Monster in the Closet

There was only one rule: don’t open the door. It must stay shut all night, lest the monsters come in and gobble you up.

“Keep the door shut, Ellie,” her Mum would say once the sun went down. “Don’t open it til morning, you hear?”

And so Ellie never opened the door. Not when she heard the begging. Not when she heard the crying. Not when she heard the voice calling her name.

Ellie would emerge each morning, head downstairs to see her parents sitting at the breakfast table, blissfully unaware of all the terrible things she heard in the night. Ellie never told them what she heard. She didn’t want to worry them.

She knew her Mum didn’t like the closet, but pretended to be unaware of the noises coming from behind its doors each night.

The voices she heard calling out to her. Voices that sounded just like her sister. The sister that had disappeared years ago, when Ellie was just a baby.

Ellie didn’t remember her sister Emma. She saw her face in the picture frames, and heard her voice from the old video recordings.

But Ellie wanted to know her sister. She wanted to meet her.

The closet was perfectly safe during the day. In fact, Ellie often hid in there during games of Hide N Seek.

Little did she know, that’s what her sister Emma liked to do as well.

Ellie climbed into the closet after bed one night. She sat in the darkness, listening to the voices getting louder and louder.

“Do you wanna play with me, Ellie?”

This time, instead of cowering away, Ellie nodded, and moved further into the closet, and found the cold, bony hand of her sister.