The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

  “Here you go.” Jack sat beside me, making the springs of the sofa squeak, and handed me a rich tea biscuit. I dipped it automatically into my tea, then took a bite, and shivered, I couldn’t help myself. “Are you cold?”

  “A bit. Not really. I mean, I have a jumper, it’s just I didn’t—

  I couldn’t—”

  I swallowed, then, feeling like a fool, I nodded at the streak of attic dust I’d noticed on the sleeve.

  “I can’t get the smell of that place out of my head. I thought maybe it was in my sweater.”

  “I understand,” he said quietly, and then, as if reading my thoughts, he stripped off his own jacket, streaked with cobwebs, and laid it aside. He was only wearing a T-shirt underneath, but in contrast to my chill, his arms were warm, so warm that I could feel the heat from his skin as we sat, not quite touching, but uncomfortably close on the small two-seater sofa.

  “You’ve goose pimples all up your arms,” he said, and then, slowly, as if giving me time to move away, he put out a hand and rubbed the skin of my upper arm gently. I shivered again, but it was not with cold, and for a long moment I had an almost overwhelming urge to close my eyes and lean into him.

  “Jack,” I said, at the same time as he cleared his throat, and the baby monitor on the counter let out a crackling wail.

  Petra.

  “I’d better go and get her.” I stood, setting the tea down on the counter, and then staggered as a sudden wash of dizziness came over me, from standing up too fast.

  “Hey.” Jack stood too, putting a hand on my arm, steadying me. “Hey, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” It was true, the moment of faintness had passed. “It’s nothing. I get low blood pressure sometimes. And I’m just—I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  Ugh. I had already told him that. He was going to think I was coming apart, adding amnesia to my list of frailties. I was better than this. Stronger than this. I had to be.

  I badly wanted a cigarette, but the CV I had handed in to Sandra had said “nonsmoker” and I couldn’t risk unpicking that particular thread. I might discover everything unraveled.

  I found myself glancing up, towards the ever-watching egg-shaped eye in the corner of the room.

  “Jack, what are we going to tell Sandra?” I asked, and then the baby monitor crackled into life again, this time a more determined cry that I could hear both through the speaker, and coming down the stairs. “Hold that thought,” I said, and sprinted hastily for the stairs.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later I was back down with a freshly changed Petra, who was grumpy and blinking, and looking as tousled and confused as I felt. She glowered at Jack as I came back into the kitchen, her little hands gripping my top like a small marsupial, but when he chucked her under the chin she gave a little, reluctant smile, and then a proper one as he pulled a funny expression, laughing and then twisting her face away in that funny way children do when they know they’re being charmed into good spirits in spite of themselves.

  She let herself be settled in her high chair with some segments of satsuma, and then I turned back to Jack.

  “I was just saying—Sandra and Bill. We have to tell them about the attic—right? Or do you think they know?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jack said thoughtfully. He rubbed his chin, his fingers rasping over dark auburn stubble. “They’re sort of perfectionists, the way that cupboard was boarded up inside didn’t look like their work. And I can’t imagine they’d leave all that crap up there. Sorry, excuse my French, Petra,” he said formally, giving her a little mock bow. “All that rubbish, is what I meant to say. They cleared the house when they moved in from what I understand—I didn’t start work until a couple of years after they bought it, so I didn’t see the renovations, but Bill’ll bore the hind leg off a donkey if you give him an excuse to talk about the work. I can’t imagine them just ignoring something like that. No, my best bet is that they’d never opened the cupboard and didn’t know the attic was there. The key was pretty stiff, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had the wrong one. It’s only because I’m a stubborn bastard I forced it.”

  “But . . . the poison garden,” I said slowly. “They did just ignore that, right?”

  “The poison garden?” He looked at me, startled. “How do you know about that?”

  “The girls took me in,” I said shortly. “I didn’t know what it was at the time. But my point is they’ve done the same thing there, haven’t they? Shut the door, forgotten about it?”

