The Light in the Loft

My name is Eleanor, and for thirty-seven years I taught literature to teenagers who mostly didn’t care. Now I spend my days tending to my garden and my nights with a good book and a cup of chamomile tea. My husband, Gerald, a retired civil engineer, is a man of routine and reason. We have two daughters, both married, both living far away, and our home is a sprawling Victorian house with a creaky staircase and an attic we rarely visit.

My mother’s final years were a cruel descent into the fog of dementia. She would often speak to people who weren’t there, or cry out for her own mother, who had passed decades before. In her last days, as she lay in the hospice, she was mostly silent, her eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on something only she could see. The night she died, my father was by her side. He told me her last words, spoken with clarity that startled him: ‘Who has pulled the dark down like a curtain?’ He said her eyes darted to the corner of the room, and then she was gone.

We buried her on a grey, drizzly Tuesday. After the service, my father came to stay with us, as he couldn’t bear the empty house. He was a quiet man, but the grief had made him more so. On the day of his arrival, I made a shepherd’s pie, his favorite, and we sat down to eat in the dining room. I had a small radio on the sideboard, and I turned it on for some background noise. The opening notes of a song filled the room, a melody I didn’t recognize, but my father’s fork froze halfway to his mouth. ‘What is it, Dad?’ I asked. He set his fork down, his face pale. ‘That’s the song your mother and I danced to at our wedding reception. ‘The Long and Winding Road.’ I haven’t heard it in years.’ He looked at the radio, then at me. ‘What a coincidence.’ But there was a tremor in his voice.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, the image of my mother’s last moments replaying in my mind. Around 3 AM, I heard a faint, rhythmic thumping coming from above. It was soft, like a heartbeat. I got up and walked to the foot of the stairs, listening. The sound was coming from the attic. I called for Gerald, who groggily came out of our bedroom. ‘Do you hear that?’ I asked. He listened, frowning. ‘It’s just the pipes, love. Or a bird on the roof.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Go back to bed.’ I obeyed, but the sound continued for another hour, then stopped.

The next day, I decided to investigate the attic. I hadn’t been up there in years. It was cluttered with old trunks, my mother’s sewing machine, and boxes of Christmas decorations. The air was musty and cold. As I looked around, I noticed a small, unmarked box tucked away in a corner. I pulled it out and opened it. Inside were my mother’s old diaries, bound in cracked leather, dating back to her twenties. I had never seen them before. I took one out, a diary from 1955, the year before she married my father. I opened it to a random page, and my breath caught. The handwriting was neat, but the content was chilling. ‘I heard the steps again tonight. They come from the attic. Father says it’s just the wind, but I know better. There is something in the loft. It whispers my name, but it sounds like the leaves rustling. Last night, it said, ‘Eleanor, come up.’ But I am not Eleanor. I am Margaret.’ The entry sent a jolt through me. My mother’s name was Margaret. And I am Eleanor, named after her grandmother. I closed the diary, my hands shaking.

Over the next few weeks, strange things began to happen. Every time I turned on the radio, it would pick up a song that held significance for my mother or my father. The same song would appear on different stations, or I would think of a song and it would play. It was as if something was trying to communicate through music. Then the lights in the house started to flicker, always at the same time: 3:15 PM. My mother had looked at the clock at 3:15 the day she died, and then looked at my father and said, ‘It’s time.’ But what did it mean?

I started reading the diaries in earnest, searching for clues. I found entries about ‘the presence’ that would sometimes move objects, and about a dream where a woman with no face would comb my mother’s hair. The entries became more frantic as she got older, and after her marriage, they stopped. The last entry, in 1956, was brief: ‘It is here. It has come with me. I fear for my children, should I have any. But I will not let it harm them. I will make a pact.’ The diary ended there. I had no idea what pact she meant.

One night, I woke to the sound of footsteps in the attic. They were measured, deliberate. I got up and took the flashlight from the nightstand. Gerald was snoring soundly. I climbed the stairs again, my heart pounding. The door to the attic was ajar, even though I had closed it earlier. I pushed it open, and the beam of my flashlight swept across the room. The box of diaries was on the floor, the diaries scattered around it as if someone had been reading them. In the center of the room, a figure stood, silhouetted against the single window. It was a woman, wearing a long dress, her face obscured in shadow. I whispered, ‘Who are you?’ The figure turned, and I saw that it had no face, just a smooth, pale expanse. It raised a hand, and I heard a voice, not from the figure, but from all around me. It said, ‘You have the light, Eleanor. You are the one.’

I fled, slamming the attic door behind me. I woke Gerald and told him everything, expecting him to dismiss it. But he listened, his face grim. He said, ‘I have been seeing things too, El. Golden lights in the garden at night. And yesterday, I saw your mother sitting in her old chair, but only for a second.’ We held each other, terrified. That’s when I knew this was not coincidence. There was a pattern, a purpose.

I began to research. I spent hours on the internet, searching for stories of people who had heard their deceased loved ones’ last words echoed in songs, or saw ghosts of the dead. I found a message board for people who had experienced ‘post-mortem contact.’ Many had similar stories, but none had anything like what I was experiencing. Then I found a post from a woman in England who said her grandmother had died of MS and her last words were ‘Who has put out the stars?’ The post went on to describe how she had started hearing that same phrase in radio static, in the sound of wind chimes, in the rustling of leaves. And then, she found an old diary. She said, ‘I know now. It’s not a question. It’s a summons.’ The post cut off.

I tried to contact that woman, but her account had been deactivated. I dug deeper, and I found a name: Amelia Hart. She had been a researcher in the 1960s who wrote a paper on ‘acoustic phenomena associated with the dying,’ but it was ridiculed and she disappeared. I found an archived interview with her, where she said, ‘The last words of the dying are often not a plea for the living. They are a communication with something else. A listener. It is as if the dying are saying, ‘The light is going out. You must come to me now.’ The listener is a kind of spirit, a gatherer. And it collects the words, the songs, the memories. It uses them as breadcrumbs to find the living.’

I also discovered that in my mother’s family home, where she grew up, there had been a fire in 1956, the year of her marriage. The house burned to the ground. A maid named Eleanor had perished in the fire. The maid was my great-grandmother, after whom I was named. The fire had started in the attic.

I have now come to realize that the presence is not my mother. It is something that was in her family’s house, that attached to her as she was dying, and that has now attached to me. It uses the songs, the lights, the whispers to draw me closer. It wants me to go to the attic and open the final diary, the one I haven’t read, the one with the black cover that I found hidden in the bottom of the box. I am afraid of what it will tell me. But I can’t stop myself. The songs are more insistent now. Yesterday, I heard ‘The Long and Winding Road’ playing from a music box in the attic, even though we never owned such a thing. I am writing this down, because I fear I won’t be able to tell the tale myself. There is a pull, an irresistible pull, to go up those stairs one last time. And I am going, because I must know the truth.

When I reach the attic, I will open the black diary. I will read the entry dated August 12, 1956, the day before the fire. And I will tell you what I find. If I don’t return, then you know the light has gone out. And the question is not for me. It is for you.