The Locked Cupboard

• 4 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

There was a cupboard in my grandmother's back room that was locked, and she wore the key on a chain round her neck.

Not in a drawer. Not on a hook by the door. Round her neck, under her clothes, all day, every day, for as long as anybody could remember.

When we asked what was in it she said old papers.

Old papers

Nobody believed that, and nobody pushed it either, because she was not a woman you pushed.

My cousin Sara tried once when she was about nine. She asked three times in one afternoon and on the third time my grandmother put down what she was holding, looked at her, and said, "Old papers," in a voice that ended the conversation for the next eleven years.

So it stayed locked and we grew up and stopped being curious about it, more or less.

After

When my grandmother died, the family gathered at the house, and the key came off the chain and went onto the table in the front room.

Everybody looked at it.

Sara picked it up.

We went into the back room together, six of us, in the middle of the afternoon with all the lights on, which I mention because it did not help.

She turned the key and the door came open.

Inside

There were old papers.

That is the part nobody expected. Three shelves of them: letters, receipts, a rent book from the sixties, two folders of documents about the house, a bundle of photographs held with a rubber band that had gone brittle.

Sara laughed out loud with relief and everybody started talking at once.

It took us about a minute to notice the fourth shelf.

The fourth shelf

It was empty except for one thing, which was a small notebook lying in the middle of it.

Sara opened it.

It was a list, in my grandmother's handwriting, of dates. They went back to 1974 and forward to about six years ago, and there were perhaps ninety of them, spaced out irregularly, sometimes two in a month and sometimes none for a year.

Next to each date was a single word, and the word was always the same.

Checked.

What we did

We took the papers out and went through all of them properly over the next few days, and there was nothing else. No explanation, no letter, nothing addressed to anyone.

The notebook is in my house now.

And I have thought about it for a long time, and the thing I keep arriving at is this.

She did not lock that cupboard to keep us out. If that were it, the key would have been in a drawer.

She wore it round her neck for fifty years because she was the only one who was allowed to open it, and roughly four times a year, for fifty years, she opened it and looked at whatever was on that fourth shelf and wrote down that she had.

And the last date in the book is six years before she died.

Which means that at some point she stopped checking, and I do not know why, and the shelf was empty when we opened it.