The Seventh Step

I was seven when we moved into the old coast guard station at Cape Meridian. The building had been decommissioned in the sixties, and for decades it had sat empty, a hulking concrete monument to weather and neglect. My father, a marine biologist, had taken a post at the nearby research institute, and the station was the only housing available on such short notice. My mother hated it. She said it felt like a tomb, with its thick walls and salt-rusted fixtures, and she was right. But we had no choice but to make it our home.

There were four of us kids: my older brother, Daniel, who was twelve; my sister, Elena, who was ten; my other brother, Sam, who was nine; and me, the baby, at seven. We each had our own strange encounters in that place, but the one I remember most clearly happened during our first winter, when the sea storms lashed the cliffs and the wind howled through the gaps in the window frames like a chorus of the drowned.

It was about two in the morning, and I woke up parched. The heater had been rattling all night, and the air was dry and stale. I slipped out of bed, my bare feet cold on the linoleum, and padded down the hallway to the staircase. The stairs were steep and narrow, with a worn wooden handrail, and I took them slowly, counting each step as I always did. One, two, three, four, five, six, and then I paused on the seventh step, because from there I could see into the kitchen through the open doorway.

I didn’t see anything at first. The moonlight filtered through the jalousie windows, casting silver stripes across the counter and the old gas stove. But then I noticed a figure standing by the stove, half in shadow. It was a man, tall and broad, wearing a yellow rain slicker and dark trousers. I thought it was Daniel, who had worn a similar slicker when we’d gone walking on the beach earlier that day. But something felt off. The figure was stock-still, facing the stove as if waiting for something to boil, and it didn’t turn when I spoke.

‘Daniel?’ I called out, my voice small and uncertain. ‘Can you get me a glass of water?’ The figure didn’t move. I repeated myself, louder this time, a hint of irritation creeping in. ‘Daniel, I asked you for water!’ Still nothing. The silence was absolute, broken only by the distant crash of waves against the rocks below.

A cold dread began to coil in my stomach. The figure wasn’t breathing. I could see its shoulders, perfectly still, and I realized that the slicker looked too long, too heavy, and the legs beneath it were not moving, not even swaying with the natural shifts of a living body. I took a step back, my heart thudding, and that’s when I heard a sound behind me. It was a soft, wet slapping, like bare feet on damp wood, coming from the top of the stairs. I spun around, but there was nothing there. When I turned back to the kitchen, the figure was gone.

I ran back to my room, not bothering with the water, and buried myself under the blankets, my breath shallow and hot. I told myself it was a trick of the light, a dream, but I knew better. In the morning, I asked Daniel if he had gotten up in the night. He looked at me, puzzled, and said no, that he had slept like a log. I didn’t bring it up again.

But the station kept its secrets. The following week, my mother found the stove’s pilot light off, though we never used it after dinner. My father, an avid birdwatcher, claimed he saw the silhouette of a person standing on the cliff’s edge at dusk, but when he went to investigate, there was only a cairn of stones. And then there was the night I found Sam, my nine-year-old brother, standing in the hallway, staring at the wall with blank eyes. He didn’t respond when I shook him, but after a minute, he blinked and asked why I was there. He had no memory of leaving his bed.

The final incident happened the night before we moved, when the research institute finally provided proper housing. I woke to the sound of water running. I crept to the bathroom door and peeked inside. The faucet was on, and in the mirror, I saw the reflection of the same figure—the yellow slicker, the dark trousers—standing behind me, its face obscured by the hood. But in the mirror, its face was not a face at all. It was a hollow, black void, and I knew with sickening certainty that it had been waiting for us, feeding on our fear, growing stronger with each encounter.

I slammed the door shut and ran to my parents’ room, screaming. They found no one in the bathroom, but the faucet was still running, scalding hot, and the mirror was cracked from the inside out. We left the next morning, and I never looked back.

Years later, when I was in college, I read a Coast Guard report about drowned sailors who had been stationed at Cape Meridian during a hurricane in 1959. One of them, a man named Petty Officer Martin Grey, had been lost at sea. He was last seen wearing his yellow rain slicker, and he had been the cook, spending much of his time in the kitchen. I do not know if what we saw was his ghost, or something else that had taken his form. But I know this: the seventh step on that staircase was always colder than the others, and I never, ever, stopped to look into the kitchen again.