The Key

"What if somebody was murdered in that room, and the body is STILL THERE?"

That room at the end of the hallway scared the holy hell out of all five of us kids. It was an old two-story house, and things were just downright spooky about it. Noises, like creaking stairs, rattling windows, and our big imaginations, which made it worse! The craziest thing about it, was the room at the end of the upstairs hallway. It was locked. There were stairs on the outside of the house, that led up to the room from that side. That door was locked, too. Our parents didn’t seem to care that they didn’t know what was in that room. But we sure were curious! We made up stories of the possibilities. The most popular one was, “What if somebody was murdered in that room, and the body is STILL THERE? Maybe it’s a skeleton, and maybe it’s a ghost that goes down the stairs every night, and is planning to kill US? What if it is trying to get out of that room?” That’s the story we landed on. We were home alone one evening, and were getting wound up about the mystery room. We decided we would try to break into it. My 13-year-old brother had a key collection. He had keys from other places we lived, old car keys, keys he found on the beach, keys that nobody knew where they came from. And he had a skeleton key. We tried several keys until we decided on that key. It worked! Now we were in it for real. My heart was in my throat, and the hair on my neck and arms was standing up, so that I could feel it brush up against my shirt. I stood behind my siblings, close enough to step on their heels. The door opened easily, and it was so dark, even the flashlight in my brother’s hand barely lit the floor in front of our feet. My brother was making spooky noises to keep the tension high, “Oooooooh,” he quietly moaned, and it worked. A few steps in, I felt something touch my face, and I screamed bloody murder! As it turned out, it was just a cobweb draped from one corner of the room to the other. After examining the small room, cautiously, we found nothing but another wall. There was no door to the outside, which meant there was another small room on the other side of the wall, and the outside door was there. The mystery wasn’t solved yet! We had to go through the whole process again, from the outside stairway. But it was dark outside, and we just couldn’t take the chance that we would run into a skeleton ghost on the stairs, in the dark. The next day, we got the chance to examine the other room. The same key fit, and in the daylight, we could see it was just another empty room. Partly disappointed, and partly relieved, we solved the mystery of the….storage rooms.

Sharon Hudson 2024