The Last Straw

In the autumn of 1987, I was eight years old, living in a clapboard house on the edge of Pemberton, a town so small it didn’t even have its own stoplight. My older sister, Emily, was ten, and we were the only ones left at home after our older brothers had gone to live with our father in Ohio. Our mother, Carol, worked the evening shift at the textile mill, so Emily and I were latchkey kids, trusted to get ourselves dinner and do our homework before she came home at eleven.

I had always been the quiet one, the one who saw things out of the corner of my eye, who heard footsteps in empty hallways, who felt a cold breath on my neck when no one was there. Emily thought I was making it up, or that I had an overactive imagination. Mom, when she noticed, would just shake her head and say, ‘Don’t dwell on such things, sweetheart. It’s just your mind playing tricks.’ But I knew better. The house on Maple Street was old, built in the 1920s, and it creaked and groaned like an old man. But there was something else, a presence that seemed to watch me from the shadows.

One chilly October afternoon, Emily and I got off the school bus and walked the two blocks home. The sky was a bruised purple, and the wind rattled the bare branches of the maples. As we climbed the porch steps, I noticed a strange smell, like burnt sugar and old pennies. Emily unlocked the door, and we stepped inside. The house was silent, save for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. That clock had been a gift from our grandmother, and it had never kept perfect time, but today it seemed to be ticking faster, almost excited.

We dropped our backpacks by the door and headed to the kitchen to make grilled cheese sandwiches. As I reached for the bread, I saw something out of the corner of my eye—a figure standing in the hallway, just beyond the kitchen door. I turned quickly, but there was nothing there. My heart hammered. ‘Emily, did you see that?’ I asked, my voice shaky. Emily rolled her eyes. ‘See what? You’re always seeing things. Come on, I’m hungry.’

But I couldn’t shake the feeling. I walked to the hallway and peered down it. The light was dim, and the shadows seemed to cling to the walls. At the end of the hall, the door to the basement was slightly ajar. That door was always kept closed and locked. Mom had a key, and we were forbidden from going down there. But now it was open, just a crack. I felt a pull, like something wanted me to go down there. But I was scared. I backed away slowly and returned to the kitchen.

Emily had already put the sandwiches on the stove and was humming a tune. I sat at the table, trying to catch my breath. ‘Maybe you should see a doctor,’ Emily said, not unkindly. ‘You’ve been getting worse.’ I didn’t answer. I just stared at the kitchen window, which overlooked the backyard. The swing set we had when we were younger was still there, and it was swaying gently, as if someone had just gotten off. But there was no wind outside; the air was still.

Over the next few days, the occurrences intensified. Objects would move on their own—a cup would slide across the counter, a book would fall from the shelf. I would hear my name whispered in the middle of the night, in a voice that was not human. I started sleeping with the lights on, and I begged Mom to let me stay at her room, but she just said, ‘You’re a big girl now. You need to face your fears.’ Emily thought I was being dramatic.

Then, one Saturday, Emily and I were home alone. Mom had gone to the grocery store, and we were supposed to do our chores. I was in the living room, dusting the bookshelves, when I noticed a book that wasn’t there before—a thin, leather-bound volume with no title on the spine. I pulled it off the shelf and opened it. The pages were yellowed and brittle, and the handwriting was spidery and old. It was a diary, written by a woman named Margaret, who had lived in this house in the 1940s. She wrote about her husband who had died in the war, and about a ‘friend’ who visited her at night, a friend who promised to take her pain away. As I read, the temperature in the room seemed to drop. The words on the page began to blur, and I felt a cold hand on my shoulder.

I screamed and dropped the book. Emily came running in. ‘What happened?’ she cried. I pointed at the book, which lay open on the floor. ‘That book. It’s cursed.’ Emily bent down and picked it up, examining it. ‘It’s just an old diary. You’re overreacting.’ But as she said that, the pages began to turn on their own, flipping to a blank page near the end. Then, a pen that was on the coffee table flew into the air and landed on the book, and began to write on its own. The handwriting was neat and deliberate, and it wrote: ‘YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE READ.’ Emily’s face went white. She dropped the book as if it were on fire.

That evening, when Mom came home, we tried to tell her, but she just sighed. ‘Enough of this nonsense. You two are making up stories to scare each other. Go to bed.’ As we trudged up the stairs, I felt a presence behind me, and I knew that something was now in the house with us, something that had been waiting for a long time.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my bed, listening to the sounds of the house. The clock in the hallway chimed midnight, and then I heard a creaking sound, like someone walking down the hall. The footsteps stopped outside my door. I held my breath. The door slowly creaked open, and in the dim light from the hallway, I saw a figure—a tall, thin woman with long black hair, wearing a white dress that seemed to glow. She didn’t have a face; it was just a void, but I could feel her staring at me. I wanted to scream, but my throat was tight. She took a step closer, and the temperature dropped to freezing. She reached out a hand, and I saw that her fingers were impossibly long and thin. She touched my forehead, and I felt a jolt of ice. And then she was gone.

I bolted out of bed and ran to Emily’s room. She was awake, sitting up in bed, shivering. ‘You felt it too?’ I asked. She nodded. ‘I saw her,’ she whispered. ‘In my doorway. She just stood there.’ We huddled together for the rest of the night, not sleeping, waiting for dawn.

The next morning, we were exhausted, but we knew we had to do something. I remembered the diary, and I went to the living room to find it. It was still on the floor where we had left it, open to the last page. There was new writing there, in the same spidery script: ‘I WILL NEVER LEAVE. THIS HOUSE IS MINE.’ The handwriting was different from the automatic writing we had seen. This looked old, like it had been there for years.

I showed it to Emily. ‘We have to get rid of this house,’ she said. ‘But how? Mom owns it.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Maybe we can burn the diary. Maybe that will break the spell.’ We took the diary to the backyard, where Mom had a fire pit. We struck a match and set the pages alight. The diary burned quickly, but as it burned, the air was filled with a high-pitched shrieking sound, and the ground shook. We ran inside, but it was too late.

The house was no longer empty. We could see her, standing in the hallway, watching us. Her face was no longer a void; it was the face of Margaret, the woman from the diary, but twisted and hateful. ‘You’ll never get rid of me,’ she hissed. ‘This is my home, and you are my guests—forever.’

We tried to run out the front door, but it was locked, and the handle was ice cold. The windows wouldn’t open. We were trapped. Mom came home that evening to a silent house. She called our names, but there was no answer. She searched the house, but we were nowhere to be found. She never saw us again.

Years later, a new family moved in. They saw a little girl and her sister in the upstairs window, but when they went to look, the room was empty. They moved out after a month, citing strange occurrences. And the house stood empty for a long time, until it was eventually torn down. But even then, people said they could still hear two children crying in the night, and a woman’s voice whispering, ‘You should not have read.’