The Wormwood Gate

When I was six, my family moved into a house that seemed to breathe. It sat at the end of a gravel lane in the Oregon woods, where the trees grew so close they blotted out the sun, and the air always smelled of damp earth and rotting leaves. The previous owners had left in a hurry, and the realtor’s smile had a tightness that I only understood years later. My father, an engineer who loved logic, dismissed the local talk about the property, and my mother, a painter, fell in love with the quality of the light that filtered through the canopy. My older brother, Caleb, and I explored every room the first day, and we both noticed the cellar door in the kitchen, set into the floor with a heavy iron ring. It had a padlock that no key seemed to fit, but the lock was rusted open.

That first night, I woke to a sound like someone dragging a heavy chain across the floor below us. I thought it was the plumbing, or an animal in the walls, but the sound came again, and this time it was accompanied by a low, guttural voice, speaking in words that were not English. I called out for my brother, but when he didn’t answer, I went to his room. He was sitting up in bed, staring at the same spot on the ceiling where my gaze had been drawn. In the dim moonlight, I could see that the ceiling was coated in a fine dust that had a faint, metallic sheen. As we watched, more dust sifted down from a crack in the plaster, and the guttural voice became a clear, but distorted, whisper that seemed to come from all directions at once: ‘The gate is open.’

Over the following weeks, the house seemed to shift around us. Doors opened on their own, and we would find the kitchen cutlery arranged in strange symbols on the counter. My mother dismissed it as the wind, but she started sleeping with the lights on. My father spent more time at work. Caleb and I, however, were drawn to the cellar door. We found a key on a nail in the garage, and when we turned it in the lock, the padlock clicked open. We lifted the door, and a wave of cold, foul air washed over us. The stairs descended into darkness, and at the bottom, there was a dirt floor and walls of rough stone. In the center of the floor was a depression, as if something had been uprooted, and the dirt was black and oily, unlike the surrounding soil. On the far wall, there was a symbol scratched into the stone: a spiral within a circle. I felt a sudden pressure in my ears, and the voice returned, clearer now: ‘She is still here.’

Our family began to fray. My mother started to have nightmares, thrashing and crying out in her sleep. My father grew distant, and I once found him in the cellar at 3 a.m., holding a trowel, muttering about ‘digging up the dirt.’ He never explained. Meanwhile, the animals—our two dogs and the cat—refused to enter the kitchen. They would cower in the hallway, whining, and the cat one day simply vanished. When I asked my parents about it, they just looked at me with hollow eyes and said, ‘It’s fine.’ But it wasn’t fine. I saw a figure in the garden one evening, a tall woman in a black dress, standing perfectly still among the ferns. When I blinked, she was gone, but I felt her eyes on me, and I knew she was the one who spoke.

Caleb and I decided to dig in the cellar, using a flashlight and a small shovel. We dug down about two feet, and we found a rusted metal box. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a diary and a photograph. The diary belonged to a woman named Margaret, who had lived in the house in the 1950s. The pages were cramped and frantic, describing a ‘presence’ that had taken her husband, who had become violent and cruel. She wrote that she had tried to seal the ‘gate’ in the cellar, using a ritual from a book she had found in the attic. The last entry read: ‘I must finish the circle before it takes me too.’ The photograph showed a woman with dark hair and kind eyes, standing in front of the house, and behind her, just at the edge of the porch, was a blurred shape that seemed to lean toward her.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard the chain dragging again, and this time I followed it to the cellar. The door was open, and the stairs were bathed in a sickly green light. At the bottom, the depression in the dirt was now a deep hole, black as a void, and from it rose a column of shimmering air, like heat haze. The tall woman stood beside it, and she turned to me. Her face was beautiful, but her eyes were black, like polished jet. She spoke, and her voice filled my skull: ‘You are the key.’ I tried to run, but my legs wouldn’t move. She pointed to the hole, and I saw Margaret’s face looking up at me, gaunt and pale, reaching a hand out, her lips forming the word ‘no.’

The next morning, the sun rose, and everything seemed normal. The family had breakfast, and my father joked about the drafty house. But I knew something had changed. The cellar door was locked again, and the key was gone. No one would speak about the night. But in the garden, I found a black, stone ring, no larger than a bracelet, inscribed with the spiral-and-circle symbol. I picked it up, and it was warm to the touch. I never told anyone, and I kept it in my pocket, feeling a faint pulse.

We moved out a month later, and my father got a job transfer back to the city. We never spoke of the house again. But I still have the ring, and sometimes, when I hold it, I hear that whispering voice, calling me back to the wormwood gate. And I know that one day, the gate will be open again, and I will be the one to go through.