The Empty Chair

In the autumn of 2012, I was twenty years old, living in a cramped attic apartment in the old mill town of Ashford. The building had been a textile factory a century ago, and now it housed a dozen artists and drifters, each with their own peculiarities. My neighbor across the hall was a retired nurse named Elsie, a frail woman with a wild mane of white hair and a fondness for chamomile tea. Every Thursday, she invited me over, and we’d sit in her cluttered living room, surrounded by porcelain figurines and yellowed doilies, while she told me about the children who lived in the walls.

According to Elsie, there were three of them: two boys and a girl, all in old-fashioned clothes. They were mischievous, she said, always hiding her knitting needles, stealing biscuits from the tin, and leaving tiny footprints in the dust on her windowsill. She’d find her bedspread wrinkled in the shape of small bodies, and sometimes she’d hear them giggling behind the radiator. I never saw them, but I humored her, attributing it to a lonely old woman’s imagination. I believed in ghosts, yes, but not in the way she did. To me, they were echoes, not playmates.

One night, in late October, I came home from a gig with my band. I was the designated driver, so I was stone-cold sober, my ears still ringing from the feedback. As I climbed the creaking stairs to my floor, I noticed that Elsie’s door was ajar, a sliver of pale light spilling into the dim hallway. That was odd, because she usually kept it locked, and she was a heavy sleeper, often in bed by nine. I called out a soft hello, but there was no answer. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room was immaculate, which was strange, because Elsie was anything but. The doilies were perfectly centered, the figurines arranged in neat rows, and the air smelled of lemon polish. But the chair in the corner, Elsie’s favorite wingback, was empty. That was where she always sat during our talks, and I felt a chill run down my spine as I realized she wasn’t there. Her cup of chamomile tea sat on the side table, still steaming, as if she’d just stepped away.

I called her name, my voice echoing in the unnaturally quiet room. No response. I walked toward the hallway that led to her bedroom, and that’s when I saw them: three small silhouettes huddled in the shadows near the coat rack. They were motionless, but I could feel their eyes on me. My heart pounded. Elsie had described them in such detail that I recognized them instantly: a boy in a cap, a girl with pigtails, and a smaller boy, all dressed in moth-eaten clothes from another era.

I tried to speak, but my throat tightened. One of the children, the oldest boy, raised a finger to his lips and pointed toward the bedroom door. I followed his gaze and saw a thin line of darkness seeping from under the door, like oil spreading across the hardwood floor. The children began to fade, their outlines blurring, and I heard a faint whisper: ‘She’s not there anymore.’

I stumbled backward, knocking over a stack of magazines. The sound shattered the silence, and the darkness under the door receded as quickly as it had appeared. I ran out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the cold night air. I didn’t stop until I reached the all-night diner on the corner.

The next morning, I called the police, but they found nothing amiss. Elsie had indeed passed away in her sleep the night before, they said, peacefully. There was no sign of foul play. But as I sat in my own apartment, trying to make sense of it, I noticed something on my kitchen counter: a single, tiny footprint in the flour dust, about the size of a child’s hand. And on my fridge, stuck under a magnet, was a yellowed recipe card, written in Elsie’s looping hand, for chocolate chip cookies, with a note at the bottom: ‘For the little ones.’

I haven’t had tea with Elsie since, of course. But every Thursday, I set out three cookies on a small plate, and leave the chair in the corner of my living room empty. Because sometimes, I hear them giggling behind the walls, and I’d rather they steal my cookies than show me what else they can do.