The Brass Key of Ashworth House

In the sultry summer of 1979, I landed a job as a junior docent at the Ashworth House Museum, a sprawling Victorian relic perched on a hill overlooking the fading mill town of Mercer Falls. The house had been built in 1874 by Silas Ashworth, a railroad magnate whose fortune had evaporated in the Panic of 1893, leaving the family to dwindle into obscurity. Locals whispered that the house was cursed—that Silas had made a pact with something in the woods to ensure his success, and that the price was paid in blood. As a seventeen-year-old hungry for anything but another summer of factory work, I dismissed the rumors as the kind of folklore that every old house collects.

My first week was uneventful. I memorized the script: the walnut-paneled library, the conservatory with its overgrown ferns, the dining room where Mrs. Ashworth had once hosted a dinner for the governor. But it was the second floor that drew me—a narrow corridor lined with portraits of the Ashworth children, all frozen in sepia, their eyes oddly hollow. At the end of the hall, a locked door with a tarnished brass keyhole and no key in sight. My supervisor, a gaunt woman named Mrs. Harker, warned me never to touch it. ‘That room has been sealed since 1901,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘The last person to open it was the groundskeeper, and he was found the next day in the ravine, his face frozen in a scream.’ I laughed nervously, but she did not smile.

It was on a scorching Thursday afternoon, when the heat made the old house groan, that I found the key. It was wedged between the floorboards of the attic, hidden beneath a loose plank, and it glinted as if polished. My curiosity was a live thing, coiling in my chest. The museum was nearly empty; the only visitor was a pale man in a linen suit who had been staring at the same portrait of Silas for an hour. I slipped the key into my pocket and climbed the stairs to the second floor. My heart hammered as I fit it into the lock. The mechanism turned with a click that seemed too loud in the silence, and the door swung inward.

The room was not a bedroom as I had imagined, but a nursery, frozen in time. A cradle, a child’s rocking horse, faded wallpaper with dancing rabbits. The air was thick with dust and something else—a sweetness like rotting flowers. On the windowsill, a porcelain doll with cracked, painted-on eyes stared at the glass. But what struck me most was the writing on the wall, scrawled in a child’s hand, in what appeared to be dried brown ink: ‘HE MADE THEM GO AWAY.’ I stepped closer, my breath fogging the air. The writing was repeated, over and over, rising to the ceiling, until the script became frantic, and then it stopped abruptly, as if the hand had been taken.

I heard a creak behind me. The pale man in the linen suit stood in the doorway, his face impassive. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. His voice was soft, almost kind. ‘That room is not for the living.’ I stammered an apology, but he simply tilted his head, and I saw that his eyes were not pale blue as I had thought, but a shade of milky white, like cataracts. ‘The Ashworth children were five,’ he continued, stepping closer. ‘Silas buried them in the garden, one by one, when they became inconvenient. But the last one, little Violet, she knew. She wrote it all down before he cut out her tongue.’ He smiled, and his teeth were too white. ‘I am her ghost, you see. I have been waiting for someone to unlock the door.’

I tried to move, but my legs were rooted. The room grew colder, and the doll on the windowsill began to rock, though there was no breeze. The pale man—Violet’s ghost—began to transform. His skin flaked away like dead bark, revealing a child’s face beneath, but stretched and wrong. ‘You will join them, in the garden,’ she said, her voice now high and piping. ‘But first, you will tell the story. All the story.’

I slammed the door shut, but the lock clicked from the inside. The handle turned, and I heard the sound of tiny footsteps—bare, padding on the wood. I ran, down the stairs, through the parlor, past the startled visitors, and out into the blazing sun. I did not stop until I reached the road. My hands were shaking, and I was crying, but I swore I would never return.

The next day, the museum called to say they had found the door ajar, and that the groundskeeper had quit. They asked if I had lost anything. I said no, but I lied. I lost my sanity, or a part of it. Sometimes, at night, I still hear the footsteps in my apartment, the padding of a child who wants to play. And I see the brass key lying on my nightstand, though I threw it into the lake. It always comes back. And so does she.

My therapist says it’s stress. But last week, I saw a child’s handprint on the bathroom mirror, and it was not mine. The house is still there, on the hill, and I hear it calls to me. ‘Come back, dear,’ it whispers in Violet’s voice. ‘The garden is lovely this time of year.’ I am writing this down, so that someone knows the truth. If you ever visit Mercer Falls, do not take the key. Do not open the door. And if you hear a child humming a lullaby from the attic, run. Run as fast as you can, and pray she does not follow.