The Pencil’s Path

It was a Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday, the kind of day that blurs into the next when you’re on break from university. I was at my cousin’s place, a drafty old farmhouse my aunt had inherited from a great-uncle who’d been a bit of a recluse. My cousin, Lena, and I were in the middle of a marathon session of a racing game, the plastic wheel vibrating in my hands as I took a sharp corner. The room was lit only by the glow of the television, and the rest of the house creaked and groaned like an old ship at sea.

Suddenly, a wooden pencil—the kind with a worn eraser and teeth marks—launched itself from a cup on the desk across the room. It zipped past my ear, close enough that I felt the wind of its passage, and embedded itself in the wall behind us with a soft thud. We froze. The game music blared, oblivious. I looked at Lena, and she looked back, her face pale in the flickering light. ‘Did you see that?’ she whispered. I nodded, my mouth dry. We spent the next hour setting up a series of small mirrors on tripods, angling them to see down the hallway and into the corners of the rooms we couldn’t see from the living room, hoping to catch our prankster. But there was no one. The house was empty, save for us.

That night, we decided to sleep in the same room, a guest room with peeling floral wallpaper and a bed that smelled of mothballs. I couldn’t sleep. I lay there, listening to the wind outside, when I noticed something odd on the wall. There, barely visible in the moonlight, was a series of faint, glowing strokes—like someone had drawn with a flashlight. They formed odd symbols, almost like letters. I nudged Lena awake, and we both stared at the wall. The symbols resolved into a phrase: ‘Zed, ek’cuf evah.’ It was gibberish at first, but then it hit me: it was reversed. We decoded it, letter by letter, until it read: ‘Dave, Have Ckue’—no, that didn’t make sense. We tried again, and finally it clicked: ‘ZA, Kcuf evah’—we laughed nervously, the message was ‘Have a fuck’? That couldn’t be right. But then the strokes shifted, and a new message appeared in their place: ‘You’ve Read This Wrong’ in perfect English. My blood ran cold.

Over the next few days, the weirdness escalated. The kitchen would rearrange itself when we weren’t looking—a box of baking soda would slide across the counter as if pushed by an invisible hand, then fall and shatter on the floor. Lena refused to cook after that. I started leaving a small recorder on at night, hoping to catch some EVP, but the only sound it captured was a low, rhythmic breathing, almost like something was sleeping under the floorboards.

The messages continued, always appearing in that glowing script on the walls. They started as warnings: ‘Get Out.’ Then they became more personal: ‘You Don’t Belong Here.’ And finally, one night, as I was alone in the hall, a line of shimmering text spelled out, ‘I See Your Reflection, Dale.’ But my name isn’t Dale. It’s Marcus. That was the moment I knew something was wrong with the house itself.

The last straw came when I reached for a skillet in the kitchen. As my hand closed around the handle, the skillet jerked violently, yanking me forward. I stumbled, and the skillet swung back, smashing into the window above the sink. Glass exploded outward. Lena came running, and she saw it too: in the shards scattered on the lawn, we saw two reflections—mine and a dark, shape that seemed to be standing just behind me, watching. It had no face, just a hood of blackness.

We left that night, driving in silence through the rain. As we reached the main road, I glanced in the rearview mirror. The farmhouse was a dark silhouette against the storm-torn sky, but in the last flicker of lightning, I saw a figure in the upstairs window. It was holding a pencil.

I haven’t been back since. But sometimes, when I’m alone in my own apartment, I’ll find a pencil on the floor where it shouldn’t be. And every time I pick it up, I feel a cold draft, and I hear a faint whisper that says, ‘I see your reflection, Marcus.’