A Skull in Reverse

Continuing our tradition of spooky December stories, Stephanie Feldman brings us a dark road on the path of loss and yearning.

~ Julian and Fran, December 14, 2025

For December, the Sunday Morning Transport brings you new stories and, as is our annual tradition, a Storyflod of favorites from throughout the year at the end of the month. We began with last week’s tale from Juan Martinez (whose spectacular “Lesser Demons of the North Shore” appeared in April 2024), and this week’s spooky story from Stephanie Feldman (also a fantastic SMT alum with “The Sorcerer’s Test,” in September 2022). As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

We are grateful to our paying subscribers, who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up or giving a gift subscription.

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A Skull in Reverse

by Stephanie Feldman

A month after Kim moved into her forever home, the attacks began.

It was December, midnight. Kim slept on the couch—downstairs was warmer in the tiny ranch, the worst house in the best neighborhood she could afford. A bright touch roused her, like snowflakes on her eyelids. She blinked awake to two white lights dilating in the window, setting the cheap drapes aglow, then ablaze. Kim instinctively lifted her hand, as if to repel the glare, and the room plunged back into darkness. For an instant, she felt flush with power.

Then she realized a car had rolled up her driveway, nearly to the living room window, and cut its headlights.

Car door slam, footsteps, knock-knock-knock, and Kim jumped, as if the shuddering door were another slat in her rib cage.

The knocking continued—frantic, aggressive—and Kim’s heart beat a fearful response. She had been a single woman, resourceful, frugal, and patient enough to save a down payment by her fortieth birthday; now she was a single woman, alone, unarmed, and scared to open the door.

But she did—she had to. She did—just three inches, all the brassy chain lock allowed.

The young man rambled while Kim measured his wool cuffs’ dirt and his left eye’s twitch, the needle in her mind skittering from dangerous to needy to dangerous again.

“. . . stranded on Barren Hill Road, the top of the hill, where the road banks hard. She said her car was broken down, but was there a car? I don’t know. I offered her a ride—just wanted to help, I swear, she was shivering, it’s freezing. But when we pulled in”—he gestured to his car, parked two feet from Kim’s living room window—“she’s gone!”

“Who?” Kim asked.

“Your daughter.”

Kim didn’t have a daughter. Kim slammed the door, turned the bolt. The driver paced outside, and she paced inside. Just as she resolved to dial the police, her window blazed again, light shrinking to two small white eyes as he backed out of the driveway.

Kim streamed a tutorial, bought a used drill, and installed a second chain lock.

A week later, midnight, another bewildered man knocked on the door. He was older and better dressed, and it was an SUV in the driveway, two tires on the sod she’d planted months before, but his story was the same: Barren Hill Road, the elbow above the slope, Kim’s address offered in a trembling whisper, and then, in her driveway, the empty back seat. The rescued hitchhiker, the sweet, scared girl, gone.

“I don’t have a—” Kim started.

Then she saw a blurry white face hovering behind the car window. It glowed through the window until it was a luminous skull, hovering five feet—teenage daughter height—above the frosted asphalt. Its misty aura unwound into long, tangled hair. The man, staring at Kim, didn’t sense it. Kim lifted a shaking hand to point, and the ghost rushed at her, its boneless body streaming like a comet tail.

Kim slammed the door, and one of the three kitschy crosses nailed above—Kim had been too busy to remove them—fell.

“Mrs. Moore, please!” the driver shouted.

Not Kim’s name, but the name of the previous owner.

The old woman’s executor said Aunt Joan would have been pleased Kim wasn’t going to knock down the house and replace it with a lot-width pillared monstrosity, like the new builds across the street. Kim ached for those houses, eternally beyond her budget.

On the back of the cross, in black marker: Darling, go into the light.

The man knocked, paced, brooded in the driver’s seat, eventually drove off—while Kim conducted, and completed, her internet investigation: December, thirty years ago, Victoria Moore, age seventeen, drove her car off the peak of Barren Hill Road.

Two nights later a third man knocked—why was it always men?

“Barren Hill Road . . . right where it swerves . . . standing there, in a party dress, though it’s cold, so cold . . .”

Again, the skull—Victoria’s skull—flickered in the car window, flashed above the path, surged toward Kim.