The Amber Key

I never believed in ghosts. Not until the summer of 2008, when my family fell out of the world into a creaking, salt-worn house on the Oregon coast. Our old life had crumbled with the economy, and my parents, desperate, had taken a deal on a place called the Whitmore House, a Victorian relic that perched on a cliff like a tooth about to be pulled.

My sister, Clara, was just a toddler then, with a mop of black curls and a habit of talking to things I couldn’t see. Our mother, Ellen, would find her in the corner of the parlor, having long, animated conversations with the dust motes. She dismissed it as imaginary play, until the day Clara appeared with a small, polished stone in her palm, the color of a stormy sea.

‘Where did you get that?’ Mom asked, kneeling down.

Clara looked past her, to the staircase landing, and said, ‘The Lady in Yellow gave it to me.’

Mom’s blood went cold. She would later say that the name just felt wrong, like a promise of something terrible. The stone was warm, and it had a tiny, intricate key painted on it in faded gold. We had no idea what it opened.

We were new to the house, but the house seemed old to us. It had been vacant for years, and the previous owners had left behind oddments: a grandfather clock that stopped at 3:33, a rocking chair that swayed on its own, and a portrait of a stern-faced woman in a yellow dress that hung at the top of the main staircase. My father, David, swore the eyes followed him.

Nights were the worst. The house would settle with groans and sighs that sounded like slow footsteps. My cat, a fat gray tabby named Carver, who had never been shy, refused to go upstairs. He would sit at the foot of the steps and hiss, his tail puffed, until one of us carried him down. He would only tolerate being in the kitchen or the living room, and even then, he’d watch a particular corner of the ceiling with unblinking intensity.

One night, not long after we’d moved in, I woke to a crash and the sound of shattering glass. It came from downstairs, from the direction of the French doors that led out to the veranda. My heart hammered. I heard my parents’ bedroom door slam open, and their feet thudding down the stairs. I followed, my legs like jelly.

They were standing in the parlor, my father holding a fireplace poker, my mother clutching a flashlight. The French doors were wide open, the wind whipping the sheer curtains like ghostly fingers. But the glass was intact. Not a single pane was broken. The floor was clear of debris. And yet, we had all heard it. The crash, the tinkling fall of glass.

Dad stepped outside, shining the flashlight into the fog. Nothing. Just the white noise of the ocean against the rocks. When he came back in, he closed the doors slowly, his face pale. ‘Must have been a raccoon,’ he said, but his voice was hollow.

The strange occurrences multiplied. I began to feel a presence, a pressure in the air on the second-floor landing. It was as if the house was holding its breath. Clara started calling the Lady in Yellow ‘Mama Yellow’, and would wake up crying, saying that Mama Yellow wanted to take her for a walk. Mom started locking Clara’s bedroom door at night, a rule that infuriated Clara, who would sob and press her face against the window, saying, ‘She’s there, she’s there, in the garden.’

I did my own investigating. I found a locked door in the attic that none of the keys our landlord gave us fit. I had the absurd thought that maybe the key on Clara’s stone was for that door. Desperate for answers, I stole the stone from where mom kept it in her jewelry box.

The attic door was in a low-ceilinged corridor that slanted under the eaves. The wood was warped, the lock tarnished. With trembling fingers, I inserted the key. It turned with a click that echoed like a gunshot. The door swung inward, releasing a gust of cold, musty air that smelled of camphor and something else, something foul.

Inside was a small room, almost completely bare, save for a single object: a round mirror, tall as a man, stood against the far wall. Its silvering was blotchy, but my reflection was sharp, sharper than it should have been. As I stared, my own image seemed to ripen and age, the skin loosening, the hair thinning, until I was looking at a withered, desiccated version of myself. Then the old woman in yellow stepped out from behind me in the mirror, her face a mask of sorrow.

I stumbled back, tripping over a loose floorboard. The plank came up, revealing a hollow space. In it were other things: a braided lock of black hair, a child’s shoe, and a yellowed photograph. In the photograph, a young woman in a yellow dress held a tiny baby, and on the back, in faded ink, were the words: ‘My Eleanor, forever lost. May the sea take me.’

I ran downstairs, clutching the photograph, my mind reeling. I found my parents in the kitchen, drinking coffee in the gray dawn light. I told them everything. Mom’s face went white; she grabbed Clara and held her close. It was Dad who did the research. He found a newspaper article from 1919, about a wealthy widow named Margaret Whitmore who had lost her infant daughter to a fever. Consumed by grief, she had thrown herself from the cliffs below the house. The article mentioned her habit of dressing in yellow, as she believed it kept death away. She was known in town as ‘the Lady in Yellow’.

The stone key. The attic mirror. The lady wanted her child back. But we weren’t going to give her Clara. That night, we decided to leave. We packed our bags in frenzied haste, piling into the car as the wind howled. As we drove away, I looked back. In the window of Clara’s old room, I saw a figure in yellow, watching us. And in Clara’s car seat, she was holding the stone again, turning it over and over, a small smile on her face. She whispered, ‘Mama Yellow says hello.’

We never spoke of it again. But to this day, when I look in a mirror, I sometimes see a shadow of yellow behind me, and I know that the Amber Key belongs to a door that should never have been opened.