The Weight of the Night

Three years ago, I moved into a sprawling Victorian house with four other students. The place was drafty, with high ceilings and long corridors that swallowed sound. My room was at the end of the second-floor hallway, away from the others. The first night, I remember the peculiar feeling of the mattress indenting as if someone were walking their fingers up the side of the bed. It stopped halfway, and I lay rigid, staring into the darkness, but nothing more happened. I chalked it up to old springs settling.

Night after night, the same sensation, but the fingers crept higher. By the end of the first month, they reached my pillow, and I would feel the faint pressure near my ear. I never saw anything, and it never touched my skin. I grew accustomed to it, even found a strange comfort in the routine, like a cat that brushes your leg before settling.

When the lease ended, I moved to a smaller house with just one roommate, a quiet girl named Mara. The new place was a modest bungalow with a garden that backed onto a dense forest. The first night there, I slipped into bed, exhausted from unpacking. I dreamed of a heavy blanket pressing down on me, but I woke with a start to a violent thud at the foot of my mattress, as if a concrete slab had been dropped. The bed lurched, and I sat up, heart pounding. The room was still, the moonlight casting pale squares on the floor. Nothing was amiss, so I convinced myself I had imagined it.

The next night, it happened again, but this time the force was stronger, shaking the bed frame. I turned on the light, but there was nothing. Mara, hearing the noise, knocked on my door, her face pale. ‘Did you feel that?’ she asked. ‘The whole house shook.’ We searched the house but found nothing. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

Over the following weeks, the disturbances escalated. The thud grew to a slam, and soon the bed began to rock violently, as if someone were shaking it. I would hold onto the mattress, praying for it to stop. Mara, too, started feeling presences in her own room. She would wake to find her furniture moved, her clothes scattered. We decided to investigate the history of the house. The landlord, an old man with a knowing look, reluctantly told us that a previous tenant, a woman named Elspeth, had died here. She had been a medium, and she had tried to contact the spirits that haunted the land. One night, during a séance, she fell into a coma and never woke up. Her body was found in the attic, a strange symbol carved into the floorboards beneath her.

That night, I lay in bed, unable to sleep. The air grew cold, and I felt the familiar weight at the foot of my bed, but this time it was different. The pressure began to move upward, like fingers crawling, but heavier, more deliberate. It reached my knees, then my thighs, and then it stopped. I heard a low humming sound, like a distant choir, and the room seemed to darken. A voice, soft and mournful, whispered in my ear, ‘You have to stop her.’

I screamed, and the pressure vanished. I ran to Mara’s room, but she was not there. The door to the attic was ajar. I climbed the creaking stairs, my flashlight trembling. In the attic, I found Mara standing over a circle of candles, chanting. She turned to me, her eyes glowing with a faint amber light. ‘She wants to come back,’ Mara said, her voice not her own. ‘She needs a vessel.’ I realized then that the presence had been following me not to harm me, but to warn me. Elspeth, trapped between worlds, had been trying to reach me, to stop the other spirit—the one that had been possessing Mara and causing the physical attacks.

I backed away, but Mara lunged, and we struggled. In the chaos, I knocked over a candlestick, and flames caught the dry wood of the attic. As the fire spread, the symbol on the floor began to glow, and I saw a shadowy figure rise from it—a woman, gaunt and twisted. It screamed, and the sound was deafening. The fire consumed the attic, and I barely escaped with my life. Mara was not so lucky; she was found in the charred remains, her body frozen in a scream.

I moved away, but the nightmares persist. Every night, I feel the weight at the foot of my bed, and the fingers walk up to my ear, and a faint voice whispers, ‘You have to stop her.’ But Mara is dead, and the house is gone. Yet I know the spirit of Elspeth is still trapped, and the other thing, the one that possessed Mara, it lives on, searching for a new host. Sometimes, in the mirror, I see a shadow behind me, and I wonder if it is only a trick of the light. But the weight on my bed tells me otherwise.