The Whispering Frame (part 3)

Two weeks passed after Margaret’s ghost faded from the sewing room. The house—once thick with silence—felt different. Not quite peaceful, but less burdened, as if it had released a breath held for nearly a century.

I stayed longer than intended. The more I cleaned, the more I felt compelled to stay. Something about the old house begged to be understood, not just fixed. It was never just Margaret haunting the place—it was the weight of stories buried beneath wallpaper, behind floorboards, in rooms no one dared enter.

I decided to restore the sewing room. Not to erase the past, but to acknowledge it. I began with the vanity.

The cracked mirror had always been the centerpiece of the haunting. The place where Margaret first appeared. Now, it just reflected a room in recovery.

I reached behind the vanity to unscrew the frame and paused.

Something was wedged in the wall cavity—thin, brittle paper inside a small wooden frame.

I pulled it free carefully. It was an old photograph, faded and slightly curled. A girl—Margaret—stood stiffly between a man and a woman. Her hair was long, her expression unreadable. The woman beside her, presumably her mother, wore a tight-lipped frown. The man’s face was turned slightly, but even through the fog of time, he looked... wary.

On the back of the photo, in faint pencil, were the words:

“For Henry. Remember me when the stars fall.”

Henry? Not her father, surely. And why such an ominous message?

That night, I placed the photograph on my desk. I meant to research it later. But around 3:00 a.m., something jolted me awake—the sharp clatter of glass on wood.

I rushed into the study. The frame had fallen from the desk. The glass had cracked diagonally, eerily similar to the mirror in the sewing room. I bent to pick it up, but froze.

Something had been traced into the dust of the desk. Four words.

“Henry knew. Ask the church.”

The next morning, I went straight to the town’s only remaining church—the one my parents occasionally attended. A young priest named Father Nolan met me at the front.

“I’m looking for records,” I told him. “From the 1920s. About someone named Henry. Possibly Henry Fielding.”

He looked surprised. “That’s going back quite a bit. But we have ledgers—baptisms, confirmations, even teacher records. Fielding… that name rings a bell.”

He led me to the archives, tucked away behind the choir loft. Dust coated everything. It felt familiar.

After an hour of flipping pages and scanning long lists of handwritten names, I found it.

Henry Fielding. Schoolmaster. Choir leader. Sunday school volunteer. Dated 1922 through mid-1923.

Then—nothing.

No transfer. No death record. Just a single note in red ink:

“Removed from records following the Wexler incident. Declined to testify. No further contact.”

I felt a chill move through my spine.

“Do you know what the Wexler incident was?” I asked Father Nolan.

He hesitated. “Not in detail. But there’s an old story among some of the older parishioners—about a girl who was said to speak to spirits. They say the teacher tried to protect her, but something... scared him off.”

He leaned in.

“They also say he kept something of hers. Something powerful. A book, maybe. A keepsake. They say he left it behind before he disappeared.”

A book.

Margaret’s diary had mentioned a book that spoke. Henry's letters had hinted he believed her.

What was in that book?

I returned to the house as the sun dipped behind the pine trees, the familiar shadow stretching through the hallway. I stood in the sewing room again. The mirror reflected only me now, and yet I felt eyes on me.

The frame still sat cracked on my desk.

Henry knew something. Margaret had left a trail.

And something told me the book wasn’t gone.

It was waiting.

Somewhere in this house.