The Empty Rocker

It was the summer of 1994 when my family and I traveled to the arid highlands of northern Mexico to visit my mother’s parents. The village, nestled between rugged mountains, was called Cerro Alto, a place where time seemed to crawl. My grandfather had built the house himself, a sprawling adobe structure with thick walls that kept the heat at bay. My parents, my siblings, and I were given my aunt’s old bedroom, a room that had been untouched since she moved to the city years ago. The room was sparse: a wooden bed, a faded dresser, and in the corner, an old rocking chair. My grandfather had made it for my grandmother when they were first married, and it now rested there, as if waiting for someone to sit in it. My brother Mateo and I slept in the bed while our younger sister slept on a cot near the window. The first night passed uneventfully, but on the second night, Mateo woke with a start.

He told me later that he had been dreaming of a vast, empty desert, when a cold draft pulled him from sleep. The moonlight filtered through the thin curtains, casting long shadows across the room. And there, in the rocking chair, sat a figure. It was not human, but rather a black silhouette, darker than the night, as if all light was swallowed by its form. It was leaning forward, elbows on knees, chin resting on one hand, staring intently at the floor in front of the chair. The chair did not move, but the figure seemed to breathe, its shoulders rising and falling ever so slightly. Mateo’s heart hammered in his chest. He wanted to scream, but his throat was tight. He tried to nudge me, but my arm was limp, my breathing steady. He was alone with this thing.

For what felt like hours, Mateo lay frozen, staring at the figure. He tried to convince himself it was a trick of the light, a coat draped over the chair. But the longer he looked, the more solid it became. The edges of the figure were crisp, and the way it held its chin made it seem deep in contemplation, as if it were watching something beneath the chair. Finally, summoning every ounce of courage, Mateo whispered, ‘Hey.’ The figure’s head snapped up. It turned toward the bed with a motion that was too fast, too mechanical. Its eyes, if it had any, were hidden in the shadow of its face, but Mateo felt them boring into him. A wave of terror washed over him, so intense that his mind went blank. He slammed his eyes shut and prayed, pulling the blanket over his head. He felt the weight of the figure’s gaze even through the fabric.

Morning came like a reprieve. Mateo woke to the sound of chickens clucking outside and the smell of my grandmother’s cooking. He looked at the rocking chair. It was empty, rocking slightly as if someone had just risen from it. He said nothing to anyone, but when he told me years later, his hands were shaking. He said that from that night on, whenever he visited the old house, he would never enter that room alone, and he had an inexplicable fear of rocking chairs. But what haunted him most was not the figure itself, but the thought of what it had been watching. He had been too terrified to look down. Decades later, I found myself back in that house, now empty, about to be sold. I stood in that same room, the rocking chair still in the corner, and I noticed a dark stain on the floorboards beneath it, a stain that had been hidden by the shadow of the chair. I knelt down, and as I did, the chair began to rock on its own, slowly, as if in rhythm with my heartbeat. I looked closer at the stain, and I realized it wasn’t a stain at all, but a hole, a smooth, black void, like a keyhole to a room that didn’t exist. And from that hole, I heard a faint, rhythmic sound, like a heartbeat, or the slow creak of a rocking chair. I backed away, and the rocking stopped. But as I turned to leave, I heard a whisper, not in my ear, but in my mind: ‘I was watching you.’