The Pale Girl

This doesn’t look like the kind of house that would be haunted. I chose it because it’s modern and bright: all clean lines and full-length windows. No gothic towers, cold stone or dark corners here. I’ve made the place quite cosy since I moved in a few months ago, but the throw rugs and potted plants can’t shake the indefinable sense of… I don’t know what. Melancholy? Restlessness? It was only a few days after I picked up the keys when I started to feel something was off. To begin with, it was nothing more than a feeling – a coldness, an uncanny sense of a presence in the building with me. Before long, I began to hear (or imagine I heard) footsteps or a chair scraping across the floor in another room. More than once, I called out but got no reply. Then I started to see things. Just out of the corner of my eye, I’d glimpse movement like curtains shifting in a draft or not so much a person as a space where a person had just been. It was nothing in itself – less than nothing – an absence of a thing. But it was enough to infuse the house with a lurking sense of unease, however bright and airy it looked.

I’d nearly convinced myself it was all in my head until I walked into the bathroom one morning and, before I got into the shower (yes, before not after), I saw a single wet footprint in the middle of the floor. My blood ran cold. A footprint. Just a footprint. But no other footprints around it and far too small to be my own. What could possibly explain it? Here was tangible evidence that I was not alone.

Finally, I saw her. I looked up from the sink where I was washing up and I saw a young girl standing in the middle of the garden, outlined by the early morning sun. I looked away, just for a moment, just for long enough to find a tea towel to dry my hands, and when I looked up again, she was gone. This set a pattern. I began to see the girl more and more often. I’d glimpse her when I walked into a room, when I turned off a lamp, when I groped my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Every time, it was the same: I’d see her with startling clarity, only for as long as I kept my eyes on her. If I looked away, turned the light back on or rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, she would be gone when I looked back.

I doubted myself, of course. I told myself that it was a trick of the light, that the girl was a fragment of a dream, that I’d been working too hard and this was all the outcome of stress. I had to be sure I could trust what my eyes were telling me. I resolved not to look away the next time the girl appeared – to satisfy myself that she was more than the product of my imagination and guilt. And there she was. It was a January morning, cold and dark, and I’d stumbled downstairs in a thick dressing gown to make coffee and find out why the heating hadn’t come on. I entered the kitchen and turned on the light and she was standing in the middle of the floor, looking straight at me. Even half-asleep, I found the presence of mind not to turn away. I looked closer. She was young – I guessed eight or nine years old – thin and dressed in only a pale pink nightdress. Her cheeks were puffy, her eyes red-rimmed and her hair and skin had a greyish, faded sheen. I felt I could almost see through her. She kept staring at me, unblinking, unsmiling. Finally, she spoke in a voice as thin as she was: ‘I’m cold.’

It was more than I could bear. I fled from the room, threw open the front door and ran out into the street. Despite the bitter winter cold, I immediately felt calmer. But if I thought seeing the girl more clearly would bring some kind of end to it all, I was sorely mistaken. This was just the beginning. From that point on, I saw her everywhere, all the time. There was no telling where or when she would appear to me. I could go for weeks without seeing her at all but, some days, I would see her several times. It made no difference where I was. I must have seen her in every room in the house and I even began to see her on the bus, in the office, in the supermarket. Every time, she looked exactly the same: thin, cold and forlorn, staring straight at me without expression.

You might wonder why I never spoke to her and asked her what she wanted, but the fact is I already knew. You see, it’s because of me that this girl has become what she is. It was March the previous year and I was giving my daughter a bath. She had just got out when my phone rang downstairs and I left her in the bathroom to go and answer it. It was an urgent call from my boss (but not important, really couldn’t have been less important) and it took longer than I expected. The boss finally rang off and I went back upstairs to eerie quiet. When I entered the bathroom, I saw her. Lucy was on her back, in the bath, eyes wide open, utterly motionless. I grabbed her and dragged her out of the bath but, however desperately I breathed into her and screamed for help, she stayed stiff, motionless and cold. So very cold. The coroner’s report noted a lump on the back of Lucy’s head and reasoned that she’d slipped, hit her head and fallen unconscious into the bath. He returned a verdict of accidental death but it was no accident. It was pure neglect. It was my fault, all my fault – I know it and so does she.

She’s here because she wants me to make amends for what I’ve done. I want it too, want it more desperately than you could imagine. But how can I make amends? I killed her. I killed her as surely as if I’d cut her throat and I must live with the ghost of my daughter and with the appalling truth of what I allowed to happen. There is nothing more awful, more terrible than to take a life. How much more so when that life is the life of a child. I left my wife and my son to live alone and protect them from what I might otherwise have done to them, but I’ll never be free of Lucy. Until I find some way to earn her forgiveness, she will be a wound that never heals. She will never leave me and never let me forget what I’ve done. She and I belong to each other until the day death takes me to her forever.