Open Me Only When I’m Dead

She was dead now. My grandmother.

And I had the crowbar in my hands.

Grandmother wasn’t the sentimental type. Cold-blooded, my mother used to say. “She raised me like a plant she forgot to water.”
Yet at the funeral, they buried her with a rosary clenched so tightly in her fist it left red imprints on her bones.
She died with her jaw unhinged. Not metaphorically — it literally hung open, dislocated, as if she’d been screaming when her heart stopped.

I moved into her house a week later. Inherited, though not by choice. The walls still smelled like rosewater and sulfur. Her bedroom was locked from the inside.
I didn’t have the key.
But the attic was open.

I found the box beneath a mound of old quilts and moth-chewed dolls. There was no lock. Just those handwritten words again:
OPEN ME ONLY WHEN I’M DEAD.
I pried at the lid.
The first nail screamed.
The second snapped.
The third oozed black rotten liquid of who knows what.

Inside were photographs — dozens of them — all of the same man. Middle-aged, unsmiling, his eyes blurred as if he’d moved during every shot. His face looked… wrong. Like the camera couldn’t focus on him properly.
Beneath the photos was a sealed letter addressed to “The Last Living Girl.”
Me.
It read:
You must not look directly at him. If you’re reading this, the seal is broken, and he knows. He does not live in the photos. He lives in the act of looking. That’s how I trapped him. That’s how he’ll find you. — Jennifer

it's from grandma.

That night, my phone buzzed at 3:04 a.m.
A photo had been taken.
In my camera roll: a shot of my bedroom doorway. Pitch black — except for one thing.
A blurred figure in the frame.
Not inside the room. Just outside, as if watching me through the cracked door.

I deleted the image.
It came back an hour later.
I deleted it again.
By sunrise, there were six.

The thing was, I’d seen that man before.
Only not in life. In dreams. And sometimes in reflections — like he was just behind the skin of the world, pressing in.
But now he was sharper. Hungrier. Like the photos had fed him.
And I’d opened the box. I’d broken the seal.

On the second day, I heard breathing in the walls. Heavy. Wet.
And scratching.
God, the scratching.
I tore open a section of drywall and found claw marks inside — from the inside out. Some fresh. Some decades old. Some in sets of four. Some… human.

By the third night, I began coughing up hair.
Not mine. Coarse. Grey. Wiry. Like something had nested in my throat and died screaming.
I stopped sleeping.
Because in the dark, he came closer.
Every blink was a shutter click.

I burned the photographs.
I buried the box in the yard.
I recited prayers until my tongue cracked and bled.
Nothing helped.
He didn’t live in the box.
He lived in the knowing.

By the seventh day, mirrors no longer reflected me correctly. They showed my face, yes — but smiling when I wasn’t. Bleeding from the eyes when I blinked. Tilting its head slowly when mine was still.
The mirror-me began mouthing things. Not words. Just sounds.
Wet ones.

I tried to sort help or supposedly just raise awareness.
I texted my sister: “Don’t come to the house. Don’t open the attic.”
She replied: “You never had a sister.”
And she was right.
But the number was saved under her name. The profile photo was our childhood picture.
And she knew about the attic.

Day eight.
My eyes started rejecting light. Pupils wide and leaking. I walked with the curtains closed. But in every shadow, I could see him now. In the creases of coats, in the folds of bedsheets, in the static between radio stations.
He had taken shape.
He had my voice.

I recorded myself sleeping.
When I played it back, I heard something I’ll never forget.
The creak of the floorboards.
The slow turning of my doorknob.
And then — in a whisper thick with blood — a voice saying:
“You opened me before I was ready.”

I think I understand now.
The box wasn’t a warning.
It was a trap.
A prison held together not by nails, but by belief.
By restraint.
And I — in my arrogance — tore it open.
I opened him.

Tonight, I hear the walls splitting.
He’s almost fully free.
And I can’t tell where he ends and I begin.

So I’m writing this now, not as a warning...
But as a replacement.
I’ll seal it in something stronger than wood.
I’ll wrap it in silence and bury it beneath this rotting house.
And maybe, just maybe — if you're reading this...
You’ll know better.

Open me only when I’m dead.
And not a moment before.

end