  “Well,” Jack said slowly, “I . . . well, I think that’s a bit different. They’ve never been as hands-on in the grounds. There’s nothing up there to harm anyone, though.”

  “What about the writing?”

  “Aye, that’s a bit weird, I’ll give you that.” He took a long gulp of tea and frowned. “It looked like a child, didn’t you think? But according to Jean, there’d been no kids in the house for more than forty years, when the Elincourts moved in.”

  “It did look like a child.” My thoughts flickered to Maddie, then Elspeth, and then to the heavy manlike tread I’d heard, night after night. That had not been the step of a child. “Or . . . like someone pretending to be a child,” I added slowly, and he nodded.

  “Could be vandals, I suppose, trying to creep people out. It’s true the house was empty for a long time. But then . . . no, that doesn’t make sense. Vandals would hardly have boarded up behind themselves. It must have been the previous owners who did that.”

  “Dr. Grant . . .” I paused, trying to think how to phrase the question that had been hovering at the edge of my mind ever since I had read the newspaper article. “Did you . . . I mean, are you . . . ?”

  “Related?” Jack said. He gave a laugh, and shook his head. “God, no. Grants are ten a penny up here. I mean, I suppose we’d have all been part of the same clan back in the day, but there’s no connection between our families nowadays. I’d never even heard of the man until I began working here. Poor bastard killed his daughter, isn’t that the story?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked down at Petra, at the soft vulnerable curve of her skull beneath the thistle-down hair. “I don’t know what happened to her. She ate poison berries according to the inquest.”

  “I heard he fed her some experiment from his dabblings. That’s what the folk in Carn Bridge’ll tell you if you ask.”

  “Jesus.” I shook my head, though whether in denial or disgust, I wasn’t sure. There was something inexpressibly upsetting about hearing the suggestion in Jack’s cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, and I wasn’t sure what bothered me most—the idea that Dr. Grant might have killed his own child and got away with it, or the fact that local gossip had apparently tried and condemned him as a murderer in the absence of any concrete proof.

  It seemed impossible though that anyone would poison their own child, and it hardly fitted with the wild, grief-stricken face I’d seen on the web. He looked like a man destroyed by his own pain and despair, and all of a sudden, I felt a fierce urge to defend him.

  “The article I read said that Elspeth accidentally picked cherry laurel berries thinking they were elderberries or something, and the cook made them into jam, not realizing what they were. I can’t see how that could be anything more than an accident.”

  “Well, the folks round here would have you believe that he was—” He stopped, looking at Petra, and seemed to think better of whatever he had been about to say, even though she was too little to understand any of it. I knew how he felt. There was something obscene about discussing such horrible things in front of her. “Well, never mind. Not a pretty story, either way.” He drained his cup and put it neatly in the dishwasher, and then gave a little wry smile, very different from the warmth of his usual broad, expansive grin. “There’s a reason the house was empty for a decade before Sandra and Bill brought it. There’s not many from round here would have lived at Struan, even if they had the money to renovate it.”

  Struan. The name fro
m the article gave me a little prickle, a reminder that whatever Sandra and Bill had done to erase it, this house had a past, and that people in Carn Bridge remembered it. But Jack was continuing on, untroubled.

  “What d’you want me to do about it, then?”

  “Me?” I asked, startled. “Why do I need to decide?”

  “Well, it’s your bedroom it opens onto. I’m not a superstitious man, but I wouldn’t fancy sleeping next to that lot myself.”

  I shuddered, unable to help myself.

  “Yup, me either. So . . . what are my options?”

  “Well, I suppose I can board it up, leave it for Sandra and Bill to decide when they get back. Or I could try to . . . tidy the attic up a wee bit.”

  “Tidy it up?”

  “Paint over some of that writing,” he said. “But that would mean leaving it open. I mean, I could lock the door, but it wouldn’t be worth boarding over the inside again, if we were planning to go back in. I don’t know how you feel about that.”

