The Door
I’m a first year resident at the local hospital, so I often work
long hours and I’m always sleep-deprived. I do make decent money, if
not nearly as much as a licensed doctor, but on account of student loans
I live in a crappy apartment.
The bedroom of this apartment is tiny and the only spot for my
dresser is immediately to the right of the entrance. It’s just a bit
too long for the space, so the door only opens halfway before it starts
pressing against the corner of the dresser, and it makes an awful
splintering noise when you’ve gone too far. This happened often enough
my first month here that I’ve already left some big dimples in the wood.
Outside, the bathroom is down the hall on the left, the living room to
the right. The hallway is just wide enough for the bedroom door, with a
couple of inches leeway on either side for the frame.
Why is this important?
About two weeks ago, the door to my bedroom moved. I’m not sure how
else to describe it. I had just worked my second thirty-hour shift in
three days, and on four hours of sleep I was getting up for another one.
When I pulled open the bedroom door something struck me as off, and it
took me a minute to realize what it was– the door had opened
completely. I looked to see what had happened, discovering that while
my dresser was still flush against both walls, there was an extra inch
of space between the dresser and the door.
I shrugged, chalked it up to some fluke of the apartment walls, and
proceeded down the hall to shower before heading into work. When I got
home thirty hours later, exhausted and desperate for sleep, the door was
pushing against the dresser same as always.
Nothing unusual happened for a couple of days, but on Thursday
morning I was going out for another long shift when the door opened even
wider. It looked like the doorway had shifted even farther left, far
enough that I could see a half-inch of the hallway wall sticking out
beyond the door frame. It was as though the contractor had
miscalculated when he built the place, slightly displacing the doorway
from the hall. An inch more and I’d have been able to see insulation
and wiring.
I stared at that sliver of drywall for a few minutes, dumbfounded,
while my mind tried to come up with some rational explanations. The
building was old, settling, and this was just the result of natural wall
tensions easing. This disjunction had been there this whole time, and I
had been too busy or too tired to notice. I’d slept through an
earthquake, during which my room got displaced a couple of inches from
the hall. All of the explanations seemed plausible.
With work coming up in half an hour I really just wanted to get some
coffee and get out of there, so I decided to call the super after I got
off. However, when I got home the next morning the door was back to
normal, and I was tired enough to not even care.
Everything was ordinary the next day, too.
On Saturday, I was headed to the hospital again when I found that
although my door only opened halfway, grinding against the dresser as
usual, the hallway itself had shifted a good foot. The entire wall and
then some was clearly visible. To the left of the wall, where I should
have been looking into my bathroom, there was this black, inch-wide gap.
The light from my room only went a couple of inches into that shadowy
space, but I could see a floor that looked to be made of concrete –
smooth, featureless, and gray. This musty smell emanated from inside,
like from an old, dry basement, or maybe an attic that had been left
untouched for too long.
My first instinct was to just close the door. Clearly this was a
hallucination brought on by working too many hours with too little
sleep, but…the doorknob clattered against solid drywall. My door
wouldn’t close.
Confused and more than a little disturbed, I initially thought to
just leave. Get the hell out of there and worry about the details
later. The need for a rational explanation, however, coupled with a
morbid sense of curiosity, kept me from bolting out the front door.
I called out of work for the first time in almost a year, saying that
a pipe had burst in my apartment and that I needed to let the repairmen
in to fix it. Next, I called the super and asked him to come by.
Then, while waiting for him to arrive, I shined a flashlight into that
sliver of space.
There wasn’t much to see. The area ended at a cinderblock wall
roughly where my hallway turned, and although I was blocked from seeing
how far the room extended to the left, I got the impression that it was
big, maybe bigger than my entire apartment. Even if I was wrong,
though, the fact remained that there was a strange space where my
bathroom was clearly supposed to be. I even looked to be sure –
everything looked perfectly ordinary from my bathroom.
The super arrived less than half an hour later, but in the time it
took for me to answer the door and escort him back to my room,
everything had gone back to normal. As you can imagine, I got pretty
agitated, even frantic. However, when the super saw how upset I was he
actually asked me outright whether or not the walls seemed to be moving
on their own.
While I gaped at him, he explained that the previous tenant – a young
woman who had also worked at the hospital – had complained to him about
something similar. She had claimed that the wall sometimes extended an
inch or more past the frame of the doorway, but whenever he came to
investigate nothing was out of the ordinary. The young woman eventually
became hysterical, on the verge of moving out, but at his suggestion
took a leave of absence from the hospital instead. After that, there
had been no more complaints. She stayed until her lease was up and then
left without incident.
The super gave me a sympathetic look after he told me this story, and
asked whether I had been working particularly long hours recently, or
perhaps also felt trapped by my work schedule.
I mean, what could I say to that? I agreed with him, informed him
that I would be taking a break from work as well, and apologized for
wasting his time. The super was cool about it, since I guess he had
experience with this sort of thing, and even said that he was glad to
help, that the hospitals work us residents too hard. After he left, I
called work to let them know I’d be out tomorrow as well, and then
decided to turn in early to make up for lost sleep.
It was nearly midnight when I awakened. I’d been dreaming about
something – I don’t remember what it was, but it must have been a
nightmare because I woke up with this sense of utter dread washing over
me. It was like when you’re alone in the early hours of the morning,
silence hanging over your room like a sheet, and out of nowhere you get
the feeling that someone is in the room with you. Standing behind you.
Watching you. That was the feeling I had upon waking up in the
stillness of my bedroom at midnight.
And then I heard the scratching.
