The Ledger in the Limewood

Our family’s old hunting lodge, Raven’s Hollow, sat deep in the Appalachian woods, a two-hour drive from the nearest town of Millbrook. It had been in our family since the 1920s, built by my great-great-grandfather, Elias. Now, my great-aunt Margaret and her husband, Uncle Jesse, were the keepers of the place, and we’d visit every summer to escape the city heat. The lodge was a maze of creaking floorboards and dusty rooms, and the bathroom on the second floor was actually a converted linen closet. That’s where I found myself one humid July evening, scrubbing my hands before dinner, when I noticed a faint glow from the old cast-iron tub. The tub had been there since the beginning, with claw feet and stains that never came out. I turned, and there he was: a man in a faded pair of coveralls, sitting on the edge of the tub, writing in a thick, leather-bound ledger. His hair was the color of wet bark, and his eyes were an unsettling shade of pale green, almost luminous. His left leg was bent at a grotesque angle, the foot twisted inward, as if it had been broken and never set right. He looked up at me, and a slow grin spread across his face, then he let out a rumbling laugh that seemed to shake the floorboards. He reached down and pulled the brass plug from the tub, and in an instant, the water in the bottom of the tub—there had been no water—began to swirl, and he was sucked down as if the drain were a whirlpool. I stood frozen, then bolted out of the bathroom, screaming for my great-aunt. She listened calmly, her face going pale as I described him. She said, “That’d be Albert, Elias’s younger brother. He died in the ’30s, fell down the well out back. They say his leg was broken in the fall. He always kept a ledger of the family’s comings and goings.” She stopped, then added, “He tends to show himself when there’s something important written in that book. Something that changes everything.” I never saw Albert again, but that night, I dreamed of the ledger, its pages filled with names and dates, and one line written in fresh ink: “The last of the Holloways will leave before the first frost.” Now, every time I visit, I check the bathroom, half-expecting to see the glow, but the tub is always empty. Yet, I can’t help but feel that Albert is still writing, and that one day, he’ll come to me again.