The Stain on the Ninth Stair

The first time I noticed it, I was seven. We had just moved into the curved brick block on Meryton Lane, a three-story crescent of flats that wrapped around a sunken courtyard and a kidney-shaped pool. Mum had chosen it for the price and the proximity to the tram line. I chose it because the stairwells smelled of damp concrete and old laundry, which felt like a secret.

Our flat was on the second floor, overlooking the pool. Every day after school, I’d run down the twenty steps from the street, past the bins and the lopsided barbecue, and I’d play in the courtyard until the streetlights hummed to life. I’d skip, I’d kick a ball, I’d swim. But I always kept one eye on the corners.

It started with a flicker. A dark smudge at the edge of my vision, like a shadow that didn’t belong to anything. I’d turn my head, and it would be gone. Then it grew bolder. I’d be looking at the big gum tree with its hollow stump near the laundry room, and there he’d be—a man-shaped shadow, tall and thin, peeking out from behind the trunk. As soon as I looked directly, he’d slip away, as if shy.

Inside our flat, I saw him too. He’d duck behind the kitchen counter when I drank my milk, or he’d shrink into the corner of my bedroom when I read at night. He never moved with me. He was always just out of sight, like a forgotten word. I told Mum about the shadow man. She said it was my imagination, that it was the light through the blinds, but I knew better. I called him the Peeker.

The Peeker followed me for three years. I’d see him in the stairwell, on the fire escape, under the pool’s diving board. He was always the same—a flat, black silhouette, featureless except for a slight tilt to his head, as if he was curious. He never bothered me, never came closer. He just watched, and then vanished.

When I turned ten, I stopped seeing him. I stopped looking for him. I got older, I got friends, I got interested in other things. The Peeker became a childhood memory, a ghost story I told at sleepovers. Mum and I stayed in that flat, and life became routine: school, homework, the hum of the air conditioner, the smell of Mum’s fried rice.

I’m sixteen now. Last Tuesday, I fell down the stairs. I was carrying a basket of laundry, and my foot caught on the torn stair carpet—the strip that had always been loose, even when I was seven. I tumbled down the last eight steps, landing hard on my wrist. The pain was sharp, but what made me gasp was what I saw as I lay on the landing, looking up at the stairwell above me.

There he was. The Peeker. He was pressed against the wall half-way up the flight, his dark shape flat against the white paint. But this time, he didn’t dart away. He was solid, real, and he was staring at me with a face that I could finally see—not a blank shadow, but a grey, mottled surface, like an old photograph left in the rain. His mouth was open, and his eyes were two pale dots, milky with cataracts.

I scrambled to my feet, my wrist throbbing, and I ran up the stairs to our flat. I was panting, shaking, and I told Mum, but she just sighed and said I’d hit my head. She bandaged my wrist and said I should be more careful.

That night, I heard footsteps in the hallway outside our door. Slow, dragging, like someone wearing wet socks. I lay in bed, listening. The footsteps stopped right outside my bedroom door. I held my breath. Then I saw it—a shadow creeping under the door, inch by inch, spreading across the floor like spilled ink. It formed a shape—a man’s head and shoulders, stretched and distorted, but unmistakable. And then, a voice, not audible but inside my head, whispered, ‘You can see me now.’

The next morning, I checked the stairwell. There was a faint grey stain on the wall where I’d seen him, like a patch of damp that hadn’t been there before. I touched it. My finger came away dusty, with a smell of old pennies.

I’ve started seeing him everywhere now—not just in the corners, but in the mirrors, in the pool water, in the pupils of my own eyes when I stare too long. Mum says I’ve got a shadow, a ‘familiar’, whatever that means. She started sleeping with the lights on.

Last night, I woke up to find the Peeker standing at the foot of my bed. For the first time, he wasn’t shy. He raised a black, tendril-like arm and pointed at the window. Outside, the moon was full, and the pool below was as still as glass. In the reflection of the water, I saw a girl in a yellow sundress playing with a skipping rope—only I was looking at it from above, and the girl was me, seven years old, and the Peeker was standing behind her, his shadow merging with hers.

The stain on the ninth stair is still there. I counted them. He was standing on the ninth stair when I fell. Tonight, I’m going down there to look him in the eyes. I don’t know what he wants, but I know one thing: he’s not shy anymore, and he’s been waiting for me to grow up so I can finally see him for what he is. And I think, maybe, he’s been trying to tell me something all along—that the shadow I saw was never a man. It was a door. And now, it’s open.