The Weight of August

The fire took everything in late autumn, and I, Mara, found myself displaced to a small, peeling house on the edge of a town that seemed to have forgotten it existed. My father’s aunt, Elspeth, was a woman of few words and many locked doors. The house smelled of mothballs and dust, and the walls seemed to sag inward as if the house itself was tired. My brother and sisters were across town with our grandmother, but I had been sent here, to the only relative who had a spare room, or so they said.

At first, the silence was a relief after the chaos of the fire and the sirens. But within a week, the silence began to take on a shape. It was not empty; it was filled with a low, persistent hum, like a distant refrigerator, but wrong. I went to sleep each night to the sound of my own breathing, but I woke to the feeling of something watching me from the corner of the room. There was never anything there, only the faint outline of a shadow that dissolved when I turned on the light.

Elspeth was no comfort. She spent her days in a rocking chair by the window, staring out at the overgrown garden. She barely acknowledged me, except to remind me to lock the door at night. ‘He doesn’t like the door left open,’ she said once, and when I asked who, she just shook her head and went back to her rocking. The first time she said it, I thought she was senile. But as the days stretched into weeks, I began to notice things.

The grate in the hallway that should have led to a basement was sealed with a new-looking patch of cement, but the cement was always slightly damp, even on dry days. And there was a smell that came from it, faint but unmistakable: the sickly sweetness of rotting leaves, mixed with something metallic, like old copper coins. My sadness, which I had carried from the fire, started to feel less like grief and more like a weight pressing down on my chest. It wasn’t my own; it was too heavy, too ancient.

I tried to write about it, as I had after the fire, but every sentence I wrote came out wrong. The words would smear on the page as if wet, even though my pen was dry. And I would find myself staring into the blank spaces of my notebook, my mind filled with a vision of a gate, iron and rusted, set into a hillside of black earth. Behind it, I felt a presence, not malevolent, but utterly indifferent, and vast. It was this indifference that terrified me most.

In my dreams, I walked through the house, and every room was filled with that same humming. The floorboards creaked with each step, but there was another set of footsteps, heavier, slower, that would pause when I paused and start when I started. I never saw who or what made them, but I could feel its breath on my neck, cold and damp. I would wake with my mouth dry and my heart thudding, and I would lie there, listening for the footsteps to fade.

One afternoon, the sadness was so thick that I couldn’t get out of bed. I stared at the ceiling, and the pattern of plaster cracks began to form a shape: a face, not human, with too-wide eyes and a mouth that was a straight line. I blinked, and it was gone. I rang Elspeth, but she took a long time to come, and when she did, she stood at the threshold of my room, her face pale.

‘You need to leave,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He’s getting stronger.’ I asked her what she meant, but she just pointed to the far corner of the room, where the shadow lingered, darker than the rest. She said, ‘He feeds on the sad ones. The ones who feel too much. He’s been here since I was a girl, trapped behind the grate. But the fire opened a crack, and you brought him more.’ She started to cry, a dry, rasping sound. ‘I’m sorry. I should have warned you.’

That night, the house was alive. The hum was a throbbing, and the floorboards creaked constantly. I could feel the presence in my room, a weight in the air, pressing down on me. I moved to the window, and I saw that the garden was full of shapes, not plants, but hollow, bent figures, standing perfectly still. They were all facing the house, and they all had their heads tilted, as if listening to something. I realized they were waiting for me to give up, to let the sadness swallow me whole.

I did the only thing I could think of: I stood on the bed, and I screamed at the presence. I screamed about the fire, about my lost things, about the injustice and the anger I had been holding back. I screamed until my voice broke, and the weight lifted, just for a second. In that gap, I saw myself as if from outside: a small figure on a bed, shaking, but alive. The presence recoiled, and the humming flickered, like a bad signal.

I took the opportunity. I grabbed my coat, shoved my feet into shoes, and ran. I didn’t look back. I ran through the garden, past the figures, which didn’t move, but I felt their attention shift to me. I ran until I reached the main road, and a passing motorist, a man with kind eyes, stopped and asked if I was okay. I couldn’t speak, but I nodded, and he drove me to a motel on the edge of town.

In the motel’s cheap, bright room, I slept for fourteen hours. When I woke, the sadness was still there, a dull ache, but it was mine again, manageable. I called my mother, and I told her I was coming home. She said, ‘Of course, baby. We’ve been so worried.’ I didn’t tell her about the presence or the figures. I didn’t tell her about the whispering in the walls or the weight on my chest.

But I knew I would never forget. And as the weeks passed, I started to realize that the fire had not only taken my belongings; it had opened something else. And that something else was always waiting, behind the grate, for the next sad soul to feed on. I began to notice others, people with that same hollow look, and I would wonder, are they carrying their own, or are they carrying a piece of what lives in that house?

I wrote this story hoping to exorcise it, but I know it won’t be that easy. The weight is still there, just under the surface. And sometimes, at night, I hear the hum, faint but persistent, like a promise. And I know that as long as there is sadness, as long as there is loss, he will always have a door.