Behind Closed Doors

She dragged herself out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut behind her, digging the key to the front door out of her pocket and walking up the old concrete steps. 

Despite the many surface-level perfections, there were still signs of her brother’s much messier life; when she held the key to the lock she realized it was still installed upside down from when Damien screwed it in wrong the first time and never fixed it, and when she pushed the front door open she saw that there were organized clusters of chaos all around the house. It looked exactly as she expected it to, in some ways. He wouldn’t have lived any other way.

In other aspects, though, it felt wrong. Wrong, because it was nowhere near as horrific as he described in the letters he sent–the ones her parents tried and failed to keep from her. 

Claire, Claire, Claire, Dear Claire,

My new house is haunted. I’ve been having these dreams, and the creatures–these weird, ugly things–they linger in the daytime. Talk to Mom and Dad, please. They’ll listen to you. I need a week away. Please. They speak to me at night, but it’s worse when the sun’s up. When the sun’s up, they just stare.

She tossed her keychain into a bowl on the hallway dresser, slipped her boots off, and left them by the door as she walked through the house, hands stuffed in her jacket pockets. 

There was a stairwell in the front hallway, a living room to the left, the kitchen and dining room were connected to each other to the right, and there was a bathroom down the hall next to the laundry room. Upstairs, there was an attic door on the ceiling, a closet, two bedrooms, and another bathroom. She quickly committed the layout to memory, searching for a secret room of horrors that would explain what her brother experienced. But it was only a house, and Damien had simply driven himself to insanity on his own. 

Two hours later she’d settled into the guest room, her few boxes unpacked into the drawers, still working up the confidence to open his bedroom door. She didn’t want to get comfortable or attached, not when she was only here to clean up and sell it. But still, curiosity shifted in her chest, heart fluttering and urging her to see how he lived in this place that he hated so much.

After so many minutes of sitting on the bed and thinking, and so many years of silently ignoring the letters, Claire pulled a notepad and pen out of her purse and sat down on the floor. 

Dear Damien, 

I’m sorry I never called or answered your letters. I read all of them. When Mom and Dad sent you away, they said it was for the best, and I believed them. We all noticed the shift in you, when you changed and started getting worse and acting less like yourself–you always talked about the people who stared at you and the figures who lurked, but no one else saw them. You were always so smart and put together before, so the shift was so much more jarring. I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry. 

It wasn’t the first time she’d written something to him with no intention to send it. There were hundreds of letters in a shoebox underneath her bed back at home, all of them starting and ending with ‘I’m sorry.’ She wrote it a lot, only because she felt it a lot. Yet she never sent any of them–if he were still alive, she wasn’t so sure that she was sorry enough to do it, to slip the paper into an envelope and send it out without hoping it got lost in the mail, even now.

She shut the notepad and tossed it to the side, leaving the letter inside, and looked around the room, wondering if her brother ever had any guests. Probably not–he never liked having his space invaded, and Claire couldn’t name one person he would have invited. Except for her, and she never would have come.

──── ִֶָ☾.────

That night, she dreamed of following Damien through a part of the house she didn’t recognize, but somehow knew was there–she knew it the way she only knew things in her dreams, like a buzzing, undeniable truth.

His face was hidden, his body turned away from her, but Claire could tell it was him; he looked the same as the day she slid into the passenger seat of their dad’s old pickup truck and drove off, watching as his expression darkened, turning him into someone unrecognizable, with the realization that they were actually leaving him behind. He was the opposite then of how he was back in high school before he’d lost his mind, disheveled and weary when he was supposed to be neat and perfect. It wasn’t how he would’ve wanted her to remember him, but the smell of the leather seats and the searing regret in the pit of her stomach burned the memory into her mind, and her own cowardice ensured she never saw him again after that.

He flicked a lightswitch back and forth a few times, before an old overhead bulb hummed, filling the dingy room with dim light that painted Damien’s pale skin a yellow hue. 

She followed him down the steps, expecting something to jump out and grab her when she turned the first corner. Nothing moved towards her, but the shadows warped in the darkness, squirming and shifting and whispering all around them. The walls should have been solid, but they constantly changed in a way no structurally sound thing could, like they were more of an idea or a jittering hallucination than the very thing that kept the room held together. 

One of the floorboards creaked underneath her weight, and Damien froze. He turned around on her, eyes wide and bloodshot, and raised a finger to his lips in a silent plea.

