The Hollow in the Attic

The summer I turned fourteen, my mother rented a crumbling Victorian house on the edge of Pine Hollow, a town so small it didn’t even have a stoplight. We’d moved there to escape the memories of the city, to start over after Dad left. But the house had its own memories, thick and suffocating as the dust that coated every surface. My little sister, Lily, was only two, a wisp of a thing with wide, wondering eyes. She was the reason we moved, to give her a yard, a quiet place to grow. I resented her for it then, for the way she siphoned all of Mom’s attention, for the way she seemed to fill the silence with her constant babbling.

It was in that house that Lily fell ill. She’d been fine one morning, giggling as she chased a moth through the kitchen, then by evening she was burning with fever, her tiny body trembling. Mom, who had been through this twice before with me and my older brother, knew it wasn’t just a cold. She called the only doctor in town, a man with a handlebar mustache and a smell of stale coffee, who said it was a summer virus and to give her fluids. Mom insisted, her voice tight with panic, that it was more, that Lily’s neck was stiff, that she was crying at the light. The doctor waved her off, prescribing Tylenol and rest. By dawn, Lily was unresponsive, her breathing shallow. We rushed her to the county hospital, but it was too late. The meningitis had ravaged her brain. She was declared brain-dead that afternoon.

I remember the silence in the hospital hallway after the doctors told us. Mom’s sobs were the only sound, muffled against my shoulder. I felt hollow, a shell of myself. I thought of all the times I’d wished her away, all the times I’d yelled at her for touching my things. And now she was gone, a flicker of a life I’d never truly known. I was angry at the doctor, at God, at myself. I begged the universe, into the cold void of my room at night, ‘Just let me talk to her. Let me tell her I’m sorry.’

A week after the funeral, I was in the attic, searching for old photo albums Mom wanted to sort through. The attic was vast, filled with the detritus of a hundred years of lives. There were trunks of moth-eaten clothes, stacks of yellowed newspapers, and a child’s rocking horse with a cracked wooden face. In the far corner, behind a stack of mildewed boxes, I found a rectangular object covered in a stained canvas drop cloth. I pulled the cloth away to reveal a mirror, maybe four feet tall, in an ornate, tarnished silver frame. Its glass was smoky, cloudy with age, but there was something about it that drew me closer.

As I stood before it, I saw my own reflection, but it was wrong. My face was there, but the eyes were different—they were Lily’s eyes, impossibly blue, staring out from my own flesh. I stumbled back, my heart hammering. When I looked again, it was just my own tired face, but I felt a coldness seep through the floorboards, wrapping around my ankles. I wanted to flee, but a thought, not my own, pulsed in my mind: ‘You wanted to talk to me.’

The mirror became my sanctuary and my curse. I started visiting it daily, and with each visit, the glass would clear a little more, and I would see glimpses of a small girl in a white dress, running through a sunlit meadow that I recognized as the one behind our house. She would wave, and her mouth would move, but I couldn’t hear her. I pressed my palm to the glass, and it felt cold, like touching the surface of a frozen lake. One afternoon, as I leaned in, my breath fogging the surface, her hand met mine on the other side, and for a split second, I felt her small, cold fingers. I pulled away, gasping, and saw that my palm bore a faint, icy-blue mark, like a bruise that had never formed.

I didn’t tell Mom. She was lost in her own fog of grief, barely leaving her room. I was alone with my secret, and the mirror began to change me. I started to sleep less, my dreams filled with whispers that sounded like Lily’s voice, but wrong, too low and guttural. I woke up with scratches on my arms, thin as hairlines, in the shape of tiny hands. I started to fear the mirror, but I couldn’t stay away. It was like a drug, the only connection I had to her.

Then one night, I was jolted awake by a crash from the attic. I crept up the stairs, heart pounding, and found the mirror shattered on the floor, its silver frame bent and blackened. In the center of the shards lay a small, white, porcelain doll, with cracked, blue eyes that seemed to follow me. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the marrow, that the mirror had been a portal, and now it was sealed, but the thing that had been using Lily’s image was not trapped. It was free.

Later that night, I heard a sound from Lily’s room. It was a soft, rhythmic creaking, like a rocking chair. I pushed the door open. The room was empty of furniture except for the crib, but in the center stood a ghostly, white figure, shimmering like heat, no taller than a toddler. It turned, and where its face should have been was a void, a hollow darkness. And from that hollow, I heard my sister’s voice, but stretched and warped, ‘You let me in.’

The figure lunged. I backpedaled, tripping over the hallway rug, and slammed my head against the wall. When I looked up, the hallway was dark, empty, but I could feel it watching from the shadows, waiting. I understood then that my grief had opened a door, and the thing that came through was not Lily, but something that wore her shape to feed on the living. The mark on my palm had grown, a black web creeping toward my wrist.

I ran to Mother’s room, screaming, but the bed was empty, the sheets cold. I searched the house, a frantic, trembling animal, until I found Mother in the attic, kneeling amidst the shards of the mirror, holding a shard in her hand, blood trickling down her fingers. She looked up at me with eyes that were not her own—they were Lily’s blue, but vacant, like the eyes of a doll. She whispered, ‘She’s waiting for us, sweetheart.’ The shard in her hand glittered, and I saw my reflection in it, and behind my reflection, a dark, hollow shape.

The house groaned around me, and all the doors slammed shut at once. I realized there was no escape, not for any of us. The hollow in the attic had found a permanent home, and it had chosen to wear the skin of our grief. I knelt beside Mother, and as the last bit of light faded from the windows, I felt a cold hand slip into mine. It was small, and it was not my sister’s. But as I looked down, I knew I would never be alone again.