Pick a Word, Paint a Story #24

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Footsteps in the Corridor

It was close to night when I first heard them.

Footsteps.
gentle, thoughtful, but unmistakably real. They reverberated through the old rustic corridor outside my bedroom like a tale from the history.

I firmed in my bed, my eyes blinking into the blackness. The house, erected decades ago by my forefather, had always carried stories — tales of horselaugh, loss, and occasionally, silence. Tonight, silence had turned into commodity differently.

I lived alone now. The rest of the family had moved abroad, and I had stubbornly chosen to stay — incompletely to guard the ancestral house, incompletely because it felt like home. But at that moment, indeed the familiar felt strange.

The footsteps stopped.

For a alternate, I wondered if I had imagined them. perhaps it was just the wind against the creaky walls, or a branch brushing the window. But also I heard it again.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Getting near.

I mobilized the courage to set up and hand over for the flashlight on my nightstand. It flitted as I revolved it on, emanating a pale unheroic ray across the place. My heart barged. I walked out into the corridor.

The house subsisted girthed in muteness, except for the discontinuous moan of wood under era and time. I footed towards the origin the long concourse that conducted to the reverie .

And there they were.

Footprints.

knockout but wet — as if someone had walked in with sticky shoes. The impresses led straight to the study door, which stood narrowly ajar. I possessed n’t unclosed it since closing week.

Pushing the door open sluggishly, I set up the room devoid — at least, visibly. The window was wide open, and the curtain flopped like a tocsin in the night wind.

On the office lay a snap. I had n’t seen it in times. It was of my grandmother and me held on my fifth birthday. I picked it up sluggishly, stupefied. A note fluttered to the ground from behind the frame.

“ Some anamneses walk with us ever — suchlike footsteps echoing through the soul. ”

A bite ran down my chine. Not fear. commodity differently. Grief. craving. maybe indeed peace.

I do n’t know if the footsteps that night were from this humanity or beyond. But I do know this they did n’t come to scarify me. They approached to remind me. Of love that noway leaves. Of lives that still loiter in the walls we call home.

Since that night, I hear those footsteps now and also. I no longer sweat them.
I hear. And I flash back .

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10 beneficiary set to @hindwhale

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Regards,
@taaher1