It was faint at first, so faint that I thought I was imagining it,
but gradually grew in volume until it was clearly audible from across
the room. Something was scratching at my bedroom door. That in itself
shouldn’t have been so alarming – I’d had mouse troubles at the
apartment before. I’d even heard them scratching at the walls at odd
hours of the night. After the events of the previous days, however, the
sound jolted me awake, that sense of dread deepening into real fear.
I slowly got out of bed and tiptoed toward my door. Up close, the
sound was unmistakable – the scratching was coming from the bottom of
the other side. Well, mouse or not, I reached over and, quietly as I
could, locked the door. Then I grabbed the flashlight from the top
drawer of my dresser, got onto my hands and knees, and shined it through
the half-inch space underneath the door.
The scratching stopped almost immediately. Then something reached in
through the bottom of the door. I was so startled that for a moment I
didn’t even realize what it was, and then it felt like someone had
punched me in the gut. Three fingertips curled against the bottom of my
door frame, wriggling slightly as though trying to push the door open.
The fingers were gray and skeletally thin, stained the rusty brown any
medical student could tell you was dried blood. Their nails were long
and ragged, clearly broken numerous times, with the splitting and
pitting characteristic of malnutrition.
And then I heard something else coming from just outside, carried on that musty, dry-basement smell.
“Help me…”
The voice was so soft as to be barely audible, but it was clearly a
woman, and I could hear panic running through it, quiet sobs underneath
the words. And then I could hear something else, a sound like soft
footsteps approaching from somewhere far away. And all the while the
voice continued whispering, never growing any louder but getting more
urgent, more rapid.
“Help me…please, please, please help me…it’s coming…
pleasehelpmepleasepleasehelpme
pleaseit’scomingit’
scomingpleasepleasepleasepleas
epleasepl–”
Then the fingers vanished, as though whomever they belonged to had
been violently jerked away. I could hear the sound of something being
dragged along the ground, something scraping frantically against the
concrete, but that noise quickly faded into the distance.
And then I heard the soft sound of footsteps approaching again. It
stopped outside my door, and for a while there was only silence. Then,
as I watched by the trembling light of my flashlight, the lock slowly
began to turn. Somehow, it was being unlocked from the other side.
I jumped up and slammed my shoulder against the door, dropping the
flashlight in my haste, and scrambled to lock the door again. Something
resisted my frenzied attempts to turn that little dial, and my fingers
were so sweaty that they kept slipping off. Before I finished turning
the lock, the knob twisted in my grip and whatever was back there hit
the door hard enough that the whole thing shuddered. Raw terror flooded
my system, and I pushed back as hard as I could, my body leaned almost
parallel to the ground even as I continued fumbling with the lock.
Whatever it was hit the door again, harder this time, such that it
actually opened for a split second. I was almost sobbing at this point,
but my bare feet found purchase on the linoleum floor and I shoved back
with all my strength, somehow slamming the door back closed. At the
same time, my fingers were finally able to wrap themselves around the
lock and turn it. Using the time that bought me, I ran to my dresser
and dragged it in front of the door, then sat down with my back against
it.
The pounding continued, even more strongly than before, but with my
dresser in the way the door stayed closed. After a few minutes, it
simply stopped, and there was another minute or two of silence before
the soft sound of footsteps finally moved away. Still, I continued
sitting in front of the dresser, back braced against it, too terrified
to even think of opening the door or heading back to bed. The only
window in my bedroom was too small to climb through, and I’d left my
phone on the kitchen counter. There was nothing to do but sit and wait,
which I did until the grayish light coming through my window announced
the arrival of morning.
It took me a while to finally muster the courage to push the dresser
aside, and even then I just stood there for a few minutes staring at the
doorknob. In the end, the need to know overcame the fear of the
unknown, and I pulled the door open just a crack. My hallway sat
outside, same as always, with no sign that anything was unusual. Even
the other side of the door was pristine, with no evidence that any
violence had been directed toward it during the evening.
With the door halfway open, pressing against the dresser as usual, I
slipped outside the bedroom and into the hallway, heart pounding even
though I was already doubting my own mind. Could it all have been just a
nightmare? Had I suffered a psychotic episode in the middle of the
night, terrified of nothing more than a mouse scratching at my bedroom
door? Did I spend the entire night camped out in front of my dresser on
account of a hallucination?
As I stood there, doubting, I let my bedroom door close behind me, and my nostrils filled with that dusty basement smell.
I ran. I took off into the hallway, practically clawing against the
wall as I dashed for the living room, and tore the front door open when I
got there. Just before I launched myself outside, I heard the
splintering noise of my bedroom door pressing against the back corner of
my dresser.
It’s been over a week. I haven’t gone back – not for my things, my
clothes, nothing. I’m crashing on a friend’s living room couch instead.
He brings me takeout when he comes home from work. I extended my
leave of absence from the hospital, citing a death in the family. I
tried finding the woman that used to live in my apartment, the previous
tenant that had also complained about the moving walls, but her address
forwarding had long since expired. Searching for her by name turned up
no results – not on any social networking site, nor search engine, nor
people finder. The super didn’t know any of her friends or family. I
even checked the FBI’s Missing Persons page, with no luck. I hope she’s
out there somewhere, merely beyond my ability to find.
But I have nightmares every night, ones in which those emaciated
fingers and soft, pleading voice reach out to me from a dark, endless
space. Still, I insist that every door in the apartment stays open,
because the last time I opened the front door, there was a tiny
cross-section of wall exposed, as though the doorway had been displaced a
half-inch from its usual spot.
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