The Tin Matchbox

In the autumn of 2008, my brother Aidan and I moved with our parents into Cragmoor House, a damp, sprawling Victorian on the edge of a bleak Yorkshire moor. The village below called it ‘The Writer’s Folly,’ after the recluse who built it and then vanished. We thought we’d got a bargain; the rent was laughably low. But from the first night, the house felt wrong.

It started with small things. The clocks. Every clock we set would stop at exactly 3:47 in the morning, and no matter how many times we replaced batteries or had the mechanisms checked, they’d stop again. The hallway mirror would be smeared with a greasy residue, as if someone had pressed their face against it, though we cleaned it daily. And the smell—a sour, metallic tang—would drift through the house, strongest in the cellar, which we never went into because the door was always locked from the outside, yet we never had a key.

My mother, a skeptical nurse, blamed the damp. My father, a quiet man who read detective novels, said nothing. But I saw him one night, standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at the back door as if waiting for someone. And Aidan, my younger brother, started sleepwalking. I’d find him in the hallway, his eyes open but vacant, muttering the same phrase over and over: ‘The tin matchbox, under the floorboards.’

One Sunday, Aidan and I were cleaning the study, an unused room piled with old mildewed books. I was dusting a high shelf when a heavy brass paperweight—the kind shaped like a serpent—flew off the shelf, narrowly missing Aidan’s head. It clattered to the floor, and we both froze. The shelf was solid; nothing had shifted. I looked at Aidan, whose face was white. ‘It was pushed,’ he whispered.

The atmosphere grew heavier. We all felt watched, but never saw anyone. Our cat, a normally aloof tabby, refused to enter the house, yowling on the doorstep until we let her out. My mother started sleeping with the lights on. My father, a man of routine, began checking the locks three times before bed. And I, who had always been the rational one, started feeling a cold dread every time I passed the cellar door. I dreamed of a man in a long coat, his face a blur, standing at the foot of my bed, holding a small tin object.

One night, I woke to the sound of floorboards creaking in the attic. I crept upstairs, my heart pounding. The attic was a single room, dusty and bare, except for a loose floorboard in the corner. I pried it up, and there, nestled in the gap, was a small tin matchbox, rusted and dented. It was empty, but the inside was lined with a dark, sticky substance that smelled of copper. I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to take it, to keep it close. I hid it in my sock drawer.

From that moment, the house seemed to calm. The clocks stopped stopping. The smell faded. Aidan stopped sleepwalking. But I grew increasingly obsessed with the matchbox. I carried it in my pocket, rubbing it like a talisman. I felt a strange comfort, a sense of purpose. And then, one night, my father confronted me. He had found the matchbox, and he was terrified. ‘Where did you get this?’ he demanded. I told him, and he went pale. ‘The man who built this house,’ he said, ‘he was a collector. He had a brass serpent, a tarot deck, a tin matchbox. They say he used them to summon something. He disappeared, you know. No trace.’

My father took the matchbox and threw it into the moorland bog, but I saw him later that night, sobbing in the garden. The next morning, he was gone. The police searched for weeks, but they never found him. My mother, unable to cope, moved us back to the city. But I know he’s still out there, because sometimes, in my dreams, I see him standing in the mist, holding a rusted tin matchbox, and he’s smiling. And I know the matchbox is not empty after all—it’s full of my father’s absence, and it’s still in the bog, waiting to be found again.

I haven’t slept properly since. I can’t smell anything without thinking of copper. And every time I see a matchbox, even a new one, I feel a pull, a temptation to open it. Because I know what’s inside now. It’s not nothing. It’s the doorway to the man in the long coat, and he’s been waiting for someone to let him out. And I’m afraid that one day, I’ll be the one to open it.