The Creaking Gate of San Ildefonso

The old house in San Ildefonso, a small town in the Philippines, was a sprawling, two-story affair with a rusted iron gate that groaned like a wounded animal every time it opened. We moved there when I was eleven, after my father inherited it from a distant uncle. The lot was long and narrow, with the house set far back from the road, behind a grove of acacia trees. To the left of the property, a narrow alley led to an abandoned well, half-hidden by overgrown weeds. Our nearest neighbor was an elderly woman, Aling Rosa, who claimed she never came near our house because of ‘the smell’.

Our first week was spent unpacking and exploring. My sister, Liza, and I discovered a sealed room on the second floor, its door painted over with layers of thick, black paint. The windows were boarded up from the outside, and the air around the door was perpetually cold, even in the afternoon heat. One evening, as I passed the door, I heard a faint scratching from inside, like fingernails on wood. I pressed my ear to the surface, and the scratching stopped. Then, a voice, barely a whisper, said, ‘You smell like the others.’ I ran to my parents, but they dismissed it as a rat.

As days passed, the incidents escalated. Our dog, a normally boisterous labrador, would growl and bark at the empty gate, cowering as if something were approaching. My father found his tools scattered on the floor of his workshop, arranged in a strange pattern—a circle with a crude star in the middle. We thought it was Liza playing tricks, but she denied it with terror in her eyes. One night, I woke to the sound of the gate creaking open. I looked out the window, and in the moonlight, I saw a tall, emaciated figure standing in the driveway, its head tilted at an unnatural angle, staring directly at my window. I blinked, and it was gone.

The scratching became more frequent, and the door began to bulge inward, as if something were pushing from the other side. My mother began to hear lullabies at night, sung in a language she didn’t recognize, coming from the direction of the sealed room. She started sleepwalking, often ending up in front of that door, her forehead pressed against the wood, whispering names that weren’t ours. My father, increasingly desperate, decided to break the door open. But as he swung the sledgehammer, the door seemed to exhale a gust of cold, musty air, and we all heard a deep, resonant thud from inside, as if something had fallen from a great height.

Two weeks after our arrival, we found the source of the smell. In the abandoned well, covered with decades of leaves and mud, was a child’s shoe, a small, decaying skull, and a rusted locket. The locket opened to reveal a photograph of a woman with hollow eyes, and on the back, in faded ink, was written: ‘For my unborn child, I shall find a new vessel.’ That night, I woke to find my sister, Liza, standing by the sealed door, her mouth open in a silent scream. On the surface of the door, letters were scratched deep into the wood, as if by sharp claws: ‘Let me in, or I’ll take her.’ I grabbed Liza’s hand, and she snapped out of her trance, but the scratches were real, and Liza’s right arm bore a fresh, deep cut that hadn’t been there before.

The next day, we discovered that the door had turned a shade darker, and the scratches had multiplied, forming a crude, branching pattern. My father called in a local priest, who blessed the house and sprinkled holy water on the door. The scratching stopped for a while, but that evening, we heard the gate creak open, and a heavy, dragging sound approached the house. Through the window, we saw a figure—a woman in a white, tattered dress—walking with a limp, dragging a large, black bag. She stopped at the front door, and even though the door was locked, we heard it creak open. The sound of dragging continued up the stairs, toward the sealed room. Then, a loud slam, and silence. The door to the sealed room now stood ajar.

We huddled in the car, ready to leave, but our car wouldn’t start. The engine turned over, but no ignition. The lights flickered, and we saw a face pressed against the windshield—the same woman, but her eyes were black voids, and her mouth was stretched into an impossibly wide grin. She raised a clawed hand and scratched the glass, leaving deep furrows. ‘You’re not leaving,’ she hissed. In a panic, my father threw the locket we had found at the windshield. The woman recoiled, and the engine roared to life. We sped out of that driveway, the gate creaking shut behind us, sealing the house in silence.

We never returned. But sometimes, at night, I hear that creaking gate, even though we live miles away now. And last week, my sister woke up with new scratches on her arm, in the same pattern as the ones on the door. She looks at me with fear in her eyes, and whispers, ‘She’s coming back. She wants us all.’ I haven’t told her that I saw the woman standing at the foot of my bed last night, holding the locket, which I thought we had left behind.