The Hollow Cadence

I had never believed in ghosts, but I loved the stories. My friend Mira would spin tales of her family’s farmhouse, claiming it was haunted, but I always suspected she was weaving fiction for attention. When she invited me for a weekend stay, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to debunk her tales once and for all.

The farmhouse sat at the edge of a vast, empty prairie, isolated from any neighbors. Mira’s mother, a devout woman, kept an old CD player perpetually humming with a recording of a man chanting from the Quran. The sound made my skin crawl—not because of the words, but because it reminded me of funerals, of death. I asked Mira to turn it off, and though she hesitated, she obliged, sliding the disc out and silencing the machine.

We settled in her room, its walls lined with faded posters and dusty trinkets. The clock struck one in the morning, and we were laughing about the old tales when the first sound came: a steady, rhythmic thumping from above. It wasn’t the patter of rats or the creak of settling wood; it was the unmistakable click-click-click of high heels walking across the roof. Each step was deliberate, moving from one side of the ceiling to the other, pausing, then returning.

I tried to rationalize it, suggesting maybe a branch brushing the house, but Mira’s face had turned pale. She whispered that she had heard it before, always at this hour, always after her mother shut off the Quran. Her voice trembled as she recalled her grandmother telling her that the recitation kept something at bay, something that would walk the roof if the sound stopped.

‘It’s just your imagination,’ I said, but my heart was pounding. The footsteps grew louder, closer, until they were directly above us. Then they stopped. The silence was worse, heavier than the sound. I held my breath, waiting. Suddenly, a voice came from outside the window—a low, guttural hum, like a distorted version of the Quran chant, but wrong. It was almost mocking, a twisted echo.

I forced a laugh, heading to the window to prove there was nothing there. But as I pulled the curtain aside, I saw her: a figure in flowing white, standing at the edge of the roof, her face obscured by a veil. She was tall, impossibly thin, and she was staring not at me, but at the ground below. Then, with a voice like sand scraping glass, she spoke a single phrase in Arabic. I didn’t understand the words, but Mira did. She screamed, ‘No! Don’t repeat it!’ But it was too late. The figure turned, and I saw her face—it was Mira’s face, pale and weeping, yet twisted in an unnatural smile.

I stumbled back, colliding with Mira, who was shaking uncontrollably. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she whispered, her eyes darting toward the ceiling. ‘She hears you. She’s trying to become whole again. The chant keeps her incomplete.’

We sat in frozen silence, the footsteps resuming, now moving down the walls, as if the roof itself was bowing. The woman outside began to rap on the window, each tap a soft, insistent beat. I saw her lips moving, forming words I couldn’t hear. Mira clapped her hands over my ears, screaming, ‘Sing! Hum anything! Drown her out!’

So I did. I started humming a random tune, any tune, to break the rhythm. Mira joined, and we sang at the top of our lungs, a chaotic duet of pop songs and lullabies. The rapping ceased, and the footsteps retreated, fading into the sky. We kept singing until the sun rose, and when the first light streamed in, the world felt normal again.

But I couldn’t shake the image of that woman—Mira’s doppelgänger. As we finally quieted, Mira broke down. She admitted that her family had never been able to sell the house because whoever stays too long is ‘copied.’ The ghost is a mimic, a hollow being that learns you from the inside out, and the Quran verses keep her at bay. If she fully forms, she replaces you. She had been trying to take Mira for years, and now she had seen me too.

I left that day, vowing never to return. But as I drove away, I saw in my rearview mirror a figure standing on the roof, waving. It wore my clothes, my hair, my face. And though I haven’t seen her since, sometimes, in the still of the night, I hear footsteps on my own roof. And I know, without a doubt, that she is walking, waiting for the moment I lose my voice.