The Hollow Between the Walls

The house on Bramble Lane was a Victorian relic, its bones creaking with every gust of wind. My brother Elliot and I were nine and seven when we discovered the spare room’s secret. It was a room we were forbidden to enter, but children are drawn to the locked door like moths to a flame, especially when they hide their treasures there. Our mother had converted it into a storage room for our toys, those we had outgrown and those we still cherished, all crammed into cardboard boxes and plastic bins that towered like miniature cityscapes.

I remember the day clearly: the light through the stained-glass window cast amber and violet patterns on the dusty floor as we snuck inside. Elliot wanted his favorite dinosaur, a tattered T-Rex with a missing arm, and I was after my stack of comic books. We were giggling, pushing aside boxes, when a cold draft slithered down the back of my neck. I turned, and there it stood in the doorway: a figure so black it seemed to drink the light, tall and gaunt, with a hood that fell over a featureless face. It had no scythe, but it didn’t need one—the image of the reaper was burned into my mind. My heart slammed against my ribs, and I grabbed Elliot’s hand, yanking him backward. We scrambled up the narrow stairs, our breath hitching, and I slammed the door to our bedroom, pressing my back against it.

‘Did you see it?’ I asked, my voice a shaking whisper. Elliot’s face was ashen, his eyes wide. He nodded, then said, ‘It was like the grim reaper, but not with a scythe. It just… stood there.’ We were both convinced we had seen the same thing, and that terrified us even more. We tried to tell our babysitter, a teenage girl named Carla who was more interested in her phone than in us, but she brushed us off, saying we had watched too many scary movies. We didn’t dare go back downstairs for the rest of the day, and that night, I lay awake, listening to the house settle, expecting to see that shape in the doorway of our room.

The next morning, our mother found the spare room door open. She scolded us for going in, saying we must have left it unlocked, but we knew we had closed it. Over the following weeks, the shadow figure became a recurring presence. It never spoke, never moved, just stood in doorways or at the foot of our beds, watching. Sometimes it was there in the corner of my eye, a flicker at the edge of vision, but when I turned, it was gone. I started having nightmares, and my mother took us to a child psychologist, who said it was a classic case of shared hallucination or night terrors. But Elliot and I knew what we had seen.

One day, our mother decided to clean out the spare room, planning to turn it into an office. We were ordered to stay upstairs, but as we sat on the landing, we heard a crash from below. We crept down and peered through the banister. The room was a mess, books and boxes toppled, and our mother stood in the center, pale, holding a small, old mirror we had never seen before. She looked up at us, her eyes wide, and said, ‘Don’t come in here. Go back to your room now.’ She didn’t sound angry, just frightened. That evening, she burned the mirror in the backyard, and the shadow never appeared again. But I could never shake the feeling that it hadn’t been the house that was haunted—it was that mirror, and it had been watching us all along.