The Turn of the Key

“Huh,” Jack said. He tossed the keys on the bed, looking thoughtful. “Well, that’s weird.”

“Weird? You mean, why lock up a perfectly usable closet?”

“Well, I suppose so, but what I really meant is, the draught.”

“The draught?” I echoed stupidly, and he nodded.

“Look at the floor.”

I looked where he pointed. Across the floorboards were streaks, where a breeze had plainly forced dust through the narrow gaps, and looking more closely at the stained and dusty plasterboard I could see the same thing. When I put my hand to the gap, there was a faint cool breeze, and the same dank smell that I had noticed coming from the keyhole last night when I had peered through, into the darkness.

“You mean . . .”

“There is something back there. But someone boarded it up.”

He moved past me, and began rummaging in his tool kit, and suddenly, I was not at all sure that I wanted to do this.

“Jack, I don’t think— I mean, Sandra might—”

“Ah, she won’t mind. I’ll board it back up more neatly if it comes to it, and she’ll have a working closet instead of a locked door.”

He took out a small crowbar. I opened my mouth to say something else—something about it being my bedroom, about the mess, about—

But it was too late. There was a crunching noise, and a slab of plasterboard toppled forward into the room so that Jack only just got out of the way. He picked it up, carefully avoiding the rusty nails that were sticking out of the edges, and propped it against the side of the closet, and I heard his voice, echoing now, as he let out a long, satisfied “Ah . . .”

“Ah, what?” I said anxiously, trying to peer past him, but his big frame filled the doorway, and all I could see was darkness.

“Have a look,” he said, stepping back. “See for yourself. You were right.”

And there it was. Just as I had imagined. The wooden treads. The swags of cobwebs. The staircase winding up into darkness.

I found my mouth was dry, and my throat clicked as I swallowed.

“Do you have a torch?” Jack asked, and I shook my head, feeling suddenly unable to speak. He shrugged.

“Nor me, we’ll have to make do with phones. Mind your feet on those nails.” And he stepped forward into the blackness.

For a moment I was completely frozen, watching him disappear up the narrow stairs, the beam of his phone a thin glimmer in the black, his footsteps echoing . . . creak . . . creak . . .

The sound was so close to the noise of last night, and yet, there was something different about it too. It was more . . . solid. More real, faster, and mixed with the crunch of plasterboard.

“Holy shit,” I heard from above, and then, “Rowan, get up here, you’ve got to see this.”

There was a lump in my throat as if I was about to cry, though I knew that I wasn’t; it was pure fear that had lodged there, silencing me, making me unable to ask Jack what was up there, what he had found, what he needed me to see so urgently.

Instead, I switched on my phone torch with fingers that shook, and followed him into the darkness.



Jack was standing in the middle of the attic, staring openmouthed at his surroundings. He had switched off his phone, and there was light coming from somewhere, a thin, gray light that I couldn’t immediately locate. There must be a window somewhere, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. What I was looking at were the walls, the furniture, the feathers.

They were everywhere.

Strewn across the broken rocking chair in the corner, in the dusty, cobwebbed crib, over the rickety doll’s house and the dusty chalkboard, across the pile of smashed china dolls piled up against the wall. Feathers, feathers, and not down from a burst pillow either. These were thick and black—flight feathers from a crow, or a raven I thought. And there was a stench of death too.

But that wasn’t all of it. It wasn’t even the worst of it.

The strangest thing was the walls—or rather, what was written on them.

Scribbled on all of them, in childish crayon letters, some small, some huge and scrawled, were words. It took me a minute or two to make them out, for the letters were misshapen and the words badly spelled. But the one right in front of me, the one staring me in the face over the small fireplace in the center of the room, was unmistakable. WE HATE YOU.

It was exactly the same as the phrase Maddie had spelled out in her Alphabetti Spaghetti, and seeing it here, in a locked, boarded-up room she could not possibly have entered, gave me a jolt to the stomach as if I had been punched. It was with a kind of sick dread that I held up my phone torch to some of the other phrases.

The goasts donet like you.

They hate yu.

We want you too go awa.

The gosts are angrie.

They haite you.

Get out.

There angry

Wee hate you.

We hite u.

GO AWAY.

We hate you.

Again and again, small and large, from tiny letters etched with concentrated hate in a corner by the door, to the giant sprawling scrawl above the fireplace that I had seen when I first entered.

We hate you. The words had been bad enough, sliding in slimy orange juice across a plate. But here, scrawled in a demented hand across every inch of plaster, they were nothing short of malevolent. And in my head I heard Maddie’s little sobbing voice again, as though she had gasped the words in my ear—the ghosts wouldn’t like it.