The Latch That Opened for the Hollow

My great-aunt Marigold had a way of telling stories that made the air in the room go still. She’d sit by the fire, her knitting needles clicking like teeth, and speak of the old farmhouse in the backwoods of Vermont where she and her brother, Elias, and his wife, Ruth, had lived for a single, terrible winter. They’d moved there for cheap rent and the promise of isolation, but the isolation was more than they bargained for.

The house itself sat at the edge of a dense pine forest, the trees so thick that even at noon, the woods were a green gloom. The nearest neighbor was four miles down a dirt road that turned to mud in the rain. At night, the silence was so profound that they could hear each other’s heartbeats – or so Marigold said. Except that silence was often broken.

It started with the laughter. High, tinkling laughter like a child’s, coming from the woods. They’d hear it in the late afternoon, just as the sun began to drop. Sometimes it was joined by the sound of crying – soft, hiccupping sobs that seemed to call out to them. Elias, a practical man, would grab his flashlight and head out into the trees, his boots crunching on the frozen ground, but he’d find nothing. No footprints, no broken branches, no sign that any child had ever been there. The sound would stop the moment he stepped past the first row of trees, then start again behind him, always just out of sight.

Inside, the house had its own peculiarities. The front door had a latch that would never stay locked. No matter how many times they turned the key, slid the bolt, or hooked the chain (and they tried all of them), they’d walk away and hear a soft click – and the door would be standing ajar, swinging gently as if someone had just passed through. They’d scoured the place for drafts, for warped frames, but it was as if the door was determined to be open.

One night, Marigold and her husband, a quiet man named Arthur, were lying in bed in the upstairs bedroom. The wind had picked up, rattling the single pane window, and the house groaned like an old ship. Marigold had just begun to doze when she heard a sound from the hallway – a steady, deliberate ticking. Click, click, click. Like claws on the wooden floor. She nudged Arthur, and they both sat up, listening. The sound grew closer, entered their room, and stopped at the foot of the bed. They could feel a cold draft, as if a large animal had come in from the snow, and they distinctly felt a warm, moist breath on their faces, though they saw nothing. Arthur reached out a trembling hand, and his fingers touched nothing but air. The breath continued, slow and steady, as if something was examining them. Then, with a heavy thump that shook the bed frame, the invisible presence lay down on the rug at their feet, and they could feel the weight of it pressing into the mattress. They lay there, paralyzed, until dawn, when the pressure lifted and the sound of claws clicking back down the hallway faded.

They tried everything to get rid of the presence. They burned sage, they placed salt lines, they even invited a priest from the nearest town, who blessed the house and left promptly, his face pale. But the laughter in the woods continued, and the door remained unlocked. The final night, Marigold was alone in the kitchen. Elias and Ruth had gone into town for supplies, and Arthur was out in the barn. She heard the laughter again, but this time it was inside the house. It echoed from room to room, growing louder, until it was a cacophony of childish joy and despair. She felt something tug at her skirt, and looked down to see a small handprint forming in the dust on the floor, although there was no hand to make it. She ran out the front door, which swung open as if to welcome her escape, and didn’t stop running until she reached the main road.

They moved out the next week. Marigold never spoke of the house again, except to say that she’d learned that some doors are meant to be left open, and some sounds are not meant to be followed. And to this day, if you listen at the edge of those Vermont woods, you might hear the laughter of children who are not there, and the click of unseen claws on the forest floor, waiting for the next latch to turn. But the latch that really opens, the one that matter, is the one in your mind, that wonders what it is that wants to be let in. And that door, once you open it, never truly closes again.