The Gilded Locket

When my aunt Rosario came to bless the nursery, she carried a small, tarnished locket that she pressed into the baby’s crib, muttering something in Spanish I didn’t catch. She left a faint smell of burnt sage and old paper. I thought nothing of it—aunt Rosario was always performing little rituals, her own brand of folk Catholicism. But weeks later, my sister Lucia returned from a late-night prayer group, her voice hoarse from chanting the rosary. She sat on the edge of her new bed, the one facing the wall where the baby crib would go, and opened the worn prayer book she’d been given. She read aloud from a page marked with a yellow ribbon, and as she intoned the words, the bed began to tremble, softly at first, then with a violent rattling that shook the headboard against the wall. She tried to stand, but her legs felt like lead. The door, which always swung freely, refused to budge. The window, a non-locking casement, was sealed as if welded shut. From the hallway, I heard her screaming for our parents, but our footsteps seemed to stretch into an eternity of slow motion. Finally, the door burst open and Lucia tumbled out, sobbing, her face pale as the moon. She said the prayer had summoned something—a pressure, a cold weight on her chest, and a whisper that sounded like her own name, but wrong. The next day, we called aunt Rosario back. She walked into the room, closed the door, and for ten minutes we heard only the rustle of fabric and faint clicking, like a locket opening and closing. When she came out, she wore the same smile she’d had when she blessed the crib. ‘No está aquí,’ she said calmly, patting my mother’s arm. She never explained, and Lucia refused to sleep in that room again. We found the locket later that night, lying in the crib, its clasp broken, a dark smudge on the velvet interior. Lucia swore that from then on, she would hear the locket’s gentle tick-tick-tick from the nursery, even when it was in a drawer across the house. And sometimes, at 3:33 AM, the exact time she read that prayer, the locket would open on its own, revealing a tiny, mirrored surface that reflected not the ceiling, but a face—decades older, her own, staring back with hollow eyes. The room was eventually converted into a storage closet, but we left the locket there, buried under a pile of forgotten linens, because every time we tried to throw it away, it found its way back. And now, as I walk past that door, I hear the ticking, and I wonder if aunt Rosario knew exactly what she was sealing inside—or if she merely let it in.