The Hovering

My father was a long-haul trucker, gone for weeks at a time, so during his absences, I would crawl into my mother’s bed, seeking the comfort of her warmth and the steady rhythm of her breathing. We lived in a creaking Victorian house on the edge of a town that seemed to forget us, a place where the floorboards had a language of their own and the wind whistled through the cracks in the walls like a forgotten song. I was six, an age where imagination is a constant companion, but what happened that night was no dream.

I woke with a start, my heart pounding, to find the cracked plaster ceiling inches from my face. The water stain that looked like a map of a foreign country loomed large, its contours sharp in the pale moonlight. I could see every crack, every dust mote suspended in the air. I reached out, my small finger touching the cold, rough surface, and then, as if the universe had taken a breath, I fell, landing on the bed with a soft thump. The impact was gentle, but the bounce that followed was not. I rose and fell, rose and fell, my body moving as if on a trampoline, the springs groaning beneath my weight. The noise must have been enough to rouse even the dead, for my mother, a woman who could sleep through a thunderstorm, shot up in bed, her eyes wide with irritation.

‘Marcus, what in God’s name are you doing?’ she snapped, her voice sharp and ragged from sleep. ‘It’s the middle of the night!’ I tried to explain, my voice trembling, ‘I was on the ceiling, Mom. My face touched the ceiling, and then I fell.’ She stared at me, her expression shifting from anger to confusion, to something darker, something I didn’t have a name for yet. She knew the house was old, but she never spoke of it being haunted, not until much later. That night, she simply pulled me close, her arms tight around me, and said, ‘It was just a dream, baby. Go back to sleep.’ But I knew it wasn’t a dream. I had felt the plaster, tasted the dust.

The next morning, I searched the ceiling for any sign of disturbance, but the water stain was there, unremarkable. I tried to tell my older sister, Lena, but she laughed it off, calling me a dramatic little kid. My father called from a truck stop somewhere in Ohio, and I mentioned it, but he dismissed it with a gruff, ‘You and your imagination, Marcus. Get some hiking boots, you’re going places.’ But the strange occurrences didn’t stop. A week later, I found my toy soldiers arranged in a perfect circle in the middle of the living room floor, though I had left them scattered in my toy box. The television would turn on by itself at 3:00 AM, static humming like a swarm of bees. And always, that feeling of being watched, a prickling at the back of my neck, as if something invisible stood just behind me, breathing.

Years passed, and the house became a character in our lives, its moods and quirks a constant undercurrent. My mother, a skeptic by nature, began to change. She would sometimes stop mid-step, staring at a wall, and when I asked what was wrong, she’d shake her head and mutter, ‘Nothing, just the old house settling.’ But I knew better. One night, when I was twelve, I woke to find my own face hovering above the bed, my body weightless, the sheets hanging below me like a shroud. This time, there was no bounce. I hung there, suspended, staring down at my own sleeping form, and I saw a shadowy figure standing in the corner of the room, a shape darker than the darkness, with hollow eyes. It raised a finger to its lips, a gesture of silence, and then I was dropped back onto the mattress with a thud that rattled my teeth.

I didn’t tell my mother. I couldn’t. That shadow, that silent sentinel, had imprinted itself on my mind. It wasn’t until I was seventeen and home alone that I finally faced it. I was in the attic, searching for old Christmas decorations, when I found a journal wrapped in oilcloth. The handwriting was my great-grandmother’s, Elspeth. She had lived in this house, and the pages were filled with frantic scribbles about ‘the hovering one,’ a benevolent ghost, she called it, that watched over the children of the house, lifting them gently to see the world from above, protecting them from the dangers below. The final entry, dated three days before her death, read: ‘It lifts the children, shows them the shadow world, and then it takes them. But I am old. It wants the young. Beware the hovering.’

A chill ran down my spine. I remembered the fall when I was six, the weightlessness, the silent figure in the corner. My great-grandmother had died when I was just a baby, but I remembered her face, kind and worn, from photographs. Was this the same presence? Was it trying to protect me, or was it something else, something that preyed on the young, using the ceiling as its playground? The next night, I lay in bed, waiting, my heart a jackhammer. At 2:23 AM, the familiar weightlessness returned. I didn’t fight it. I let myself rise, higher this time, my back brushing the ceiling, and I looked down. The shadowy figure was there, more solid than before, its edges defined, its eyes glowing like embers. It spoke, not with lips, but with a voice that vibrated in my skull. ‘Join me,’ it said. ‘See the world from above. Leave the earth behind.’

I closed my eyes, and in that moment, I felt the pull of something vast and dark, a void that promised peace, but also oblivion. I thought of my mother, how she’d wake in the morning and find me gone. I thought of my father, who I hardly knew. And I thought of my great-grandmother, who had escaped this fate but had spent her life trying to warn others. I forced myself to think of my own name, of the boy who loved the smell of rain and the taste of mint ice cream. I refused. I spoke aloud, my voice steady, ‘No. I am not yours.’ The figure’s glow flickered, and for a moment, I felt terrified, but then, like a candle snuffed out, it vanished. I crashed down onto the bed, the springs shrieking, and I lay there, gasping, the feeling of being watched gone.

The next day, I told my mother everything, the journal, the vision, the voice. She went pale, and then she told me secrets of her own. She too had floated, only once, as a child, and a woman in white had whispered to her, ‘Be still, and know that I am here.’ She never spoke of it, but she never forgot. We decided to leave the house, selling it to a young couple with two small children. I felt a pang of guilt, but also a need to escape. I couldn’t save everyone.

I am twenty-five now, and I live in a modern apartment in a city where the buildings scrape the sky, and the only ceilings are the ones I look up at from the sidewalk. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up and find my body a few inches from the ceiling, my breath fogging the drywall. And I see that shadowy figure in the corner, its eyes patient, waiting. I close my eyes and concentrate, anchoring myself to the earth, and I descend. But I know it’s only a matter of time before the hovering takes me, and this time, I may not have the strength to hold on.