“Three Shadows: A Collection of Horror Stories”

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CHAPTER ONE: The Roommate

I don’t like remembering that year. Even now, decades later, it gives me an oily, crawling feeling somewhere deep inside my chest. I was thirteen when I transferred to the boarding school — one of those cold, brick-built places that smelled like chalk, floor polish, and loneliness. They paired me with a boy named Weston. We weren’t friends, not even close. Just two kids forced to share a twelve-by-twelve room with two beds, two desks, and a narrow closet that reeked faintly of damp wool.

The strangeness began almost immediately.

One afternoon, Weston handed me a folded piece of paper — a list. No explanation, no context. Just, “Here. You’ll need this.”

Inside was a list of things I was not allowed to bring into the room. At first, I thought it was some kind of joke. “Frogs,” it said. “Feathers.” “Bones.” “Salt.”

Salt.

I remember staring at that word for a long time, waiting for him to laugh, but his face was stone still. He spoke in that quiet, deliberate voice of his. “Please,” he said. “It’s important.”

That night, I caught him whispering to himself after lights out. His voice was low, rhythmic — a whisper so faint I thought it was the wind slipping through the window frame. But then I recognized my name.

He had a notebook too. Always hidden under his mattress. I shouldn’t have looked, but curiosity is its own kind of sickness when you’re young. The book was mostly blank except for a handful of pages filled with names — students from our dorm. Half were crossed out. The rest, including my own, were not.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I imagined him at his desk, muttering my name, drawing a line through it when he was done.

For weeks I avoided him. I spent most of my time in other rooms, anywhere but ours. But fear is patient; it grows in quiet places.

Then one night, I woke to the sound of breathing that wasn’t mine.

Weston was standing over my bed.

The moonlight through the window cut across his face — his lips stretched in a smile that didn’t belong to any sane person. His hands hovered in the air as if frozen mid-motion.

I screamed. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t move. Just smiled and said, “You were talking in your sleep.”

He returned to bed as if nothing had happened. I stayed awake until dawn, trembling under my blanket.

The next morning, he acted puzzled. He didn’t remember any of it — or said he didn’t. I couldn’t tell which was worse.

Days passed. Then one evening, I came back to find a snake coiled on my bed. A real one — green, glossy, alive. Weston sat calmly at his desk, watching me shriek. He apologized, said it was a prank. When I demanded to know where it came from, he said, “What do you mean? They’re everywhere.”

He opened a jar from his desk. The snake slithered straight into it, obedient as a pet.

That was when the real nightmares began.

One night, I woke — or thought I woke — to find the air in the room trembling. Something black was swirling above my bed. It wasn’t smoke, not quite a shadow either. It pulsed, like it was breathing. From it, a shape emerged — a claw, long and crooked, scraping at the bed frame.

Then, suddenly, it recoiled — as though something unseen had burned it. The thing went berserk, darting through the room, knocking books from desks, rattling drawers, until it smashed through the window and vanished into the night.

I woke with a start — sweating, gasping — and realized the window was really shattered. Cold air poured through the jagged frame. The scratches on the bedpost were real too.

Weston was asleep. Snoring.

I shook him until my arms hurt, but he didn’t wake. I wanted him to wake up — to scream, to explain, to be guilty of something. But he slept on.

When he finally did wake, he looked genuinely confused. Then angry. He accused me of going through his things. He started hissing like an animal, then shouting words I didn’t understand — a language that felt old, vibrating in my chest more than in my ears.

The Resident Assistant came running. They pulled us apart and sent me to sleep in an empty room.

When I woke, that room’s window was open.

Weston was gone by morning. His bed stripped, his drawers empty. The administration wouldn’t tell me where he’d gone — just that he was “no longer my concern.”

The years that followed blur together in my memory. I try not to think about Weston, or the list, or that black thing in the air. But sometimes, in the dark, I remember how salt had been on the list.

And I remember that I’d eaten dinner that night — salted fries, just before bed.

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CHAPTER TWO: The Farmhouse

When I was a child, I spent two weeks every summer at my grandparents’ farm in rural Pennsylvania. Calling it a farm was generous; most of it was dense woods. The air always smelled of pine sap and something faintly sour — rot, maybe.

I slept in the attic, in what used to be my father’s boyhood room. Slanted ceiling, narrow bed, one window that looked straight into the trees.

The first summer passed quietly. But the next, strange things began to happen.

It started with footsteps on the attic stairs. Soft, hesitant, like someone walking barefoot. The doorknob turned, just slightly — six inches open — and froze there.

I turned off my flashlight, pretending to sleep. No one came in. No one left. Just silence thick enough to hear my own heartbeat.

