Chapter 4 - The Locked RoomWe found the entire family gathered in the hallway.
Nobody spoke.
The brass bell continued ringing downstairs.
My mother-in-law looked at me with tears in her eyes.
“It's begun.”
I stepped toward her.
“What has begun?”
She didn't answer.
My father-in-law did.
“The ceremony.”
“What ceremony?”
“The one your family agreed to twenty years ago.”
I stared at him.
“My family?”
He nodded.
My husband looked shocked.
“Dad, she knows nothing.”
“That is exactly why she was chosen.”
My chest tightened.
“Chosen for what?”
Nobody answered.
Then a scream came from upstairs.
Everyone turned.
The scream had come from a room at the end of the hallway.
A room I had never noticed before.
My husband grabbed my hand.
“Stay here.”
He rushed toward it.
His father blocked him.
“No.”
“Move.”
“You know what happens if that door opens before midnight.”
My husband froze.
I looked at the locked room.
Something was moving beneath the door.
A shadow.
Small.
Fast.
Like a child crawling.
I stepped closer.
The shadow stopped.
Then a tiny hand slipped beneath the door.
My body went numb.
The fingers were covered in dried blood.
I screamed.
My father-in-law grabbed me.
“Do not touch it!”
The hand disappeared.
Silence followed.
Then I heard a child's voice.
“Mommy?”
I stopped breathing.
Because the voice sounded exactly like mine.
My husband stared at me.
“That voice…”
I whispered:
“It knows me.”
“No,” he said.
“It remembers you.”
The door suddenly unlocked by itself.
Click.
It opened one inch.
And from inside...
came the smell of damp earth.
Then something rolled across the floor.
A photograph.
I picked it up.
It showed my husband as a child.
Standing beside another little girl.
The girl's face had been scratched away.
But I recognized the dress.
It was the same dress I had worn in a photograph from my sixth birthday.
I turned the photograph over.
May you like
Three words had been written on the back:
THE FIRST BRIDE.
