The Hollow Light Well

When I was nine, my mother and her new husband moved us from our cramped Boston walk-up to a tenement in the Milltown Flats. The building was a monstrosity of rust-red brick and black iron fire escapes, six stories tall, with four apartments on each landing. Our unit, 4B, sat at the heart of the building, a box of dim rooms connected by a narrow hallway. But the strangest part was my bedroom. It had no window to the outside. Instead, high on the wall, there was a small, frosted glass pane that looked into a light well—a vertical shaft of brick and shadow that ran from the basement to the roof. Through that grimy glass, I could see other windows like mine, belonging to other middle apartments in the building. They were all dark, mostly, but sometimes I saw a hand press against the glass, or a face, pale and gone before I could blink. I told my mother, but she dismissed it. ‘Don’t go staring into other folks’ windows,’ she said. ‘It’s rude.’ The building was full of ex-cons and junkies, people who kept to themselves and never looked you in the eye. The only sound that ever came through my window was a low, rhythmic tapping, like a finger on glass, from somewhere above or below. I started to think it was a signal.

My stepfather, Carl, was from a dusty New Mexico town, and he’d never made peace with the damp New England cold. He spent his evenings at the Fireplug, a dive bar two blocks over, leaving my mother to hover over the kitchen sink, smoking and staring at the peeling wallpaper. On the third week, I heard it for the first time—a voice, muffled but clear, coming from the light well. It was a child’s voice, high and thin, singing a rhyme I hadn’t heard before. ‘In the hollow of the wall, where the spider makes its crawl, there’s a room with no door, and it’s waiting for us all.’ I pressed my face to the cold glass, but saw nothing but the dark shaft and the faint outline of the window above. I tried to call out, but my throat tightened. The singing stopped. Then, a whisper, so close it seemed to come from inside my own head: ‘He sees you.’ I yanked my hand back as if burned.

Weeks passed, and the voice grew bolder. It called my name, or what sounded like it—’Mara’—but I never gave it. It told me secrets about the neighbors: Mrs. Gable in 2C had a body under her floorboards; Mr. Ruiz in 5A kept a shrine to a dead dog. I stopped sleeping. My mother noticed the circles under my eyes but blamed the thin walls, the arguing from 3D. I wanted to tell her about the voice, but every time I tried, the words died in my throat. The voice knew. It would laugh, a soft, wet sound, and say, ‘No one hears us but you, little spider.’

Then, one night, I woke to a tapping that wasn’t rhythmic—it was frantic, desperate. A face was pressed against the glass of the window above mine, mouth wide, eyes rolled back. It was a woman, her skin gray like papier-mâché, and she was pounding on the glass with both fists. Through the pane, I heard her voice, not through sound but through terror—

‘she’s coming, she’s coming, she’ll get in through the light, don’t let her in.’ A shadow rose behind her, cloaked in a darkness so deep it seemed to suck the dim light from the shaft. It wrapped around her, and then she was gone. I stumbled back, fell to the floor, and lay there, breathing in shallow gasps. Above me, the glass pane darkened, and I saw something like a hand, too long, with too many knuckles, trace slow circles on the other side. Then the hand pressed flat, and the glass began to creak.

I ran to the kitchen, where my mother was dozing in her chair. I shook her awake, babbling about the window. She looked at me with that weary, half-drunk expression and said, ‘There’s no one out there, Mara. It’s just a pipe.’ But she took my hand and led me back to my room. She yanked the curtain over the window—a curtain I hadn’t even thought to draw. ‘See? It’s just the dark.’ As she turned to leave, a voice drifted through the thin wall, from the apartment next door, which had been vacant for months: ‘Thank you for your silence. I was hungry.’ My mother froze. I felt her hand tighten on mine. We both looked at the curtain, and saw it billow outward, as if a breath had passed through it, even though the room was still.

We left the next morning. We moved in with my aunt in Portland, and my mother never spoke of that building again. But I still dream of the light well—of the hollow shaft and the windows that go nowhere. And sometimes, when I lean close to a bathroom vent or an old intercom, I hear that voice again, humming the rhyme. The last time, it added a verse: ‘The walls are thin, but the dark is thin too. Knock once, and I’ll find you.’ I always wake up with my hand pressed to the nearest wall, knocking.