Part I - Part II

“I suppose I should’ve pulled you aside for this chat five years ago,” Terrence sighed. “Truth is… I used to live at your place.”

The greying, middle-aged man scooped up his mug of coffee with two unsteady hands. He concealed his pale, fearful face in the steam plume erupting from the drink, as he greedily lapped up the liquid. We were the only early-morning customers at the local café. The shop’s atmosphere was uncharacteristically still and sombre.

“Why did you never tell me?” I asked. “We’ve talked in here so many times. Usually, you can’t stop talking.”

Terrence sheepishly scratched the nape of his neck, averting my gaze. The non-committal disposition of an often-jolly town resident was filling me with deadening dread — I had hoped Terrence would be my saviour. After all, wasn’t that what the abomination had said? Terrence, save me.

“Something happened that prompted my move away from that house,” He said. “I had a wife. Molly. She was a deeply disturbed individual, battling demons. I tried to help her with her mental illness, but she was never the same after she tried to… end things.”

Terrence paused to dab a solitary tear, trickling down his cheek. “And then one day, seven years ago, she left. Vanished without a trace. Nobody’s seen her since. I pray that she’s safe out there.”

I consoled the man whilst he sobbed profusely, and he offered me a meek smile, clutching at a glimmer of his usual jovial self.

“I’m sorry for dumping that on you, Ethan,” He sighed. “Not our usual brand of conversation, eh?”

“But do you believe what I said?” I asked.

Terrence frowned. “About a ghost? I mean… Like you, I’ve seen things in my time. Things I couldn’t explain.”

“And do you think the woman I saw could have been…” I trailed off.

The man’s eyes widened with terror, as he finally appeared to comprehend my implication. A hypothesis which seemed to devastate Terrence Brown to his very core.

“Molly?” He whispered. “No, it couldn’t have been…”

“She spoke your name,” I said. “She begged you to save her.”

“Save her?” He gasped. “Do you… think I still can?”

I hung my head dejectedly. “Terrence, I don’t think she’s still alive. What I saw in that room… wasn’t human.”

“I don’t know,” Terrence mumbled. “Sometimes, I… I think I see her. Hear her.”

As if to affirm the man’s point, a rattling noise jolted me upright. The sound, like an old door wrestling with its hinges, came from a distant spot. My eyes were immediately drawn to the road outside the coffee shop. And there, standing on the pavement, was a haunting apparition — the woman from the chest of drawers. Molly.

I soundlessly screamed as the woman raised a finger to her lips, warning me to not utter a sound. I complied, though my mouth was agape as the dead woman took sinister strides towards a nearby bus stop, vanishing behind it and not re-emerging.

“Ethan? Are you okay?”

Terrence wrenched me from my silent nightmare, and I saw recognition in his eyes. I think he knew what I’d seen. I’m sure the age-old words played on his lips that it looked as if I’d seen a ghost.

“I’m fine,” I eventually lied. “I think I’d better head back home.”

“You do look a little pale,” Terrence said, nodding. “Give my best to Kate, won’t you?”

I smiled and promised to do just that. After shaking the man’s hand, I strolled home, thinking back on the conversation. There was so much to unpack, and my frazzled brain wouldn’t complete the mental jigsaw until later.

When I arrived home, I was frustrated to see another car on the driveway. The BMW with tinted windows could only belong to one person — Ryan. And when I stormed into my house, that horrifying prospect was confirmed.

“Dad…” Kate quietly said, as I found them talking in the kitchen. “This is-”

“- Ryan,” I coldly finished.

The young man gulped, extending a shaky hand for me to receive. I unleashed a wicked little grin and pointedly looked at the hand, keeping my own firmly by my side. Then I moved onwards, changing the conversation.

“Kate, can we talk about the room?” I asked.

“Sure,” She replied. “But we can do it here. I’ve just filled in Ryan on what happened the day before yesterday.”

I squinted disbelievingly. “You told him… everything?”

She nodded, and I moved my attention to Ryan, who had finally returned his outstretched hand to his side, wearing a wounded expression on his boyish face.

“And what do you think, Ryan?” I asked. “A lot of superstitious nonsense?”

Ryan vehemently shook his head. “No, sir. I believe in that stuff, and Kate’s no liar.”

“And we all aspire to be so honest, don’t we?” I asked.

Ryan gulped, and Kate shot me a look that told me, without need for words, to drop it. Not wanting to upset my daughter, I groaned and begrudgingly obliged. Silently, the three of us walked up to the upstairs landing and eyed the ominous purple door at the far end.

This time, I led the way. When I opened the door, finding the room to be much the same as last time, I shuddered at the prospect of reliving those dreadful events again. But I needed answers. I needed to know about the woman, Molly. If Terrence couldn’t save her, I decided that I could.

“This is really fucking weird,” Ryan whispered.

We scoured the room from top to bottom, but there were no clues. I was partly relieved, especially to see that the door wasn’t shrinking into the carpet, but the lack of answers was disconcerting. If I couldn’t save Molly, would her vengeful spirit exact its fury upon me? I trembled at that thought.

“What’s that?” Kate asked.

My daughter was pointing her quivering index finger at a spot on the wooden floor — one of the boards was slightly damper than the others and, by the looks of it, looser.

“Good find,” I said.

