The Crawlspace of Sunken Eyes

The summer I turned fourteen, my mother moved us from the sun-bleached coast of New Zealand to a cramped fishing village in the Faroe Islands. We settled into a flat that was the top floor of a salting house that had been converted into homes a century ago. The whole place smelled of brine and old wood, and the stairs creaked like a ship in a storm. My mother and her new husband took the main bedroom, my two younger brothers shared a room that overlooked the harbor, and the husband’s son, a sullen boy of sixteen named Rói, got the last proper room. That left me with the attic.

The attic was not a proper room. It was a crawlspace under the steeply pitched roof, with a low doorway that forced you to bend almost double to enter. The ceiling sloped sharply, and in the center you could stand, but at the edges you had to crouch. It was furnished with a thin mattress on the floor, a crooked nightstand, and a single bare bulb that hung from a beam. The first time I stepped inside, I felt a weight press down on my shoulders, as if the roof itself was tired of holding up the sky. And there was a smell—not just old timber and dust, but something faintly sweet and rotten, like seaweed left to decompose in a rock pool.

I tried to make it cozy. I hung a string of fairy lights along the beams, but the bulb flickered even when I turned it off, and the fairy lights never stayed on for more than a few minutes. One night, I woke to a sound like rain, but it was dry outside. The sound came from the wall behind the head of my mattress—a soft, scratching, as if something was trying to claw its way through the plaster from inside. I pressed my ear to the wall and heard a low, gurgling murmur, like water trapped in pipes, but it was too rhythmic, almost breathing. When I pulled back, I saw a tiny crack in the plaster, and through it, I could have sworn I saw a dark shape moving, and then an eye—sunken, milky, and impossibly old—looking back at me.

I told my mother the next morning. She laughed and said it was probably a rat or the wind. Her husband shrugged and said the attic had always had a draft. But Rói, who usually ignored me, looked up from his breakfast with a strange, knowing expression. ‘You sleep up there?’ he asked. I nodded. He said nothing else, but his face drained of color, and he left the table early.

That night, I could not bring myself to go up to the attic. I curled up on the living room couch, but the house itself seemed to resent that. The couch cushions sank as if something had sat down heavily beside me. The doors to the hallway creaked open on their own, and the floorboards under the rug shifted with phantom footsteps. By midnight, I felt a cold draft seep through the keyhole, and I could smell that rotten sweetness again, stronger now, coming from the direction of the attic stairs. I heard the low door to the attic creak open, and then a sound like something heavy being dragged across the floor above, inch by inch, toward the stairwell.

I fled to the bathroom and locked the door. I stayed there until dawn, sitting in the tub with the light on, listening to the house settle. When I finally emerged, the attic door was closed, and the smell was gone. But I knew it was waiting.

A few nights later, I forced myself to go up there. I was exhausted, and I told myself it was just my imagination. I placed a flashlight by my mattress and lay down, staring at the sloped ceiling. The bare bulb flickered. The scratching started again, but this time it was underneath me, from the floor, right beneath the mattress. I flipped onto my stomach and pressed my ear to the boards. I heard a voice, faint and muffled, like it was speaking through a thick cloth. It said, ‘Let me in.’ It said it over and over, and the voice was not a rat. It was a child’s voice, high and thin, but with a wet, gasping quality, as if it was drowning.

I tried to scream, but only a croak came out. I scrambled to the door, but it wouldn’t budge. The handle wouldn’t turn. I threw my shoulder against it, and the wood groaned, and then I felt something grab my ankle. It was cold and slippery, like a fish out of water, and it was pulling me back toward the center of the room. I looked down and saw a hand emerging from the crack between the floorboards—a small, pale, mottled hand, with long, brittle fingers. It tightened around my ankle, and I kicked and thrashed, and finally it let go. I fell backward, hit my head on the nightstand, and blacked out.

I woke up in my mother’s bed. She was sitting beside me, stroking my hair. She said I had a fever and had been delirious, that I had been found lying on the attic floor, clutching my ankle, which had a bruise in the shape of five perfect fingers. She said the attic was off-limits from now on. I was to stay in my brothers’ room, on a cot.

I obeyed. I slept in my brothers’ room for the rest of the summer. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I would wake to see the door to the attic slowly opening by itself, and I would hear that voice, clearer now, from the darkness beyond. ‘Let me in.’ And I knew it was not talking to me. It was talking to that space inside me that I had opened when I first put my ear to the wall. It was talking to my memory, my fear, my certainty that something old and hungry lived in the bones of that house, and that it had chosen me.

Before we moved away, Rói found me on the back steps one evening and handed me an old photograph. It was faded, sepia-toned, showing a group of children standing in front of the salting house, long before it was converted. One child, a girl with a round face and sunken, milky eyes, was not looking at the camera. She was looking directly at the attic window. Rói said, ‘She went missing in 1924. They never found her body. Some say she’s still up there, waiting for someone to let her out.’ I looked at the photo, and then at Rói, and he pointed to the girl’s hand. It was raised, as if waving. Or as if reaching out. I dropped the photo and never looked back.

We moved to the mainland the next month. But even now, years later, I cannot sleep in a room with a sloped ceiling or a low crawlspace. And sometimes, when the house settles, I hear a faint scratching, and a voice, echoing from some forgotten attic in my mind, ‘Let me in.’ And I always answer, ‘No.’ But I am not sure how much longer I can say no.