The Glass-Dry Lullaby

My grandmother had a saying: ‘The house remembers what the walls hear.’ We never paid it much mind, not until the summer my uncle Marco moved back in with us after his wife left. He was a quiet man, prone to long silences and longer stares at the ocean. Our home was a converted lighthouse on a rugged stretch of coast, the light long decommissioned but the tower still standing, a hollow sentinel against the wind.

One night, after a storm had knocked out the power, Marco came home late, smelling of salt and cheap whiskey. My mother, my twin, and I were huddled in the kitchen with candles, and we heard him stumble up the stairs. He walked past us without a word, clutching something large and rectangular wrapped in a stained tarp. My mother asked if he was alright, but he just muttered, ‘Fine, just tired,’ and disappeared into his room, which had once been the keeper’s quarters.

In the morning, the power was back, and the house was quiet. Too quiet. My mother knocked on Marco’s door, but there was no answer. She pushed it open, and we saw his room exactly as he had left it: bed unmade, a glass of water on the nightstand, his boots by the door. But the tarp-wrapped object was propped against the far wall, and on the floor lay a single photograph, face-down. My mother picked it up and turned it over. It was a picture of our grandmother, young and smiling, but her eyes were glassy, and in the background, visible through a window, was the lighthouse, but the light was on—even though it had been decommissioned for decades.

We didn’t find Marco. The police searched, but it was as if he had vanished into the sea. The tarp was never opened; my mother forbade us from touching it, and we were too afraid to disobey. But that night, I couldn’t sleep. The wind had a new voice, a low, rhythmic hum that seemed to come from the tower itself. I crept up the spiral staircase, and at the top, I found the old lantern room. The light was on—a weak, sickly yellow, flickering as if fed by something dying. And in the corner, propped against the glass, was the tarp-wrapped frame, now unwrapped. It was a huge, ornate picture frame, empty, but the glass was covered in a thin layer of condensation, and inside, I could see the reflection of the room behind me—but it wasn’t my room. It was Marco’s, and he was sitting on the bed, staring back at me, his face hollow, his mouth moving as if trying to speak through the glass.

I must have screamed, because my mother ran up, and when she saw, she grabbed me and dragged me downstairs. We boarded up the lantern room that night, but the hum didn’t stop. It grew louder each day, a dry, crackling sound like a record of someone slowly inhaling. The house began to feel brittle, as if the air itself was desiccated. My grandmother’s old music box, which hadn’t worked in years, started playing on its own—a waltz, but at half speed, and the notes sounded like they were being scraped from the teeth of a comb.

One week later, my mother found an envelope under Marco’s bed. Inside was a letter, written in his hand but the ink was smeared, as if with tears. ‘The glass doesn’t lie,’ it read. ‘It shows you what you’ve become. I looked into it and saw the sea, and the sea saw me. Don’t open the frame. Whatever you do, don’t open the frame. The keeper’s mirror is a door, and the door is ajar.’

The hum stopped on the anniversary of our grandmother’s death. We had almost forgotten about the frame, but that night, I had a dream. I was standing in the lantern room, except the glass was now a single enormous pane, and behind it, the ocean had turned to desert—a white, crystalline plain that stretched to infinity. In the distance, I saw a figure walking toward me. It was Marco, but his skin was cracked and dry, and his eyes were closed. As he got closer, he raised his hand and placed it flat against the glass. The glass began to steam, and I saw words form in the condensation: ‘She’s thirsty.’ I woke up screaming.

We moved out the next week. The new tenants are a young couple with a baby. The last I heard, they complained of a strange lullaby coming from the tower—a dry, rasping song that sounded like wind over salt flats. And in the baby’s room, a handprint appears on the mirror each morning, small and faint, as if a child is trying to reach through from the other side. I don’t know if they’ve found the frame. I hope they don’t. But some doors, once ajar, never fully close. And some lullabies are sung for the dead.