The Greenglass Wardrobe

My mother and I were sorting through old photographs last Tuesday, the kind of afternoon that smells of dust and tea. She paused at a picture of me at three, grinning in front of a mossy stone cottage, and said, ‘That house… the wardrobe in your room. I never told you the whole truth about it.’ I’ve always been the one in the family who feels things others don’t—cold spots, the weight of unseen eyes—so I leaned in.

We moved to that cottage when I was an infant, a crooked little place in the Welsh borders, surrounded by thick yew hedges that seemed to swallow sound. The previous owner, a retired botanist named Mr. Pemberton, had sold it at a loss, claiming the damp was too much for his arthritis. Mum and Dad thought him eccentric, but practical. The house was cheap, and the garden had a greenhouse full of strange, glassy plants that Mum loved.

My room, at the end of the upstairs hall, had a tall wardrobe built into the wall, its doors made of a dark, almost black wood with a single panel of green glass. Dad joked it looked like a confessional. The first year was quiet. I was a colicky baby, but nothing supernatural. Then, when my sister and I shared that room, things began to shift.

Dad was the first to notice. He’d come up to check on my sister’s crying, only to find the wardrobe doors slightly ajar, the green glass fogged as if breathed upon. He’d close them, and within minutes, they’d be open again. He thought it was a draft, but I remember, at four, pressing my palm against that glass. It was cold, and I swear I saw a hand—smaller than mine—pressing back from the other side.

Mum told me the story of the night my sister wouldn’t stop screaming. Dad went up, but the bedroom door was stuck fast, as if braced from within. He threw his shoulder against it, and when it finally gave, the wardrobe doors were wide open, and my sister was sitting up in her cot, pointing at the glass, babbling something that sounded like ‘green, green.’ The wardrobe was empty, but there was a smell—like rotting leaves and wet soil.

We moved out a month later. Dad never admitted it, but he hired a priest to bless the house. But what Mum told me last week was the part she’d kept hidden: the night we left, she’d gone back alone to pack the last boxes. She found a small green glass jar in the wardrobe, sealed with wax. Inside was a single withered flower and a scrap of paper with a name—’Elara’—and a date from 1912. She put the jar in her coat pocket and never opened it again.

That jar is now in my bedroom, on my desk. I found it in her attic while she was talking. I don’t know why I took it, but I felt it calling. I opened it, and the flower crumbled to dust, releasing a faint perfume like damp earth. Since then, I’ve seen a girl standing in my mirror, reflected only in the glass, wearing a white dress. She mouths words I can’t hear, but I read her lips: ‘Let me in.’

And last night, I found a green scratch on my arm, shaped like a leaf. The wardrobe in my current room has a mirror, and sometimes, when I pass it, the glass ripples. I know now that the house we left wasn’t the point. The wardrobe was a door, and the jar was a key. I just don’t know who—or what—I’ve unlocked.