The Locked Door

“Alright, that’s the tour of the house,” The lady with the glasses tells me. She says her name is Mrs. Ayla. “Is there anything else you want to know about the house?” She asks and I nod.

“Can we go back to the library on the first floor, please?” I ask her.

“Okay, sure!” She holds her clipboard in one hand and her pen in the other as she leads me to the library. The house is nearly 300 years old, but I think it will be perfect for my family. There are lots of floors and would be perfect for my kids to play hide and seek. Mrs. Ayla suddenly stops and swings a door open. “Here it is!” She exclaims. I look around, pretending that I actually live here. I sit at the desk and fill out my imaginary paper work. Mrs. Ayla laughs. I didn’t really want to see the library again. I wanted to see what was in the locked room across from the library. Mrs. Ayla didn’t let me see inside the first time around, so I doubt she’ll open it for me now. But it’s worth a try.

My eyes find their way to the lock on the door. I look over at Mrs. Ayla and she glances nervously at what I’m looking at.

“Please,” I whisper. “If you want anyone to buy this house than you need to show people what’s in that room. I am so close to buying this home. If you show me that there is nothing dangerous in that room that could hurt my kids and me, than I’ll buy it.” Mrs. Ayla looks at her clipboard and glances at the locked room again. She lifts her glass up on her head and wipes her eyes.

“I can’t! I’m sorry but I can’t! It’s been locked for hundreds of years and I was told not to open it for anybody. Actually, you can’t open it yourself. The key was lost and nobody ever found it.”

“Do you even know what’s in there?” I ask her. She shakes her head.

 “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.” She says. I don’t really have a choice anyway, me and my family need a house. This house is the only one for sale in the area I need to go to for work. So, I sigh and buy the house.

My two kids, Alissa and Kayden, run wild in the house when we move in. They are 7 year old twins and are always hyper. They have only ever lived in a small apartment and love the open space. I sit in the library trying to finish all of the paper work I have, but one of them always runs in and says, “Did you know there are six bedrooms?!” I laugh and get back to work.

One night when we are eating dinner, the lights shut off. There weren’t any lights 300 years ago, but these were recently added. They aren’t that old. Alissa screams and I lean over to cover her mouth. Someone turned these lights off, I knew it. I light some candles and set them on the huge dining room table. Darkness surrounds us and I get the creepiest feeling that someone is watching me. I shiver and feel too sick to eat.

The kids didn’t want to go to sleep the first night. they want me to stay with them and read them a story. Or at least sit with them for a while. I tell the twins I have important work to get done. They whine for a while and I finally just leave them to fall asleep on their own. I get lost while trying to find my own room. I jump when I hear doors slamming on the floor above me.

“Alissa and Kayden! You guys better be in bed,” I call up the stairs. I start climbing them when I remember that the twins room was on the second floor, not the third. I freeze and then quickly turn around and run back to their room. Their sleeping soundly but I see a few of their toys hovering above them. A dark shadow moves across the room and then disappears. I scream and smack the toys to the ground. The kids wake up crying and it’s impossible to get them to sleep again.

In the morning, we are all exhausted. The kids are grumpy and I’m sick of doing paperwork. I sit at my desk in the library, filling out forms and signing a whole bunch of papers. Alissa comes running in with shocking news.

“Mom! Mom! You know the lock on the door? It’s gone now!” She exclaims. I jump off my chair and rush to the door. Sure enough, the lock is gone. Alissa smiles at me and tells me to open it.

“Kayden! The house’s huge mystery will be solved in like, five seconds! Get down here!” Alissa yells. Kayden rushes down to see what’s behind the door. It’s been a while since we moved in and I actually sort of forgot about the locked door. I feel nervous and my heart races as I swing the door open. Alissa screams and covers her eyes.

“Alissa you don’t even know what’s down there yet,” Kayden says. She laughs and peeks through her fingers. Only darkness is behind the door. I squint to see better but it’s still too dark. Alissa has always been the bravest one out of all of us and she grabs a flashlight and walks into the room. When she shines the flashlight I see that it’s not a room, but that there are stairs. Stairs going down…

“It’s a basement,” Alissa guesses.

“More like a cellar,” I tell her. We walk down the stairs which twists in circles. When we make it down we gasp. It looks like it used to be a tiny operating room. There are lots of deadly tools laying on a metal side table that I never even knew existed. A metal chair sits in the middle of the room with blood splattered all around it and on it. Alissa screams and Kayden passes out. I cover Alissa’s eyes and carry them both back upstairs. Soon it gets dark and this time I sit in their room with them until they go to sleep.

