The Locked Room
A door that no key will open
At the far end of the upstairs stood a door that never opened.
The room behind it was the one that had troubled Emma from the start.
Every key that they owned had been tried, but none of them worked.
The lock was old and heavy, and it had clearly been fitted long ago.
"This door was locked by someone who did not want it opened," Tom said.
The wood around the frame had been painted many times over the years.
Emma pressed her hand against the door, which felt strangely cold to touch.
A thin of icy air was being pushed out from under the door.
"No room that is simply empty could ever feel this cold," she whispered.
The house that they had bought held a space they could not enter.
Tom fetched the tools that were kept in a box beneath the stairs.
The screws in the lock had been fixed so tightly that they would not move.
"It is as if this door was meant to stay shut forever," he muttered.
Emma noticed a small through which a light seemed to shine.
She bent down and looked into the room that no one could enter.
Inside, she saw a chair which had been placed in the very centre.
On the chair sat something that she could not quite make out.
The cold air that touched her eye made her step back at once.
"There is a chair in there, and something is resting on it," she said.
The door, which had been silent all week, gave a sudden loud .
Both of them jumped back from the frame that had just moved slightly.
A voice, thin and dry, seemed to be whispering behind the locked wood.
The words that reached them were too quiet to be fully understood.
"This room was closed for a reason," Emma said, "and we have found it."
That night, the cold from the locked room through the whole house.
And the whispering, they both knew, had not stopped when they walked away.