The Stained Ceiling

My name is Leo, and I’m twelve. I’ve had two encounters with things that shouldn’t exist. The first happened when I was seven, in a cramped flat above my mother’s bakery in the old mill district of Greyhaven. The building was over a century old, with pipes that gurgled and floors that sagged, but it was home.

We lived there for three months before the ceiling in my room began to stain. It started as a faint brown patch near the window, which I assumed was water damage. But it grew, spreading like a web, and sometimes I’d catch it shimmering when the light hit it just right, as if it were wet even though it was dry to the touch.

One night, I woke to the sound of dripping. I sat up in bed, and there it was: a shape, tall and impossibly thin, plastered against the ceiling as if it were made of shadow. Its head was tilted, and even in the dark, I could see the stain spreading beneath it, creeping toward me. I wanted to scream, but my throat was frozen.

The shape moved, not like a spider, but like oil sliding across water, and it slid down the wall, leaving a dark trail. It paused at the foot of my bed, and I felt its gaze, heavy and cold. Then it darted out of the room, and I heard the kitchen door swing open and shut.

I lay there, heart pounding, and eventually, I convinced myself it was a dream. But the next morning, my mother asked why I had been in the kitchen the night before. I said I hadn’t, but she insisted she had heard the refrigerator door open and close. She looked at me, worried, and said, ‘I thought you might have been hungry.’

I didn’t tell her what I saw. But that stain on my ceiling never faded, and sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch it glisten in the moonlight, wondering if it was watching me back.

The second thing happened three years later, after we moved to a small cottage by the marsh. I was older, less likely to believe in monsters. But the cottage had a cellar door that was always locked, and I was told never to open it. Of course, I did.

I found a spiral staircase leading down into darkness, and at the bottom, a single room with a dirt floor. In the corner, there was an old well, its mouth sealed with cracked concrete. I knelt to look, and I heard a voice, faint and raspy, coming from the depths. It said my full name, ‘Leo Merrow,’ and asked me to help it out. It said it had been down there for a long time, and it was hungry.

I ran upstairs, slammed the door, and never told my mother. But that night, I heard scratching from behind the cellar door, and a voice that sounded like my own, asking to be let out. The lock rattled, but it held. In the morning, the door was slightly ajar, and the kitchen was in disarray.

I still live with that memory. I don’t know what I let into that house, but I know it wasn’t human. And sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see a faint shadow at the corner of my eye, like it followed me. But I never turn around fast enough to see it.