The Hollow Traipse

It was the summer of ’93 when I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the salt marshes—a place that had been in my family for generations but had stood empty for nearly a decade. The house sagged like a tired animal, and the floorboards throughout creaked and groaned with every shift in temperature. I’d taken it on as a project, a way to escape the city and a messy breakup, and I told myself the constant sense of being watched was just the house settling.

My girlfriend at the time, a woman named Cora with a passing interest in folk magic, had carved a sigil into the doorframe of my bedroom ‘for protection,’ she’d said, though she refused to explain what it meant. I’d laughed it off, but at night, with the salt wind rattling the windows, I’d find myself staring at that strange knot of lines, feeling like it was looking back.

One night, I went to bed as usual, setting my alarm for five in the morning to get a head start on the tide before heading out to my job as a fisheries inspector. The clock was on the nightstand, angled so I could read it from my pillow. I remember the weight of the day pressing on me, and I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep almost instantly.

A noise jolted me awake—not a loud noise, just the soft creak of a floorboard, the kind that comes from careful, deliberate steps. I blinked into the dim light of the moon coming through the gauze curtains, and my eyes found the clock. It was 1:01. I groaned internally. Five more hours of sleep, I thought, and rolled over to pull the covers up.

But then I heard it again—a slow, shuffling step, coming from the hallway. It was the exact sound my father used to make when he’d shuffle to the kitchen in his worn slippers, a dragging, heavy tread. But my father had been dead for three years. My heart started to pound. I lay perfectly still, straining to hear over my own breathing.

The steps stopped right outside my bedroom door. I stared at the thin, pale rectangle of light under the door, waiting. Then the door handle slowly turned, the latch clicking with a sound like a bone popping. The door swung inward, and the light from the hallway spilled across the floor, but there was no silhouette in it.

I held my breath, and then the footsteps began again—but this time they were inside the room, coming around the bed. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the floorboards moan under a weight that wasn’t there. The steps stopped at the foot of the bed, and the air turned cold, heavy, like the pressure before a storm.

I don’t know what made me do it, but I lunged up and fumbled for the lamp. The light snapped on, and the room was empty. The door was still shut. I sat there, heart hammering, sweat soaking my shirt. I told myself it was a dream, a half-awake hallucination, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was grinning in the darkness just beyond the lamp’s glow.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. When dawn finally came, I got up, determined to find a rational explanation. I examined the floorboards, looking for loose planks or animals, but found nothing. As I was about to give up, I noticed the sigil on the doorframe—Cora’s protection mark. It had been scratched out, as if someone had taken a knife and dug angry lines over the original carvings.

I called Cora, but she’d moved out a month before, and I hadn’t spoken to her since. Her phone was disconnected. I left a message on her old machine, asking what the sigil meant, but she never called back.

That night, at 1:01 again, I heard the steps come up the hallway, stop at my door, and then pass through the wall into the bedroom. I lay rigid, staring at the ceiling, and I saw it—a dark shape, like a negative space, slowly coalescing at the foot of the bed. It didn’t have a face, but I could feel it staring at me. It reached out a long, thin hand, and I felt a cold pressure on my ankle, like a bird’s claws.

The pressure grew, and I felt myself being pulled, dragged down toward the bed, as if the mattress had turned to quicksand. I screamed, but no sound came out. The shape leaned in, and I heard a whisper, dry as old leaves, say, ‘You shouldn’t have scraped her away.’

I woke up the next morning face-down on the floor, my mouth full of dust. The sigil was gone, scraped clean off the wood. I packed my bags that day and never went back. But even now, sometimes, in the quiet hours just after one in the morning, I’ll hear footsteps in my new apartment, slow and deliberate, coming toward my bed. And I know it’s not my imagination—it’s that hollow traipse, following me home.