When She Walks, Her Nails Drag on the Floor

The shirt on her back was ripped down to leave only a couple inches at her waist keeping it on her skeletal frame. Each vertebrae was defined as her grey skin stretched over her hunched back, no muscle or fat to blur the shapes.

It was three AM. It was always three AM when I heard her coming down the hall. From which room, I never knew. The rest of my family's bedrooms were in that direction, with mine being the first in the hallway and closest to the foyer.

If anybody else saw her, they never mentioned it. Breakfast came each morning without a murmur of strange happenings in the night. The scraping sound of the knife spreading jam on toast cooked a touch too dark brought back memories of her footsteps, though her bared feet and the carpeted hallway could not produce such a sound in combination.

I grabbed my backpack and my parents sent me off to school with thin smiles on their faces and dark circles under their eyes, but my nightly trespasser had a way of making me wonder if I was projecting how I felt onto my parents. A month of waking up in the middle of the night, every night, had a way of distorting your waking hours.

On my way home, walking on sidewalks so familiar that I no longer thought about my path, I stopped in a convenience store and grabbed the first canned coffee drink that I came across. It was how I got through the school day and the assigned homework. Caffeine.

Closing the glass door to the refrigerated storage, I saw her. Just a glimpse and only for a moment before she was gone again. But I would never mistake that posture. That limp dark hair, unkempt, that fell to her waist and shrouded her face. The tattered clothes that hung off her form. Those long, long arms that left her fingers touching the ground. Her nails, unkempt, trailed behind her along the ground like the train of a bridal gown. They clacked together with the slightest motion of her fingers, and I heard the sound from within the glass.

I pulled my hand away from the handle as though it'd burned me. And perhaps, on a psychic level, it did.

I told myself that it was a trick of my tired mind, and nothing more, before I continued my walk home with quickened steps.

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Night came, as it always did, with a measure of fear rooted deep in my heart. It wrapped out and around my lungs so that my breaths were short and labored.

There were nights, when that woman's walk through the hallway was a new occurrence, that I slept with the lights on. It hardly helped. Rather, it made the woman's features more identifiable, and I decided that I preferred the sight of a silhouette.

I kept my door open a little less than halfway. I learned within the first week that she would open closed doors and take the time to peer in on the room's occupant. Her empty, dark eye sockets set on the bed with me in it, too afraid to even pull the blankets over my head in a childlike display of defense.

Maybe it was just me. Since nobody in my family talked about her, I didn't know if they would open their own doors after everybody retired for the night. It would have been more comforting that way, to know that I wasn't singled out by this woman.

Not that I was ever lucky enough for that.

I could only find true rest after the sun rose.

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Moving into my dorm room for college brought with it the hope that I would be free of this woman's oppressive presence in my life. For the first time in longer than I cared to remember, I felt at ease settling down for the night. I was able to close my door and lock it.

Still, there was a touch of hesitance. The lingering effect of habits so deeply set, but I did my best to brush them off. Finally free, I reminded myself.

Finally free.

Then, I was awake and my clock read three AM. Outside in the hall with its tiled floor, I heard the clacking of her long nails with each step she took. My door, closed and locked, opened. Slowly, in the dim light of the hall, she came into view as the door revealed her.

The veil of limp hair over her face couldn't hide those empty sockets directed right at me.