The Hollow Guest

When I was twelve, my family moved into the old Steeple House on the edge of the salt marshes. The house had stood empty for decades, and the locals avoided it, but my father saw a bargain. My first night there, I woke from a feverish nap at three in the afternoon. The room felt wrong, too still, and I couldn’t move a muscle. A figure knelt by my bed, its skin the color of stagnant pond water, its face a smooth, unbroken oval. No eyes, no mouth, just a faint depression where a mouth should have been. It leaned close, and I heard a voice, not from it but from inside my own skull: ‘Let me go.’ The paralysis snapped, and I sat up gasping, but the thing was gone.

The following year, I was home alone, walking to my room. My mother’s bedroom was across the hall to my right. As I reached my door, I turned and saw a globe of light, about four inches in diameter, hovering in the hallway. It wasn’t bright like a bulb, but a soft, sickly white, like a pearl. A thin ribbon of pale light trailed behind it as it drifted toward my mother’s door. It paused there, as if waiting, then slipped through the door without opening it. I stood frozen, my heart thudding, until the light vanished. I never told my mother, but that night I heard her murmuring in her sleep.

Years passed, and I tried to forget. But the phenomenon repeated, always at odd hours, always shifting. At sixteen, I woke to find the green thing standing at the foot of my bed, its mouth now a wide, dark gash. It didn’t speak, but I felt a hunger, a longing for release that wasn’t mine. I screamed, and it dissolved into the shadows.

At nineteen, I moved to the city for university, hoping to escape. But my new apartment had its own peculiarities. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the orb, bobbing in the dark. It grew larger each time, until it filled my vision, and I’d wake gasping. My roommate said I talked in my sleep, always the same words: ‘Let me go.’

One night, I decided to confront it. I stayed up, waiting, and at 3:00 AM, the air grew cold. The orb materialized in my room, now the size of a beach ball, its light pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat. And for the first time, I heard a voice, not in my head, but in the room, a dry rasp like dead reeds: ‘You have carried me long enough. Set me free.’ I knew then what I had to do. I sought out a priest who dealt in the occult. He performed a ritual on the shore of the marsh, where the house still stood, now crumbling. He said that the figure and the orb were the same entity, a fractured spirit that had once been a man, torn between two worlds. It had attached to me because I was susceptible, a thin veil between life and death.

As the priest chanted over me, I felt a tearing sensation in my chest. The spirit was leaving, but it took a part of me with it. I saw the green face one last time, its gash now forming words: ‘Thank you.’ And then it was gone. I collapsed, and when I woke, I was alone, but hollow. A piece of me was missing, and I have never felt whole since. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I still see a flicker of white at the edge of my vision, but it no longer approaches. It is waiting, as I am, for something I cannot name.