The Cedar Run Wardrobe

It happened during the autumn of my twelfth year, when we lived in a converted farmhouse that smelled of old apples and dust. My bedroom was at the end of the upstairs hall, a narrow room with sloped ceilings and a single window that overlooked the apple orchard. The previous owners had left a massive wardrobe in the corner, its dark wood carved with twisting vines and berries that looked almost too real. My mother had tried to cover its cracked mirror with a linen cloth, but I’d always found the wardrobe fascinating, peeking inside at the empty shelves and the faint scent of cedar and mothballs.

That particular evening, I had been reading by the weak light of a bedside lamp, the house creaking as it settled. I had placed my copy of ‘Favorite Tales of the Road’ on the nightstand and turned off the lamp, but as I lay in the darkness, I couldn’t shake a feeling of wrongness. The usual rhythm of the house—the groan of the stairs, the hum of the refrigerator—seemed to pause, as if the house itself were holding its breath. Then I heard it: a scraping sound from the wardrobe, like a heavy door being pushed against the floor. My heart lurched, and I froze, my eyes fixed on the dark shape of the wardrobe against the far wall. I knew I had left both doors shut, but I hadn’t locked them; they had a tendency to swing open if the floor tilted. Yet the windows were sealed, and there was no draft.

The scraping came again, louder this time, and the left door swung open with a bang, hitting the wall. I sat bolt upright, my skin prickling. Then, after a pause that stretched like a cold thread, the right door swung open too, slower, as if a heavy hand had pushed it. The interior was a black void, bottomless, and from it came a whisper that wasn’t a whisper—it was a rustle, like dry leaves skittering across a floor, followed by the faint, hollow ticking of a clock. My breath caught. I fumbled for the lamp switch, my fingers clumsy, and when the light blazed on, the wardrobe doors stood wide open, and the mirror reflected my own pale, terrified face. But behind my reflection, in the shadow of the wardrobe, there was a shape—tall, thin, with branches of fingers reaching out. The doors slammed shut with a force that rattled the walls, and then silence.

I didn’t sleep that night. I kept the lamp on, and the wardrobe remained shut, but I could feel something watching from inside the wood. In the morning, I told my mother that I had seen a spider, and she brushed it off, but she noticed my eyes lingering on the wardrobe. That evening, when I came home from school, the wardrobe had been moved to the attic. My mother had hired two men to haul it up the narrow stairs, and she said, ‘The old wood was warping, it wasn’t safe for you to keep it in your room.’ I never heard it again, but sometimes, when I walk past the attic door on the second floor, I hear a soft, rhythmic ticking from within. And on windy nights, when the orchard rattles its branches against the house, I think I hear the faint scrape of a door being opened—left, then right—and I know that the wardrobe has not forgotten me. It is waiting, patient as a root, for the day I come back to that old farmhouse and once again turn off the lamp in the dark.