The Tin Fiddle

My name is Clara, and I am thirteen. I live with my mother, father, and my little brother, Leo, who is five. This story happened when I was very young, maybe four or five, in the old house we used to live in, on the edge of a town called Millbrook. The house was an old converted schoolhouse, with a long hallway and a kitchen that smelled of rain and dust. But the room that mattered was the pantry, a narrow, dark space off the kitchen, with a heavy wooden door that always stuck.

I don’t remember how it started, but I had an imaginary friend. His name was Mr. Grimsby. I told my parents he was tall and thin, with a voice like a rusty hinge, and that he lived in the pantry. He would only come out when the door was closed, and he would whisper to me through the keyhole. I would spend hours sitting on the cold linoleum, listening to his stories about the old schoolhouse, about children who had been punished and never went home. He said he was the one who kept them in the walls.

My mother thought it was a phase, a way to cope with the move and my father’s long work hours. My father would play along, asking, ‘Clara, what’s Mr. Grimsby saying today?’ and I would answer, ‘He says the new baby is making too much noise.’ That was after Leo was born. My father would laugh, but my mother would shiver. Every time she went into the pantry, she said she felt a cold draft, even in summer, and the shelves never seemed to stay organized. She found a small tin fiddle in the back, tarnished and out of tune. She gave it to me to play with, thinking it might distract me. But when I touched it, Mr. Grimsby went silent for a week.

Then, the night Leo had a fever, everything changed. Leo was crying in his crib, and my mother was up with him. I heard a sound from the pantry—a slow, scraping rhythm, like a bow on metal strings. I crept out of bed and saw the pantry door ajar. Inside, the tin fiddle was on the floor, glowing faintly with a sickly blue light. Mr. Grimsby’s voice came from the shadows, no longer rusty, but smooth and terrible. ‘Play for me, Clara. Play for your baby brother.’ I didn’t understand, but I picked up the fiddle. It was ice cold. When I drew the bow across the strings, it made a sound like a child’s cry. My mother screamed from the nursery, and I ran in. Leo was lying still, too still, his face blue. My father called the ambulance, and for thirty terrible minutes, we thought we’d lost him. But Leo breathed again, and the doctors said it was a febrile seizure, a miracle turn. When we came home, the pantry door was locked from the inside, and neither my mother nor I have ever opened it since.

A year later, we moved out. I never spoke of Mr. Grimsby again, and I thought I had left him behind. But last week, Leo, now five, came to me with a strange toy in his hands. It was a paper cutout of a tall, thin man, with a hole for his mouth. ‘Clara,’ he said, his voice too calm, ‘Mr. Grimsby says you lied. He says he was never in the pantry. He was in the house. And he’s always been waiting for you to play the fiddle again.’ I looked at the cutout, and I swear I saw its paper eyes blink. Then, from the kitchen, I heard it: the faint, horrible sound of a tin fiddle, playing a lullaby my mother used to sing to us. And the pantry door in our new house creaked open, all by itself.