The Salt Hollow Hours

The summer I turned fourteen, the heat pressed down on our village like a wet wool blanket. My name is Elena, and I’d been riding since I was six, but that year, the stable felt less like a haven and more like a cage. My cousins, Marco and Lucia, and I would meet at the old livery at the edge of the fields, where the sun scorched the earth and the air shimmered with heat. The owners, the Conti family, had a small apartment above the tack room, but they’d long since fled to the mountains for the season. So we had the place to ourselves, or so we thought.

The tack room was a cramped, windowless space, smelling of leather and dust. A rickety ladder led to a loft above, where the Contis stored ancient saddles and bridles, their brass fittings gone green with neglect. We’d spend our afternoons there, playing cards on a upturned crate, listening to the flies buzz against the single, cobwebbed bulb. It was our refuge from the sun, but also our prison, because once you were in, the heat seemed to double, and the air grew heavy with the scent of old sweat and something else, something sour and faintly sweet.

That day, Marco had brought a deck of cards, worn and creased at the corners. Lucia was trying to teach me a new game, but I couldn’t concentrate. My eyes kept drifting to the loft, to the dark gap where the ladder disappeared. I had a weird feeling, like someone was breathing right behind my ear, though no one was there. I told myself it was just the heat, playing tricks.

Suddenly, a sound came from above, a soft scraping, like a hoof on wood. We froze, staring at the ceiling. ‘It’s just a rat,’ Lucia whispered, but her voice was thin. Marco, the brave one, grabbed the flashlight from his backpack and shone it up into the loft. The beam cut through the darkness, revealing a mound of old horse blankets, a broken saddle tree, and a child’s wooden toy horse, its paint chipped and faded. I’d never seen it before.

Then the scrape came again, closer this time, right above us. And then a whisper, so faint I almost missed it. ‘Fresco… fresco…’ Marco’s face went pale. ‘Did you hear that?’ I nodded. Lucia bit her lip. ‘It’s probably just the wood settling,’ she said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

The whisper grew louder, more urgent. ‘Fresco… fresco…’ It sounded like a little girl’s voice, pleading. I felt a cold draft in the sweltering room, and the hair on my arms stood up. Marco grabbed the ladder, determined to see what was up there. ‘I’ll go check,’ he said, but I grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Something’s not right.’ He shook me off. ‘It’s probably a cat or something. I’ll be quick.’ He climbed up, his footsteps echoing in the small space.

The moment his head disappeared into the loft, the whispering stopped. A terrible silence fell, so thick I could almost touch it. Lucia and I held our breath, listening for any sound. Then, Marco’s voice floated down, oddly calm. ‘Elena, Lucia, come up here. You have to see this.’ I looked at Lucia, my heart pounding. Her eyes were wide, but she nodded. We climbed the ladder, one after the other, into the dark loft.

The loft was smaller than I remembered, cluttered with forgotten things. A thin shaft of sunlight slanted through a crack in the roof, illuminating a circle of dust motes. In the center, Marco was kneeling, staring at something on the floor. As I drew closer, I saw it was a child’s handprint, small and delicate, pressed into the wood, as if burned there. And next to it, another, and another, leading towards the wall.

The whispers began again, but this time they weren’t coming from the air. They were coming from inside my head. ‘Fresco… fresco…’ I saw a flash of a little girl in a white dress, her dark hair in two braids. She was running, laughing, her small feet pattering on the wooden floor. Then she stopped, turned to look at me, and her face was not a child’s face. Her eyes were black pits, and her mouth opened into a silent scream.

I stumbled back, nearly falling off the ladder. ‘We have to get out of here,’ I choked. Marco was frozen, still staring at the handprints. Lucia grabbed my arm. ‘It’s her,’ she whispered. ‘The Conti’s daughter. She died in a fire in this loft, fifty years ago. They say she never left.’

I didn’t wait to hear more. I scrambled down the ladder, Marco and Lucia behind me. We burst out of the tack room into the blinding sun, gasping for air. But the heat outside felt suddenly cold. We didn’t go back to the livery that summer. We rode in the fields, far away from that building. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was following me.

Weeks later, on the last day before school started, I rode past the livery alone. The sun was setting, and the long shadows stretched across the ground. I stopped at the fence, staring at the silhouettes of the stable and the tack room. And then, I saw her. A little girl in a white dress, standing in the doorway, waving at me. She was smiling, but her smile was too wide, and her eyes were still black pits. She called out, her voice the same pleading whisper, but now I understood.

‘Fresco,’ she said. ‘Fresco…’ she meant ‘Fresco’ as in the Italian word for ‘fresh’. But she wasn’t asking for fresh water or fresh air. She was asking for fresh blood. She was offering me a deal. And in that moment, I knew she would never let me go.