The Yellow Palm

It was a Tuesday night, and the rain drummed a monotonous rhythm against the tin roof of the old farmhouse. My phone was the only source of light in the dusty living room, and I was scrolling through the app store out of sheer boredom. I’d done everything else: cleaned the kitchen, reorganized the bookshelf, even cataloged my collection of pressed fern leaves. So when I saw an app called ‘Spirit Companion’ with a ghost emoji, I shrugged and tapped download. It was something to do, and I never believed in ghosts anyway.

Setting: the farmhouse had been in my family for generations, but my sister Carrie and I had only moved in a month ago after our grandmother passed away. The place was full of her things—cane-backed chairs, lace doilies, and a locked closet in the hallway that we’d never opened. The realtor said it was just storage, but something about that door made my skin crawl. Every time I passed it, I felt a chill, like a cold breath on the back of my neck.

The app opened with a grainy interface. It claimed to detect supernatural presences and translate their communications. I laughed, half expecting a parody. But the screen flickered, and a map of the house appeared, with a red dot pulsating in the upper west corner—the hallway, right where the closet stood. I swallowed, my thumb hovering. ‘Just a glitch,’ I told myself. ‘The GPS is off.’

Then words began to scroll at the bottom: ‘ontogeny,’ ‘hart’s tongue,’ ‘cottonwood,’ ‘suppress.’ I frowned. Those were specific words, not random nonsense. ‘Ontogeny’—that was from my biology textbook. ‘Hart’s tongue’—a type of fern, like the ones I had pressed. ‘Cottonwood’—the tree outside the kitchen window. ‘Suppress’—why that word? I felt a prickle on my arms. I screenshot the screen, then quickly closed the app, tossing my phone onto the armchair.

‘Hey, you coming to bed?’ Carrie called from the hallway. She was already in her pajamas, yawning. I nodded and flicked off the lights, plunging the house into darkness. The rain continued its steady drum. I climbed into the creaky bed in my room, the one facing the hallway door. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, trying to convince myself that the app was bogus.

I rolled onto my left side to get more comfortable, my eyes adjusting to the dim. That’s when I saw it, just inside the bedroom door, a shape half-emerged from the floor—like a hand, but not a hand. It was a long, tapering limb, the color of old yellowed paper, with overly long fingers that ended in sharp, dirty nails. It was reaching out, the palm facing up, as if beckoning me. My breath caught. I couldn’t move. The thing was motionless, but I felt its gaze even though it had no eyes.

I tried to scream, but only a whimper escaped. Carrie snored softly in the next room. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened again—it was still there, a little closer. The skin looked waxy, like a mannequin’s, but with a sickly yellow tint. I remembered the words from the app: ‘suppress.’ Was that a warning? Suppress your fear? Or suppress something else?

I don’t know how long I lay there, frozen. The rain stopped. The thing’s fingers twitched, and it started to drag itself toward me across the wooden floor, leaving no marks, just a faint, greasy residue that gleamed in the dark. I wanted to get up, to run, but my legs were like stone. The only motion was the thing’s slow crawl.

‘Carrie!’ I finally managed a strangled shout. The hand paused, as if listening. Then it lashed out, impossibly fast, and grabbed my ankle. Its grip was cold, like wet clay. I screamed, a raw, tearing sound. Carrie burst in, flicking on the light. The hand recoiled, slithering back into the floorboards like it was dissolving. My ankle ached where it had touched—the skin was yellowed, like a bruise.

Carrie helped me up, asking what was wrong. I told her everything, showing her the screenshot. She paled. ‘That’s from Grandma’s diary,’ she whispered. ‘Those words are coordinates or something. I found it in the closet—wait, the closet is open?’

We turned to the hallway. The closet door, which had been locked, was ajar, a sliver of darkness inside. And from within, we heard a dry, rustling sound, like dead leaves scraping together. A voice, thin and ancient, whispered: ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’

We ran. We grabbed my phone, the car keys, and drove to town, never looking back. But as we sped down the muddy road, the phone screen lit up with the app again. The red dot was now on the map, moving behind our car. And the words read: ‘You cannot suppress the fern that grows in the dark.’ I looked in the rearview mirror. In the back seat, a yellowed hand was resting on the headrest, its palm open, almost friendly.

We never stopped driving. We left the farmhouse behind, but we never shook off the feeling that wherever we went, the closet’s occupant was just one turn away—waiting for us to open the wrong door, to step into the wrong shadow, to finally hear what it had been trying to say all along.