by Juan Bosco T.
The hallway light had a habit of turning itself on after everyone was asleep.
Maya noticed it during her first week in the house. She would wake in the middle of the night and find pale yellow light stretched across her bedroom floor, thin and quiet beneath the crack of her door.
At first, she blamed the house.
Old wiring. Faulty switches. The kind of explanation people choose because it lets them sleep afterward.
But there was something strange about the way it happened. The light never flickered. It switched on cleanly, deliberately, as though someone had reached for it in the dark.
Her mother refused to talk about it.
“Just keep your door closed,” she would say too quickly.
So Maya started leaving it open.
She told herself it was curiosity, though deep down it felt more like waiting.
Some nights, nothing happened. Other nights, she would wake to that same strip of yellow light spilling into her room, followed by a silence so complete it almost sounded intentional.
And always, the hallway felt colder afterward.
One evening, unable to sleep, Maya sat awake beneath her blankets listening to the house settle around her. Pipes creaked softly. Wind pressed against the windows. Somewhere downstairs, wood shifted with a low sigh.
Then the hallway light clicked on.
Maya looked toward the doorway.
The corridor stood empty.
Still, something felt wrong. Not dangerous exactly. Worse. Familiar.
Her eyes drifted toward the far end of the hallway where the light switch sat against the wall.
Slowly, almost lazily, it moved downward.
As if invisible fingers had just slipped away from it.
The cold came instantly after that.
Maya’s chest tightened. She could hear it now: the faint sound of footsteps against the floorboards. Slow. Uneven. Damp somehow.
They stopped just outside her room.
She stared at the doorway, unable to move. Nothing appeared. But after a long moment, a voice spoke softly from the darkness beyond the hall.
“You still leave it open.”
Art by Gertrud Goldschmidt, “Untitled“
About the Author
Juan creates subtle, eerie stories that linger between memory and imagination.