The Stacked Pallets

October 20, 2011

by Annabelle

It began in the sweltering summer of 2009, when my girlfriend Maya moved from the city to a dusty trailer park on the outskirts of a small desert town in Nevada. Her boyfriend at the time, Derek, would drive down three times a week to see her. On the nights he stayed over, he would swear he saw a face pressed against the bedroom window—a pale, gaunt face with black eyes. Maya would mention it to us casually, but we laughed it off, chalking it up to his imagination and too many horror movies.

Then my brother (Maya’s brother) moved in with her, and I would come over every evening to hang out. The trailer was cramped, with a narrow hallway and a window that looked out onto the barren yard. Maya and Derek were obsessed with watching scary movies, so the TV always blared with cheap scares and gore. I never felt at ease there, but it was a place to pass the time.

One early morning, Maya called me, her voice trembling, asking if I could come over and stay with her for the whole day. When I arrived, she told me she had heard something rustling through her things in the bathroom—papers, plastic bags, the sound of movement. So we stood in the living room, silent, straining to hear. Sure enough, we both heard it: a soft, shuffling noise, like pages turning, coming from the hallway. We crept toward the back bedroom, only to find everything untouched, exactly as it had been. I told her we should just leave for the day, forget it, but from then on, she heard it every single day—the sound of something going through her belongings, always just out of reach.

A year passed, and the occurrences grew stranger. Maya started finding small items missing: a hairbrush, a pair of earrings, a photograph of her grandmother. Derek began sleeping less, muttering about the face at the window. My brother claimed he felt a cold draft in the hallway at night, and once, he woke to find the front door wide open, though he swore he had locked it. We all tried to rationalize it—maybe it was a raccoon, a draft, a prank—but the unease clung to us like the desert heat.

One night, as we sat in the living room, the TV went static, and the lights flickered. Maya screamed, pointing toward the window. There, pressed against the glass, was a face—not human, but not entirely animal, its features elongated, its eyes empty pits. Derek grabbed a flashlight and rushed outside, but the yard was empty, save for a trail of footprints leading to the old pallets stacked against the fence. That’s when we noticed something carved into the wooden slats: a pattern of concentric circles, like an eye. We decided to leave, to pack up and go, but as we turned to the door, we heard a low growl from the hallway, and the lights went out completely.

We stumbled outside, into the dim orange glow of the desert dusk, and saw that the pallets had been rearranged. They now formed a crude archway, and through it, we could see a shimmering darkness, like a rip in the air. Maya’s eyes went wide, and she whispered, ‘I think I understand now.’ She walked toward the archway, despite our shouts. As she stepped through, the pallets collapsed with a crash, and she was gone. We never saw her again, but sometimes, in the dead of night, we still hear the sound of papers rustling, and we know that somewhere behind that archway, something is still sorting through her things.

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