The Fallen Cross

The first thing I noticed about the house on Hemlock Lane was the smell—old wood, damp plaster, and something faintly mineral, like wet stone. We’d moved there just after our twelfth birthday, and Dad kept saying it was a fixer-upper with good bones. But Mom’s face was tight, and she never unpacked the china. My twin sister, Alina, had recently traded her church shoes for sandals and started calling herself ‘Luna.’ She’d stopped going to mass with us, saying the sermons were full of ‘male guilt trips.’ Our bedroom was the strangest part of the house: the entire second floor’s west side was one long, narrow room with a door at each end. It felt like two rooms had been joined by knocking out a wall, leaving a faint seam in the floorboards right down the middle. We put our beds against opposite walls, so we faced each other from across that seam. That first night, I hung my mother’s old crucifix—a heavy iron thing with a twisted corpus—above my headboard. By morning, it was face-down on the floor, the nail pulled clean from the plaster. I tried different hooks, different heights, but it always fell within the hour. Nothing else on the walls moved. Luna laughed and said, ‘The house doesn’t like your guilt trip.’ I ignored her and chalked it up to poor framing, but I noticed the fall was always precise: the cross would land with the face pressed into the floor, the crown of thorns touching the wood.

We made friends with two sisters from down the street—Mira and Tess—who told us that the house had been empty for years after old Mrs. Volkov died in it. ‘She was a Russian icon painter,’ Mira said, her voice dropping. ‘But people said she dabbled. She had a special room where she painted only with her left hand, using water from the gutter. They say she never washed that hand.’ I thought it was just a story to scare us, but that night, I couldn’t sleep. The moon was full, and through the window at the far end of the long room, I saw something move in the backyard—a shape that didn’t match any tree. It was tall and too thin, and it swayed without wind. I reached for my little flashlight, but of course, the batteries were dead. When I looked again, the shape was gone. Luna stirred and mumbled, ‘Stop watching,’ as if she knew what I’d seen. In the morning, I found my crucifix on the floor again, but this time it was turned to face the ceiling, the corpus’s arms stretched out as if reaching for something. And there was a thin gray powder on the wood, like ash from a cold hearth.

We decided to explore the long room’s other door. It had been locked since we arrived, with a key that didn’t fit any of our keys. But one afternoon, while Mom was out, I jimmied the lock with a butter knife. On the other side was a small, windowless closet that smelled like wet earth. The floor was packed dirt, and on the back wall hung a single icon—the Virgin Mary, but her eyes had been scratched out, leaving rough gouges. Beneath it was an old piano stool, and when I pulled it open, I found a leather journal. It belonged to Mrs. Volkov. Her handwriting was spidery, and many pages were blotted with what looked like dried tears. The journal spoke of her ‘daughter’—but she never had a child. She wrote: ‘She came to me crying from the walls, and I painted her so she might have a face. But she grows strong on my faith, and my left hand is her mouth.’ The last entry was dated a week before she died: ‘She wants a sister now. She wants to wear my skin and dance.’ I slammed the book shut. Luna had followed me in, and she was staring at the icon with an expression I’d never seen—reverent and hungry. She said, ‘We should call her. She’s lonely.’ I wanted to scream, but I just grabbed her arm and dragged her out. I replaced the journal and relocked the door, but I knew she would go back.

That night, Luna started talking in her sleep. It wasn’t her voice. It was higher, like a child’s, and it said, ‘Two beds, but I want both. One cross, but no faith in-between.’ I sat up in bed and saw Luna’s silhouette raise one arm and point at my headboard. The crucifix—which I had hung with a nail and a prayer—shuddered, then fell. But it didn’t land face-down. It hung in the air, spinning slowly, as if caught on an invisible thread. Then it dropped to the floor with a clang and broke in two across the seam of the room. The broken pieces slid toward Luna’s side, leaving a dark trail on the rug. Our eyes met, but hers were wrong—she was smiling, but her mouth was too wide. She said, in that wrong voice, ‘She thanks you for the bed.’ I turned and ran for the door, but it slammed shut before I could reach it. I heard a laugh from the locked closet—a giggle that vibrated the floor. And then the long room went cold, and the moonlight on the floor seemed to ripple like water. I hid under my blanket until morning, and when I woke up, the broken crucifix was gone, and there was a new picture taped to the wall above my bed: a crude crayon drawing of two girls holding hands, but one of them had no face. Underneath, in smudged pencil, it read: ‘I took her name. Now I take her shape.’

