The Moonlit Gable

It was a Tuesday when my mother, Lina, first told me about the figure on the roof. She’d been sitting in the dark living room of our rented house in the outskirts of Greenfield, a town where the houses were old and cramped, their tin roofs catching the moonlight like silver shields. My father, a heavy machinery operator, was on call that night, and his truck wouldn’t be rolling down the gravel path until dawn. I was a nurse at the county clinic, finishing my shift at ten, but I often stayed late to help with the stock. That night, I didn’t get home until nearly midnight.

Lina never slept when we weren’t all under one roof. She’d sit by the wide wooden window, her hands folded over her lap, and watch the street for the wink of our car’s headlights. The night was calm, the air so still that the leaves of the acacia tree hung without a whisper. She told me that at around 2 AM, a strange unease settled over her, like a cold draught seeping through the cracks. She thought she saw a movement from the corner of her eye, a pale streak against the darker patch of the neighbor’s gable. She turned her head slowly, thinking it was a stray cat or a night bird. But it wasn’t.

It was a woman, dressed in a long, flowing white gown that looked like a nightgown, but tattered at the hem. She was walking, not on the street, but on the very apex of our neighbor’s roof, a few houses down. She moved with an unsettling grace, as if the sloped tin were as flat as a sidewalk. Lina blinked, rubbed her eyes, and looked again. The figure was still there, pacing back and forth along the ridgeline, her bare feet making no sound. She would pause every few steps, tilt her head as if listening, then continue.

At first, Lina thought it might be a drunk neighbor, a prank, or maybe a projection from a car’s headlights. But there were no cars, and the figure was too distinct, too solid against the moon. It wore no shoes, and its hair fell in a dark curtain, obscuring the face. It never once looked toward our house, but Lina felt a crawling sensation along her spine. She decided to wake me, though she knew I’d just come in an hour earlier and was already asleep. She came to my room, tapped my shoulder, and whispered, ‘Amara, there’s someone on the neighbor’s roof.’ I groggily followed her to the window, expecting to see a worker fixing tiles or perhaps a petty thief. But when I looked, my heart skipped. There was the figure, exactly as she’d described.

We watched for a minute, two, three. The woman walked to the edge of the roof, stood there for a long while, and then, with an unnatural suddenness, she turned her head. It wasn’t a normal turn—it was like the whole head rotated, not the neck. And even from that distance, in the dark, we could see two black pits where eyes should be. She stared straight at us, and I felt a wave of nausea. Then, without warning, she raised a long, thin arm and pointed directly at our window. A single finger extended, and her lips moved as if she were speaking, but we could hear nothing. A moment later, she vanished, not by stepping down, but by dissolving like mist.

Lina’s hand was gripping my arm so hard I thought it might bruise. ‘We need to call your father,’ she said, her voice trembling. But I told her it was probably a trick of the shadows, a hallucination from lack of sleep. I made her sit down, brought her a glass of water, and turned on all the lights in the house. For the rest of the night, we stayed in the kitchen, talking about mundane things, trying to shake off the image. When my father came home at dawn, we didn’t mention it, thinking it was a one-off.

But it wasn’t. The following night, I was home early, around ten, and my father had gone to bed. Lina and I were having tea in the living room, and she suddenly froze. ‘Amara, look,’ she whispered. I turned. There she was again, on the same roof, but this time closer—on the roof of our immediate neighbor, just two houses away. She was walking in circles, her white gown glowing faintly. This time, she didn’t look at us. Instead, she knelt down and began to tap on the tin roof, as if knocking. A rhythmic tap, tap, tap, that echoed in the quiet. I felt a chill. ‘Maybe it’s a prank,’ I said, but my voice sounded hollow.

That night, we called the police. A patrol car came, but by then she had vanished, and they found nothing around the house. The officer suggested it might be a sleepwalker, or a bird, or a trick of the moonlight. He drove away, leaving us with a strange unease. The next morning, we learned that the old lady who lived next door had died from a heart attack the night before. She was found slumped on her stairs, wearing a white nightgown. That was the first death.

A week passed, and the apparition returned, always at 2 AM, always on the roof, always pointing at our house. Then the old man across the street passed away peacefully in his sleep. Then a young mother in the third house down slipped in her bathroom and broke her neck. The occurrences could have been coincidences, but the pattern was unmistakable: each time the woman appeared, a death would follow within a day. And she was slowly moving closer, from roof to roof, house by house, as if drawn to us.

We tried everything to stop her. We had a priest come and bless the house. He left pale and told us to leave, without explaining. We put salt on the windowsills, hung herbs, but every night she appeared, and with each appearance, she was a bit closer. My father, who was skeptical, began to take night shifts to avoid her, but one night he saw her too, from the warehouse window. He saw her standing on the adjacent building, her hair whipping in a wind that didn’t touch him, her finger pointing at him, and he heard a faint, high-pitched whistle. That same week, a colleague of his died in a machinery accident.

We were terrified. We couldn’t sleep, we barely ate. We spoke in whispers, afraid that if she heard us, she’d come sooner. My mother confessed that she had been seeing the woman since she was a little girl, back in her old village. Every time someone was about to die, the lady in white would appear, walking the rooftops. She said it was a banshee, a death omen, and that she only appeared to those who were about to lose someone. She never spoke, she only walked and pointed, and her coming was always a prelude to sorrow.

But why our house? Why was she coming closer to us? Did she target us because we witnessed her? Or because someone in our family was marked for death? The night she appeared on our own rooftop, I was standing at the window, staring at her through the glass. She was crouched, her head tilted, and for the first time, I saw her face clearly. It was a woman’s face, waxy and pale, with a wide mouth stitched shut with black thread. And her eyes—they were not empty pits, but deep, dark and brimming with tears. She looked at me with something like pity, and then she pointed not at me, but at the room where my father lay sleeping. I felt a cold hand grip my heart. My father was healthy, but in that moment I understood: she was not choosing her victims, she was merely a messenger. Death was coming for someone, and she was the one to announce it.

I couldn’t accept that. I did everything in my power to protect him. I made him stay home, I took leave from work, I kept him by my side. We moved our bedroom to the inner room without windows. But every night, she found us. She would appear on the gable of the house across the street, and I would see her from the hallway window. She never got closer than the street, but she was always there.

One night, I decided to confront her. I waited until she appeared, and I walked outside, onto the cold dewy grass. My mother called me from the door, but I ignored her. I walked toward the chain-link fence separating our yard from the street. She was on the roof of the idle grocery store, her gown billowing. I shouted at her, ‘What do you want? Why are you following us?’ She stopped and slowly turned her head. That same impossible rotation. Her lips moved, parting the stitches, and a foul smell of rot washed over me. A voice, dry as dead leaves, whispered into my ear, but from a distance, ‘I only bring what is given.’

I blinked, and she was gone. But that night, my father woke with a fever. By morning, he was delirious, and by the next, we were in the hospital. The doctors found a rare aggressive infection that had entered his bloodstream, no cause, no cure. He lasted three days. At his funeral, I saw her one last time, standing on the church roof, watching. And then she faded, and she never came to our house again.

We moved away after that, leaving Greenfield and its moonlit gables. But sometimes, at night, when I look out from our new apartment window, I see a flicker of white on the rooftop across the street. My mother says not to look, not to acknowledge. She will come again, she says, when death is near, and there is nothing we can do but wait. She has learned to live with it. I have not. So I keep my curtains closed, and I dread the moon, and I know that she is always out there, pacing the rooftops, waiting for her next errand. And I wonder if she will ever come for me.