Granny

More about Granny

I must write quickly, before the lamplight gutters and the scratching begins again. For three nights now, the thing in the cottage has called itself Granny—though no living blood relative of mine could ever possess such eyes, glistening like twin moons over a drowned coast.

I arrived at the ancestral homestead in Arkham-by-the-Marsh to settle the final estate of my great-aunt Temperance, a woman whispered about by neighbors who crossed themselves even when uttering her name. The cottage sagged against the bog-wind, its timbers swollen, as if something inside breathed too deeply.

On the first night, I heard humming—an impossibly frail, wavering nursery tune, coming from beneath the warped floorboards. When I pressed my ear to the wood, the humming ceased. In its place came a voice: thin, sweet, and ancient beyond imagining.

“Come closer, child. Granny misses you.”

The second night, the trapdoor to the root cellar creaked open by itself. A figure climbed upward, joints popping like the crack of ice on a tomb. She wore a colonial bonnet of faded crimson lace, and her smile—too broad, too knowing—cut a ghastly crescent across her withered face. Her eyes bulged with such delighted hunger that I recoiled as though struck.

“Oh, you’ve grown so fine,” she whispered, fingers long as willow branches stroking the air between us. “Your grandfather promised you’d return.”

I fled to my room and barred the door, but through the night she sang to me—lullabies in no human tongue, each note curdled with cosmic dissonance. I felt my dreams sink into fathomless gulfs where titanic grandmothers with bonnets of constellations rocked the universe in cradles of bone.

Tonight, the truth revealed itself. Among Temperance’s papers I found a genealogy that had been violently crossed out. A margin note remained: “The Old Mothers are not born—they are invited.”

As the candle dwindles, I hear her nails on the wood, tracing the grain in slow, patient circles. She croons that my blood remembers her, that all descendants must eventually return to the first cradle, the first devouring womb, the timeless matriarch brooding beneath creation.

Something moves behind me. A breath creeps along my neck—warm, mildewed, and impossibly familiar.

“Come now,” Granny murmurs. “Don’t make your Granny ask twice.”

If anyone finds this record, burn the cottage. And bury the ashes deep. For if you hear humming from under the floorboards…

…do not answer it.