The Weight of the Unseen

After weeks of insomniac boredom, I found myself tracing a summoning circle onto a scrap of cardboard in the attic of our new farmhouse. The previous owner had left a stack of old newspapers, and one article described a local legend about a ‘hungry presence’ that lurked in the woods behind the property. I laughed it off, but the idea stuck. I used a wine glass and a candle to make my own planchette, and I drew the letters in permanent marker. It was a stupid, idle thing to do, and I did it alone, in the dead of night, while the wind rattled the loose shutters.

At first, nothing happened. The glass sat still on the cardboard, the candle flame steady. I whispered, ‘Is anyone here?’ and felt foolish. But then the air in the attic seemed to thicken, and the candle flickered as if someone had breathed on it. A cold draft coiled around my ankles, and I swear I heard a low, guttural hum, like a giant tuning fork buried deep in the earth. I blew out the candle and ran back to my room, my heart hammering.

The next morning, my father, who has been blind since a car accident in his youth, asked me at breakfast, ‘Did you hear that scratching on the roof last night?’ I hadn’t, but I said, ‘Maybe it was a raccoon.’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘Sounded too heavy. Like a man walking on all fours.’ I forced a laugh, but my stomach turned.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening. Around 2 AM, I heard it: a slow, deliberate thud, thud, thud, moving across the roof directly above my bedroom. Each step sounded like a cement block dropping. I trembled, too scared to move, as the sounds circled and then stopped right over my head. Then I heard a scraping, like claws trying to pry up a shingle. I screamed and scrambled downstairs.

My mother was in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea. She saw my pale face and said, ‘Someone’s on the roof, isn’t they?’ I nodded. My father had already grabbed his old hunting rifle from the closet. He went outside, and I watched from the window as he climbed the ladder to the roof, his boots unsteady on the rungs. A few minutes later, he came down, his face grim. ‘Whoever it was, they got away. Ran into the treeline.’ But then he added, oddly, ‘They didn’t make a sound. No crunching leaves. Nothing. Just disappeared onto the dark.’

That was enough to terrify me. I went back to my room and locked the door, then the window, then the closet. I grabbed the cardboard circle from the attic and folded it in half, the wine glass still inside. I placed a heavy book on top and then a paperclip as a makeshift seal. But as I sat on my bed, trying to calm down, I felt a pressure in the room, like the air itself had gained weight. The walls seemed to bend inward. And from the corner, I heard a wet, sucking sound, like something being pulled out of a drain.

Then my father’s voice, muffled, came through the wall, though he was downstairs. ‘Did you feel that?’ he called. ‘The temperature just dropped.’ I didn’t answer. I knew then that I had opened something, and that it was now inside the house, watching me. The paperclip on the folded board began to tremble, as if something was trying to push it off.