After my aunt's departure, my father's instruction came quietly, clear, and left no room for refusal or argument. No space for discussion. "You will be the one to stay by your grandmother’s side," he said. His words arrived not as a request, but as a verdict spoken with quiet authority. There was no path left open but obedience, wrapped in familial duty.
I had no choice. So I gathered my belongings, folded my dreams into a suitcase, and carried my studies to the threshold of a new house٫ a house that seemed to breathe with memories older than my own existence. A house that held the past, that smelled of dust and history, where dust settled not as neglect, but as memory made visible. The walls kept the scent of another era. They held photographs in oval frames٫ my father as a boy, his hair parted incorrectly, standing beside uncles whose names blurred together in my memory; a wedding that predated everything I knew, even my mother’s face. Old wood stored stories. The furniture looked as if it had been sitting in the same place for decades, as though it had remained frozen in a long-forgotten era. Years refused to move on. Everything had stayed the same for years.
The house, once filled with the echoes of many voices, now held only the two of us٫ an elderly woman whose steps had grown hesitant, and a young man still finding the shape of his own restlessness. The first nights were heavy with silence, broken only by a faint shuffle٫ a small, careful rustle, faint movements echoing through the corridors, as though they were being brushed aside by invisible sleeves. I paid it no mind. Old houses speak; their bones creak and their corridors murmur, and no one is meant to answer.
In other words, in those first nights, the silence was shattered not by a call, but by the faint, melodic strain of a music box. It was a tune I didn’t recognize, yet it felt intimately familiar, like a scent from childhood.
My grandmother was gentle and warm, but the chasm of years between us birthed a profound unease. It shortened our conversations and stretched the silence into something endless.
Her stories returned to the same familiar themes. She lived in a world governed by the slow ticking of a pendulum clock, while I was tethered to the electric pulse of the modern age.
Boredom, that patient thief, began to steal into me, slipping into my days without warning and quietly. My own mind, restless and hungry, began to graze on the bright, endless pasture of social media. I scrolled until the hours thinned, letting the world outside replace the world inside٫ until an advertisement caught my eye and stopped my thumb: a motion-sensor lamp. Sleek, modern, automatic. A modern answer to an old house’s stubborn shadows. A reviewer with four stars had written, “Perfect for elderly parents who won’t use the nightlight.” I thought it would be perfect for my grandmother, lighting her way to the bathroom.
I ordered it that same hour and paid for expedited delivery. I installed it in the hallway and felt, for the first time since arriving, that I had done something that mattered. Something in me ached to be useful and responsible.
The first night, she stirred me from the shallow edges of sleep with a whispered plea for passage to the bathroom. Her voice was soft and apologetic. I rose without hesitation, guiding her gently through the dim corridors of the house, where every shadow seemed older than memory itself, then walked her back to her room. I murmured a promise: “If you need me again, call out. I am right here.” She patted my hand, and her touch carried the softness of trust. I returned to my bed, but sleep had grown shy. I lay staring at the ceiling for a long while. My mind drifted in restless fragments, grappling with looping thoughts that refused to settle. I lay there, suspended between wakefulness and dreams. Gradually, drowsiness began to reclaim me, pulling me under like a gentle tide.
In that fragile state between consciousness and oblivion, something caught my attention: a soft, amber glow bleeding through the crack beneath the door. Once. Twice. Three times.
Half-asleep, caught between awareness and drift, I reasoned: she must have wanted to go again. I wondered why she had not summoned me. Perhaps she valued her privacy. Maybe she had pitied my exhaustion and didn’t want to disturb me a second time. Was it a tender mercy, or was she sparing me another interruption? Yet before the thought could take root, the current of exhaustion pulled me under, drowning my curiosity in the deep, silent well of sleep.
In the morning, I asked her, “Why didn’t you wake me the other times last night?” Her puzzled eyes met mine. She looked at me with the patient bewilderment of someone who has misheard a familiar language. “I only went once,” she said simply. “That was the one time I woke you.” I stood very still in the kitchen, holding her words, trying to understand. My mind replayed the night٫ the light was sliding under the door, the repeated flicker. The light had flickered three times, at least. I was certain of it. At that moment, the memory of those extra flashes returned, sharp and unexplained.
I told myself there was always a rational explanation. A mouse, I decided at last. Nothing more than a mouse.
I remembered an old trick my mother used to swear by٫ ancient and practical, as all the best tricks are. I went to the pantry, took out the flour, and laid a thin white line along the baseboards and down the length of the hallway. If something moved in the night, the flour would know. The flour would tell.
I went to bed almost amused, imagining the small creature I would outwit by morning.
The second night was louder. The light performed its theater with renewed enthusiasm, flaring and dying. The hallway pulsed in an irregular rhythm that I watched from my bed with a smile that held a warning. “I’ll get rid of you and put an end to this,” I said.
Shock broke through with the morning light.
Dawn brought something far worse than answers. The flour was as smooth and untouched as fresh snow. Not a single track. Not a smudge. Not the faintest trace of anything that had passed٫ neither a mouse nor anything else. And yet the bulb had insisted something was moving through that hallway all night long, faithfully recording the passage of something unseen. A cold realization settled in my marrow. The lamp had sensed a presence that left no mark on the physical world٫ something that left no trace. Fear tightened its grip, and curiosity wrestled with dread.
That was the moment fear began to learn my name.
… To Be Continued …
