The Salt-Worn Window

My name is Eibhlín, and I’ve lived my whole life in a crumbling cottage on the western edge of Inishmore, where the Atlantic gnaws at the cliffs and the wind never truly sleeps. The cottage has been in my family for generations, its stone walls soaked with salt and memory. I’m seventeen now, and I’ve been seeing things since I was eight—things that slide sideways in my vision, whispers that skitter like crabs across the floorboards. My parents think I have an overactive imagination, but my grandmother knew. She used to say, ‘The sea keeps what it takes, and the house keeps what it’s given.’ She died last winter, and the night she passed, I saw her reflection in the kitchen window, but it was young, and it was smiling.

The first thing I remember clearly happened when I was ten. I woke in my narrow bed under the eaves, the moon a pale coin through the salt-crusted glass. There was a girl standing at the foot of my bed, dressed in a sodden woolen shift, her hair plastered to her face like kelp. She was transparent, and I could see the wallpaper through her, but her eyes were solid, black and bottomless as the sea at midnight. She didn’t speak, but she pointed at the window, and I saw a face pressed against the glass—a man with skin like old leather and eyes like the drowned. When I blinked, they were gone, but the window was wet on the inside, as if someone had breathed on it.

That was the first of many. Over the years, I learned to ignore the cold spots that gathered in corners, the faint sounds of weeping from the attic, the way the doors would sometimes stick for no reason. But this past winter, after my grandmother’s funeral, the house became more active. I’d wake to find my hair wet at the tips, and the smell of brine clung to my pillows. One night, I found a puddle of seawater in the middle of the kitchen floor, and a dead gull was floating in it, its eyes missing. I told my father, but he just stared at the puddle and said, ‘It’s the tide,’ and went back to his whiskey.

The only one who believed me was my cousin, Cillian. He came to stay for the summer, a lanky boy with a skeptic’s smile but a hidden curiosity. I told him everything—about the ghost girl, the man at the window, the whispers that said my name in my grandmother’s voice but wrong, like it was trying to remember how to speak. The first night he slept in the room next to mine, he knocked on my door at 2 AM, pale as milk. He said he woke to the sound of something scratching at his wall, and when he pressed his ear to it, he heard a voice, muffled and wet: ‘Let me in, I’m cold.’ I told him not to answer, and that’s when the scratching started coming from inside the room, from behind the wallpaper, as if something were trapped there.

We decided to investigate the attic together, armed with a flashlight and a rosary my grandmother had left. The attic stairs were narrow and bent, and the air thickened with dust and salt. There was a window at the far end, looking out to the sea, and it was frosted over despite the summer heat. On the windowsill, we found a small, bound journal. It was my great-grandmother’s, written in faded ink. The entries were mundane until the last page, where her handwriting grew frantic. She wrote about a ‘bride of the sea,’ a woman who had been drowned two centuries ago on these cliffs, and whose spirit latched onto every woman in our family. She wrote that the only way to quiet her was to give her a name, but never your own. ‘She knows the sound of who you are,’ she wrote, ‘and she will call you home.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my bed, watching the window, and I felt a cold draft. When I turned, the ghost girl was standing closer than ever, her black eyes inches from mine. She reached out a dripping hand and touched my cheek. Her touch was ice, but it left a warmth that felt like a brand. She opened her mouth, and a stream of saltwater poured out, and I heard my grandmother’s voice say, ‘Join us, Eibhlín.’ I screamed, and she vanished, but the water remained on my pillow, and it was salty with blood.

The next morning, Cillian was missing. His bed was empty, the sheets damp. I found him on the cliffs, standing at the edge, staring at the water. He was soaked, and when I pulled him back, he looked at me with eyes that were not his—they were black. ‘She almost had me,’ he whispered. ‘She said you were the one.’

I knew then that I had to stop her. I went back to the attic, taking the journal. I read the final line, which I had missed: ‘The name must be spoken aloud, and she will be bound to it, but if you speak your own name, she will bind to you.’ I had heard her whisper my name many times, so I had to give her another. I think of my grandmother’s words: ‘The sea keeps what it takes.’ I took the journal to the kitchen, and I lit it on fire. As the pages burned, I whispered the name of the drowned woman from the journal—’Aoife’—and I said it three times, as the book turned to ash.

The house trembled. A gale swept through, throwing the windows open. The ghost girl appeared one last time, but she was fading, her form unraveling like thread. She looked at me with something like gratitude, and then she was gone. The wind died, and the house was silent. Cillian was himself again, but he wouldn’t speak of it. We never talked about it after that.

But sometimes, late at night, I still feel a cold breath on my neck, and I hear a whispered word that sounds like my name, but not quite. And when I look at the salt-worn window, I see my own reflection, and in the glass, my smile is not my own.