The Yellow Ledger

I was in my final semester at the University of Oaxaca, buried in a mountain of dusty tomes and half-finished theses. My shared apartment near the Santo Domingo church was a cramped affair, but it had one saving grace: a battered wooden desk by the window overlooking the bustling Plaza de la Danza. That night, the air was thick with the smell of roasting corn and the distant strumming of a mariachi band, but I couldn’t enjoy it. A bone-deep fatigue had settled into my limbs, making each page of my thesis feel like a stone I had to lift. Around midnight, I gave up, snapped the ledger shut, and collapsed onto my cot.

But sleep refused to come. Instead, a strange dizziness swept over me, and my stomach churned like the Pacific on a stormy day. I lay in the dark, my heart racing for no reason I could name. The faint glow of the streetlamps painted long shadows on the ceiling, and I found myself staring at a crack in the plaster that looked like a torn smile. A chill crept down my spine, and I felt an overwhelming urge to leave—but where could I go at that hour? I pulled the thin blanket up to my chin, listening to the muffled sounds of the city fading into an unnatural silence. Then, I heard it: a soft, rhythmic scraping against the window, like fingernails dragging across glass. I froze, my breath caught in my throat.

I told myself it was a branch, but the tree outside was a stubby guayaba with no low branches. The scraping grew louder, more insistent, and then I saw her. A figure pressed against the window from outside—a woman in a flowing white dress, her hair a tangled black curtain that hid her face. The glass fogged where her breath met it, and I could hear a faint whispering, a voice that seemed to come from inside my own skull: ‘Let me in.’ I squeezed my eyes shut, counting to ten, and when I opened them, she was gone. I laughed nervously, blaming my exhaustion, and turned on the lamp. The light revealed something sickening: on the window pane, written in what looked like candle soot, were the words ‘I’m already in.’

Terror gripped me, but I forced myself to look around the room. The ledger on my desk was open to a page I hadn’t reached yet, and there, in the margins, were strange symbols—curling, insectoid marks that seemed to writhe under the lamplight. I slammed the book shut, my hands shaking. That’s when I noticed the temperature had dropped, and the air smelled of wet earth and rotting flowers. A low sound, like a sob, echoed from the corner near my wardrobe. I turned slowly, expecting the worst, but saw only my reflection in the mirror. Except the reflection wasn’t me. It stood still, eyes wide and black as coal, and it smiled with too many teeth. I stumbled backward, knocking over the lamp, plunging the room into darkness.

In the pitch black, I heard footsteps—soft, shuffling, approaching. I scrambled toward the door, my fingers fumbling for the lock, but the knob was cold, unnaturally cold, as if it had been dipped in ice. A whisper brushed past my ear: ‘You opened the ledger, señorita. Now you must write the ending.’ I fled into the hallway, racing down the stairs, not stopping until I burst onto the cobbled street, gasping for air. The city was asleep, the plaza empty, and a thin fog clung to the ground. I looked up at my window, and there she was—the woman in white—staring down at me, while in her hand she held my yellow ledger, its pages fluttering as if caught in a wind that wasn’t there.

I never returned to that apartment. I left Oaxaca the next morning, claiming a family emergency. But the ledger followed me. It appeared on my desk in Mexico City, in my suitcase in Guadalajara, and finally here, in this small room in Austin, where I write this. Each time, it has one more page filled with symbols, and each night, I hear that scraping at my window. She wants me to finish the story, but I know what the ending is. It’s the one where I join her. So I’m writing this final entry, and when I’m done, I’ll burn the ledger. I don’t know if it will stop her, but it’s the only thing I can think of. If you find this, don’t read it. Don’t write in it. And whatever you do, don’t answer the window when it scrapes at night.