What Lies Within

A Family of Shadows

I didn’t plan to open the door that day. I told myself I would wait for sunlight that felt less like old milk, for a steadier hand, for some sign. But the sign had been dangling from the knob all night: the brass tag with Room M in polite little letters, tied with a bow my mother had taught me to tie as a girl. The ribbon’s tails hung perfectly even. I couldn’t stand looking at it any longer.

The iron keys were heavier than they should have been—tiny anchors dragging on my palm as I walked the hall. The portraits followed me down in their quiet way. The silver-eyed woman’s sheet had slipped in the night, revealing the corner of her mouth. It looked almost amused, and I hated that I noticed.

At the door, I picked a key by nothing more than the rhythm of my breath. The first wouldn’t enter. The second slid in and balked. The third—longer, uglier—caught. Something inside the lock shifted. A small, private sound. I felt it in my teeth.

“Please,” I said without meaning to.

The lock turned.

The door opened in a slow, sticky arc as if it had been sealed with something sweet long ago and had only now decided to let go. The air that spilled out was stale and familiar at once: lavender gone to rot, dust, the faint mineral cold of damp plaster. Beneath it, a sweetness I knew I shouldn’t associate with childhood, and did.

The room was small. The window had been nailed shut from the inside; the curtains hung stiff, the light thin as breath. A narrow iron bed sat against the far wall, its quilt patched with care and frayed where a small hand might have worried the edge. A rug had been laid down once to warm the floorboards. It was threadbare now, colors eaten by time into dull bruises.

I stood with my hand still on the knob because the room asked me to be careful. Not polite—careful, the way you are around a sleeping animal you want to stay sleeping.

On the nightstand, a photograph leaned in a cracked silver frame. I knew what it was before I picked it up because knowing is a muscle that remembers its work. My mother stood in a stiff dress, her hair pinned, her mouth in its straight hard line. Beside her, a boy—six, maybe seven—leaned into her skirt, his chin tilted like he’d been taught to present himself properly. His eyes were too light, too steady. A smudge of brightness the camera hadn’t dimmed.

I pressed my thumb against the glass as if I could blur him away.

“Matthew,” I said, trying the name aloud. The room seemed to receive it like a coin placed in a palm.

Something brushed the rug. A small sound. I turned. In the corner near the nailed window, a wooden horse lay on its side, one wheel cracked. A loop of ribbon—blue—peeked from beneath the bedframe like a tongue.

I moved closer and felt the floor dip; one board was looser than the rest. When I knelt, my knees clicked, and some old embarrassment hit me, as if I’d been caught doing something I’d been told not to do. I pried the board up with my nails and a snapped butter knife I found in the nightstand drawer.

Underneath: a folded drawing, brown-edged with age. I opened it with the care you give a body.

Three stick figures: a tall woman with hair like long lines, a little girl with a crooked bow, a smaller boy between them. The house stood behind them, too big, its windows like eyes drawn with no pupils. Over the boy’s head, in shaky block letters: MATTHEW.

I sat on the floor and bawled.

Not graceful tears. Small, angry animal sounds I didn’t recognize as mine. I hated my mother for her silence. I hated the house for swallowing a child and learning to like the taste. I hated myself for the flash of recognition I felt when I looked at him—some greedy, terrible relief that I wasn’t imagining everything, that proof existed, that the ghost in my hall had had a body once and crayons.

When I could breathe again, I wiped my face with the hem of my shirt like a child and stood. A word had been scratched into the plaster under the window, hidden by the curtain’s hem. I lifted the fabric.

REMEMBER ME.

The letters were jagged, dug in like fingernails. Below them: M. L.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth until my teeth hurt.

Behind me, the bed gave a small sound, the mattress answering some long-ago weight. I turned too fast and knocked the frame on the nightstand; the photograph fell face-first and the glass cracked right across my mother’s mouth.

The hallway beyond the door felt warmer when I stepped out, and I knew it wasn’t. The air in the room had left a film on my skin. I turned back and shut the door carefully. I didn’t lock it. Locking felt like a repetition I didn’t want to be guilty of.

Halfway down the hall, I felt watched. Not by the portraits. By the length of my own shadow.

“Matthew,” I said, not whispering this time. “I see you.”

The house made that small adjusting sound again, like cloth settling on a chair.

That night, I slept with the drawing under my pillow the way children hide teeth for a promised coin. I woke to the faintest sensation—fingers, smaller than mine, brushing my hair back from my face. The air smelled like lavender and ash. When I opened my eyes, my room was empty.

On my dresser, the blue ribbon I’d found under the bed lay in a neat loop.

And in the mirror, for the blink of a second, a boy stood very close behind me, looking at me with a steadiness that was not unkind.

Then I blinked again and I was alone, the ribbon bright as a bruise in the morning light.