The front gate hung crooked, as if too tired to stand upright any longer. It creaked mournfully when Daniel pushed it open, the wind catching the iron just right. He hesitated. The sky above him had turned the color of old bruises, and the trees whispered things he didn’t want to hear. Still, he stepped through.
The house loomed ahead — three stories of rotting wood, shattered windows, and ivy like veins crawling up its skin. It was the kind of place kids dared each other to touch and ran screaming from if a branch so much as snapped. But Daniel wasn’t a kid anymore. And he wasn’t here for a dare.
He was here to find what he had left behind.
The door gave way with a shove. Dust spiraled into his lungs, making him cough. The smell was sharp with age — mildew, burnt wood, something faintly sweet and rotten. Inside, the floor groaned with every step. Paint peeled like curling scrolls from the ceiling. A chandelier hung motionless, heavy with cobwebs. And all around, silence pressed like a weight.
Daniel stepped into the front parlor. The fireplace was cold, but the ashes looked oddly disturbed. He didn’t remember that. He didn’t remember the broken mirror over the mantle either, though he did remember the piano in the far corner. It sat like a sleeping beast, its keys yellowed and cracked, one leg braced with a stack of books that looked ready to collapse.
He crossed the room slowly, each footstep a prayer.
Years ago — fifteen? Twenty? — this had been his grandmother’s house. Before the fire. Before the whispers. Before the stories spread about how no one should live here anymore. She had taught him hymns on that piano. She used to sing in the mornings while baking biscuits, always humming the same lines over and over: Abide with me; fast falls the eventide…
Daniel reached out and pressed a key.
The note wavered and died like breath on a windowpane. He tried another. This one stuck. He tried a third — and this time, the chord rang clearer than it had any right to. The sound echoed around the ruined room, then faded into stillness again.
But something had changed.
The air felt thicker. More alert.
He sat down on the bench, surprised it held him. His fingers hovered over the keys. He hadn’t played in years. Not since she died. Not since the fire had chased every good thing from these walls.
But his hands moved anyway.
He played the first notes of the hymn she had loved — haltingly, then steadier, as the melody found him. And as it did, something stirred upstairs. A creak. Then another. Daniel paused, heart beating like a snare drum.
“Probably a squirrel,” he said aloud, too loudly.
But when he looked up, he saw a shadow at the top of the stairs.
A girl.
No — a woman.
Hair falling long past her shoulders, dressed in something that shimmered like memory. She was watching him, but not moving. And though her eyes were dark and her face unfamiliar, he knew. Somehow, he knew.
“Grandma?”
The word caught in his throat.
The figure didn’t speak. She only turned and began walking down the stairs, one soft step at a time, her feet not quite touching the wood. Daniel stood as she approached, but didn’t run. Couldn’t. He felt something ancient and good rising in him, like a lost psalm remembered.
She stopped a few feet from him.
And then, for a moment — a flicker — he saw her as she was: the woman who made his cocoa just right, who kissed his scraped knees, who told him Jesus sang over them when they slept. Her hands were wrinkled but warm. Her smile small, almost shy.
“You came back,” she whispered, though her mouth didn’t move.
Daniel opened his mouth, but had no words.
She glanced at the piano.
“Play.”
He did.
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide…
And as the hymn poured into the room, something shifted. The walls straightened. The rot receded. The dust lifted. The mirror healed itself in silence. Light spilled through windows that had been broken moments before. It was as though the song was stitching the house together, memory by memory, grace by grace.
The woman began to hum.
Her voice was low, rich with a kind of sorrow Daniel didn’t understand but trusted. Other voices joined in — not loudly, not from the room, but from somewhere deeper. The walls. The floorboards. The very foundation. Echoes of children’s laughter. A man’s baritone hum. A weeping alto. They weren’t ghosts. Not exactly. They were more like… remnants of praise, trapped until someone remembered to sing.
Daniel’s hands trembled as he reached the final notes. The air around him had turned golden, warm, alive.
The woman touched his cheek. Her hand felt real. Firm. She looked into his eyes one last time, and he felt that familiar peace — the one she used to speak of when he was afraid at night.
“There is no fear in love,” her voice echoed. “Perfect love casts out fear.”
And then she was gone.
No fading. No vanishing. Just… absence.
The house stood still. Clean. Whole. The piano gleamed slightly in the new light. Daniel rose, his fingers tingling, his heart aching in that beautiful, holy way it sometimes does when God moves so quietly it nearly breaks you.
He turned toward the door. As he stepped outside, the wind shifted. The trees no longer whispered dread, but something closer to praise. The sky had lightened — not clear, but hopeful.
He looked back at the house. For the first time in decades, it looked like home.
And then, from the cracked chimney above, came the sound of a single note — piano-soft, hymn-true, floating down like grace.
