The Gilded Gate

I am Clara, and in two days I will be sixteen. Most girls my age are planning parties, picking dresses, and whispering about boys. I spend my evenings tracing the faded pattern on my grandmother’s wallpaper, a pattern of roses so dark red they look like dried blood. I am counting down to something else entirely.

My story begins when I was six, in the summer my mother and I lived in that little house with the crooked fence. I remember because the heat was so thick you could taste it, like copper on your tongue. I was playing in the yard, digging for worms, when I saw them: two women standing by the fence. They wore long white dresses, the fabric so heavy it barely swayed in the breeze, and each was printed with huge, blowsy roses, like the ones that climbed the side of old Mrs. Henderson’s house. Their hats were wide and white, casting their faces in shadow, but I could see they were smiling. The taller one and the shorter one, identical in every way, like two prints from the same negative. They looked at me, and the taller one raised a hand, fingers pale as milk. Then they turned and walked down the lane, and I watched them go. They didn’t hurry, but the space between them and the world seemed to lengthen, and then, mid-step, they simply were not there. I told my mother, and she laughed, said it was a trick of the light. But I saw the way she checked the locks that night.

Two years later, I went to live with my grandparents in the city. My mother said it was for school, that the village school was too poor, too far. The truth, I think, was that she wanted to be rid of the reminder. My grandparents’ apartment was in a building that had once been grand, with a sweeping marble lobby and a gilded elevator that creaked like a tired old man. My grandmother, Elsa, was a stern woman with a back like a ruler and eyes that missed nothing. My grandfather, Tomas, was gentler, but he drifted through rooms like a ghost, always looking at photographs of people I didn’t know. They gave me a room that overlooked a narrow courtyard, where the sun only reached at noon, and the walls wept with damp. It was there, on my first night, that I saw them again.

I woke to the sound of fabric rustling, like heavy skirts moving over a wooden floor. The room was dark, but the city light leaked in through the curtains, and I saw two shapes standing at the foot of my bed. The same dresses, the same hats, the same identical faces, now older, more lined, but unmistakable. The shorter one reached out a hand, and in the gloom, her fingers were as white as bone. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came. Then they turned and walked to the wall, and passed through it, leaving only the faint smell of roses and dust.

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay rigid, staring at the wall, until the grey dawn crept in. In the morning, I asked my grandmother about the apartment’s history. She was silent for a long moment, then said, ‘This building was once a sanatorium for women of a certain disposition. They wore white dresses and wide hats to hide their shame. Two of them, sisters, were left here for years. They died in that room, the one you sleep in. The room was sealed after, but your grandfather, he insisted we use it as a guest room. He said the dead deserve company.’ She said it without emotion, as if reading from a ledger.

I couldn’t sleep there again. I begged to be moved, but my grandmother refused, said it was good to be close to the past. So I stayed, and every night, they came. They never spoke, but their silence was a language. They would stand, and stare, and then the taller one would point to the window, and I would feel a pull, a longing for something I couldn’t name. They were not malicious, I came to see. They were waiting. Waiting for me to understand something.

On my fourteenth birthday, the ritual changed. That night, they walked to the window and, for the first time, they spoke. Not to me, but to each other, in a language I didn’t recognize, but somehow felt like I should know. The shorter one turned to me and, with a voice like dry leaves, said, ‘She is ready.’ The taller one nodded, and they began to fade, but not before the shorter one pointed to the wallpaper, to the pattern of roses. I looked, and for the first time, I noticed that the roses were not random. They formed a shape, a sort of gate, with a keyhole in the center. The keyhole was small, almost invisible, but once seen, it was all I could see.

The next day, I told my grandfather. He looked at me for a long time, then showed me a dusty box in the attic. Inside was a key, brass and tarnished, with a head shaped like a rose. He said, ‘It belonged to them. The key to their room. They were not sick, you know. They were sighted. But in this city, sight is a disease. They were locked away, and they died here, but they never left. They are waiting for the one who can see, to give them the key to the other side. To the place they came from.’ He pressed the key into my hand. ‘They have chosen you.’

I have kept the key in my pocket every day since. And the women, they visit me every night, and now they don’t just point. They gesture to the rose gate on the wallpaper, and they mouth words I can almost hear. They want me to unlock it. They want to go home.

Tonight is my sixteenth birthday. I have the key in my hand. The wallpaper seems to pulse in the candlelight, and I can hear their whispers, faint but growing louder, like the rush of wings. I am afraid, but I am also curious. I have seen things others haven’t. I have felt the pull of the gate. And I think, perhaps, that I am not only unlocking their door. I am unlocking a door in myself. And on the other side, I hear a voice—my own voice—calling me home.