The Ceiling Fan’s Rhythm

Last year, in the sweltering autumn of 2012, my cousin Tomas and I found ourselves stranded in the outskirts of Baguio City. We had spent the evening at a karaoke bar with our girlfriends, Ana and Liza, celebrating a friend’s engagement. The beer flowed, the songs got louder, and before we knew it, the clock on the wall read 11:30 PM. The last bus to our hill town had departed hours ago, and the thought of walking twenty kilometers in the cold mountain air was unbearable.

Tomas spotted a decrepit sign that read ‘Hilltop Haven’ – a lodging house perched on a winding dirt road. The building was a three-story Victorian relic, its paint peeling like dead skin, and the windows stared at us like empty eye sockets. We were desperate, so we climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the front desk, where a wizened old man with cataract eyes handed us two keys without a word. His fingernails were yellow and cracked, and he smiled too broadly, revealing rows of pointed teeth.

We took the last two rooms on the third floor. Tomas and Liza got the final room at the end of the corridor, while Ana and I took the room before it, separated by a thin wall. The moment we stepped inside, a damp chill wrapped around us, and the air smelled of mothballs and something faintly metallic. The room was small, with a single bed, a rickety wardrobe, and a ceiling fan that wobbled as it spun, creaking in a rhythm that seemed almost intentional. The bathroom light flickered, but after a few hesitant flushes, everything seemed functional. We locked the door, but the locks felt loose, as if they had been jimmied open before.

We lay on the bed, trying to sleep, but the fan’s rhythm drilled into my skull. Ana dozed off quickly, but I stayed awake, listening to the building settle. Around 1 AM, I heard a soft tapping from the wall behind the headboard. Tap. Tap-tap. It was too steady to be the wind. I pressed my ear to the cold plaster, and the tapping stopped, replaced by a muffled voice that sounded like Liza, but distorted, like she was speaking through a mouth full of gravel. ‘Let me in,’ it whispered. I froze, wondering if Tomas and Liza were having a quarrel, but the voice was wrong, too deep, too deliberate.

I shook Ana awake, but she was groggy and dismissed it as my imagination. ‘It’s just the pipes,’ she murmured, pulling the thin blanket over her head. I tried to ignore the tapping, but it grew louder, more insistent, and soon the ceiling fan began to slow, its blades casting long shadows across the room. The light bulb in the bathroom flickered on its own, illuminating a crack in the bathroom door that I swear was closed. I got up to check, and as I peered into the grimy bathroom, the mirror reflected not my face, but a pale, gaunt figure with hollow eyes, smiling at me with a mouth that stretched too wide. It vanished when I blinked, and my own reflection returned, but my hair was damp and plastered to my forehead, even though I hadn’t touched water.

A scream ripped through the hallway, high-pitched and raw. It was Liza. I burst out of our room, and the corridor was plunged in near darkness, only a single flickering bulb at the far end casting sickly pools of light. The door to Tomas and Liza’s room was ajar. I shoved it open and found Tomas on the floor, writhing, his hands clamped over his ears, screaming about the ‘voices in the fan.’ Liza stood in the corner, naked and shivering, her eyes wide and unblinking. The ceiling fan in their room was spinning impossibly fast, and the blades were bent, scraping against the ceiling with a screech like nails on a chalkboard. Then, as I watched, the fan’s rhythm changed – it slowed to a crawl, then reversed direction, and from the center hub, a thin, black wire-like tendril descended, dripping a viscous, dark liquid onto the bed.

I grabbed Tomas and dragged him out of the room, but Liza wouldn’t move. She just kept chanting in a low, guttural voice, ‘The fan wants to dance, the fan wants to dance.’ Ana appeared behind me, her face pale, and she pointed to the far end of the hallway. The old man from the front desk was standing there, his head tilted at an unnatural angle, his mouth moving as if he were whispering, but no sound came out. In his hand was an old, rusted key, and he gestured toward the attic door at the ceiling, which I had not noticed before.

We tried to leave, but the front door was locked from the outside, and the windows were barred. The old man had vanished, leaving only the rattling of the key on the floor. The screaming stopped abruptly, and the building fell into an unnatural silence. We huddled in the room, listening to the fans in every room spin faster and faster, their blades whistling in sync. Then, from the attic, we heard a heavy dragging sound, like something being pulled across the floor, followed by a wet, rhythmic thumping that matched the heartbeat in my chest.

I looked at Tomas, and his eyes were bloodshot, his skin had taken on a waxy pallor, and he was rocking back and forth, muttering, ‘The ceiling fan’s rhythm, it calls them home.’ I knew then that we had stumbled into a place where the dead didn’t just haunt – they performed a grotesque symphony, and we were the unwilling audience. Ana began to claw at the wall, her nails leaving bloody streaks, and she whispered, ‘They’re in the walls, they’re in the fan, they’re in me.’

The night stretched on, but dawn never came. The ceiling fan in our room finally stopped, its blades bent and broken, and from the gap where the motor used to be, a hundred small, black spiders cascaded out, covering the floor. As they swarmed over us, I saw, in the flickering light, the old man’s face grinning from the attic door, and I understood that we had been marked. The last thing I remember was the sound of all the ceiling fans starting up again, in perfect unison, playing a lullaby that was not meant for human ears.

We were found two days later, huddled in a corner, our eyes frozen open, each of us clutching a single ceiling fan blade in our hands. The lodge was demolished a month later, but locals say that on quiet nights, you can still hear the fans whirring in the ruins, keeping their endless rhythm, and if you listen closely, you can hear us whispering, ‘Let me in.’