The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

Because I dig myself a hole with my words and instead of knowing when to stop, I keep digging.

I am not very good at failing, Mr. Wrexham, that’s the thing. Exams. Dating. Jobs. Any kind of test, really. My instinct is always to aim low, save myself some pain. Or, in the case of dating, just don’t aim at all, rather than risk being rejected.

I stood waiting, feeling curiously both watched and ignored.

Only that sounds as if I’m building something—a house perhaps. Or a picture in a jigsaw. Piece by piece. And the truth is, it was the other way around. Piece by piece, I was being torn apart. And the first piece was that night.

“Achlys—(pronounced ACK-liss)—Greek goddess of death, misery, and poison,” it read.

Because it was the lies that got me here in the first place. And I have to believe that it’s the truth that will get me out.

I hadn’t let the demons win. Not this time.

Still, though, it left an odd sensation of vulnerability—the way the foursquare front looked so neat and untouched, while at the back it had been ripped open, exposing all the house’s insides. Like a patient who looked well enough above their clothes, but lift their shirt and you would find their wounds had been left unstitched, bleeding out.

God, it’s like a metaphor for this whole thing, Mr. Wrexham. It’s all connected. The beauty and luxury of this house, and the seeping poison underneath the high-tech facade. The solid Victorian wood of a closet door, with its polished brass escutcheon—and the cold, rank smell of death that breathes out of the hole.

That, more than anything that came after, was the moment the key turned in the lock. That was when they knew.