  I nodded, biting my lip. Truth be told, I didn’t want to sleep in this room again, and in fact I wasn’t sure if I could. The thought of lying in that bed, listening to the creak . . . creak . . . of the boards, with that demented writing just feet away from me behind nothing more sturdy than a locked cupboard door . . . well, it creeped me out. But the idea of boarding the room back up didn’t seem much better either.

  “I think we should paint it,” I said at last. “If Sandra and Bill agree, of course. We can’t—we can’t just leave it. It’s too horrible.”

  Jack nodded. Then he pulled the bunch of keys out of his back pocket, where he had stashed them, and began winkling the long black attic key off the bunch.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, just as it came clear with a little click. He held it out.

  “Take it.”

  “Me? But I don’t want—” I swallowed, trying not to show the depth of revulsion I felt. “I don’t want to go up there.”

  “I know that. But if it were me, I’d feel better knowing that I had the key in my own hands.”

  I pressed my lips together, then took the key from him. It was heavy, and very cold, but to my surprise, he was right. There was something . . . not quite powerful, but at least an illusion of control in holding the key in my own hands. That door was locked. And only I had the power to unlock it.

  I pushed it into my jeans pocket. I was just trying to work out what to say, when Jack nodded again, but this time at his watch.

  “Have you seen the time?”

  I looked down at my phone.

  “Shit.”

  I was late to pick up the girls.

  “I’d better go but—but thank you, Jack.”

  “What for?” He looked genuinely surprised. “The key?”

  “Not that. Just—I don’t know. Taking me seriously. Not making me feel like an idiot for being freaked out.”

  “Listen.” His face softened. “That writing freaked me out too, and I’m all the way across the courtyard. But it’s over, okay? No more mysterious noises, no more writing, no more wondering what’s behind that door. We know now, and it’s creepy and a little bit sad, but it’s done, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and I nodded. I should have known it was too good to be true.

  I have been scared a lot in prison, Mr. Wrexham. The first night as I lay there, listening to the laughs and shouts and shrieks of the other women, trying to get used to the feeling of the narrow concrete walls closing around me, and many, many nights following that. And later, after one of the other girls beat me up in the cafeteria and I was moved to another wing for my own protection, as I lay there trembling in a strange cell, remembering the hate on her face, and the way the guards had waited just that slight instant too long before intervening, counting down the hours until the next day when I’d have to face them all again. And the nights when the dreams come, and I see her face again, and I wake with the stench of blood in my nostrils, shaking and shaking.

  Oh, God, I’ve been scared.

  But I have never been quite as scared as I was that night in Heatherbrae House.

  The girls flaked out early, thankfully, and all three of them were out for the count by half past eight.

  And so, at quarter to nine, I climbed the stairs to the bedroom—I could no longer think of it as my bedroom—on the top floor.

  I found I was holding my breath as I touched the door handle. I could not help imagining something horrible flying out and ambushing me—a bird, clawing at my face, or perhaps for the writing to have spread like a cancer out from behind the locked door and across the walls of the bedroom. But when at last I forced myself to turn the knob, shoving the door open with a violence that sent it banging against the wall, there was nothing there. The closet door was closed, and the room looked just as it had that first night I had seen it, apart from a few flecks of dust that Jack and I had trodden across the carpet in our haste to get out of the attic.

  Still though, I knew I couldn’t possibly sleep here, so I slid my hand under my pillow and grabbed my pajamas, quickly, as if I were expecting to find something nasty there, waiting. I changed into my pajamas in the bathroom, did my teeth, and then I rolled up my duvet and carried it downstairs to the media room.

  I knew if I just lay down and waited for sleep I would be waiting a long time, maybe all night, while the images of the attic intruded and the words on the wall whispered themselves again and again in my ears. Drugging myself into oblivion with a familiar film seemed like a better option. At least if I had a loud laugh track ringing in my ears, I would not be wincing at every warped floorboard and sigh from the dogs. I was not sure if I could bear to lie there in silence, waiting for the creak . . . creak . . . to start up again.

