The Paint-Peeled Room

I never liked the room at the end of the upstairs hall in Aunt Cora’s farmhouse. The door was always slightly ajar, and the wallpaper peeled in long, brittle strips that looked like dead skin. When I was five, I refused to go near it, screaming if anyone carried me past. I called it the ‘crackly door’ because of the sound the wallpaper made when the draft blew through. My dad would ask why, and I’d say, ‘It’s the sticky room, Daddy. It wants to eat my breath.’ He’d laugh, but I saw the way he never opened that door either.

By eight, I’d forgotten my fear. I’d run past it, even peek inside once—it was just an empty room with a bare mattress and a water stain on the ceiling shaped like a hand. But the summer I turned ten, things changed. I started seeing things in the hallway: a flicker of a gray dress, a child’s silhouette standing at the end of the hall, gone when I blinked. At night, I’d wake to the sound of scratching—not from the walls, but from inside my own head, like nails on a chalkboard. I’d lie still, and the air would grow cold, and I’d feel a pressure on my chest, as if something was sitting on me, breathing my air.

I told my mother, who never visited the farm. She said Aunt Cora had a ‘heavy presence’—that she collected old things, sorrows, and the house had soaked them up like a sponge. She gave me a small cloth bag of herbs and told me to keep it under my pillow. It didn’t help.

Now, a week before my father and I were to spend four days at the farm, I got a call from Aunt Cora. Her voice was thin, like rustling paper. ‘Come early,’ she said. ‘There’s something you need to see in the crackly room.’ I hadn’t told anyone that name in years. My blood turned cold.

We arrived on a gray afternoon. The farm looked the same, but the upstairs hall was darker, and the wallpaper in the crackly room had peeled completely, revealing the plaster beneath, which was covered in faint, childlike drawings—stick figures with hollow eyes, and one recurring shape: a small hand reaching out from a black circle. That night, I heard the scratching again, louder. I followed it to the crackly room. The door was wide open. On the bare mattress lay a tarnished locket, open. Inside was a faded photograph of a girl my age, with the same hollow eyes as the drawings. I touched the locket, and the room went cold. A voice, barely a breath, said, ‘You’re finally here. Now you can stay.’

I ran. I slammed the door, but the latch wouldn’t catch. I fled downstairs, but the hallway kept stretching, the doors multiplying. I heard my father’s voice calling from somewhere, but it sounded muffled, like from under water. I turned a corner and saw the girl from the photograph standing at the end of the hall, her head tilted. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out—except a faint, rhythmic scraping, like something being dragged across the floor.

I woke up in my bed the next morning, my father shaking me, asking why I was sleeping in the hallway. I tried to explain, but the words wouldn’t come. I looked at my hands—they were covered in dust, and under my fingernails was a fine, gray powder. On my wrist, faint and red, was a mark like a small hand.

The locket was in my pocket. I haven’t shown it to anyone. And I know that in a week, I’m not going to the farm. I’m going to the room, because the girl is still there, and she’s been waiting for a very long time.