When they fall asleep, I slowly make my way back to the cellar with a candle in my hand since the lights still don’t work. There was something off about it. When I get down there, I notice what it is almost right away. I swipe my finger on the floor. The blood surrounding the chair and on the tools is still wet. I freeze and feel my heart stop. The cellar is eerily quiet, so when I hear a whisper and feel a breeze like something passed me, I almost scream. I slowly turn my head to see a dark shadow quickly moving across the room. It stops at a few boxes and then vanishes. My head screams, “RUN, RUN, RUN!” But my curiosity tells me to see what’s behind the stack of boxes. I slowly walk over, checking over my shoulder to make sure nobody is running at me with one of those deadly looking tools.

Something smells really bad, but I can’t tell what it is. I peak behind the stack of boxes and cover my mouth so I don’t scream. It’s Mrs. Ayla lying there, and she’s cut open. I think back to the time Mrs. Ayla was showing me this house. She looked very nervous when I mentioned the locked door. She must’ve knew what was behind it and was terrified. But how would she have gotten down here? I look around for some clue for how Mrs. Ayla would have gotten in the cellar. It’s a small room that’s deep in the ground. My hand brushes the dirt walls and I feel something cold and hard. My heart skips a beat when I brush some dirt off and see a big metal door. I turn the handle and the door creaks open. Without thinking, I step into the dark hallway with my candle. The door shuts loudly behind me and I jump. What did I just do?! The kids are going to be terrified in the dark! I shake the thought from my head. This hallway has to lead somewhere, and hopefully it leads to an exit.

Multiple spiderwebs stick to my face as I walk through the dusty hallway. The floor is wooden and the walls are dirt. With every step, the floor creaks and cracks. The hallway seemed to never end. Suddenly I come to a dead end. I could either go right or left. I couldn’t see where each hallway ended and had no clue where to go. The dark shadow that showed me Mrs. Ayla came up behind me and quickly turned left. At least, I think it turned left. Every part of me told me not to follow it, but curiosity won again. I ran after the shadow hoping it knew the way. It disappeared when I came to a ladder. I climb it and poke my head out of the small opening. I am in the middle of a forest. The moon gives enough light for me to see, so I blew out my candle and left it at the ladder. So whoever killed Mrs. Ayla escaped through here. The shadow seemed to know the way. Odd, I thought.

The woods didn’t look familiar to me. I start to find the way back to my house when I see smoke rising above the trees. I follow it and it leads me to a fire that was set. There is a small tent next to the fire. Nobody is near me, so I crawl in the tent and look around. My eyes get bigger and bigger when I look at what is in here.

There are the same deadly tools from the cellar. And they’re covered in fresh blood. I hear breathing behind me and stay perfectly still. Then I grab one of the tools and swing around. I slice the empty air in front of me. A dark shadow comes into view and I let out a sigh of relief. For some reason I never got scared around it. The shadow lifted it’s arm and pointed to an old path. I knew I had to follow it even though I didn’t know where it was going to take me. As I got deeper in the woods, I heard a voice far away at the tent.

“Someone was here!” He shouted. The murderer? Was the shadow helping me…get away? It stays in my mind until I stumble out of the woods into a very familiar looking clearing. The path led to my house. I run inside and immediately check on Alissa and Kayden. They’re sound asleep. As I sit there, everything starts making sense.

The shadow I saw holding the kids toys up, it was helping them fall asleep because I wouldn’t. It showed me Mrs. Ayla’s body so that I knew there was a murderer. It showed me to go left instead of right. That led me to the woods and the tent. The shadow knew the murderer was going to be back so it showed me the way home. Was it protecting us from the murderer?

“Alright, that’s the tour of the house,” I say six weeks later to the person who’s interested in buying the house. I stand there with my clipboard and my glasses just like Mrs. Ayla did. Alissa and Kayden were too scared to stay in the house and it was time to move anyway. They ask one more time for me to show them the door that has a very big shiny lock on it. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that for you,” I tell them. They beg me to tell them what’s in the room, but I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone. They end up buying the house anyway and I stand near my car looking back one more time at the 300 year old house. Alissa and Kayden are complaining to go home but just before I get in the car, I see something. There is a shadow in one of the top windows. I may have been imagining it, but I think it waved goodbye.