The Lace-Curtain Visitor

My name is Elias, and I’ve never been able to explain the things that happened in my childhood home on Mulberry Lane. I was adopted, but I didn’t find out until I was thirteen, and by then, the memories were already carved into me like scars.

The house itself was a sprawling Victorian relic, with peeling wallpaper and a porch that sagged like a tired smile. My adoptive parents, Margaret and Harold, were devout Methodists, and they filled every room with the scent of old books and lemon polish. They believed in the power of prayer, but they never spoke of ghosts, not until I started talking about the lady in the attic.

I was three when I first mentioned her. I was playing with my wooden trains in the hallway, and I looked up at the attic door—always closed, always locked—and said, ‘She’s up there again.’ Margaret dropped her teacup. Harold asked who. I described her as a young woman with a long brown dress and hair pinned up, but not like any hair I’d seen on television. She had a thin face and hands that were always folded in front of her, like she was waiting for something. I called her Alice, because that was the name she gave me.

For years, Alice was my constant companion. She’d sit with me while I did my homework, and I’d feel a cool draft on my neck. She’d hum a tune I can’t remember, but it was always the same one. Margaret and Harold never spoke of her, but they started leaving the attic door slightly ajar, and I’d find objects moved—a thimble on the stairs, a book on the floor, a photograph tilted on the mantel. They blamed the draft, but I knew it was Alice.

We moved when I was ten, to a brick bungalow on the other side of town. I thought we’d left Alice behind, but one night, I woke to the sound of a needle dropping on a phonograph that wasn’t there. The next morning, I found a lace curtain from our old house draped over the mirror in my room, covered in a fine gray dust. My mother gasped. She said it was impossible—we’d burned those curtains before we left. But I knew it was Alice, and I knew she was angry.

That was when things started to change. Alice no longer sat beside me; she stood at the foot of my bed, her face gray and her mouth sewn shut with black thread. She pointed at me, then at the ceiling, and I understood. I had to go back to the old house. I begged my parents, but they refused, and the next week, Margaret fell down the stairs and broke her hip. The doctors called it an accident, but I saw Alice at the top of the staircase, watching.

I turned thirteen that summer, and I began to dream of the attic. I dreamed of a room with a single window, and a dressmaker’s dummy draped in a white wedding gown. Alice stood beside it, holding a pair of silver scissors. She whispered, ‘You can’t leave until you cut the thread.’ I woke up screaming, and Harold found me in the dark, my hands tearing at the wallpaper. He drove me back to the old house the next day, against Margaret’s protests.

Standing in the dusty parlor, I felt a pull, like a rope tied to my chest. I climbed the stairs to the attic, each step groaning under my weight. The door was unlocked, swinging open on its own. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of mothballs and old roses. Alice was there, more solid than ever, her sewn mouth gaping as she pointed to a trunk in the corner. I opened it, and inside was a photograph of a woman who looked just like Alice, and a newspaper clipping from 1923 about a bride who disappeared on her wedding day. The name on the clipping was ‘Alice Whitfield.’

I understood then. Alice had been left at the altar, and she’d hung herself in this attic, her wedding gown still on. I was the first person who’d ever listened to her, and she’d grown attached. But my listening wasn’t enough. She wanted me to absolve her, to cut the thread that bound her to this world. The scissors were on the trunk, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. I told her I was sorry, that I couldn’t help her, and I left the house, feeling her rage follow me like a cold wind.

Since that day, I’ve never been truly alone. Alice is with me always, sitting in the corner of my vision, her presence a weight on my soul. I’ve tried to ignore her, but she grows stronger, and I’ve started to hear that humming again, coming from my closet, my basement, my walls. I don’t know how to end this, and I’m afraid that when I’m in what should be my final moments, it won’t be death that greets me—it will be her, holding those scissors, asking me to cut the thread that binds her to this world and somehow binds me to her.

I’m writing this in the hopes that someone will understand, but I know they won’t. Because the truth is, I never cut the thread. I never even tried. And I know that one day, I’ll have to, or I’ll spend eternity as her companion, forever trapped in that lace-curtained room, waiting for a deliverance that will never come.