The Loop of the Unseen

My name is Elin, and I’ve just started as a mental health carer at Solglimt, a group home on the wind-battered coast of western Sweden. The building is a renovated old maritime hospital, its halls still smelling of salt and stale antiseptic. My clients are not like the ones I read about in textbooks; they’re real, and they carry their own strange weights. One of them, Rune, is a quiet man in his sixties who believes the radio in the common room broadcasts messages only he can decipher. Another, Maja, sees a girl in the corner of her eye, always in the same floral dress, always pointing at the sea.

I’m new, so I’m on the evening shift, the one everyone avoids. The house sits on a cliff, and the wind never stops. On my third night, I’m making the rounds. The hallway light flickers—not in a theatrical way, just a tired bulb. I pass Rune’s door; he’s muttering about a ‘loop’ in the radio, a phrase that’s repeated three times a night for a week. I note it in the log, but I don’t think much of it.

It’s around 2 a.m. when the phone rings. The landline in the staff office. It’s a disconnected line—I can hear static, and then a voice, not human, but like a tide pulling back and forth, saying, ‘You are the fourth. You will see.’ I drop the phone, and the line goes dead. I check the caller ID: it reads ‘SOLGLIMT 2’. But this is the only building.

I decide to check the basement, where the old laundry and storage are. The stairs are stone, worn smooth by years of footsteps. At the bottom, the air is cold and smells of seaweed. I find a door I’ve never seen, painted over with the same color as the walls. Behind it, a small room, empty except for a photograph on the wall: a group of nurses in 1950s uniforms, standing in front of this very house. And in the corner of the photo, a girl in a floral dress, facing the sea. Her face is a blur, but I feel a chill. I take the photo back to my office to look closer.

Over the next week, I become obsessed. I learn that the building was built over an old ritual site—the local legend says that sailors who drowned in a storm near here were never recovered, and their spirits are said to wander the cliffs, seeking the living. I ask the other staff, but they laugh it off. ‘Old stories,’ they say. But I notice they all avoid the basement, and the evening shift notes always mention a strange ‘tapping’ near the laundry.

One night, the tapping starts. It’s coming from the basement door. I open it, and the hallway is empty. The phone rings again. Same static, same voice: ‘You are the fourth. You will see.’ I realize that by documenting everything, I’ve been making it real. My notes, my observations—they are the loop. The radio, the phone, the girl—they are all trying to get the carer to notice, to acknowledge, to complete the cycle.

On the seventh night, I decide to stay the whole night. Around 3 a.m., I hear the common room radio turn on by itself. It’s playing a tune from the 50s. Rune is asleep, but the radio crackles, and I hear a woman’s voice over the static: ‘They never found my body. I drowned, but they said I wandered off. Now I’m stuck in the loop, and you are the fourth to see me. The others closed their eyes. Will you?’

I go to the window. The moon is bright, and the sea is calm. But then I see her—the girl, standing on the cliff’s edge, in the floral dress. She points to me, and then to a spot in the water. I feel a pull, a compulsion to go outside. I fight it. I run to the basement, grab the photo, and I tear it into pieces. But as the pieces fall, the wind outside howls, and the phone rings again. This time, the voice is clear, and it’s my own voice: ‘You are the fourth. You will see.’

I wake up the next morning on the floor of the common room. The staff find me, shaken. They say I had a seizure, but my medical history says no. The radio is playing the same tune. I look out the window, and the girl is still there, but now she’s closer, and she’s waving. I realize the loop is not broken. I am the fourth, and the fifth is already here—a new carer, just hired. I look at the photo, burnt in the fireplace, but I still see her face.

Now, every time I close my eyes, I see the sea and her pointing. I keep my job, but I’m the one who now checks the basement, who logs the taps on the door, who hears the radio sing. I am the new loop. And I know that one day, she will find me, and I will see what the others saw. But I won’t close my eyes. I’ll write it all down, and I’ll publish it, so that the loop becomes a story, and the story becomes a warning, and the warning becomes a sigh carried by the wind.