The Hollow in the Attic

The old farmhouse on the edge of Pine Hollow had always felt too big for just our grandmother and us kids. Two stories of creaking wood, dusty rooms, and a staircase that seemed to swallow sound. My cousin Louise, my sisters, and I would race each other up to the second floor only when we had to, and we always came down faster than we went up. There was a weight up there, a sense of being watched, as if the shadows between the beams had eyes.

Our grandmother said it was nonsense, just old house sounds and the wind off the fields. But she never went up there herself, not even to fetch stored jars or old photo albums. We noticed but didn’t ask.

Then, one summer, we found the attic door. It was behind a wardrobe in the hallway, almost invisible. We’d never seen it before—or maybe we’d never noticed, because it was always closed. Louise dared us, and we opened it. A narrow staircase led up into blackness. The air that rushed out was cold and smelled of dry dust and something faintly metallic.

We went up, of course, all four of us, holding hands. The attic was huge, with a low, slanted ceiling. In the center stood a single object: a heavy hardwood chest, carved with patterns we didn’t recognize. It was locked with a padlock, but the lock was rusted and broken. We opened it.

Inside was a collection of small, cloth-bound journals, all written in the same spidery handwriting. The first page of the top journal read: ‘I will not forget. I will wait here until they come.’ We read a few pages, but the writing got increasingly frantic, disjointed. It mentioned a child, a secret, and a burial under the apple tree. But there was no child in our family, and the old apple tree had been cut down years ago.

We took the journals downstairs, meaning to show our grandmother. But when we showed her, her face went pale. She grabbed them from us and threw them into the stove without a word. When we asked what they were, she just said, ‘Nothing. You shouldn’t have gone up there.’

That night, at exactly 10:00 PM, we heard it: a woman’s scream, high and clear, cutting through the house. It came from the attic. We all froze in the living room. Our grandmother was in her chair, knitting, and she didn’t even look up. ‘It’s just a fox,’ she said. But we knew it wasn’t a fox.

The screams continued every night at the same time. We tried to ignore them, but eventually, Louise couldn’t take it. She said she was going to find the source. We pleaded with her not to, but she went up anyway. We waited, counting the minutes. An hour passed, then two. Louise didn’t come back.

We found her in the attic, standing in front of the empty chest, staring at something we couldn’t see. She was murmuring, ‘She’s here. She’s always here.’ We pulled her out, but she wouldn’t speak for days.

The next night, at 10:00, the scream came from directly below us, in the living room. Then from the kitchen, then from our bedrooms. It was as if the woman was moving through the house, getting closer.

On the third night, our grandmother gathered us together. She looked older than she ever had, her hands shaking. ‘I should have told you,’ she said. ‘I knew the story. The woman who lived here before was my grandmother. She had a child, a baby, but the baby was stillborn. She couldn’t bear it. She walked to the tracks that night. But her journals were not about a ghost—they were about a pact. She wrote that if she gave herself to the tracks, her grief would stay in this house, and it would grow, feeding on any child who heard her. I thought if I burned the journals, she would forget. But she doesn’t forget. She waits for the children.’

We left that house the next morning. We never went back. But even now, at night, when the clock strikes ten, I hear a faint scream from somewhere inside the walls. And I wonder if we left her behind, or if she followed us, hiding in the hollows of every home we’ll ever live in.