The Turn of the Key

Then I set my hand to the door, and opened it.

*

The smell was just as I remembered from last time—dank, musty, the smell of death and abandonment.

But there was something up there, I could see that now, something casting a low white glow that illuminated the cobwebs the spiders had woven across the attic steps. Yet, no one had been up there since Jack and me, that was plain. It was not just the key in my pocket that told me that—but the thick unbroken webs across my path, painstakingly respun since my last passage. There was no way someone could have passed this way without disturbing them. As it was, I was forced to step cautiously, sweeping my hand in front of my face to try to keep the clinging strands out of my eyes and mouth.

What was the light? The moon, shining through that tiny window? Perhaps, though it was so covered with grot, I would have been surprised.

At the top of the stairs I drew a silent breath, steeling myself, and then I stepped into the attic.

I saw two things straightaway.

The first was that the attic was just as I had last seen it when I took a final glance back at the place before following Jack down the steps the day before. The only thing that was missing was the doll’s head that had rolled out from the pile to rest in the center of the room. That was gone.

The second was that the moon was shining into the attic, and surprisingly brightly, for the window—the window that Jack had shut—was open again. He had evidently not latched it properly and it had blown open in the night. Striding angrily across the creaking boards, I slammed it, harder than he had, and fumbled in the darkness for a catch. At length I found one—a long tongue drilled with holes. It was covered in thick cobwebs, and I was forced to brush them aside with my hands, feeling the crunch of long-dead prey in the webs, as I wiggled it back into place, ensuring that there was no way the window could work itself open again.

At last it was secure, and I stepped back into the room, wiping my hands. The light had dimmed instantly as I shut the window, the mildewed glass shutting out everything but a thin trickle. But as I turned back to the stairs, the thin beam from my torch illuminating a narrow path across the floor boards, I noticed something else. There was another light. A fainter, bluer one this time, and it was coming from a corner of the attic opposite the window, a corner totally in shadow, a corner where no light had a right to be.

My heart was thudding as I crossed the floor. Was it an opening to one of the rooms downstairs? Something else? Whatever the source of the light was, it was hidden behind a trunk, and I pulled it roughly aside, no longer trying to be quiet, for I no longer cared who found me up here, I had only one instinct—to find out what was really going on.

What I saw made me draw back, astonished, and kneel down in the dust to look closer.

Hidden behind the old trunk was a small pile of belongings. A book. Some chocolate bar wrappers. A bracelet. A necklace. A handful of twigs and berries, wilting, yes, but by no means desiccated.

And a mobile phone.

It was the light from the phone that I had seen from across the attic, and as I picked it up, it buzzed again, and I realized that was the source of the odd noise I had heard earlier. It had evidently updated, and was stuck in a loop of trying to turn itself back on, failing, and restarting, buzzing each time.

It was an old model, similar to one I’d had myself a few years ago, and I tried a trick that had sometimes worked when my own phone was dying, holding the volume-up and power buttons simultaneously for a long press. It hung for a moment, the screen whirling, and then went black, and I pressed restart.

But as I waited for it to reload, something caught my eye. A silvery glint, coming from the little pile of rubbish I had pushed aside to pick up the phone.

And there it was, strewn innocently across the floorboards among the rest of that pathetic pile of detritus, the light from my phone torch glinting from one of its curves.

My necklace.

My heart was beating fast in my throat as I picked it up, unable to believe it. My necklace. My necklace. What was it doing here, in the darkness?



I don’t know how long I sat in the kitchen, my fingers wrapped around a mug of tea, letting the thin links of my necklace chain trickle through my fingers, and trying to make sense of it all.

I had brought the phone down too, but without a PIN I couldn’t open it to see who it belonged to. All I could tell was that it was old, and that it appeared to be connected to the Wi-Fi but didn’t seem to have a SIM card in.

It wasn’t the phone that bothered me though. That was strange, yes, but there was something personal about finding my necklace hidden up there, amid the darkness and the rotting feathers. I should have been thinking about Rhiannon, worrying about where she was, and the argument we were bound to have when she walked through the door. I should have been thinking about Sandra, considering my options and trying to work out what to say—how to tell her the truth.

I was thinking about both things. But above and below and around those thoughts were twined like the links of my necklace, as I tried to figure out chronologies and timings and work out how my necklace could have disappeared inside a locked room, behind a door to which the only key lay in my pocket, up a corridor sealed by a hundred unbroken spiderwebs. Had it been up there before, when Jack and I first broke in? But that explained nothing. That cupboard had been boarded up for months, years. The dust traces, the thick swags of cobwebs, no one had entered via the stairs for a long, long time. And the window was barely large enough for me to get my head and shoulders through, and it looked out onto sheer slates.