  Friends seemed about the right level of intensity, and I put it on the huge wide-screen TV, pulled the duvet up to my chin . . . and slept.

  * * *

  When I woke, it was with a sense of complete disorientation. The TV had gone onto standby in the night, and there was daylight streaming underneath the blackout blinds in the media room.

  There was a hot, heavy weight on my legs . . . no . . . two heavy weights, and my chest was tight and wheezing. Hauling myself into a sitting position and pushing my hair out of my eyes I looked down, expecting to see the two dogs, but there was only one black hairy monster sprawled across the foot of the sofa. The other hot little body was Ellie.

  “Ellie?” I said huskily, and then felt in the pocket of my dressing gown. My inhaler was in there, as always, but it knocked against something unfamiliar as I drew it out, and with an odd rush I remembered the key, and all the crazy events of yesterday. Then wiped the mouthpiece of the inhaler on my dressing gown, put it to my lips, and took a long hissing puff. The relief was instant, and I took a deeper breath, feeling the release in my chest, and then said again, more loudly, “Ellie. Sweetheart, what are you doing here?”

  She woke up, blinking and confused, and then realized where she was and smiled up at me.

  “Good morning, Rowan.”

  “Good morning to you too, but what are you doing down here?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I had a bad dream.”

  “Well, okay, but—”

  But . . . what? I wasn’t sure what to say. Her presence had shaken me. How long had she been padding around the house last night by herself without me hearing her? She had evidently been able to get out of bed and come all the way downstairs and tuck herself in beside me without me hearing a thing.

  There didn’t seem much I could say at this point though, so I just rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and then pulled my legs out from under the dog and stood up.

  As I did, something fell out of the folds of the duvet and hit the floor with a dull ceramic-sounding crack.

  The sound made me jump. Had I knocked over a forgotten coffee mug or something? I’d had hot milk last night, but I could have sworn I’d left the cup safely on the coffee table. In fact, yes, there was the mug still sittin
g on its coaster. So what had made the noise?

  It was only when I pulled up the blind and folded the duvet that I saw it. It had rolled halfway under the sofa before coming to a halt, facing me, so that its wicked little eyes and cracked grin seemed to be laughing at me.

  It was the doll’s head from the attic.

  The feeling that washed over me was—it was like someone had poured a bucket of ice water over my head and shoulders, a drenching, paralyzing deluge of pure fear that left me unable to do anything but stand there, shaking and gasping and shivering.

  I heard, as if from a long way away, Ellie’s reedy little voice saying, “Rowan, are you all right? Are you okay, Rowan? You look funny.”

  It took a huge effort for me to drag myself back from the brink of panic and realize that she was talking to me, and that I needed to answer.

  “Rowan!” There was a frightened whine in her voice now, and she tugged at my nightshirt, her little fingers cold against the skin of my waist. “Rowan!”

  “I—I’m okay, honey,” I managed. My voice was strange and croaky in my ears, and I wanted to grope my way to the couch and sit down, but I couldn’t bring myself to go anywhere near that . . . that thing, with its mocking little grin.

  But I had to. I couldn’t leave it under there, like an obscene little grenade, waiting to explode.

  How? How had it got there? Jack had locked the door, I had seen him do it. And he had preceded me down the stairs. And I had the key in my pocket. I could feel it, warm against my thigh with my own body heat. Had I . . . could I have possibly . . . ?

  But no. That was absurd. Impossible.

  And yet, there it was.

  It was while I was standing there, trying to get a hold of myself, that Ellie bent down to see what I was staring at and gave a little squeal.

  “A dolly!”

  She crouched, bum jutting in the air like the toddler she still half was, and reached, and I heard a sudden roar in my ears, my own voice shouting, “Ellie, for God’s sake, don’t touch it!” and felt myself snatching her up, almost before I realized what I was going to do.