The Sixth Drawer

Mara and I started with a candle and a hand mirror in her basement, the air thick with dust and the smell of old wood. We chanted Bloody Mary three times, our voices cracking with fear and excitement, and on the third repetition, the mirror leaped from the wall, shattering against the concrete floor. We froze, staring at the jagged pieces, our reflections fractured into a hundred accusing shards. We didn’t dare touch the glass; we just backed up the stairs, hearts hammering.

That should have been the end of it, but curiosity is a poison. Two nights later, we dug out an old Ouija board from Mara’s attic, the kind with faded letters and a cracked planchette. We set it up in my bedroom, the same room where the mirror had fallen, and asked if anyone was with us. The room turned icy, so cold I could see my breath, and the planchette slid to ‘YES’ with a force that felt deliberate, not our own. We yanked our fingers away, scrambled out, and slammed the door. But I knew, even then, that we had invited something in.

A week later, Mara told me she couldn’t sleep anymore. She heard footsteps in her hallway at night, slow and heavy, like someone dragging a wet sack. She saw a shape in her peripheral vision, a tall figure in a hooded cloak, but when she turned, it was gone. I tried to laugh it off, blaming horror movies and our overactive imaginations, but the dread was real. The air in her house felt wrong, charged like before a storm.

Then I made the mistake of using the board alone. I was home, my parents out late, and I thought I could prove to myself that it was all nonsense. I asked, ‘Who are you?’ The planchette moved to ‘M’, then ‘A’, then ‘R’, then ‘A’. It spelled my own name. I asked again, my hand shaking, ‘What do you want?’ The planchette flew to the corner of the board and circled the word ‘SEVENTH’ over and over, then stopped. I slammed the board shut and shoved it under my bed.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. My room felt watched, the shadows too deep. I got up to get water and passed my mother’s antique dresser, an old oak thing with six drawers that she kept in the hallway. In the dim light, I saw something in the mirror above it. A figure, tall, cloaked, standing behind me. I whirled around, and the hallway was empty. But the dresser’s sixth drawer, the one that was always stuck, was slightly ajar. I had never been able to open that drawer, no matter how hard I pulled. Now it hung open, revealing darkness inside.

I approached, my heart pounding, and looked inside. There was nothing but a musty smell, like old earth and decay. I went to close it, but it wouldn’t budge. It was stuck again, but this time, it was jammed in the open position. I ran back to my room and locked the door. The next morning, I told Mom about the drawer. She looked at me with a strange, hollow expression and said, ‘I locked that drawer years ago. I lost the key. There’s nothing in there.’ But I saw her hand tremble as she touched the handle.

Mara called me that evening, her voice a whisper. ‘I just saw it. It was standing at the foot of my bed. It pointed to the floor.’ I asked, ‘What does that mean?’ She said, ‘I think it wants us to dig something up. There’s a patch of dirt in my backyard, right under my window. I’ve never noticed it before.’ We agreed to meet the next night with flashlights and a shovel. I didn’t say it, but I knew the patch of dirt was shaped like a rectangle, like a grave.

We dug in silence, the only sound being the crunch of earth and our ragged breathing. After about two feet, the shovel hit something hard. We unearthed a small wooden box, rotted and blackened with age. I hesitated, but Mara opened it. Inside, wrapped in a thin leather cloth, was a photograph. It showed a woman in a long dress, standing in front of the same dresser in my mother’s hallway, but the room was older, walls covered in peeling wallpaper. The woman’s face was scratched out. Also in the box was a brass key, tarnished but intact.

A cold wind swept through the yard, and we both heard the sound of a drawer sliding open, somewhere in the dark. I clutched the key, and Mara grabbed my arm. ‘We should put it back,’ she said, but I couldn’t. I had to know. I ran home, the key burning in my pocket. I went straight to the dresser, and the sixth drawer was open again. I inserted the key into a hole I had never noticed on the side of the drawer, and with a click, the lock turned. I pulled the drawer all the way out.

Inside was a diary, bound in cracked leather, with a yellowed page marked with a ribbon. I opened it. The handwriting was spidery and faded, but I could read the last entry: ‘I sealed the door, but it came back. It comes back every time someone calls to her. The mirror was her door. The board was her voice. I buried the key, but she will find it. She always finds it.’ Underneath was a drawing: a stick figure in a cloak, with a line of stick figures marching toward it, all holding hands. And at the bottom, in block letters: ‘SIX DRAWERS, SIX SOULS, THE SEVENTH IS MINE.’

I slammed the diary shut, but when I looked up, the figure was in the mirror behind me. It was tall, hooded, and perfectly still. I couldn’t move. It slowly raised a skeletal hand and pointed at the diary, then at me. A whisper rustled in my ear, like dry leaves, ‘You opened the seventh drawer.’ I realized then that the dresser had room for seven drawers, but only six were visible. The seventh was a hidden compartment behind the mirror. The mirror that had shattered. The mirror that had been a door.

I ran to Mara’s house, pounded on her door, but when she opened it, her face was white, and behind her, I saw the floorboards of her hallway bending, as if something was pushing up from the earth beneath. ‘It’s too late,’ she said, and her voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a well. ‘I heard it call my name.’ Then she stepped aside, and in her living room, standing by the window, was the figure. It turned its hooded head toward me, and where its face should have been, there was a dark void, and in that void, I saw my own reflection, but twisted, grinning.

I woke up in my bed, drenched in cold sweat, the diary clutched to my chest. For a moment, I thought it was all a nightmare. But the diary was real, and the key was in my hand. And from the hallway, I heard a soft, rhythmic scraping sound, like something being dragged across the floor, coming closer. And the dresser’s sixth drawer was open, waiting. I still have the diary, and I still have the key. But I haven’t told anyone the worst part. When I looked into the void of that figure’s face, I saw not just me, but Mara, standing behind me, her eyes wide and black, and behind her, rows and rows of figures, all in cloaks, all identical. And in the very back, in a space that should not exist, there was a seventh drawer, and it was painted the color of my bedroom door.