The Click of the Cedar Chest

I was fourteen when my mother got a job in Argentina, and I was sent to live with my aunt in her drafty Victorian house at the edge of the pine barrens. My room was a converted pantry off the kitchen, barely big enough for a narrow bed, a hulking old cedar chest that smelled of mothballs, and a metal shelving unit cluttered with canning jars and forgotten linens. The window looked out onto a gravel driveway, and beyond that, a wall of dark pines that seemed to swallow the light from the single sodium lamp on the corner, which flickered and buzzed like a dying insect.

On my third night, I woke to a sound that had no business being in that room. It was a dry, rhythmic clicking, like a rat’s claws on linoleum, but heavier—more deliberate. It came from the direction of the cedar chest, which stood three feet from my bed, its lid sealed with a metal latch that I’d never bothered to close properly. The room was pitch black; the streetlight had gone out, and the moon was hidden behind clouds, so I couldn’t see a thing. My heart hammered as I fumbled for the flashlight I kept under my pillow.

I clicked it on, and the beam cut through the dark, illuminating the chest. The lid was open about an inch. I hadn’t opened it since I arrived, and I was sure I’d closed it firmly. The clicking stopped the moment the light hit it. I lay there, sweating, trying to convince myself it was just the wood settling—old houses groaned, after all. But the sound was too precise, like a fingernail tapping, and it had a rhythm: three slow clicks, a pause, then two rapid ones.

I switched off the flashlight, and the darkness rushed back in. The clicking resumed, but now it was faster, more insistent, and it was moving—shifting along the side of the chest, toward the foot of the bed. I threw the covers over my head, but the sound seemed to come from inside my skull. I whispered a prayer I barely remembered, and after an eternity, the clicking stopped.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. In the gray dawn, I got up and examined the chest. The latch was closed, and a thin layer of dust covered the top—undisturbed. I tried to open it, but it was locked. I didn’t have a key, and my aunt, when I asked her, just gave me a strange look and said, ‘There’s no key to that chest. It hasn’t been opened since your grandfather died.’ She paused, then added, ‘He used to keep his woodworking tools in there. He was a cabinetmaker, you know. Loved his cedar.’

That night, I wedged a chair under the chest’s lid, but it did no good. I woke to the clicking again, and this time, it wasn’t coming from the chest. It was coming from the metal shelving unit across the room. I saw a shadow shift in the dark, and the clicking grew louder, more desperate. I flicked on my flashlight, and there, perched on the top shelf like a grotesque bird, was a creature—a thing of shadows and dry skin, with long, bony fingers that ended in chitinous claws. It had no face, just a hollow where a face should be, and it was tapping its claws together in that exact rhythm: three slow, two rapid.

I screamed, and it vanished. The sheriff found nothing, but my aunt’s face went pale when I described it. She told me to pack my things; I was to leave the next morning. But I never got the chance. That night, the clicking came from inside the walls, from under the floorboards, from the very air. And when I turned on the light, the room was filled with them—hundreds of the creatures, all tapping, all moving toward me.

I don’t remember how I got out. I only remember the sound. It followed me to the bus station, and even now, years later, in my city apartment with all the lights blazing, I hear it sometimes—three slow clicks, two rapid—coming from inside my closet. And I know, with a certainty that rots me from the inside, that one night, I’ll open that chest, and I’ll see what’s been waiting for me all along.