The Last Page Turner

At thirteen, I was convinced that the world could be understood through books. My bedroom was a converted pantry off the kitchen, a narrow room with a single window that looked out onto the alley. The shelves I’d begged my father to build were crammed with paperbacks, their spines a rainbow of worn colors. Every night after my parents settled into the living room to watch the news, I’d curl up in my armchair with a flashlight and read until my eyes burned. The house was always quiet then, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of the pipes. I never felt alone; I felt hidden, safe in my little cocoon of stories.

That autumn, a neighbor gave me a box of old books from an estate sale. Most were dusty encyclopedias, but at the bottom lay a slim, leather-bound volume with no title on the cover. The pages were yellowed and brittle, and the text was in an old-fashioned script. It wasn’t a story; it was a journal, written by a man named Elias who had lived in this very house over a hundred years ago. His entries were mundane at first—weather, chores, a sick wife—but as the weeks progressed, his handwriting grew more frantic. He wrote about a ‘presence’ that spoke to him at night, a voice that called his name in a whisper that ‘twisted the air.’ He believed the voice came from a crack in the wall behind the kitchen stove, a seam where the house’s skin had split. He wrote, ‘It knows my name. It wants me to come closer. I have sealed the crack with clay, but it still finds a way.’

I was both fascinated and chilled. That night, after finishing a chapter, I turned off the flashlight and lay back, the journal open on my chest. I was just drifting off when a sound sliced through the dark: my full name, spoken in a low, guttural whisper. ‘Maren.’ The voice was harsh, almost angry, as if I had offended it by ignoring it. My blood turned to ice. I didn’t move; I couldn’t. The whisper came again, closer this time, from the direction of the kitchen. I felt a cold draft, as if a window had been opened, but I knew it was closed. I strained my ears, and then I heard a faint, scraping sound, like nails on drywall, from the space behind the stove.

I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. I slid off my bed and crept to the doorway. The kitchen was silver with moonlight, and I saw it: a thin, dark crack running up the wall near the stove, as if the plaster had split. From that crack, a wisp of something—not smoke, but a darker shade of darkness—curled into the room. It took a shape, not human, but suggestive of a hunched figure with too-long arms. The whisper came again, now a sibilant hiss that formed my name. ‘Maren.’ I felt a pull, a hollow suction in my chest, as if my soul was trying to leave my body. In that moment, I recalled Elias’s last entry: ‘I will not open the crack, but it opens me. It has found my name, and soon it will have my voice.’

I did the only thing I could think of: I grabbed the journal and threw it at the crack. The book struck the wall with a dull thud, and the dark shape recoiled. The whisper turned into a shriek of frustration, and then the crack began to seal itself, as if the house was healing a wound. The silence that followed was so deep I heard my own heartbeat. I stood there trembling, and then I saw the journal lying on the floor, its pages open. Elias’s final entry had grown a single line, written in fresh ink: ‘She has given me the name. Now it has two.’

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat with my back to the wall, watching the stove, until my mother found me at dawn, pale and drained. I told her I’d had a nightmare, but I kept the journal. I hid it in the back of my closet, and for weeks I felt a pull from behind that closed door, a whisper that sometimes grew loud enough to make me drop my books. But I never opened the journal again. I learned to read with headphones on, and the crack never reopened. But sometimes, when the house is quiet and the lights are off, I hear a faint, scraping sound from behind the closet door. It’s not my name. It’s Elias’s. And I wonder if one day, it will call mine.