She waited, heart beating in her throat as an odd, with her mouth tightly clamped shut. A dull ache grew in her ears and formed a piercing sort of ringing that made her vision hazy. After a while, he glanced behind her and then quickly looked away, continuing down the stairs. She followed, more aware of the noise she made than before, but no quieter.

He turned around the corner, disappearing seamlessly into the dark. 

Claire’s heart sank to the pit of her stomach, like some deep instinct was warning her that something awful was waiting for her just a few feet ahead. 

The whispering grew louder until it was unbearable, chatters and buzzing digging deep into her skull. The ringing grew louder, too, as it mixed together with the unidentifiable sounds of the darkness. 

When she turned the corner, there was only pitch black for a heartbeat before stars littered the ceiling–no, no, not the ceiling, it was just the sky–and the lamp posts and neighbors’ porch lights illuminated the street. There was a faint noise of crickets chirping in the grass, which, she realized, she was kneeling in. 

She blinked blearily, glanced down, and gasped. Her head spun, and her throat suddenly tightened. She was clutching a sharp pair of shears, which she’d apparently used to cut up all of the garden’s deep red carnations in her sleep. 

God. She was going to be sick.

Claire hadn’t sleep-walked since middle school; back then, she’d have full conversations with her family that she never remembered in the morning, woke up in different places around the house, and sometimes even ate in her sleep. But she’d never gone outside before, let alone to do something so seemingly planned out–she didn’t even know where she’d gotten the shears from. 

She pushed herself up off of the ground, closed the shears with shaking hands, and walked back up the concrete stairs into the house, shutting and locking the front door. 

──── ִֶָ☾.────

Claire spent the rest of the night awake, cleaning up various messes around the house and organizing Damien’s belongings into some boxes she brought with her. In the morning, she grabbed everything with a sharp edge and locked it up in a closet down the hall. Hopefully, it would be enough to stop her from doing anything dangerous in her sleep.

She kept moving around the house all throughout the rest of the morning, and then through the afternoon until the clock above the stove blinked out 4:36PM in bright green and her cell phone was ringing on the kitchen counter. 

She swiped the back of her hand across her forehead and followed the sound, already knowing what she’d see before she even looked at her screen. 

Mom.

“Claire, hi! You picked up. How are things going at the house?”

“Hey, Mom. Things are going fine.” She bit the inside of her cheek, contemplating whether or not she’d tell her about last night, and then sighed. “It’s funny, actually, I had another sleep-walking episode last night.”

           There was a brief pause, and for a second all Claire could focus on was the blatant begging in her voice. 

“Really? Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure it’s fine. Probably just adjusting to sleeping in a new place.” Claire put the call on speaker, and kept working. “I did have a weird dream during it, though–and I woke up in the garden out front.” 

She didn’t mention that the dream was about Damien, that she was scared to fall asleep again, or that it truly scared her that after all of these years she still didn’t feel like she could trust herself.

“Oh.” Her mom’s voice crackled on the other end with her phone’s poor connection, but the concern was loud and clear nonetheless. “Well, I suppose that’s all the more motivation to get it on the market then.”

She taped a box on the dining room table shut and heaved it up and under her arm, carrying it down towards the hall in the back of the house, where she’d decided to keep the rest of the stuff she organized. 

Her mom’s words fell on deaf ears, as her focus shifted to a door across the hall from the boxes. Her heart sank, blood running immediately cold.

“Yeah…your dad and I…keep me updated on the house…the sooner the better…”

“Hey, Mom.” 

“You can probably…throw away his stuff..all…”

She cleared her throat, setting the box down by the ‘keep’ pile. “Mom, I’m gonna have to call you back later. Love you, bye.” She hung up the phone quickly, cutting off her mom’s confused, stuttered goodbye.

That door wasn’t there before. Claire knew that for a fact–she always checked her surroundings thoroughly, and that door wasn’t there yesterday. It wasn’t there that whole morning either; she’d been in and out of this hall many times as she worked through her brother’s clutter, and she would have noticed if it was there. 

Or would she have? She was stressed out the day before when she arrived, and got very little sleep. It was possible she missed it, somehow. It was way more likely than a door suddenly appearing, anyway. Those kinds of things didn’t just happen. 

She exhaled and shook her head, walking down the hall. 

The handle was warm when she grabbed and turned it, struggling with the door for a few seconds. She expected it to be another closet to clean out–an additional couple of hours she’d have to spend organizing junk into boxes.

