Elton had never been afraid of the dark, though some might argue he had reason to be.
Even as a child, he had always found a strange comfort in the long winter nights, in damp and foggy mornings, and overcast days when the clouds hung like rumpled grey curtains in the sky. There was a solace in the gloom, perhaps because it felt familiar; his mind was its own clouded, dark thing, muddled with dismal thoughts and feelings that he often had difficulty discerning.
“The countryside will be good for you,” Colin had said, a week ago as they had sat together in their favorite corner of the pub, “you have to get away from things sometimes. Away from all this noise, you know. You can think out there, where it’s quiet.”
And it was quiet here in this small seaside town. The cobblestone streets were empty this morning as he made his way back to the inn, the only sound the cries of seagulls muffled by the thick fog that had come rolling in from the sea.
Each morning, he took a walk. He found it helped to clear his head, to shake out some of the jumbled thoughts that clung inside his mind like spider’s webs. The deadline from his publisher was swiftly approaching, and while he would have liked to have blamed the stress and bustle of city life for his lack of productivity, he knew the problem lay with him.
He stepped into the inn, and took off his coat. He hadn’t wanted to tell Colin – it was Colin, after all, who knew the keeper of the inn and had booked the stay here for him – but as soon as Elton stepped inside the door, a sense of unease came over him that was nearly unbearable. It draped itself over him like another heavy coat, curling around his feet like the cold fog outside its doors.
“Yes, the town’s lovely. Quiet, like you said,” he had told his friend, as they spoke on the phone on his second night, “though there’s something odd about the inn.”
“Odd?” Colin had asked, “What do you mean?”
“Just…you know. Those little premonitions I get.”
Colin laughed. He knew. Elton had seen ghosts before. It wasn’t a fact he shared with many aside from his closest friend, but Elton was one of those who, for whatever reason, had been born more sensitive to those unseen things of the world. Although it was sometimes hard to distinguish what was a premonition of the supernatural from a creation of his own anxiety-addled brain.
“It slipped my mind, you know,” Colin said, “that it’s right next to that graveyard. Have you seen it?”
Elton had. It was right outside his window.
“I’d understand if you’d rather not stay,” Colin continued, more serious now.
“No, it’s all right,” Elton assured him, “it’s nothing more than I’m used to. Though the handprints are something new.”
“Handprints?”
He had found them that morning, pressed into the condensation on the other side of the glass. Child-sized handprints all up and down his window. The sight had filled him with more dread than he was used to feeling with these sorts of things.
“Maybe some kids playing a prank,” Colin suggested. Though Colin wouldn’t say that he doubted his friend’s strange sixth sense, he always seemed to have an alternate – and rational – explanation for these sorts of things.
“It’s not always ghosts,” he said, “sometimes it’s just the weather being strange, or kids who are up to no good.”
“Maybe.” Elton agreed, though he knew that was not the case.
The innkeeper hadn’t skipped a beat when Elton brought the subject up to her. How he sometimes heard footsteps padding down the hall when no one was there, or how one night as he sat working at his typewriter, he could have sworn he felt someone standing beside him and heard whispered laughter in his ear.
“Aye, there’s something here,” she had affirmed, folding her gnarled hands on the countertop, “the lost children, I believe it is.”
“The lost children?”
The innkeeper had nodded, tilting her head in the direction of the graveyard.
“Used to be an orphanage there, right behind the churchyard. Burned down nearly fifty years ago. Not even half of the children made it out alive.”
And then she had crossed herself and offered him tea.
After that, Elton couldn’t get the thought of the lost children out of his mind. And each night, he heard those strange whispers in the darkness (it was the wind through keyholes, Colin would say) or the tapping on his window (just a bird, an acorn falling from a tree, perhaps). And maybe he would have believed those explanations, but he knew some things couldn’t be explained away, some things like -
“Those handprints were there on my window again,” Elton told his friend later that week. Each morning that chill white fog rolled in from the sea, and each morning those tiny handprints were pressed so neatly against the panes, condensation droplets dotting them like small beads of glass.
“Kids do the strangest things,” Colin had replied. And Elton had wanted to tell him then, but something had told him not to bother. Or maybe he’d just wait until he was back in town, while he and Colin sat at their favorite spot in the corner of the pub. He would like to see his face, to look for the slight narrowing of the eyes that told him whether or not his story was being believed.
And he mulled it over in his mind as he set off on his morning walk, casting a glance over his shoulder to see if the handprints were still there –
Looking up, craning his neck to see the window of his room on the third story of the inn.
