The Dinner Guest

My grandmother, Evelyn, passed away in late autumn, leaving behind a house that smelled of mothballs and old paper. While sorting through her things, I found a leather-bound journal tucked between her winter quilts. The cover was worn, and the pages were yellowed, but the handwriting inside was crisp and precise. It was a dream diary, and the first entries were mundane: grocery lists, replays of conversations, the occasional flying dream. But as I turned the pages, the dreams grew stranger, and more unsettling.

One entry stood out, dated three years before her death. She wrote about a recurring dream where her dead siblings—Margaret, Thomas, and little Ruth—stood at the foot of her bed. They were pale as porcelain, their clothes dripping with grave dirt, and they reached out with open palms, as if begging her to join them. In the dream, she told them she wasn’t ready, that she still had a family to love. And they retreated, but not before Margaret whispered, ‘We’ll be waiting.’

Another entry described a waking vision. She was cooking stew, and when she turned to the patio door, she saw them standing in the gray afternoon light, their faces pressed against the glass. She wrote that they didn’t blink, and when she shouted at them, they simply dissolved like mist. She stopped using the patio after that.

As the diary approached the date of her death, the entries grew more urgent. She wrote about a dream where her entire living family gathered for a dinner—the good china, the laughter, the warmth. She described the taste of her own cooking, the way her grandchildren’s cheeks flushed with joy. After the meal, she excused herself and wandered to her bedroom. There, on the edge of the bed, sat my grandfather, Albert, who had been dead for fifteen years. He looked just as she remembered him, except his skin had a waxy sheen, and his eyes were too bright. He told her not to worry, that he would always take care of her, and then he smiled as if to reassure her. But in the margin, Evelyn had written in her final entry: ‘He never smiled like that.’

The last page was blank, and I sat there in her silent house, running my fingers over the indentation of her pen. That night, I had a dream. I was in her kitchen, the same one with the patio door, and I was cooking the same stew. The house was filled with the scent of rosemary and something faintly like decay. I looked up, and through the window, I saw them—not my grandmother’s siblings, but my own dead relatives: my uncle Frank, my cousin Maria, and my grandmother herself. They stood in the yard, their clothes damp, their faces pale, and they raised their hands in unison. I tried to wake, but the dream held me tight. I heard my grandmother’s voice, not from the vision but from behind me, soft and familiar. ‘Don’t be afraid, dear. He said he’d take care of me. He did. But now it’s your turn.’ I turned, and my grandfather was sitting in the corner, smiling that wrong smile. And the door to the patio creaked open.