But when she finally forced the door open, her heart sank at the familiarity of it all; there was an old broken lightswitch on the wall, a single lightbulb hung from the ceiling above a set of old wooden steps, and the room funneled down into a darkness that cut off abruptly at a corner. 

Oh my God.

It was a basement–the one from her dream. Less eerie and eerier all at once for the absence of her older brother and the whispering, moving walls. 

Much like Damien, Claire flicked the switch back and forth until the lightbulb blinked on, and then descended the steps. 

She paused at the last corner, almost afraid that she might take another step and end up outside in the garden again, before sliding her phone’s flashlight on and raising it to the darkness. 

The room was small, but far neater than any other area of the house. There was a desk on the side, with stacks of dozens of notes and papers and envelopes. The messiest part of the whole basement was a simple tin trash can, filled with crumpled up pieces of paper. This was where he wrote the letters, and every single one he never sent was right there, only a few feet away. 

As she inched closer on shaky legs, the fact that the place where he wrote her such deranged letters was so neat, that it was such a perfect imitation of before, disturbed her.

She sat down in his chair and reached for the garbage first, the curiosity and hunger to read every word beating in her chest as the ringing returned within her eardrums. She shook her head in an attempt to clear away the sound, and when that didn’t work, she settled on trying to ignore it altogether. It wasn’t important right now–not when she had this to sort through.

When she uncrumpled the papers, though, she saw that half of them were rough, grotesque sketches. Dark, distorted figures scratched and sprawled out against the yellow pages, staring straight at her like they knew she was there. At the bottom of the trash can, there was only one type of drawing that wasn’t a disturbing mess; neat, perfectly lined drawings of her. 

She was almost afraid to touch them, like they were something delicate and sacred–the last bit of proof of any small part of Damien’s sanity, all too fragile. 

It took her a few minutes to realize that, while they were beautifully drawn, they weren’t exactly her. Not in the way they were supposed to be. There was something small that was off about each one, nothing big enough to leave room for question that it was, in fact, art of her, but none of the sketches looked quite right either. 

Carefully, she spread the papers out across the desk and turned her attention to the fragmented letters. All of them had the same ragged, disoriented nature he’d come to write with towards the end. 

Claire, 

I’m scared that I’m forgetting things–things that I used to confidently know. I’m scared that I’m forgetting Mom and Dad, and you. I can’t remember exactly what you look like, and it’s killing me. Your face–why can’t I remember your face?

Claire, Claire, Dear Claire, 

I spent ten minutes trying to remember your name this morning. Now I’m afraid I’ll forget that too. I think I’ll just keep writing it down, so it’ll be less likely to happen again. Every day I wake up with less clarity, with more doubt about what’s real and what isn’t. I never send the letters where I talk about being afraid, but I am. I’m so–

A loud crash from upstairs jolted Claire out of the letter, a painful weight sinking in her chest. 

She pushed the chair back and walked up the stairs, legs heavy and begging her to not follow the noise. 

Turning around the corner and going back up somehow felt like walking to her own execution, her mind racing with ideas; the angel on her shoulder reasoned that it was a poorly placed box that fell and the devil argued it was an intruder. When she reached the top of the stairs and left the basement, though, she saw that it was neither. 

The wooden block and all of its knives that she’d locked in the closet earlier that morning were spread across the floor, and when she took one careful step closer, the basement door slammed behind her with an obnoxious boom. 

When she turned back around, the door was gone.

──── ִֶָ☾.──── 

Claire never believed in the paranormal, but she believed in her brother. That’s why, early on, she tried so hard to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe all of the bizarre stories he told her–and later, wrote to her about. The unexplainable quirks of the house, the shadowy movements in the corners of his eyes. But she was never able to convince herself that these things were real, not the way Damien could; going crazy was possible, a house readjusting itself and throwing knives across the floor wasn’t. 

And yet, it happened. She saw it with her own two eyes, experienced the house impossibly and undeniably come to life. All at once, Claire felt a burst of so many different things she didn’t know how to navigate–an experience she’d only had a few times, once when she first began to accept her brother’s loss of sanity, the last time she saw him, another time when she found out he was dead, then again at his funeral, and now. Now, because she had to reopen the same old, bloody wound that was losing her brother over and over again as she realized after all of these years, he may have not been crazy at all. He may have been right. 

She sat up on the edge of the guest room bed, which she had been laying quietly on for hours since she’d locked the knives back up, dangling her legs over the side and listening to the silence as she tried to quiet her racing thoughts. 

