The Hollow in the Attic

I was too young to remember the summer the sunlight turned wrong in our house, but the story has lived in my bones ever since. We were three children—my sister Lina, my brother Tomas, and me, the baby—left in the care of a woman named Aling Rosa while our parents worked the rice fields. The house itself was an old Spanish-era structure in the outskirts of Laguna, its thick adobe walls breathing humidity and the smell of damp wood. Some rooms were always cold, even in the hottest afternoons, and the attic, sealed with rusted nails, seemed to hum when you stood beneath it.

Aling Rosa was not a kind woman. When our parents were gone, her face would twist into something schooled and cruel. I was too small to understand, but I knew the sounds: Tomas crying in the corner as she pinched the soft skin of his arms, Lina screaming as she whipped the floor with a bamboo stick until it sang through the air. For me, she had a special cruelty—she would hold me so tightly that I couldn’t breathe, or she’d leave me in the dark pantry with the door slightly ajar, letting me feel the shadows close in. My siblings bore the marks, but I bore the silence.

Then, one summer night, Aling Rosa began to change. It started with a fever that wouldn’t break, her forehead slick with sweat even as the wind rustled the banana leaves outside. She complained of dizziness, of a weight pressing on her skull, and she’d stare at empty corners as if something were standing there. My parents, alarmed, called a local faith healer—Lolo Andoy, who knew the old ways. He arrived with his bundle of herbs and sharp knife, his eyes wary as he crossed the threshold.

That night, they laid Aling Rosa on the wooden bench in the main hall. Lolo Andoy chanted and shook his rattles, and the air grew thick with smoke from the burning herbs. Suddenly, Aling Rosa’s body convulsed, her back arching so high it seemed to snap. When she spoke, it was not her voice. It was thin, almost childlike, but with a guttural undertone that made the skin on my arms prickle. ‘She hurts my friends,’ the voice said, trembling with rage. ‘She lets them go hungry, and she beats them with hard things. Look at their bodies, and you will see.’

The healers stared. Lolo Andoy’s hands shook. Then Aling Rosa went limp, and a sickly sweet smell filled the room. That was when my father, trembling, pulled up his sleeves and looked at his own arms—and plain as day, there were pink welts, like the marks of pinched skin, but they hadn’t been there before. He lifted his shirt, and there on his back were long, angry stripes, as if from a bamboo stick. My mother gasped and touched her own neck, where a bruise was blooming. I stared at my tiny hands, and on my palm, a fresh red mark, like a burn, was forming.

The voice spoke one more time, from the ceiling, as if echoing down from the attic: ‘You see? She has done this to you, too.’ And then, with a sound like a snapped string, the house shuddered, and the doors burst open to reveal the scorched earth outside. The next morning, Aling Rosa was gone. No one ever found her. But the attic door, which had been sealed for decades, was now slightly ajar, and a cold draft seeped from it, carrying the faint scent of ash and old honey.

For years, our parents never spoke of it. But I grew up with a strange fear of attics, and a stranger habit: every time the house felt too quiet, I would hear a tiny voice, like that of a child—or a dwarf—whispering from above, ‘We are always hungry.’ And I would look at my own hands, remembering the marks that appeared on a summer night, and wonder if the little ones had ever left us at all, or if they still lived in the hollow above our heads, waiting for the next cruel hand to teach them how to hurt.