The Last Album

It was a chilly October evening when my wife, Elena, and I received the call from her sister, Marta, that Grandma Rosa had passed. Rosa had battled ovarian cancer for the second time, and the dementia that followed her diagnosis had been a slow, cruel thief, stealing her memories and her gentle nature. We were relieved her suffering was over, but a deep, hollow ache settled in our chests.

A few days later, Elena and I went to Rosa’s small, ivy-covered cottage to sort through her belongings for the funeral. The air inside was still and smelled of lavender and dust. As we climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the attic, I felt a strange prickling on the back of my neck, as if we were being watched. Elena paused and looked back, her face pale. ‘It’s just the wind,’ she whispered, but her voice trembled.

We found a stack of old photo albums in a trunk under a dormer window. As we lifted the top album, a cold draft swept through the attic, and the door slammed shut behind us. We exchanged nervous glances, then opened the album. The first page showed Rosa as a young woman, smiling in front of a lighthouse. But something was wrong: in the photo, her eyes were not looking at the camera; they were looking directly at us, and her smile seemed too wide, too sharp.

We turned the page, and the photos grew darker. Each picture showed a different room in the house, but always with a shadowy figure lurking in the background, half-hidden behind curtains or in doorways. In one, the figure was clearly a woman in a long dress, her face obscured by shadow. Elena gasped and pointed at the corner of the photo: there, on the wall, was a new crack, as if the house itself was aging in the image.

The next album was worse. The photos were of us, taken without our knowledge. There was one of us sleeping in our bed, taken from the foot of the bed; another of us in the kitchen, the camera angle from the hallway. The date stamps showed they were taken just days before Rosa died, but we had never been in her house during that time. The final photo was of the attic, a blurred figure standing behind us, reaching out a gnarled hand toward Elena’s head.

We dropped the album, and the attic door creaked open by itself. A low, rhythmic whisper echoed from the walls, but we couldn’t understand the words. We fled downstairs, clutching the albums, and threw them into the fireplace. As they burned, the flames turned an eerie green, and we heard Rosa’s voice—not the sweet, raspy voice we loved, but a dry, crackling whisper–‘You shouldn’t have looked.’

That night, we couldn’t sleep. We lay in bed, listening to the wind, when we heard footsteps in the hallway. The door creaked open, and a shadow fell across the floor. In the dim light, we saw a figure—not Rosa, but something wearing her face, her mouth stretched impossibly wide. It pointed a long, bony finger at us and mouthed, ‘Your turn.’

We never spoke of the albums again. But now, every photo we take has a shadow in the background. And sometimes, in the mirror, we see two reflections of ourselves, one a little too dark, a little too still. The house on Ivy Lane was sold, but we carried the curse with us. The last thing we found in Rosa’s belongings was a small, handwritten note, tucked in her Bible: ‘They come with the pictures. Run.’ We didn’t run. And now, they’ve come.