The Lamplight Vigil

The night before I left for the coast, I was at Maya’s place. It was 2007, and I was moving to Portland to live with my dad. We’d spent the evening trading mix CDs and talking about everything we’d miss, but as the clock crept toward midnight, Maya got that wild look in her eye. She’d just gotten back from a party with her boyfriend, who was now passed out in her room. ‘One last haul,’ she said, grinning. We’d done it before: stealing garden gnomes from the McAllister estate, the Tuckers’ yard, even the church’s nativity scene once. It was a dumb tradition, but it was ours.

We slipped out her back gate, the rusty hinges groaning like a dying animal. The street stretched out, empty and still under a bruised sky. The air was cold, biting at my cheeks, and the only sound was the crunch of gravel under our shoes. There were no cars, no people, just the silent rows of houses with their dark windows. Maya stopped suddenly, her hand on my arm. ‘Did you see that?’ she whispered. I followed her gaze to a house three doors down. A faint blue light pulsed in the upper window, then vanished. ‘Probably a TV,’ I said, but she shook her head. ‘No, it moved. It jumped to the next house.’ She pointed, and sure enough, the light flickered in the next window, then the next, as if something was leaping through the air, touching each house in turn. I laughed. ‘You’re such a liar.’ But a cold knot tightened in my stomach.

I turned to the gate, fumbling with the latch, my fingers clumsy in the cold. Maya went rigid beside me. ‘There’s a face,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘In the window across the street.’ I didn’t want to look, but I did. And there it was, pressed against the glass of the old Hartley house: a girl, her skin moon-white, her hair dark and stringy, and her eyes—two black holes, like empty sockets that seemed to bore into me. I felt a wave of anger radiating from her, a pure, irrational hatred that made my knees weak. I couldn’t move. I just stared, and she stared back, and then a blue flash lit up behind her, and she was gone.

I wrenched the gate open, nearly tearing the hinges off, and shoved Maya through. We stumbled into her backyard, gasping, and slammed the gate shut. But as we caught our breath, I heard footsteps in the gravel beyond the gate. Slow, deliberate, and then a soft tapping on the wood, like a single finger knocking. ‘Who’s there?’ I called out, my voice shaking. No answer. The tapping stopped. Then, from the other side, a girl’s voice, muffled and strained: ‘You saw me.’ We ran inside, locking every door and window. Maya’s boyfriend stirred on the couch, muttering in his sleep. We didn’t say a word, just huddled in the corner until morning.

The next day, I left for Portland. But I never forgot that face. Years later, I read in the local news that the Hartley house had been demolished after a fire. The newspaper mentioned a girl who had died there in 1987, under mysterious circumstances. Her name was Eleanor, and she had been found in the attic, staring at the window, her eyes blackened by smoke. The blue light, the face—it had been a message. But to whom? And what did she want?

I still don’t know. But sometimes, when I look out my window at night, I see a faint blue glow in the distance, and I feel her eyes on me, patient and furious. She’s waiting. And I’m afraid that one night, she’ll find me again, and this time, she won’t let me go.