The Key in the Linen Closet

The first thing that went wrong was the door. We were staying in my uncle’s old apartment in Prague, a place he’d bought decades ago and hadn’t touched since. It was a labyrinth of rooms, each one with a story, but we only used two: the bedroom and the bathroom. The rules were simple: keep the doors closed to keep the draft out, and turn off the lights to save on the electric bill, which was astronomical for such a small flat. But one evening, after a long walk through the cobbled streets, we returned to find the door to the spare bedroom—a room we never used—wide open, the light spilling into the dark hallway. My partner, Tom, shrugged it off. ‘Draft,’ he said. But I felt a cold spot as we passed, and the hair on my arms stood up.

We went to bed in the master bedroom, which had a connecting door to the spare room. I locked it out of habit. But in the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of a soft click. The lock had turned. The door was now ajar, and through the gap, I saw the outline of a figure standing in the middle of the spare room, motionless. I blinked, and it was gone. I shook Tom awake, but he grumbled and said it was a shadow from the streetlight. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night, listening for any sound, but there was only the creaking of the old building.

The next incident involved the air conditioner. It was an ancient unit, perched in the window of the master bedroom, and it had worked fine the first few days. But one night, it just wouldn’t turn on. Tom checked the batteries in the remote—they were gone. We replaced them, but the unit remained dead. He went to the fuse box, and all the breakers were intact. But then he noticed something odd: a small, brass key sitting on the floor near the unit. It wasn’t ours. We didn’t have any keys to the apartment except the front door key, which was on a hook by the entrance. This key was tarnished, with a strange symbol on the bow—a circle with a line through it. Tom pocketed it, and we forgot about it for a while.

But the air conditioner never worked again. It just sat there, humming faintly at night, as if it were breathing on its own. And then the shower gel incident. We had a bottle of cheap shower gel from the local market, and I used it in the morning. When Tom went in after me, the bottle was gone. We searched the tiny bathroom—under the sink, in the medicine cabinet, even in the toilet tank. Nothing. It was as if it had vanished into thin air. Tom was starting to get creeped out, but I insisted it was probably some trick of the old pipes, or maybe we had a mischievous neighbor with a spare key. But we had the only key, and there were no cleaners. My uncle was a recluse, and no one had been in the apartment for years.

Then the dreams started. Every night, I dreamed of a woman in a long, white dress, standing at the foot of the bed. She would point to the spare bedroom door and mouth something I couldn’t understand. I would wake up gasping, my heart pounding. Tom said I was just stressed, but one morning, he confessed he’d seen her too—or something like her—standing in the hallway. He described her as having long, dark hair and eyes that were all black. We decided to investigate the spare room together.

The spare room was filled with old furniture draped in white sheets. There was a heavy oak wardrobe against one wall, a dusty bed, and a dressing table with a tarnished mirror. The air was musty, and the light from the window cast long shadows. We searched the room for anything odd—cracks in the walls, hidden compartments—but found nothing. Except for one thing: in the bottom drawer of the dressing table, underneath a pile of yellowed newspapers, was a photograph of a woman. She was young, with dark hair and a faint smile. And in the background, I could see the same apartment, but it looked newer, cleaner. There was a man beside her, his face scratched out with a sharp object.

I felt a chill, and Tom took the photo. He turned it over. On the back, in faded ink, was written: ‘Anezka, 1967.’ And below that, a line: ‘She knows what you did.’

That night, we both heard it. A soft rustling sound from the spare room, like fabric being dragged across the floor. Then the door, which we had closed, opened slowly by itself, the light inside flickering on. We stared at each other, too scared to move. I remembered the key in Tom’s pocket, and I had an idea. ‘The key might be for that wardrobe,’ I whispered. Tom pulled it out, and we crept to the wardrobe. The key fit perfectly. He turned it, and the door swung open.

Inside, there was a small, hidden niche, and in it, a leather-bound diary. It was Anezka’s. We took it back to the master bedroom and read it by the dim light of a smartphone. The diary was written in Czech, but Tom had a translation app. The words told of a woman who had been trapped in the apartment in 1967, a woman who was murdered by her lover, a man who had used the apartment for his own dark purposes. The diary described how she had hidden the spare key so that no one could ever lock her in again, but also so that someone could find the truth. The last entry ended with a plea: ‘If you find this, know that he is still here. He wears his face, but he is not him. He will try to keep you from leaving.’

We looked up from the diary, and the apartment was silent. But then we heard the front door click, and the sound of footsteps, slow and deliberate, moving toward us. Tom grabbed my hand, and we ran to the front door, but it wouldn’t open. The lock was engaged, and we didn’t have the key—it was still in the wardrobe. We turned, and the man from the photograph was standing in the hallway, his face scarred over where the scratches had been in the photo. He smiled, and his eyes were black.

We never found out what happened after that. We must have passed out from fear, because we woke up in the hospital, with the police asking us about a break-in at the apartment. They said the place had been ransacked, and a woman’s body had been found in the spare room, hidden in the wardrobe for decades. They suspected the current owner, my uncle, but he had died a month before we arrived. The apartment was scheduled for demolition.

Tom and I never spoke of what we saw. But sometimes, at night, I still feel the cold spot near the spare room, and I hear the faint humming of an air conditioner that no longer exists. And I keep the key in a drawer by my bed, just in case. I don’t know why, but I feel like she’s still out there, and the key is the only thing that can unlock the truth. But every time I look at it, I see the symbol on the bow, and I remember: it’s not a circle with a line through it. It’s a noose.

We left Prague, but the weight of that key seems to have followed us. I find it in my purse when I haven’t put it there. Once, I woke up with it in my hand, the metal cold and damp. Tom grew distant, and we moved to different cities. He stopped answering my calls. Last month, his brother called to say Tom had been found in his apartment, staring at a wall, repeating a word I didn’t recognize: ‘Anezka.’

I’m writing this now, in a new apartment, but the air in here is stale, and the lights flicker. I think I know what I have to do. I have to go back. I have to find the man from the photo, the one who wore my uncle’s face, and give him the key. Or maybe I have to destroy it. But part of me is afraid that even the key is not enough. That she is the only one who can open the door, and she’s waiting for me to let her out.

I just hope I’m not too late.

I hear footsteps in the hallway outside my door now, slow and deliberate. And the lock on my door is turning. I don’t have the key anymore—I left it in the apartment. But I can see it in my mind, glinting in the light of a flickering bulb, and I know that click of the lock is the same click I heard that night. And I know that she is coming to take me back.