I knelt on the bedroom floor, inspecting the suspect plank of wood. It required little exertion to prize the board free from the floor. I exhaled deeply upon finding nothing but an empty black hole beneath it. I’d feared that I would find a body part of something unimaginably macabre.

“Well?” Kate pressed.

I smiled. “Nothing to worry about. It’s just-”

I yelled in horror as a lifeless hand emerged from the darkness, stretching its bony, emaciated extremities towards me. Before my daughter or Ryan could leap towards to save me, the fingers had seized a handful of my T-shirt. It tugged, and I inexplicably tumbled into the tiny chasm beneath the floorboard — my body flattened, squeezing through the narrow slit.

After a few terrifying moments of screeching in an endless void of blackness, I eventually returned to the mortal realm. Cold, unforgiving concrete smashed into my face, torso, and knees. I cried, nursing numerous aching joints and potential bone fractures.

Rolling onto my back, I absorbed my surroundings. Boundlessly bewildered, I failed to grasp how I had fallen through to the basement — the basement I didn’t even know my house had. Rickety stairs led up to a doorway filled with bricks. The basement had been sealed off from the outside world, and I would soon discover why.

On the wall behind me was something that filled me with fright unlike any that can be put into words. I was looking at a purple door. The same purple door as the one on the upstairs landing, and yet this one was much more tangible. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why that was so. But when I placed my hand in the dusty, long-neglected brass handle, I was horrified to see that it did not open onto the room I had come to know.

And then I realised that wasn’t true. No bed, no chest of drawers, but I recognised the oak wardrobe — it was rotten and missing its doors, but it was unmistakable. And I finally understood that the bedroom window had always been a basement window, which explained why it had been at such a low level. It was the same room, but I was looking at it in the present day. The real purple room. Not the apparition that came and went as it pleased. I realised I had been stumbling into a ghostly flashback on the upstairs landing. Molly’s ghostly flashback.

“What the fuck happened down here?” I whispered.

And that was when I saw something in the present-day room which differed from the magical one. There was writing on the wall. Scratched into the cream colouring, presumably with a sharp nail, were the following words:

My name is Molly Brown. I’m going to die down here. Terrence locked me in this room.

My heart sank, and everything suddenly made sense. Terrence’s evasiveness. His wife had died down here, the captive of a sadistic tormenter, and her husband had sold the town a twisted tale of an unstable woman who ran away. But Molly had finally shown me the truth.

“Ryan!” Kate screamed.

I turned to the wardrobe, the source of my daughter’s wail, and saw my only exit from that dungeon prison. A supernatural gateway from the wardrobe of the real basement room to the false one on the upstairs landing. Kate saw me through the wardrobe and gasped.

“Dad?” She cried.

Whilst she sobbed — blood staining her skin and clothes — in the corner of the room on the other side of the wardrobe, like a demonic version of Narnia, Terrence had pinned Ryan to the floor. He was twisting a knife into the boy’s shoulder, and the kid was screaming in agony.

Without a moment’s thought, I flew through the wardrobe doorway and entered the magical upstairs room. My body collided with Terrence, and I realised that I had no idea how to fight. I’d never laid a hand on anybody. As we both sprawled across the floor, the snarling man, who was no longer Brown the Clown, loomed above me.

“You three just had to go looking for answers, didn’t you?” He spat. “Well, the mystery has been solved. And now you can join Molly, the ungrateful little bitch, beneath the very foundations of this house.”

Ryan crawled on his back towards Kate, and the two of them — coated in blood — embraced in the corner of the room. My only focus was to keep Terrence away from them. I had to keep his attention fixed on me. I had to stop him. And that was when I saw the key to ending that night of horror.

Through the wardrobe gateway, back in the real basement room, that ghoulish contortionist crawled through the cracks between the floorboards, slinking into a painfully paper-thin form. When she had fully emerged, she bulged into the same corpse-like entity I had seen two days prior. She stood in the basement, waiting with open arms.

I finally understood.

Scrambling to my feet, I rugby-tackled Terrence towards the wardrobe. When I took a step back, my heart dropped — he had braced himself on either side of the wardrobe, preventing himself from falling through to the basement room. His victorious grin was utterly horrifying.

“I’ll look after Kate when you’re gone, Ethan,” He said. “I have a spare room downstairs that I think would be absolutely perfect for her.”

As the malevolent man lunged towards me, I braced for death. But death didn’t come. Terrence looked down, as did I, and we both saw two ghostly-white phantom limbs wrapped around his waist. His eyes grew teary and feverishly fearful.

“No…” He sobbed.

“Your turn,” Molly eerily whispered.

The undead apparition hoisted Terrence backwards, and he screeched in horror as he disappeared into the basement room. The doors of the wardrobe slammed shut behind him, sealing him in that bricked-up coffin forever.

I helped Ryan and Kate out of the upstairs purple room, and the door vanished as soon as we were back on the landing. After ambulances had been called and the day finally wound to a horrifying close, I started to document my events in this closing post.

I keep thinking about things I missed. Signs that Terrence was an abhorrent monster who meant my family harm.

Give my best to Kate, won’t you?

I never mentioned my daughter was visiting — I don’t think I even mentioned her name. Anyway, he’s rotting away in the basement now. He won’t last long down there. The basement doorway is concealed by brickwork and plaster in the ground-floor lobby. Nobody will ever find him.

I suppose Molly will keep him company.

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