the photo with the figure—a parlor with a cold fireplace and a bay window that overlooked the overgrown garden. The air was thick, and I felt a pressure in my ears, like being underwater. Lena pointed to the mantelpiece. There, propped against the mirror, was a photograph of two children, a boy and a girl, staring blankly at the camera. They looked like they could be siblings, but their eyes were hollow, and their expressions were unchanging. Lena turned the frame over. On the back, in faded ink, were the words ‘The Millbrook Twins, 1892.’ A chill ran down my spine. We put the photo back and continued down the hall, toward the stairs. But as we reached the foot of the staircase, we heard a soft, rhythmic knocking from above. It was coming from the ceiling—a steady, almost pleading beat, like a hand or a foot tapping against the floor. Lena and I exchanged a look, but we were rooted to the spot. The knocking grew louder, more insistent, and then it stopped. We both heard a child’s voice, muffled but clear, calling out, ‘Are you here to play?’ We ran. We didn’t look back until we were in the car, doors locked. As we drove away, I glanced in the rearview mirror. In the upstairs window, I saw the pale figure from the photos, watching us. It raised a hand, not in farewell, but in a slow, deliberate wave. I didn’t tell Lena until we were back at her house, but she confessed she had seen it too. We looked up the Millbrook family history. They had lived there in the late 1800s. The twins, Elias and Clara, had died in a fire that consumed the house in 1895. The house was rebuilt, but they never left. I found a death certificate for Clara, dated 1895, and a second for Elias, dated 1895 as well. But there was also a newspaper article from 1901, reporting that a boy matching Elias’s description had been seen wandering the property, but he vanished when approached. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing that knocking, and the voice asking if we were there to play. I finally dozed off, only to be woken by a call from Lena. She was whispering, her voice trembling: ‘He’s in my room.’ I heard the creak of a floorboard in my own house. I sat up, and in the dim light, I saw the outline of a child standing at the foot of my bed, its face obscured by shadow. It cocked its head and said, ‘You found our photo. We want to play.’ I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The figure took a step closer, and I saw that its eyes were like burned holes in a sheet. It reached out a hand, and I felt a cold draft wrap around my ankles. Then, the room was filled with the smell of smoke. The child’s voice turned into a whisper that seemed to come from inside my head: ‘You can’t leave. We’ll always play.’ I don’t remember the rest of the night. I woke up in my car, parked outside the Millbrook house, with Lena beside me, both of us wearing the same clothes, but our hands were black with soot. The front door was open, and smoke was rising from the chimney, though the house was supposed to be abandoned. We drove straight to the police, but they found nothing—the house was cold and empty. The photos we had taken were on my phone, but when we looked, every image had a child standing in the background, staring at us. We tried to delete them, but they reappeared. To this day, I can’t look at photographs without scanning for the pale figure. And sometimes, at night, I hear that knocking, and a voice that asks, ‘Are you here to play?’ I don’t know if we ever really left that house. The last thing I remember from that night is the sound of our own footsteps, echoing in the empty hallway, as we walked deeper into the heart of the home.