The Latch on the Cedar Door

I was eight when we moved to the old Kessler house on the edge of Hemlock Grove, a town that seemed to exist only in the shadow of its own damp forests. My father had taken a job as the curator of the local historical society, and my mother, who had always been drawn to old things, insisted on the Kessler place despite its peeling wallpaper and the smell of mothballs that clung to every room. On the first night, as I lay in my narrow bed under the sloped attic ceiling, my mother came in and sat on the edge of the mattress. She had a faraway look in her eyes, the same look she got when she talked about the past. ‘I’ve seen this house before,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘In a dream, or maybe in a life I don’t remember. But I know that bad things happened here. A family, the Kesslers, they were found dead in the dining room. All of them. It was in the papers years ago.’ I wanted to ask how she could have seen it before we ever came here, but the words stuck in my throat. I just nodded, and she kissed my forehead. After she left, I lay awake, watching the shadows cast by the streetlight through the bare maple branches outside, twisting into shapes that didn’t quite make sense.

The next day, I explored the house with a mixture of fear and fascination. The rooms were labyrinthine, with doors that led into closets that led into other rooms, and a staircase that creaked even when no one was on it. In the back of a wardrobe in the master bedroom, I found a small child’s dress, covered in dust, with a single button missing. I didn’t tell my mother. I had started to feel a presence, like someone was watching me from behind the walls, and I began to avoid certain corners of the house, especially the door to the cellar, which had a strange latch made of iron in the shape of a hand. One evening, my mother found me staring at it. ‘Don’t open that door,’ she said, her face pale. ‘Promise me.’ I promised, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something on the other side knew I was there.

A week later, I came down with a fever. My parents thought it was just a cold, but I knew it was something else. In my feverish dreams, I saw a woman with long black hair standing at the foot of my bed, pointing at the ceiling. She mouthed words I couldn’t hear, and then she floated up, through the roof, and I saw her being pulled into the sky, her arms flailing. Then I was the one falling, the ground rushing up to meet me, and I struck my back on the floor of the dream with a sickening crack. I woke up gasping, my nightgown soaked with sweat, and I realized I was on the floor beside my bed, my back throbbing with a pain that felt real. I called for my mother, and she came running. She helped me back into bed, but I saw the fear in her eyes. ‘It’s just a nightmare,’ she said, but her voice trembled. I didn’t tell her that I had felt myself being dropped, that I had heard my own spine crack, because I knew she would say I was just being dramatic.

For months, the dreams continued. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that same void, falling, always falling, then the impact, the crack, and the jarring wake-up. I started to dread going to sleep. I would lie in bed, reciting multiplication tables to keep my mind awake, but eventually exhaustion would claim me, and I would be thrust back into that terrible descent. My parents took me to doctors, but they found nothing wrong. They thought I was developing sleep issues, perhaps from the stress of the move. But I knew it was this house, this room, this bed. One night, I decided to fight it. I stayed awake as long as I could, staring at the ceiling, but just before dawn, my eyelids drooped. In the dream, I was standing in the middle of the dining room of this house, but it was night, and the furniture was gone. In the corner, I saw a woman in a long dress, her face obscured by shadows. She gestured for me to follow her, and she led me to the cellar door. The latch was glowing faintly. She touched it, and the door swung open, revealing a dark staircase. ‘You have to see,’ she said, and her voice was like a rustle of dead leaves. ‘You have to know what they did.’ I stepped forward, and the dream shifted. I was at the bottom of the stairs, in a small stone room. There were chains on the walls, and a child’s shoe in the corner. The woman pointed to a trapdoor in the floor. ‘They left them down here,’ she said. ‘They left them to rot.’ Suddenly, I felt a cold hand on my shoulder, and I woke up screaming.

I told my mother everything the next morning, about the dreams, the woman, the cellar, the trapdoor. She went pale. ‘I saw it too,’ she said. ‘In my dream, I was walking down those stairs, and I heard children crying. I didn’t go all the way down. I was too scared.’ We went to the cellar door together, and my mother unlocked it with a key she found in the kitchen drawer. The stairs were exactly as I had seen them, dusty and narrow, and at the bottom, the room was empty except for the chains and the shoe. We pried open the trapdoor, and beneath it was a pit, about eight feet deep. At the bottom, we saw a small metal box, crusted with dirt. My mother climbed down and brought it up. Inside, we found a photograph of a woman with long black hair, a child’s locket, and a piece of paper with a name: ‘Maeve Kessler.’ She had been the mother of the family that died. The paper was a letter, written in a shaky hand, reading, ‘They blamed me for the fire, but it was the house. The house did it. It takes them. It takes the ones it loves. I couldn’t save my children. I couldn’t save my own.’

We moved out of the house two weeks later. But the dreams didn’t stop. Even now, years later, I still feel the fall. I still hear the crack. And sometimes, when I’m in a room alone, I catch a whiff of mothballs, and I see the shadow of a woman in the corner, her hand reaching out to the latch on a cedar door that doesn’t exist anymore. I know that the house is gone, but I’ve come to understand that some places cling to you, and the latch never truly lets go.