The Locked Room

The root cellar was the oldest part of the house, dug into the hill before the walls above it were ever raised, and it was where the family had always gone on the night. The dark room, the inner room, the place you sat and waited to be chosen. Cal had not set foot in it since he was ten years old. He lit the lamp at the top of the stairs and went down anyway, because the thing he needed was down there, and because he was done being afraid of rooms.

The chest sat in the back corner under a sheet, exactly where his father had left it. Iron-bound, old as the house, and nailed shut. His father's nails, hammered in slantwise and angry, the work of a man sealing something he never wanted opened. Cal found a pry bar on the cellar wall and went at them one by one, and each nail came out with a shriek that the dark seemed to swallow, and the whole time the back of his neck prickled with the certainty that he was undoing something a wiser man had decided to leave alone.

The lid came up. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff with age, was a ledger, a thick book of brittle pages, and beneath it a bundle of loose papers tied with string, all of it in the same hand, a cramped, careful, old-fashioned hand that Cal had seen exactly once in his life, on the deed to the farm, signed Josiah Mercer in ink a century and a half old.

He sat down on the cellar floor with the lamp beside him and began to read his founder's words.

The first pages were ordinary, and that was almost the worst of it. They were just a man's record of building a life. The clearing of the lower field. The raising of the barn. The births of children, four of them, written out with dates and small proud notes. Thomas, a strong boy. Mary, who does not cry. A family beginning, in a green valley, a hundred and fifty years ago. Cal read it and felt the strange ache of meeting, on paper, the man whose blood had become his own, before any of the horror started.

Then the entries changed.

The fever came to the valley in the founder's seventh year there. Cal read it happen in real time, in a dead man's handwriting. The first families struck, then the next, the way it moved up the valley house by house. Josiah wrote of digging graves for neighbors. Then the entries grew shorter and more terrible, because the fever came to his own house. Thomas took to bed Tuesday. Mary on Thursday. And then, a week later, in a hand that had begun to shake: Thomas is gone. We buried him under the oak. Mary will not last the night. I have buried three of my children this month and I will not, I will not, bury the last.

And after that, a gap. Several blank pages. As if the man had stopped writing for a long time, or could not bear to.

Cal turned past the blank pages, and the writing began again, and it was different. Steadier, but wrong somehow, the hand of a man who had been somewhere and come back changed. And the first line of it stopped Cal's breath in his throat.

Let it be set down plainly, for whoever of my blood reads this when I am gone, though I will not be gone the way they will be told.

Cal read it again. Though I will not be gone the way they will be told.

He knew the family story. Everyone knew it. Josiah Mercer, the founder, had survived the fever that took three of his children, had lived on to a great age, had died at last in his bed one winter and been buried in the family plot under the oak beside the children he'd lost. There was a stone up there with his name on it. Cal had mown the grass around it a hundred times.

But the founder himself, in his own hand, was saying that the death they'd all been told about (the peaceful old man, the bed, the grave under the oak) was a lie. That he had not gone the way the family believed.

Cal looked up from the page into the dark of the cellar, the cellar where his brother had been taken, where his whole family had sat in the dark for a hundred and fifty years, and a cold understanding began to move in him.

Whatever had really happened to Josiah Mercer, he had never truly left at all.