The night the door came again, it did not belong to any normal geography. Where it appeared was wrong—low against the staircase, half submerged in the hallway's dim like an animal finding its place to sleep. The wood had been aged by weather that had never been in this house; the knob was cold and pitted with rust.
Lynn froze in the doorway of her own living room and felt something ancient and patient watch her from its frame.
It moved with purpose.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket; Cyrus. She answered, voice barely above a whisper. "I see it," she said.
"Don't touch it," he ordered. His voice was clipped, closer than she expected—he sounded as if he'd been running. "Lock the doors. I'm coming."
She jerked the deadbolt and slid the chain. Her hands trembled. "What are you—what should I do if it knocks?"
"Don't answer. No matter what it says. Don't open."
The sound that came then did not wait to be invited. The door in the hallway scraped like a bow across strings, and a voice—thin as paper and too worn to be human—called her name.
"Lynn…"
It sounded like a memory of a voice. It sounded at once soft and hungry.
She thought of Mrs. Hale's warning. She thought of the dust-letter, Eli's single name. She imagined a thousand thin fingers drawing the outline of a frame, finding purchase.
Something moved inside the planks: a ripple, a rubbing, as if someone were sliding something heavy across a floor hidden on the other side. The sound was timed, methodical. It was not urgent in the way of a predator; it was patient as a tide.
She imagined the frame as a mouth opening.
The corridor beyond the door went black. Not normal black; the kind of black that suggested depth, not absence—a dark like folded fabric. When she stepped closer, the light from the living room refused to cross the threshold. It hit the dark and sighed out, useless.
She expected terror to force her away. Instead, she felt a pull—soft but definite—like a tether tightening at her sternum. A memory not her own brushed her senses: shapes scratched in plaster, hands kneading dust, a laugh swallowed mid-breath.
"Lynn," the voice said again. This time there was more to it—partial recognition, and something that tried to sound like apology. "Remember me."
Mrs. Hale's words flared in her mind: don't answer him.
She thought of Cyrus and his remorse. She thought of his half-admission—I knew him—and how it had sat in her chest like an unfinished sentence. Her hand curled into a fist. She would not be the one to forget herself.
There was a knock on the other side of the door—three measured strikes, then a pause.
A trickle of cold air seeped under its edge. The smell that came with it was not rot or mildew but something older: iron, water, the smell of rain on a street she had never walked.
"Please," the voice murmured through the wood. "Please—open."
Lynn thought of opening the door only long enough to see the face, to prove it wasn't a ghost. The idea felt like reaching for a live wire.
She didn't move.
The doorknob rattled, then shivered. A pressure built as if the frame itself were inhaling. The very walls hummed, and the lamp on the side table guttered.
Then came a sound from the stairwell—slow, heavy steps descending. The house seemed to count each as though making a promise. Her mouth went dry.
She sat on the floor, back to the couch, and tried to hush her breathing.
Cyrus arrived not ten minutes later—hair damp, jacket clutched in one hand, his eyes rimmed with something fierce that she recognized as a kind of fear he rarely allowed himself.
"You saw it," he said without preface, shutting the door and leaning his shoulder against it.
"I did," Lynn whispered. "It called me."
He closed his eyes briefly. The lines on his face looked older.
"We won't let it in," he said, as much to himself as to her. He moved to the hallway and inspected the knob like a surgeon deciding the next step. He didn't touch it. He simply stood there, quiet and watchful, as if he could block the world with his presence.
They waited.
The knocks resumed, harder this time. Bang. Bang. Bang. The door shuddered on its frame as if something was using all its weight against wood.
Cyrus's jaw tightened. "It's not asking to come in," he said finally. "It's trying to make us open it."
"Why me?" Lynn asked, though she didn't want the answer.
Eli's name had been younger when he'd been alive. He had been a person who painted, who hid in corners and carved shadow into paper. He had been lonely and then gone. Now, he was an absence that wanted to fill itself with her attention.
"Because you listen," Cyrus said simply. "And because you have a way of being present when others look away."
Lynn's throat tightened. She hated that he was right.
The banging increased in speed, not random now but frantic—urgent and relentless. The wood cracked along the hinge. Dust fell like snow.
"If it gets in…" she began.
"It won't," Cyrus said. But his voice trembled.
Something else happened then, something minor and impossibly wrong: light began to leak from under the doorway—not the warm yellow of the lamp but a thin, pallid beam. It painted the hallway floor in a color like old paper. The beam moved, like the iris of an eye focusing in the dark.
A shadow slid across that light, long and thin, with the slow elegance of something willing itself into being. It reached out an arm that was too long for a human limb and tapped on the floor outside their door.
Cyrus stepped forward like a shield.
The knob turned.
Not with the clumsy push of a hand but with a motion that felt deliberate and intimate—like fingers learning a familiar loop.
The chain they'd latched shattered inward with a soft, splintering pop. The door bowed. The seam opened as if someone had slid a lid.
Something pressed at the edge of the door frame: a hand? A shape? The smell of iron rose again.
Lynn felt the same terror as the first night—an animal panic and then, beneath it, a profound grief. The thing at the door wanted more than entry. It wanted recognition. It wanted to be seen as it had been seen when it had a pulse.
Cyrus lunged and slammed his shoulder against the door. Wood screamed. For a second, the frame held like skin stitched tight.
Then, as if denied, the thing outside made a sound like someone trying to talk and failing. It was not a voice but a corrugated rattle, a memory trying to shape itself through broken teeth.
Lynn realized with a sudden, sick clarity what Mrs. Hale had meant: responding gave the thing purchase. A name called into the dark was a hand extended.
She sat down hard on the floor, closed her eyes, and did what felt like the bravest thing she'd ever done. She imagined herself as a stone—weighty, dull, refusing to vibrate. She imagined the name "Eli" drawn into a circle and then left outside it.
The pressure at the door eased.
The shakes in the wood slowed.
The voice—the imitation—faded into something thin and unformed and then, at last, silence.
When she opened her eyes, Cyrus was breathing hard, cheeks flushed, and the door stood still. The hallway beyond it was ordinary and dumb as drywall.
Neither of them spoke for a long while.
Cyrus finally turned toward her, hands splayed on his knees. "You did well," he said quietly. "You didn't answer."
Lynn met his gaze. "I remembered what Mrs. Hale said."
He nodded. "Good. She's seen this before."
They sat together in the living room in the aftermath of a storm neither of them could name. Outside, the building hummed as if settling. The bruise on Lynn's wrist throbbed in time with her pulse, a steady reminder of the touch she had not allowed to root.
Somewhere—somewhere beyond doors and frame and the thin divisions of day—something waited. Patient. Wounded. Learning how to ask again.
Lynn pressed her back into the couch, closed her eyes, and promised herself she would not respond.
Not yet.