The Key in the Coal Bin

Marla was sixteen the summer she took the job watching the Pettigrew twins, a pair of seven-year-old terrors named Owen and Lily. Their house sat at the end of a gravel lane in the high desert, a sprawling adobe with a sagging porch and a windmill that creaked even when the air was still. Marla liked the money, and the kids were predictable: dinner at six, bath at seven, stories at eight, lights out by nine. She had done it a dozen times before without a hitch.

On this particular Saturday, Mr. and Mrs. Pettigrew were attending a wedding in the next county, leaving Marla in charge from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. The twins were wound up from a birthday party they had attended, and by seven they were running laps around the living room in their pajamas, hollering like banshees. Marla corralled them into the bathroom, scrubbed the cake off their faces, and read them ‘The Little Mouse and the Red Wall’ twice before they finally settled under their covers.

At a quarter to nine, Owen sat up in bed. ‘Marla, will you stay in here till we fall asleep?’ He clutched a stuffed armadillo to his chest. ‘Mom stays till we’re out.’ Lily nodded, her eyes wide. Marla sighed, but she smiled. ‘Sure, I’ll stay. Just close your eyes.’

She pulled the wooden rocking chair from the corner and settled in, the springs groaning under her weight. She began to invent a story about a girl who could talk to the prickly pears in the garden. She was halfway through describing how the cacti sang at midnight when she heard it: footsteps in the hallway outside the twins’ bedroom.

The floorboards in that old house were notorious for their creaks, but these were deliberate, heavy. Marla stopped mid-sentence. Owen’s eyes flew open. ‘What was that?’ He whispered. Lily pulled the blanket over her head. Marla held up a finger for silence, then called out, ‘Mrs. Pettigrew? Is that you?’ The footsteps paused. Then they started again, slower, moving past the door and down the hall toward the kitchen.

Marla’s heart hammered. She knew the Pettigrews wouldn’t be back until after eleven; Mrs. Pettigrew had texted her a photo of the wedding cake at six. She forced herself to stand. ‘Stay in bed,’ she said to the twins. ‘I’m just checking.’ She cracked the door open and peered into the dim hallway. The nightlight at the far end cast a weak amber pool near the bathroom, but the hallway was empty. She stepped out, her bare feet cold on the tile.

She checked the kitchen first. The back door was locked. The windows were shut. In the living room, the TV was still on, showing a commercial for lawn furniture. A floorboard near the fireplace creaked under her weight, but no one was there. She walked the perimeter of the house, then returned to the hallway. At the end, near the linen closet, she noticed the door to the basement was ajar. It had been closed when she put the kids to bed; she would have remembered, because the brass knob always stuck.

Marla pulled the door open and flicked the switch. A bare bulb illuminated a concrete staircase descending into a musty dark. The Pettigrews never used the basement, and they had told her it was just for storage. But at the bottom, she saw a faint green glow. She descended, the steps cold against her soles, and found her phone’s flashlight reflecting off a row of mason jars on a shelf. They were filled with a murky liquid, something floating in each one. She didn’t look too close.

A sound from above made her snap her head up. The basement door slammed shut. She heard the click of the lock. Marla ran up the stairs and pushed on the door, but it wouldn’t budge. She pounded on it. ‘Hey! Who’s there?’ A muffled voice, high-pitched like a child’s, answered: ‘Mommy says stay down there until Sunday.’ It was Owen’s voice. Or Lily’s. Marla couldn’t tell.

She backed away, trembling. The jars on the shelf seemed to hum. She noticed a small key hanging from a nail next to a coal bin—an old rusty key with a paper tag that read ‘GATE’. She grabbed it, her hand shaking, and fitted it into the lock. It turned. The door swung open.

The hallway was dark. The twins’ bedroom door was open. She walked in, but the beds were empty. On Owen’s pillow lay a note written in crayon: ‘We are in the cellar. Come find us.’ Marla ran to the basement, but when she reached the bottom, she found no jars, no shelves. The room was bare, except for a single wooden chair and a small pile of rocks.

She climbed back up, her mind reeling. In the living room, the TV had switched to static. The clock on the wall said 10:59. At eleven exactly, the front door opened. Mrs. Pettigrew stepped in, her dress splattered with red punch. ‘Why are you standing in the dark?’ she asked. Marla tried to speak, but Mrs. Pettigrew’s eyes flicked to the hallway where the twins now stood, arm in arm, smiling. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ Mrs. Pettigrew asked, with the same high-pitched tone Marla had heard from the basement.

Marla looked at the twins. ‘They were in the basement,’ she said. ‘Came through that keyed door.’ Mrs. Pettigrew tilted her head. ‘There is no basement key, dear. That door’s been locked for years. We lost the key long ago.’ She smiled, and for a moment, her teeth looked like river stones.

Marla never returned to that house. She told her mother she lost the twenty dollars Mrs. Pettigrew paid her. But in her dreams, she sometimes sees the key, still hanging on that nail, and hears the twins whispering, ‘Mommy says stay down there until Sunday.’ She knows now that the Pettigrews didn’t come home that night. They never came home. The real ones, anyway.