The Locked Wardrobe

Three years had passed since my mother’s heart gave out without warning, leaving my father and me to navigate a world that had cracked down the middle. I was eighteen then, just old enough to understand the permanence of death, but too young to accept it. The grief settled like dust over everything, and for a while, I thought I had moved on. Then, a few months ago, something inside me snapped. I was lying in bed, tears soaking my pillow, when I cried out to her, not expecting an answer, just needing to voice my despair. ‘Mom, please, if you’re with me, give me a sign.’ Nothing happened that night, and I fell asleep exhausted, having never spoken to her aloud since her funeral.

Weeks later, the disturbances began. At first, it was the wardrobe in my bedroom. I always kept its sliding door shut, out of habit, but one morning I woke to find it wide open, as if someone had thrown it open. I dismissed it as my own sleepwalking, even though I’d never done that before. Then, the knocking started. Three knocks, slow and deliberate, from inside the wardrobe, always at 3:33 AM, the hour my mother used to say was the devil’s hour, though she’d laugh when she said it. I checked the wardrobe every time, but it was empty, just my clothes and a faint odor of mothballs. The knocking persisted, sometimes for minutes at a time, and I began to dread going to sleep.

My father noticed I was a wreck, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him; he was still fragile, and I feared he’d think I was losing my mind. Instead, I did my own research, skimming old books about spirits and hauntings, but nothing matched. Then, one night, the knocking became more insistent, and I realized the wardrobe was shaking, the door rattling as if something were trying to escape. I grabbed the handle, threw it open, and there, in the darkness, I saw a small, ornate mirror that I had never seen before, leaning against the back wall. It was tarnished, with a handle shaped like a twisted root. I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to pick it up.

When I looked into the mirror, my reflection was not my own. It was my mother, but younger, maybe my age, with the same tired eyes I had seen in photos from her youth. She looked at me, and her lips moved, but I heard nothing. Then, the mirror grew cold in my hand, and I dropped it. It shattered on the floor, and from the shards, a draft blew out, extinguishing my bedside lamp. When I turned on the ceiling light, I saw that the mirror had vanished, leaving only glistening fragments. And I noticed something else: the wardrobe door was now closed, and on it, scratched into the wood, was a single word: ‘leave.’

I didn’t sleep that night, and in the morning, I told my father everything, expecting him to dismiss it as a nightmare. But he went pale, and he brought down an old box from the attic. Inside were letters and photographs I had never seen. He explained that my mother had a sister, my aunt Ruth, who had died before I was born, in a mental institution. My mother had never spoken of her, and my father had promised to keep it secret. In one of the letters, my mother wrote that Ruth had spoken to her through mirrors, and that she had been terrified of a wardrobe in their childhood home, claiming something lived inside. My mother had kept the mirror, and she had always kept it in her closet, but he had forgotten about it after her death.

I realized then that the knocking wasn’t from my mother; it was from something that had been waiting in that mirror, something that had seen my moment of weakness and used it to attach itself to me. It had been growing stronger, and now it wanted to take form. That night, I gathered the mirror shards and buried them in the backyard, reciting a prayer that my mother had taught me, a protective prayer she had learned from Ruth. But as I returned inside, I heard the knocking again, louder, and the wardrobe door flew open on its own. In the darkness of the wardrobe, I saw a pair of eyes, my eyes, staring back at me. And I knew that I had not buried the mirror; I had merely given it roots. And now, it had a door to my world, and it was learning to walk through.