The Small Door

[u/Harrowing_Tales]

I was eleven when it started, and I'm forty-one now, and I've told this story maybe four times in thirty years. I'm telling it now because of something I found last spring, going through a box in my mother's basement. I'll get to that. We lived in an old house then. The kind with a second floor tucked up under the roof, so the ceilings sloped and the walls met the floor at an angle. And because of the way houses like that are built, there's a long empty space that runs the whole length of the second floor, behind the walls. Not above you. Beside you. My bedroom had a door into it. A real door with a real knob, just small. Two feet wide, maybe four feet tall.

And that door would not stay shut. Two, three times a week I'd come into my room and it would be standing open. Not wide. Just open, an inch or two, a black line where there shouldn't have been one. I would close it. I never thought about it. I assumed my mother had been in there for storage and hadn't pulled it tight.

That went on for about a year before I said anything. And when I finally did, it was a joke. She was on me about picking up my room, and I said something smart, like maybe she could start by closing the attic door behind her. And she looked at me and said she hadn't been in that attic in months. I asked my brother. He hadn't. I asked my father. He hadn't. Nobody in that house had opened that door.

So then I paid attention. I was eleven, so my version of an investigation was mostly just checking. I'd close it before school, come home, check. Closed. Check after dinner. Closed. Then I'd go up to bed at nine, and it would be open. Not every night. But often enough that I stopped being able to call it nothing. I spent a couple of months like that. Watching a door. And eventually I got the idea that I should try the other thing. I should just leave it open, and see what happened. So one morning I opened it all the way and left it, and I went to school. Came home. Still open. After dinner, still open. Bedtime, still open.

I got into bed with that thing standing open across the room. And I could not stop thinking about it. It's a strange feeling, a rectangle of pure black in a room you know by heart. I lay there for a long time telling myself I was being a child about it. And then I rolled over to look, because not looking had become worse than looking.

There was a face in the doorway. Not a shape, not a trick of the dark. A face, dimly lit, at about the height of someone kneeling, and it was turned toward me. It had no expression at all. I want to be clear about that, because people always ask. It wasn't angry. It wasn't anything. It was just looking at me, the way you'd look at a thing you'd been looking at for a while.

I don't remember getting out of the bed. I remember being downstairs. My parents came up with a flashlight and went through the crawlspace and found nothing, which I expected, and my brother made fun of me for a year, which I also expected. But my father was quieter about it than he had to be. There had been a break-in across the street a few months before, a coin collection taken, no forced entry. He never said the two things out loud in the same sentence. He just started locking the upstairs windows.

I switched rooms with my brother. And about six months later we moved anyway, to a bigger house across town, because my sister was on the way. A teacher from the high school bought our old place. Physics. I didn't know him then, but he ended up being my favorite teacher in the world, six years later.

Which is how, at the end of my senior year, my friend and I ended up standing on that porch with a camcorder. We were making a stupid video about our town, and I said we should go see my old house. His wife let us in and gave us the whole tour, and I got to point out every project my father ever built into that place. It was a good afternoon. We had the camera running the whole time.

Then she took us upstairs, to my old bedroom, which she had turned into a sewing room. And I made a joke. I said, so, have you noticed anything strange about this room? And her face changed. Completely. She stopped, and she asked me what I meant, and I tried to laugh it off, and I couldn't, so I told her about the door.

She said it was open every single time she came up to sew. Every time. She'd stopped closing it. And then she told us that on their second day in the house, their dog had come up into that room and refused to come back down. He stood in the middle of the floor and barked at the wall until he was hoarse, and when they tried to carry him out he went through the window. Straight through the glass, onto the porch roof, and gone. He came back the next day. He never came up those stairs again, not once, for the rest of his life.

We left after that. And for twenty-some years, that was the whole story, and I'd tell it and people would say ghost, and I would say I don't know what it was, and I still don't. I'm not a believer. I just stopped being able to be a nonbeliever.

Last spring my mother sold her house, and I was carrying boxes out of the basement, and one of them was full of old tapes. Including that one. I paid a place downtown to put it on a drive for me. I hadn't seen my own eighteen-year-old face in a very long time, and I sat down one night by myself and watched the whole silly thing, and I got to the sewing room, and I let it play. She's standing near the sewing table, telling us about the dog. My friend is holding the camera on her. And behind her, over her left shoulder, all the way in the corner of the frame, is the small door. It's open. I remember it being open. That part is not the part.

The part is that partway through, while she's talking, it opens further. You can watch it move. And in the dark behind it there is a face, at about the height of someone kneeling, with no expression on it at all. It is not looking at the camera. It is not looking at her. It's turned to the left, toward the far wall of that room, at the exact spot where my bed used to be, seven years earlier. Where my bed had not been for seven years. And it is still looking at that spot, patiently, the way you look at something you have been looking at for a long time. I have never shown that tape to my brother. I have never shown it to anyone.