The Hollow Light

The house on Maple Street had always been a bit odd. It was a two-story Victorian with a wrap-around porch, but it had a persistent chill in the stairwell and a door that occasionally creaked on its own. I lived there with my parents and my younger brother, Sam. My mother, a retired nurse, had a quiet, unshakeable belief in the unseen. My father, an engineer, was a man of logic and proof. I had always been the curious one, hoping for something more than the cold mechanics of physics. We often spent Sunday nights watching paranormal shows, half for entertainment, half out of a shared, unspoken hope that the shadows held something other than dust.

My room was at the top of the stairs, a square space with a high ceiling and one large window that faced the backyard. The walls were a pale blue, and the floor was covered in laminate that had seen better days. I had a loft bed, the kind with a desk and a small sofa tucked underneath, creating a cozy, slightly dim corner. The evening was unremarkable. I sat on the bottom bunk, the single ceiling light casting a weak glow that didn’t reach under the bed. My laptop hummed, its screen the brightest thing in the room. I was lost in the endless scroll of clickbait articles when a flicker of movement caught my eye.

It was a small, white dot, no bigger than a marble, hovering just at the edge of my vision, near the doorway. I turned my head instinctively, but it vanished almost instantly, like a tiny camera flash swallowed by the darkness. It had drifted, I thought, not disappeared in place but moved slightly, as if carried by an unseen breeze. I blinked, staring at the empty space, my heart starting a steady, nervous rhythm. I tried to rationalize: a reflection from a passing car, a glint of the window, even a dust mote catching light. But the dot had been too distinct, too round, and it had moved with a purpose.

I called Sam, to see if he’d seen anything, but he was too busy with his video game. My mother, who was in the kitchen, listened with a look of calm concern. “Could be a floater, dear,” she said, but her eyes had a distant quality. “Or maybe it’s just the house settling.” That night, I left the hall light on and the door cracked open, feeling childish but unable to shake the image.

The next morning, I found a small, perfectly round scorch mark on the laminate flooring, right by the doorway where I’d seen the dot. It was about the size of a coin, slightly raised, with a faint, burned smell. My father examined it and pronounced it ‘spilled chemical’ but couldn’t explain what chemical could leave such a clean circle. Sam joked about alien bacteria. I felt a cold knot in my stomach.

Over the next few days, the dot returned. Not every night, but often enough that I started to watch for it. It would appear in the corner of my eye, then fade as soon as I focused. Sometimes it lingered, drifting in slow, lazy circles, like a firefly. I began to keep a journal, noting the time, the location, the duration. The pattern emerged: it was always near the doorway, always within my peripheral vision, and it always moved away from me, as if it were observing me.

Then, one night, it didn’t fade. I was sitting on the sofa under the bunk, the laptop shut, the room dark except for the moon’s eerie glow through the window. I heard a faint, almost imperceptible crackle, and turned just in time to see the dot intensify, growing brighter and larger until it filled the doorway with a cold, white light. It wasn’t a circle anymore, but a hole—a round, featureless void that seemed to suck the warmth from the air. I felt a pull, a gentle tug at my core, and a voice that was not a voice but a vibration within my bones. It said, or perhaps conveyed, the word: ‘Come’.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The light lingered for what felt like an eternity, then shrank back to a dot and blinked out, leaving behind the smell of ozone and a freezer-burn cold that seeped into my skin. My mother, who had been in the hallway, appeared, her face pale. She said she had felt a sudden dread, a presence. My father, who had been in his workshop, came up and reported that the temperature in his room had dropped twenty degrees for no reason.

We didn’t speak of it aloud, but we all knew something was in the house. The next week, we had an electrician inspect the wiring; everything was fine. A priest was called; he said he sensed ‘something indifferent, not malevolent but not friendly, a lost, hollow thing.’ He advised us to ignore it.

But I couldn’t ignore it. I started to see it during the day, a ghostly mote in bright sunlight. I began to feel a phantom coldness on my left side, as if something was standing close to me. I would catch glimpses of a faint, round shadow in my peripheral vision that my direct gaze couldn’t hold. I grew tired, distracted, and my grades slipped. My parents grew worried.

One night, driven by a mix of fear and curiosity, I decided to confront it. I sat in the dark, the doorway a black rectangle, and waited. The dot appeared, a small, steady star. I forced myself to look at it directly, not away. It didn’t fade. It grew, the white light swelling, and the cold became suffocating. The tug was stronger now, and I felt myself being pulled toward it. I grabbed the edge of the desk to anchor myself.

A figure began to take shape within the light—a vague, humanoid silhouette, not solid but like smoke, with a hollow where a face should be. It raised an arm, and I saw that the arm ended in a hand with too-long fingers. It reached out, and I swear I heard a faint, metallic whisper, like falling sand. ‘Let go,’ it seemed to say. ‘Come with me.’

I screamed. I don’t remember what I shouted, but it broke the spell. The light collapsed into itself with a sudden pop, leaving a blackened ring on the floor, a ring that is still there. I ran to my parents’ room, and they held me as I shivered. My father, for the first time, said, ‘There is something.’

We moved out a month later. The house is still there, with the ring on the floor. I still see the dot sometimes, out of the corner of my eye. It’s always there, waiting. And I have this unshakeable feeling that it’s not gone—it’s just waiting for me to be alone again. I haven’t turned on the TV for a paranormal show since. I keep all the lights on, and I never sit with my back to a doorway.