The Square of White Light

The old farmhouse had a way of holding onto things. The pine boards creaked with the memory of a hundred winters, and the wallpaper in the hallway peeled in strips like dead skin. My bedroom was the last door at the end of the upstairs corridor, so far from the stairs that I sometimes imagined I was in a separate house. My parents’ room was next to mine, then a sewing room that my mother never used, then the bathroom with its porcelain tub and claw feet that seemed to grip the floor like claws. I was five, and I knew nothing about ghosts. I only knew that I was afraid of the dark.

On the morning of the town’s spring festival, I woke to a pale gray light and the sound of wind rattling the window. I had to pee, but the bathroom was a journey through the black corridor, past the sewing room with its half-open door. Usually, I would call for my mother, but that day something felt different. The house was too quiet, and the air smelled of dust and cinnamon, like the church basement during the harvest sale. I decided to be brave. I swung my legs out of bed and walked to my doorway, the floor cold against my bare feet. I looked down the hallway toward the dining room, which was visible at the end, and saw something that made my heart stutter.

There was a square of pure white light on the wall of the dining room, like a picture frame but brighter, and it was moving. The light swayed, as if held by someone, and then it began to pulse, slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat. I remember thinking it looked like the flashlight my father gave me for my birthday, but the beam was too wide, and it didn’t cast a circle on the wall; it cast a rectangle, and inside the rectangle, I saw a shape shift. I blinked, and the shape was gone, but the light remained, bobbing gently, as if whoever held it was walking toward me.

I stood frozen, my hand on the doorframe. The light grew larger as it moved down the hallway, and I could hear a soft scraping sound, like a hem dragging across the floor. I wanted to run to my parents’ room, but my legs wouldn’t move. The light reached the sewing room door, and for a moment it paused, and I saw a silhouette inside the glow—a woman, or something like a woman, with long hair that fell in ropes, and a dress that swayed without wind. She was holding something, but I couldn’t make it out. Then the light shifted, and she turned toward me.

The light flooded over me, filling my eyes with white, and I felt a warmth that was not comforting, like standing too close to an open oven. The scraping grew louder, and I heard a voice, not in my ears but inside my head, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But I was afraid. I was more afraid than I had ever been, and a dark spot in the center of the light grew and grew, like a hole being cut in the brightness, and in that hole I saw my own face, but older, with eyes that were empty, and a mouth that was open in a silent scream. I wanted to scream for my mother, but my voice was gone.

Then the light snapped off like a light bulb breaking, and the hallway was pitch black. I heard a door slam—the door to the sewing room—and then nothing. I was alone in the dark, and I wet myself, the warm trickle running down my leg, and I finally found my voice and screamed. My mother burst out of her room and carried me back to her bed, and I told her what I saw, and she said I had a bad dream. But I knew it wasn’t a dream, because I felt the cold floor on my feet and the wetness on my pajamas.

The next morning, I walked to the dining room, and there, on the wall where the light had been, I saw a rectangular spot that was whiter than the rest of the wallpaper, as if something had faded the color. My mother noticed it too and said it was just a patch of sunlight from the window, but the window was on the opposite wall. I never saw the light again, but I always knew it was there, waiting. Seventeen years later, I still can’t close my eyes in a dark hallway without seeing that bright doorway, and I still remember the exact moment when I realized that the thing in the light was not a ghost, but something far older, wearing my face to show me what I would become if I kept looking.