The Hollow Cord

It was the summer of 1987, and my family had just moved into a rambling Victorian house in the fading town of Ashbury, Maine. The house had been empty for decades, and the smell of mothballs and old wood clung to everything. My younger brother, Toby, and I shared a room at the top of the stairs, the one with the peeling wallpaper of faded roses. His bed was closer to the door, which I thought was unfair, but he was younger and needed the easier escape route, or so my mother said.

I was twelve, and I suffered from what my mother called ‘an overactive imagination.’ But this wasn’t imagination. It was around 1 AM, a week after we moved in. The hall light was left on, a feeble bulb that cast a sickly yellow glow through our partially open door. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle its old bones. Then I saw them.

Two figures, no taller than my knee, glowing with a sickly green luminescence, drifted through the doorway. They didn’t walk; they floated, as if suspended in water. They were backlit by the hall light, their edges sharp against the glow. They wore long, dark cloaks that trailed like tattered shrouds. No faces, just smooth, blank ovals where faces should be. They moved in perfect unison, as if they were one entity split in two, their movements synchronized with an eerie precision.

My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to scream, but no sound came. They moved toward Toby’s bed first. I saw them pause, hovering over him. One of them reached out with a tiny, pale hand, and seemed to stroke his hair, though he didn’t stir. Then they turned, as one, and glided toward the door.

They stopped at the threshold and looked back at me. I felt a cold dread wash over me, a paralyzing fear that numbed my limbs. They seemed to wait, as if expecting something. Then, in a whisper that was not a sound but a vibration in my skull, they said, ‘We will return for the one who is ready.’ And then they were gone, like smoke dissolving.

I didn’t sleep that night. The next morning, I tried to tell my parents, but they dismissed it as a nightmare. ‘Old houses play tricks,’ my father said, but his voice was not quite steady. I noticed Toby was quiet, distant, as if he were listening to something I couldn’t hear.

Over the next weeks, the green figures appeared more often. Always at the same time, always entering through our door. They would stand beside me, their cold presence drawing the warmth from the room. They began to speak to me in that silent voice, telling me things I did not want to know. They spoke of a ‘hollow cord’ that bound the living to the dead, and that I was the one to undo it.

I began to lose weight. I stopped eating, stopped talking. My parents grew worried, and the doctor said it was ‘nervous exhaustion.’ But only I knew the truth. The figures were growing more substantial, their outlines becoming more defined. I could now see their eyes: hollow, black pits that seemed to swallow light.

One night, I decided to follow them. I left my bed and crept behind them as they glided down the hallway, down the stairs, to the basement door. They passed through it, and I hesitated. But then I heard a voice, not theirs, but a faint, echoing cry from below. I opened the door.

The basement was not the dank, cobwebbed place I expected. It was vast and shrouded in a green glow, like being underwater. At the center stood a strange contraption, a brass machine covered in dials and a single, thick cord that pulsed like a living thing. The two figures stood beside it, pointing at me.

‘You have come,’ they said, their voices now audible, a chorus of whispers. ‘The cord must be severed. It has bound us here for a century. Your family has the gift, the sight. You must set us free.’

I looked at the cord, which stretched from the machine to a dark fissure in the wall. I felt a pull, a compulsion to touch it. As my fingers brushed the rough fabric, I saw visions: a family, long dead, bound together by a ritual gone wrong. They had tried to summon something, and instead, their souls were trapped in this house, their earthly forms reduced to these green echoes.

And the cord was the anchor. I was to be their liberator. But I was also their next binding. I could feel the cord trying to latch onto me, to draw me in.

I stepped back, shaking my head. ‘No,’ I gasped.

The figures surged forward, their green light intensifying. ‘You were chosen! The cord must be broken!’

I turned and ran, up the stairs, slamming the basement door behind me. I heard them whispering, but they did not follow.

I never told anyone what I saw. Toby started sleeping in my parents’ room, claiming nightmares. I stayed in that room alone, but the green figures never returned. I felt their absence, a hollow space where they once were.

Years later, as I packed to leave for college, I found a small, worn leather journal in the basement, hidden behind a loose brick. It belonged to a previous owner, a woman named Elspeth. She wrote of the two children she lost to cholera, and her desperate attempt to bring them back. She had built the machine, the ‘resonator’, and connected it to the veil between worlds. But something went wrong. Her children’s souls were bound, not released, and she became their servant, pulling others to that same fate.

I dropped the journal as if it were on fire. The green figures, the pilgrims, they were her children. And I had been meant to take her place.

I moved out, leaving that house behind. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I still see the green glow, and I hear the whisper: ‘We will return for the one who is ready.’ And I know, deep in my bones, that I was never chosen. I was just a stand-in, a hollow vessel, a trick of fate.