I told Mom we had to leave. I showed her the journal, but the pages were blank. She thought I was having nightmares. Luna—or whatever was wearing her—sat at the kitchen table, eating a raw tomato slice with exaggerated bites, and said, ‘I’m finally eating clean, Mom.’ That was the first time she used the word ‘Mom’ without irony. My skin crawled. I spent that night in the hallway, locked in the bathroom, with my back against the tub. I heard footsteps in the long room—soft, like bare feet—and the giggle again. Then the door handle rattled. On my phone, I found a video I had taken earlier of Luna singing to the icon. In the video, the room behind her was empty, but I saw a shadow separate from the wall and crawl toward her back. I deleted the video. I prayed, but the words felt thin. I realized I had been using my faith like a shield, but this thing didn’t care about shields—it fed on doubt. And I had plenty.

The next day, I decided to fight back. I drove to the local cathedral and begged the priest for holy water. He wouldn’t give it to me—said I was just a kid. But I stole a vial from the side chapel. That night, I confronted Luna in our room. She was standing by the window, staring out into the dark yard. The shape was there again—a bent figure like a wet coat on a hanger. I splashed holy water at her, and she hissed, stumbling back. But then she straightened, and her eyes flickered. For a second, I saw my real sister—terrified, lip trembling. She mouthed, ‘Help me.’ Then the thing surged forward and shoved me against the wall, my head smacking the plaster. Through the ringing, I heard it speak with Luna’s mouth: ‘You can’t banish me with borrowed water. I was born from her own doubts. I am her faith in nothing.’ It made a sound like tearing cloth, and then Luna’s face went slack, and she collapsed. I caught her, and for a moment, she was just my sister, snoring softly. But I knew it wasn’t over.

In the morning, Luna seemed like herself—she asked for French toast, and she glared at me when I said grace. But that evening, I found her in the closet with the icon. She had filled in the eyes with red lipstick, and she was holding a needle and thread. ‘She’s going to help me sew my other body,’ she said, and her voice was calm, almost sweet. ‘She says once we’re twins inside, we’ll be perfect sisters. We’ll never be alone again.’ I tore the needle from her hands and flung the icon against the wall. The glass cracked, and the face split, but the red eyes seemed to glow. Luna screamed—my sister’s real scream—and clutched her chest as if her heart had been stabbed. She fell to her knees, giggling with that other laugh. ‘You broke our face,’ it said. ‘Now we’ll wear yours.’

I can’t remember the rest clearly. There was a fire—I know that because the smoke alarms went off, and I remember the orange light through the windows. The fire department came, and they found me outside in the backyard, cradling my sister’s sobbing form. The house burned to the ground, but they said the flames didn’t start from any outlet or stove—they started inside the walls, on both floors at once. And they found no remains of the icon. Only a single blackened shape on the floor of the western room, like a scorched shadow of a small girl, reaching out. And in the ceiling joists, they found a finger bone—human, but with too many joints.

We moved again, to a one-story house with no history. Luna and I share a room, but I made sure there’s no closet, no crawl space, no seam in the floor. She still has nightmares. Sometimes she wakes up and says, ‘She’s still there, but she’s looking for us.’ And at night, no matter how I hang my crucifix—even on a metal hook screwed into concrete—it falls off the wall. And when I pick it up, it’s always face-down, with a fine gray powder on the wood. I’ve stopped trying to hang it. I keep it in my pocket now, but I can feel it growing colder and colder, until sometimes I think it’s not iron anymore, but bone. And somewhere out there, in an ash heap where a house once stood, a burnt figure is learning to walk, and it has my sister’s laugh.