In the morning, my grandfather said it was “the house settling” or maybe raccoons. But I knew what I’d seen: that doorknob turn.

A few nights later, I woke to find a shadow standing at the foot of my bed. It didn’t move. The bed shook — a faint vibration, like breathing. I shut my eyes and counted to one hundred. When I opened them, it was gone. The closet door stood wide open.

I told myself it was Grandma. I needed it to be her. Old people do strange things.

Every few nights, it returned — soft footsteps, the feeling of being watched. When my mother picked me up that year, I told her everything. She laughed, said Grandma couldn’t stay awake past nine, and called me imaginative.

The following summer, it started again. By then I was older, but no braver. I went to bed earlier, pulled the blanket over my head, and prayed not to hear the stairs creak.

Years passed. My grandparents died within weeks of each other while I was in college. At the funeral, I saw my cousin Francisco — he used to stay at the farm after me every year. We weren’t close, but grief has a way of making you talk to people you’d otherwise avoid.

I told him about the footsteps and the open doors — half laughing, half afraid of how childish it sounded.

He didn’t laugh. His face went blank.

“That’s nothing,” he said. “That thing used to touch me.”

He told me, in a flat, trembling voice, that the same figure would sit at the edge of his bed, making the mattress dip. Sometimes, it traced his face with rough, calloused fingers. Once, it gripped his wrist and wouldn’t let go.

He never opened his eyes. He said he knew it wasn’t Grandma — that her hands were soft, but this thing’s were coarse, cracked, like bark.

He told his mother. She didn’t believe him. She told him to stop making up stories, that he was upsetting the family. So he learned to keep still, eyes shut, until the thing left.

I didn’t say anything for a long time after that. Because if it wasn’t Grandma, then who — or what — had climbed those stairs every summer?

Sometimes I still dream of that attic room — the slanted ceiling, the single window. In those dreams, I hear the faint creak of footsteps on the stairs. Slow, careful, like something learning how to walk again.

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CHAPTER THREE: The Girl in the Window

When I was nine, my bedroom window faced the back of another townhouse — close enough that I could see straight into a window across the narrow alleyway. For years, that window was empty.

Then, one afternoon, a girl appeared.

She looked about my age. Dark hair in a ponytail. Yellow sweater. She smiled and waved, and I waved back. From then on, she was always there when I got home from school, waiting at her window.

We couldn’t talk, but we invented games. She held up drawings, and I guessed what they were. She’d give me a thumbs up or down at my homework. Sometimes I tried opening my window to talk, but she’d point to her ear, mouthing, “Can’t hear.”

My mom said the house belonged to the Murphys — an older couple, no kids. Maybe a granddaughter visiting, she suggested. That seemed right.

Then one night, I woke to tapping.

She was there, at her window, face pale in the moonlight. She pointed downward, hands clasped like she was begging. I didn’t understand. It frightened me — her expression, the urgency in her movements. I crawled back into bed, pretending not to see.

The tapping continued, then stopped.

She didn’t appear again for three days. I thought I’d made her angry. But on the fourth night, she came back. Her palms pressed against the glass, breath fogging it up. She mouthed words I couldn’t hear — over and over. It looked like Help me.

There was a dark stain across her yellow sweater, like spilled ink.

I ran to my parents’ room, sobbing. My dad rushed to look, but when he turned on the light, her window was empty.

The next day, I saw Mrs. Murphy in her garden. I waved. She smiled — until I mentioned the girl in the upstairs window. Then her face changed. She set down her watering can and came closer.

“How long,” she asked, “have you been seeing her?”

I told her a few weeks.

She asked what the girl looked like. I described the yellow sweater.

She told me to go back inside.

That evening, my parents moved my bed to the other wall. Heavy curtains went up over my window. When I asked why, they said it would “help me sleep.” My mother told me not to play my window games anymore — that I was too old for “imaginary friends.”

But she wasn’t imaginary. I’d seen her. Every day.

We moved a year later. I thought about the girl sometimes, wondered what I’d done wrong.

It wasn’t until high school that my mother told me the truth — or part of it.

The Murphys had bought their house from a family whose daughter, Jenna, had been struck and killed by a car in front of that building. She’d been wearing a yellow sweater. Eleven years old. The family moved out soon after.

The Murphys tried to use that upstairs room, but after a while, they sealed it off completely.

My mother didn’t tell me why. I don’t think she knew.

I’m thirty-four now. My house has no windows facing other homes. That’s deliberate. I don’t like reflections either. Sometimes, in dreams, I still see her — the girl in the yellow sweater — standing behind the glass. She never waves now. She only looks at me, eyes sad and searching, as if she’s still waiting for me to understand what she wanted to say that night.

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