The Cinder Path

My grandmother left me her farmhouse in the hills of West Virginia, a place I had only visited as a child during summers when fireflies blinked like restless spirits among the corn. After she died, I inherited the creaking rooms and the overgrown pastures, and I moved there with my daughter, Lily, and two aging hounds, Bo and Juniper. My grandmother had been a solitary woman, and the locals spoke of her in hushed tones, but I dismissed their warnings as country superstition.

The house was filled with her things: jars of dried herbs cluttering the kitchen, a spinning wheel gathering dust in the corner, and a locked room at the end of the upstairs hall that I never dared open. The smell of woodsmoke and lavender clung to the walls, and at night the floorboards groaned as if the house were breathing. Bo and Juniper, who had always slept beside me, refused to enter my bedroom after the first week. They would whine at the door, their tails tucked, and retreat to the kitchen hearth where they’d curl together, eyes fixed on the hallway.

One evening, while searching for a box of my grandmother’s letters, I found a key tarnished with age tucked inside a Bible. It fit the lock on the mysterious room. Inside, the air was thick with dust and the scent of stale tobacco. The room was sparse: a narrow iron bed, a nightstand with a brass oil lamp, and a single window that looked out onto the path leading to the woods. In the corner, a wooden crate held a journal bound in cracked leather. I opened it and found my grandmother’s handwriting, jagged and hurried. The pages told of a ‘Cinder Path’ behind the house that appeared only when the moon was full and fog rolled in from the valley. She wrote of visitors who walked it, men and women she called ‘the waiting ones’, who would stand at the edge of the yard, beckoning her to follow. She had written, ‘They want me to join them, but I have unfinished business. They will wait. They always wait.’

I might have dismissed it as the ramblings of a lonely old woman, but that night, the dogs began to howl at nothing. I looked out my window and saw a faint orange glow along the treeline, like a cigarette ember, but larger. It moved slowly, methodically, as if something was pacing the edge of the forest. I called out, thinking it might be a neighbor, but the sound died in my throat. The bushes rustled, and I saw shapes – dark, human-like forms – standing perfectly still at the end of the yard. Bo and Juniper pressed themselves against the kitchen door, whimpering, and Lily sleepily called for me from her room. I pulled her into my bed, and we huddled together, listening to what sounded like footsteps shuffling through dead leaves, circling the house.

The next morning, I found a line of ashes stretching from the back porch into the woods, a path where grass had been burned black in a perfect straight line. The dogs refused to go outside, and Lily pointed to the treeline, saying, ‘Mama, the gray people are watching.’ My blood ran cold. She had seen them too.

Desperate for answers, I visited the local general store and asked Old Man Whitaker about my grandmother’s property. He paled and whispered that she had ‘bargained with the mountain’ to keep the waiting ones away, but her bargain had ended when she died. ‘They want a new soul to walk with them,’ he said, his eyes darting to the hills. ‘They feed on the warmth of the living. And they are patient.’ I wanted to laugh, but the image of those ash-black footprints on my porch held my tongue. When I returned home, Bo was dead, sprawled in the middle of the living room floor, his throat raw as if he had been screaming. There were no marks on him, no signs of a struggle. Juniper was trembling in the corner, her eyes wild, and Lily was humming a tune I didn’t recognize, a melody that made the hairs on my neck stand up.

That night, I locked every door and window, and I lit every candle I could find, hoping the light would keep them at bay. But as midnight approached, the candles guttered out one by one, as if a breeze were passing through the room, even though the windows were shut. I heard the sound of soft breathing coming from the hallway, and then a knock – three deliberate raps – on my bedroom door. The doorknob rattled, and a voice, dry as autumn leaves, whispered, ‘We have been waiting for you.’ I threw myself against the door, pressing my ear to the wood, and heard the sound of retreating footsteps, shuffling down the stairs, then silence. Juniper began to growl low in her throat, staring at the corner of the room where the shadows seemed to gather like spilled ink. I saw a shape begin to solidify there, a tall figure with a hollow face, its skin gray as ash. It pointed a long finger at me, and then at Lily, who was sleeping peacefully in her crib, and I understood. They wanted her.

I grabbed a fire poker and lunged at the figure, but it dissipated like smoke, leaving a cold spot in the air. I scooped up Lily and ran to the car, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the path of ashes stretching from the house to the car, and along its edges, dozens of gray figures stood, watching. Juniper had followed me, and she began to bark frantically, but then she stopped, her tail dropped, and she let out a pitiful whine. I saw a woman emerge from the line of figures, a woman I recognized from the journal – my grandmother. She was young, as she had been in a photograph I remembered, but her eyes were hollow and black. She pressed her hand against the car window, leaving a smudge of ash, and mouthed, ‘Join us.’

I closed my eyes and prayed, and when I opened them, the figures were gone. The car started as if nothing had happened. I didn’t look back. I drove through the night, with Juniper whimpering in the back seat, and Lily crying in her car seat. We made it to a motel in the next town, and I spent the night in a cold, sterile room, watching intermittent shadows cross the blinds, thinking about the cinder path and the waiting ones. In the morning, I called a realtor to put the farmhouse on the market, but when I returned to pack our things, the path was still there, a black scar on the green lawn. The front door stood open, and inside, the smell of woodsmoke and lavender was gone, replaced by a scent of charred earth. I found my grandmother’s journal on the kitchen table, a new entry scrawled in fresh ink: ‘They followed you. They will always follow you. You must choose who walks with you.’ I burned the journal in the fireplace, but as the flames consumed the pages, I heard the shuffling of feet outside, and a child’s laughter – not Lily’s – echo through the trees. I grabbed Lily and Juniper and fled, but I knew, deep in my bones, that the cinder path would always be there, waiting, and that one day, It would stretch all the way from that cursed house to wherever I tried to hide.