The Ledger of Cinders

I’ve always had a peculiar relationship with sleep. My nights are either a void or a parade of horrors; I cannot recall a single pleasant dream. And always, just before I drift off, I feel a prickle on my neck, as if a gaze is fixed upon me, even when I’m certain I’m alone. This story begins on a night in Aracaju, Brazil, where my family had accompanied my father to a medical conference. My mother, a botanist, had dragged us along for the ‘cultural experience,’ but I mostly stayed in our hotel room, reading or pretending to work on my sketchbook.

My older brother, Lucas, had his own agenda, of course. Within days, he’d befriended a group of local surfers and spent his evenings with them, leaving me to my own devices in the room we shared. On the second-to-last night, my mother handed me her laptop, saying she wanted to check on some rare orchid data, but she was too tired. ‘Just browse the hotel Wi-Fi for whatever you need, but don’t stay up too late,’ she said. I took the laptop, intending to research local folklore for a story I was doodling.

I was alone in the room, the air conditioner humming its mechanical lullaby, when I heard it: a steady, rhythmic tapping, like footsteps but too soft and measured. It came from the corridor outside. I paused, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. The sound stopped. I shrugged and returned to my reading. Then it resumed, closer. The footsteps stopped right outside our door. I held my breath, waiting for a knock, but none came. Instead, the door handle moved, a slow, deliberate turn, as if someone were testing it, but it remained locked.

My heart hammered. I tiptoed to the peephole and peered out. The hallway was empty, lit by a single flickering fluorescent light. I opened the door a crack, checking both ways. Nothing. Feeling foolish, I locked the door and returned to the laptop. But the feeling of being watched intensified, pressing against my skin like a cold hand. I looked around the room, at the wardrobe, the bathroom door, the window with its heavy curtains. Everything still.

I tried to focus on my screen, but the tapping started again, this time from inside the room. It came from the wardrobe. A slow, rhythmic knock, as if something within were tapping its finger. I froze, my eyes locked on the wardrobe door. The knocking grew more insistent, then stopped. A child’s giggle, high and thin, sounded from the bathroom. I grabbed my phone, ready to call Lucas, but I saw the screen was dead. The room’s lights flickered.

I decided to investigate. I grabbed the heavy bronze paperweight from the desk as a weapon and crept toward the bathroom. I threw open the door. Empty. The mirror reflected my own pale face. But as I stared, my reflection seemed to lag, a fraction of a second behind my movements. My reflection smiled, a wide, unnatural grin. I stumbled back, tripping over the rug, and hit my head on the floor.

When I came to, the room was darker. The laptop screen glowed with a text I hadn’t typed: ‘FOUND YOU.’ I scrambled to my feet, grabbing my phone, which now had power. I dialed Lucas, but the call went straight to voicemail. I texted him, ‘Help, something’s in the room,’ but the message failed to send. The knocking resumed, now from the ceiling, then the walls, then from all around, a cacophony of knocks, like a thousand fingers drumming.

I screamed, but no sound came out. The room spun. I fell to my knees, clamping my hands over my ears. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. The room returned to normal. The lights were steady. The hot, humid air of Aracaju swirled in from the window I had left ajar. I lay there, shaking, until Lucas returned hours later, finding me curled in a corner, babbling about the knocking.

He brushed it off as a nightmare, a paranoid reaction to the heat. But the next morning, as we were packing, I found a small, charred ledger on the nightstand. It wasn’t mine. Inside, in a neat, cramped handwriting, were lists of names, dates, and causes of death. I was not listed, but Lucas’s name was, with a date that was three days from now, and the cause: ‘Lost at sea.’ His trip to the beach that day nearly turned fatal when a riptide pulled him under, but he was rescued just in time.

The concierge told me the hotel was built on the grounds of an old insane asylum, where a former patient, a bookkeeper obsessed with predicting deaths, had kept just such a ledger. He vanished in a fire, and they never found his remains. I clutched the ledger, my own reflection in the elevator mirror grinning back at me, and I knew the knocking wasn’t over. It had found a new home.