The Lace Curtain Divide

At nineteen, I thought I knew the texture of every creak in my aunt’s house. The Victorian had a personality—a damp, watchful one—but it was familiar, like a headache you learn to live with. My best friend, Cora, and I had claimed the old conservatory as our den. We strung up a sheer lace curtain from the doorway to separate our little world from the moth-eaten garage beyond. That curtain, I’d come to believe, was the membrane between our reality and something else entirely.

It was a summer night, thick with humidity. Cora had gone inside to raid the fridge, and I lingered, flipping through a stack of her mother’s old vinyl records. The garage door was half open, letting in the warm, buzzing darkness. I heard a faint rustle from the other side of the lace—the sound of dry leaves skittering across concrete, though the garage floor was swept clean. I dismissed it as a mouse. But then the rustle resolved into a pattern, a rhythm, like something was trying to spell out a word in morse code.

I pushed back the curtain, stepping into the darker half of the garage. The air there was colder, musty, carrying a scent of old oil and dust. The single bare bulb overhead flickered, casting dancing shadows. I saw a figure—just a silhouette—sitting on an overturned crate in the corner. It was small, hunched, like an old woman wrapped in a shawl. My heart lurched. ‘Hello?’ I called, my voice cracking. The figure didn’t move. ‘Cora, is that you?’ I took a step closer. The bulb hummed, and in that brief light, I saw its face—or rather, the absence of one. A smooth, pale oval where features should have been, shimmering like the surface of a soap bubble.

I stumbled backward, pulling the lace curtain with me. It tore from its hooks, and I fell into the conservatory, gasping. The curtain lay crumpled in my hands, the fabric now impossibly cold. I ran to the house, screaming for Cora. She came running, a sandwich in her hand, her face contorted in alarm. ‘What happened? You’re white as a ghost!’ I told her through chattering teeth about the thing in the garage. She laughed nervously, but her eyes darted to the torn curtain. ‘You’re messing with me,’ she said, but I could see her hands trembling.

We went back to the conservatory together, but the garage was empty. The crate was overturned, and the air was warm again, normal. We laughed it off as a hallucination, a trick of the heat. But that night, as I lay in the spare room, I heard a soft brushing sound against the window. I pulled back the sheer curtains—not the lace one, a different one—and saw a foggy outline pressed against the glass, a smudge of a face with no features. It vanished as I stared, leaving only a wet streak.

The next morning, I found the lace curtain re-hung, neatly, as if it had never been torn. But the pattern was reversed—the embroidered daisies now faced the garage, not the room. Cora swore she didn’t do it. I tried to convince myself that sleepwalking, or a prank, was behind it. But a part of me knew. I had crossed that threshold, and whatever lived on the other side had taken notice of me.

Over the next weeks, things escalated. I’d wake up with my hair in a tangled knot, as if someone had pulled it. The records in the conservatory would be rearranged into unfamiliar sequences. Cora started to avoid the room, and soon she avoided me too. She said I had a ‘wrongness’ about me, that my laugh didn’t sound like my own. I started to feel a constant weight in the center of my chest, a pressure like a hand pressing against my sternum from the inside.

One night, I decided to confront it. I took a flashlight and slipped into the garage, determined to see what had been haunting me. The lace curtain hung heavy, and as I stepped through, the temperature plummeted. The flashlight beam cut through the dark, and I saw it again—the same small, hunched figure, but now it was closer. It raised a hand, and I saw that its fingers were long and jointed in extra places. Its head tilted, and I realized with horror that it was wearing my face. The face was like a mask, stretched over a void, and its eyes—they were black pins, reflecting nothing.

I screamed, but no sound came out. The figure stood and walked toward me, and with each step, the ambient light dimmed. It reached out, its cold fingers brushing my cheek, and I felt a tearing sensation, as if something was being peeled from my bones. I blacked out.

I woke up in my bed, the morning sun streaming through the window. I was drenched in sweat, and my skin felt raw, like I had been scrubbed. Downstairs, Cora was making coffee. She acted as if nothing had happened, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. I looked at my reflection in the window. I looked the same, but something was off. My eyes seemed too wide, my grin a little too quick. And I noticed that the lace curtain in the conservatory was gone. When I asked Cora, she shrugged, ‘You took it down last night, you were acting weird.’ I didn’t remember.

Now, at twenty-nine, I still don’t remember what happened after I blacked out. But I’ve noticed things. I don’t cast a reflection in certain lights. I have a deep, irrational fear of lace. And sometimes, when I’m alone, I see that small, hunched figure in the corner of my vision, always just out of sight. I think I know what happened now. The thing that wore my face took my place, and I’ve been living in its world ever since. The curtain was a doorway, and I pulled it open. Now, I’m not sure which side I’m on.