The Stonemason’s Walk

Mara and I had been renting the old gatekeeper’s lodge attached to Blackwood Priory since the first frost of November. The Priory itself was a crumbling Victorian pile, all dripping gables and ivy-choked windows, set in the middle of a wind-scoured estate on the Norfolk coast. Our rooms were in the oldest part, a two-up, two-down with walls three feet thick and a hearth in the living room that had once served the entire household. The stone spiral staircase leading to our bedroom was worn into smooth, deep curves, like a riverbed dried for centuries.

From the start, there was a wrongness to the place. Not the obvious creaks or drafts, but a subtle, watchful silence that followed us from room to room. The fireplace in the living room, and the one in the bedroom directly above it, were the worst. The bedroom I shared with Mara felt heavy, as if the air itself was older and denser. I would wake in the small hours with the sensation that I was not alone, but the room was always empty, and the only sound was the sea gnawing at the cliffs below.

Then the walking began. It started about a month in. I would rouse at three or four in the morning to find Mara standing at the foot of the bed, her hair hanging over her face, her hands hovering in front of her as though she were feeling the air. When I called her name, she would turn and say something vile, something I’d never heard her say before, calling me a fool or a coward, words that cut like broken glass. In the morning, she remembered nothing. She would stare at me blankly when I told her, her sleep-fogged mind struggling to grasp what I was describing.

The sleep-talking app was her idea. We propped my phone on the nightstand, turned on the recorder, and let the darkness swallow us. But every morning, when I checked the app, it showed no recordings. The timer would be running, the screen would show that it was capturing, but the file would be empty. Not a single second of audio. I tried different apps, different phones, even an old dictaphone I found in a drawer. Nothing. It was as if the silence between our breaths was too vast for any machine to capture.

One night, I decided not to sleep. I lay still, my eyes adjusted to the shallow moonlight filtering through the grimy window. At three twenty-seven, I felt the mattress shift. Mara sat up, her movements unnaturally smooth, as if she were a puppet being pulled by invisible strings. She slid out of bed and walked to the bedroom door, her bare feet making no sound on the cold boards. I followed her, my heart thudding in my ears, down the spiral staircase, my hand trailing along the worn grooves of the stone.

She didn’t head for the front door. Instead, she went to the living room fireplace. The grate was empty, cold, black. She knelt before it and began to lay her palms flat on the stones of the hearth, moving them in a slow, circular pattern, as if she were feeling for a secret catch. Then she pressed her ear to the stones and listened. After a minute, she rose and began to cross the room, but halfway, she stopped, turned, and stared directly at me. Her eyes were open, but they were not her eyes. They were milky white, and the look they gave me was one of pure, ancient malice.

I woke the next morning on the settee, my neck stiff, my mind reeling. Mara was in the kitchen making tea as if nothing had happened. She turned to me with a smile, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes—it was a facsimile. I asked her about the night before, and she said she’d woken to find me gone, but she’d assumed I’d just gone down for a glass of water. The app had recorded nothing, of course.

I began to research the Priory. It had been built in 1874 by a family named Thorne, who had made their fortune in the wool trade. The records I found online were sparse, but one entry in a local history blog caught my eye: ‘The Tragedy of the Stonemason’s Walk.’ It told the story of a stonemason named Elias, who had been hired to carve a new mantelpiece for the Priory’s main fireplace. He was found dead at the base of the spiral staircase, his neck broken. The coroner ruled it an accident, but the local legend said he had fallen after an argument with the lady of the house, who had accused him of stealing. His ghost was said to haunt the stairs and the rooms above, waiting to ‘right the wrong’ by leading another to his fate.

That night, I placed a thin layer of flour on the floor of the living room and the bottom of the staircase. I went to bed, my hand gripping Mara’s tightly, but I must have drifted off. At four in the morning, I was jolted awake by a crash. I rushed downstairs to find Mara standing at the bottom of the stairs, staring down at the pattern of bare footprints in the flour. But they weren’t hers. They were the prints of a large man, and they led from the hearth, up the stairs, and then stopped halfway. And in the flour, just at the point where the prints vanished, was a single, deliberate word: ‘MINE.’

Mara was shivering, her face pale. ‘Who’s here?’ she whispered. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because at that moment, I realized the app hadn’t been failing. It had been recording perfectly. It was just that the sounds of the nocturnal visitor were beyond the range of human hearing, and the voices that spoke through Mara’s lips were not hers, but the echoes of a dead stonemason who had finally found a new vessel to carve his revenge. The worn grooves in the stone steps were not from centuries of feet, but from the countless times he had dragged himself up and down in the dark, seeking a way into the world. And now that he had found one, he wasn’t about to let go.

I now spend every night on the settee, the living room fireplace bricked up by a local builder who refused to come back after seeing the marks I’d made in the mortar. Mara sleeps in the bedroom, but I don’t go in there anymore. Not since I saw the scratches on the bedroom floor, the deep, deliberate grooves leading from the bed to the hearth, as if someone had been dragging their heels across the stone for years. The app still records nothing, but I don’t need it. I feel the cold spot on the stairs every time I pass. And tonight, I will sit in the chair by the window, watching the cliff for the faint, glimmering shape that climbs up from the sea, and I will wait for the moment when the floor shifts, and the footsteps begin again.