A Sealed Past

 

A woman finished placing one last book on the shelf before wiping the sweat off her forehead. She turned around to face a pile of opened and unopened boxes and then looked up at the clock: it was already midnight. The woman decided to resume unpacking the next day and got ready for bed. However, while getting under the sheets, she heard giggles downstairs.

The woman got out of bed and approached the staircase slowly. To her surprise, there were two little girls in the living room downstairs; they couldn’t have been over eight years old. However, the girls noticed her and ran away. The woman went after them, saying she meant no harm, but she lost them once they ran into the hallway next to the living room. It was as if they had just vanished. The woman then called the police, and two officers arrived at her house moments later.

“Are you sure they’re still in the house, Ms. Morgan?”

“Yes. All the doors and windows are still locked.”

“Alright, we’ll do a sweep.”

The officers searched every inch of the house, but found no sign of the girls. They told Morgan to let them know if the girls were to return. She locked the front door and looked around before going back to bed. But she couldn’t rest. Not long after, the giggling came back. Morgan tip-toed her way downstairs and tried to grab one girl’s hand, but her own went right through. The girls got started and moved away from her.

Morgan couldn’t move, or rather, she dared not to. She crawled back towards the wall while watching the girls move away, wondering if her aunt had left her a haunted house. At that moment, she remembered something: her aunt, Cathy, had twins who went missing over twenty years ago. A year later, Cathy had divorced her second husband, Victor, and moved out of the house to stay with Morgan and her mother. Morgan slowly rose to her feet and took a step forward. She spoke through trembling lips as she approached the ghost twins.

“Claudia, Cameron, I’m your cousin: Morgan.”

“Don’t lie. Morgan is younger than us.”

“I’m telling the truth; it has been twenty-two years since...”

“Since what?”

“You two went missing.”

Morgan spoke of how her aunt described them to her, as well as what games they loved to play. The twins eventually believed her. Morgan asked them what had happened; they said the last thing they remembered was waking up inside a narrow, dark space. From the way they described it, Morgan could only assume that they were sealed inside a wall. The twins said that they had drunk some milk beforehand, which had been given to them by their stepfather.

Morgan felt chills run down her back when she heard that sentence. She clenched her fists and asked them where they woke up again as ghosts inside the house; they said it was the basement. She grabbed a sledgehammer and went to the basement. It was not long before she discovered the skeletons of her cousins. Morgan then called the cops immediately.

DNA tests were carried out and Victor was found guilty of the double homicide a month later. Morgan soon sold the house and moved to another city; she couldn’t live there with the knowledge of its dark past.