The Hollow Man in the Hallway

When I was eleven, my family packed our lives into a rusted Ford and drove across three states to a town called Cinder Creek, where the air smelled of burnt sugar and wet ash. The house we bought stood at the end of Maple Lane, a two-story Victorian with a crooked porch and windows that watched you like unblinking eyes. I didn’t mind it at first, because I had my own room for the first time, with a narrow bed and a view of the overgrown garden where fireflies pulsed in the summer heat.

The trouble started on the third night. I woke to the sound of soft breathing under my bed, a rhythmic hiss like someone trying to speak through water. I called out, but my father only grumbled from down the hall. When I finally gathered the courage to peer over the edge, there was nothing but dust and a forgotten sock. I dismissed it as imagination, but I remember the way the air felt thick and wrong, as if the room itself held its breath.

By the time I turned thirteen, the breathing had become something worse: a pressure on my chest that pinned me to the mattress while a deep, guttural voice chanted my name in a language I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, only lie there with my eyes wide open, watching the ceiling blur as if underwater. These episodes came every few weeks, always in the hour before dawn, and they escalated until I was seventeen. I learned to sleep with the light on and a crucifix under my pillow, though neither helped.

The figures began when I was fourteen. At first, they were just flickers at the edge of my vision – a tall man in a hat standing at the end of the hall, a woman in white weeping in the garden. I never saw their faces, only the suggestion of them. One night, I heard a violent scratching from my bedroom door, like a cat with claws, and when I opened it, fresh gouges had been carved into the wood, three long lines dripping with something dark that turned out to be rust-colored sap. I told my mother, but she blamed it on a stray animal.

The house had a history, I learned later. The woman who sold it to us, Mrs. Delacroix, had practiced voodoo in the back room, which my father converted into a home office. When I was sixteen, I found a cardboard box in the attic filled with desiccated roots, chicken bones, and a small cloth doll with pins through its chest. I buried it in the backyard, but the next morning, it was back on my nightstand, its button eyes somehow aimed at my bed.

It grew worse after that. The figures became more solid, more insistent. I saw a black shape with no face standing between me and my bedroom door, blocking my way, its head tilting as if listening. When I blinked, it dispersed into smoke. At school, I caught glimpses of a hooded figure in the corner of my eye, always at the edge of the soccer field, never moving. My mother claimed she saw a man in a long coat staring through our kitchen window, but when she ran outside, the street was empty.

Then, a month ago, I turned eighteen. It was a Saturday, and I was coming home from a late shift at the diner. The house was dark except for the porch light, which buzzed like a trapped wasp. As I climbed the stairs, I heard a heavy dragging sound from my bedroom, something moving across the floor. I pushed the door open, and there it was: a tall, faceless figure, blacker than the night, its skin shimmering like oil. It reached out a hand – long, with too many joints – and brushed my cheek. I froze, unable to scream, as a cold seeped into my bones, a chill that felt like being buried alive.

It spoke then, not with a voice but with a vibration I felt in my teeth: ‘You are the one.’ Then it was gone, leaving the room smelling of ash and burnt sugar.

I am twenty now, and I still live in that house because I can’t afford to leave. The scratches on my door have multiplied, forming a spiral pattern that seems to rotate when I look away. The hooded figure now follows me to the grocery store, standing at the end of the aisle. And last night, I woke to find a handprint burned into my chest, a perfect negative of a palm, searing and cold at the same time.

I know now that this thing is not a ghost or a demon. It is something that was bound to this house, to Mrs. Delacroix’s rituals, and it has been waiting for a host. It selected me the day I turned thirteen, when I was old enough to bear it. It has been feeding on my fear, growing stronger, and now it wants to take my place in the world of the living.

I don’t know what will happen when it finally succeeds. I only know that the Hollow Man in the Hallway, as I call it, is patient, and it has been waiting for nineteen years. I don’t think my will can hold out much longer.