The Third Toe

In the autumn of 2002, my grandmother Lila moved into a small apartment on the third floor of the old Grimsby Mill building, a sprawling brick complex that had been converted into cheap housing. The mill had sat vacant for decades after a fire, and the locals said it was cursed—workers had died in the blaze, their bodies never fully recovered. But Lila had no choice; the rent was cheap, and she needed a place close to the hospital where she worked as a night nurse.

From the start, the apartment felt wrong. The walls were cold even in summer, and the light bulbs flickered no matter how often they were changed. The rooms seemed to absorb sound, so that even her own footsteps were muffled, as if the floor was swallowing them. Lila tried to ignore it, but the place weighed on her. She developed a habit of sweeping the floors every morning, a ritual that brought her a small sense of control. She would sweep the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom, and finally her bedroom, which was the darkest room of all, with a window facing a brick wall.

One morning, after she had been living there for nearly a year, Lila noticed something in the dust of her bedroom floor: a small footprint, about the size of a child’s, but distorted. The toe was missing, leaving only four distinct toes, and the print was deeper than it should have been, as if made by a heavy weight. She dismissed it as a smudge or a trick of the light, and swept it away.

The next day, the footprint was back, but clearer. It wasn’t just the dust; the print seemed pressed into the wood itself, a dark stain that wouldn’t come out with sweeping. Lila felt a chill, but she convinced herself it was just a mark from an old water stain or a previous tenant. She scrubbed it with soap and water, but it remained, faint but visible.

Over the following weeks, the footprint began to change. Sometimes there were two, sometimes three, as if something was walking in circles around her bed. The prints would appear even after she had mopped, and they were always cold to the touch. Lila started to have nightmares—dreams of a small, hunched figure standing at the foot of her bed, breathing heavily, its face obscured by shadow.

One evening, Lila came home from her shift and found that the footprints had multiplied, leading from the door of her bedroom to the closet. The closet door was slightly ajar, and inside, she saw a pair of children’s shoes, old and dusty, that she had never noticed before. She pulled them out; they were caked with dirt, and the soles were worn thin. In the left shoe, there was a small, dried-up toe, black and shriveled.

Lila dropped the shoe, her heart pounding. She called her son, my father, and told him she needed to move out immediately. But as she packed her things, the footprint appeared on her clothes, on her hands, on her floor. It was everywhere. When she finally left, she looked back at the apartment building, and in the window of her old bedroom, she saw a small silhouette, standing perfectly still, watching her.

She never spoke of it again, but sometimes, at night, when I was a child, I would catch her staring at her feet, counting her toes. And once, when I asked her about a scar on her foot, she told me it was from a childhood accident, but I knew she was lying. Because the scar was on the third toe, and it looked like it had been sliced off cleanly, and then reattached, but never quite right.

Now, I live in that same apartment, in her old bedroom. And last night, I woke to find a footprint on the floor, next to my bed. It’s small, with only four toes, and it’s warm under my bare foot. I don’t know how long I can stay here, but I can’t leave. I see the silhouette in the window, and I realize it’s the same one I saw as a child. And it’s waiting for me to sleep, so it can take what was left behind.