The Brass Locket

It had been three years since the accident, but the ache never truly faded. My wife Lena and I had moved to the outskirts of a bustling port town, hoping the change of scenery might dilute the memory of our little girl’s silent birth. We found a ramshackle house with a sagging porch and a yard that curled into the marsh, and we filled it with the loud, clumsy love of our dog, a monstrous German Shepherd-Rottweiler mix we called Biscuit for his honey-colored coat. My son Theo, now nine, had started to laugh again, and Lena had resumed her quiet pagan rituals—candles, herbs, the soft hum of old prayers. I, on the other hand, had traded my faith for skepticism, burying it somewhere in the mud under the new floorboards.

It was a simmering Sunday when my grandmother, Agnes, called. She was visiting a cousin in the next county and had stumbled upon a flea market ‘that reeked of opportunism.’ She said it fondly, as if she could sniff out a bargain. But there was a tremor in her voice that I chose to ignore. Lena suggested I drive up to see her, give her some company, and maybe help her haul home a new hutch. I agreed, though the thought of the two-hour drive through the salt-swept coastal roads made my shoulders tight.

At the flea market, the sun bleached the field a dull white. Stalls sagged under chipped china and rusted tools. Agnes, a sparrow of a woman with keen Milner eyes, was bent over a table of old jewelry. She held up a small brass locket, tarnished and unassuming. It opened to reveal a faded tintype of a young woman with a severe bun and hollow eyes. The stall keeper, a leathery man with a lazy eye, said it was from an old estate sale, and he didn’t know the story. Agnes bought it for three dollars, and she wore it immediately, the chain too thin for the weight.

That night, back at home, Agnes stayed in the spare room. The first oddity was the dog. Biscuit refused to enter the room. He would stand at the threshold, hair raised along his spine, a low growl rumbling in his chest, and then slink away with his tail tucked. Lena laughed it off, said Biscuit was just wary of new smells. But I saw the way Agnes touched the locket, how her fingers lingered.

The second night, I heard footsteps in the hall—soft, dragging, as if someone were wearing down-at-heel shoes. I crept out, but the hall was empty, lit only by the moon through the window. Biscuit was at the far end, frozen, staring at Agnes’s door. I dismissed it as old-house groans. But the next morning, Agnes was pale, and there were scratches on her forearms, thin and precise, as if from a tiny hand.

‘It’s the girl in the locket,’ she said over coffee. ‘Her name is Mary. She drowned in the marsh behind her house, but she didn’t stay there. She followed me home.’ My skepticism hardened. I told her it was just stress, that she was projecting. Lena shot me a warning glance, but Agnes merely smiled, a thin, brittle thing. ‘She wants to meet Theo,’ she said, and my blood turned to ice.

That evening, Theo was playing in the backyard, throwing a stick for Biscuit, when I saw him go still. He was staring at the edge of the marsh, where the cattails grew thick. Biscuit was barking, frantic, but Theo didn’t move. I ran out, and when I reached him, he pointed to a spot in the reeds. ‘There was a girl there,’ he said, ‘in a wet dress. She said she wanted to be my friend.’ My heart hammered. I pulled him inside, locked the door, and searched the yard, but found nothing. Biscuit wouldn’t stop growling at the back window all night.

Agnes took a turn for the worse. She began muttering in a dialect we didn’t recognize, her eyes darting. She told me that Mary was angry—angry that we had taken the locket, angry that she had been forgotten. ‘She’s attached to the brass, to the place it came from,’ Agnes rasped. ‘She wants me to take her back, but she’s not letting go.’ That night, I found Agnes in the bathroom, her hair wild, holding a pair of scissors. She was trying to cut the locket off, but the clasp was corroded shut. The scratches on her arms had deepened, and they were arranged in patterns—almost like lettering, but not quite.

I realized the locket was the anchor. I decided to destroy it. I took it from Agnes’s neck while she slept, using bolt cutters to snap the chain. As soon as the metal broke, the temperature in the room plummeted. The lights flickered. From the direction of Theo’s room, I heard a child’s laugh—but it was too low, too wet, like bubbles rising from deep water. I ran to Theo, who was sitting up in bed, wide awake. ‘The wet girl is under my bed,’ he said calmly. ‘She says you can’t get rid of her because you took her home.’

I grabbed Theo, and we fled to the living room. Lena was there, already calling her pagan patron, her voice steady but her hands shaking. Biscuit was whining at the hallway, hackles up. The hallway dark, and from the end, I saw a small shape creep out—a girl in a sodden dress, her hair plastered to her skull, her skin pale and wrinkled. She turned her face to me, and her eyes were the color of stagnant water. She said, softly, ‘You have something of mine. Return me to the marsh, or I will take him down with me.’

We drove through the night to the marsh behind the estate where the locket came from. The rain started as we reached the edge, a cold drizzle. The girl’s image flickered in the rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat between Theo and Agnes, who was laughing, a sound that wasn’t hers. I grabbed the locket, now just a broken piece of brass, and hurled it into the black water. For a moment, nothing. Then the marsh sighed, a great exhalation, and the water rippled outward. In the back seat, the girl smiled, then dissolved like mist. Agnes slumped over, unconscious.

We took Agnes to a hospital, where she stayed for two days. She had no memory of the last week. The scratches faded, but her forearms bore faint, white lines, like the impression of a net. The locket was gone, presumably resting in the muck. But when we returned home, Theo was quiet. He wouldn’t sleep alone. And Biscuit would sometimes sit at the edge of the yard, staring at the marsh, his tail thumping slowly, as if greeting an old friend. Now, months later, I don’t talk about faith. But I have started leaving a small bowl of milk on the back porch at night, just in case. Some things, I’ve learned, don’t let go of what they latch onto. And some doors are better left unopened.