When she finally calmed them down enough to function, albeit in a numb state of shock, she slid down. When Claire’s feet reached for the floor, one of her ankles collided with something underneath the bed, sending it sliding across the wood. 

She froze for a moment before kneeling down onto the floor and pushing the blankets out of the way and up on top of the mattress. Reaching under the bed, she felt around aimlessly until she grasped a box and pulled it towards her. 

Nausea bubbled in her chest as she stared down at the shoebox, the one she knew she’d left back at home. It was just a generic plain black, and it felt much lighter in her hands than it was meant to, but just like she knew she was somewhere in this house in her dream, she knew that it belonged to her. 

Carefully, she lifted the lid off to see only one letter inside–back home, her shoebox had hundreds. 

Dear Damien, 

I’m sorry I never called or answered your letters. I read all of them. When Mom and Dad sent you away, they said it was for the best, and I believed–

She slammed the lid back on and shoved it harshly under the bed, clumsily dragging the blankets back down over the edge of the mattress. 

It was the same letter she wrote yesterday, when she first arrived. The same notepad paper, the same pen ink, the same familiar loopy handwriting she immediately recognized as her own.

It’s fine, she told herself, slowly standing up and crawling back into the bed. It was fine. Maybe she brought it with her after all. She packed up all of her things and moved from her house to this one so quickly, in such a rush. It was entirely possible. 

Claire stared up at the ceiling for a long time after laying back down, haunted by Damien’s exhausted face every time she closed her eyes to blink. 

──── ִֶָ☾.──── 

Sleep didn’t find her that night, though that was mostly because she stubbornly refused it every time her eyes started fluttering shut. It was better to be awake, where at least she could control her own body, if nothing else. 

It was pitch black outside, barely past midnight according to her dying phone, when her ears started ringing again. It was more agonizing this time than it was before, a sharp, constant pain crawling into her skull and burying itself deep within her brain with a newfound ferocity. 

Claire sat up in bed, heart hammering in her chest, and leaped up. Her breathing quickened the more she thought about the ringing, panic tightening around her chest the more impossible it became to ignore. She stumbled out of the bedroom and into the hall, where the bathroom door was cracked open, allowing a sliver of bright blue light to slice into the wooden floorboards. 

The ringing grew louder as she walked, the light pulsing against her eyes in painful bursts, as though she was staring directly into the sun. 

When she finally reached the bathroom door, she was so disoriented that she couldn’t stop herself from bursting into the small room, the sharp noise exploding into her head through her eardrums. Her body slumped over the counter, shaking hands roughly yanking the sink handle so that cold water began to stream from the faucet. She caught the water in her hands and splashed it into her face, like it’d make the ringing disappear. She shouldn’t have been surprised when it didn’t work. 

She looked up at the mirror and staggered back, heart jumping up to her throat and then plummeting down to the bottom of her stomach. A figure was standing in the reflection of the glass, a clear image of her brother standing right behind her in the doorway. She whipped around, but no one was there–of course no one was. 

She flickered off the light, swallowing thickly as the ringing finally quieted, a wet laughter bubbled up and escaped her throat. Claire couldn’t decide if it would be better or worse if he had been there when she turned. 

A loud bang sounded from downstairs as soon as she shut the door, and she froze in her tracks. The silence that followed the singular bang was eerie and absolute, pierced only by her wary, haggard breathing. Claire descended the stairs to where it came from–and, somehow, she already knew exactly where she would end up.

The door was there again, like she knew it would be. Her heart slammed against her ribcage, and every ounce of survival instinct screamed as she just looked at it, watching and waiting like it’d burst off its hinges at any second. 

Still, she jumped when another bang came from the other side of the door. Then another one, and another, louder and more desperately violent each time. The ringing returned, growing more deafening with each bang. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw shadowy movement around the house, circling in on her, but even as whatever it was grew closer, she never looked away from the basement door. 

She moved closer to it, stopping only a few inches away. Claire waited for another loud slam, but instead, there was a voice. 

“Claire.” 

Her heartbeat picked up, her breath quickening. “Damien?” she whispered, so afraid that speaking his name into the universe would make him disappear again.

None of it made sense–but did it need to? It was Damien. It was her brother. They would figure it out, together. 

“Claire, Claire–Claire I know you’re out there. Just open the door, okay? Okay? Please, open the door. Claire.” 

God, she hadn’t heard his voice in so long. The words were messy and jumbled, and just all wrong, but it was still the voice of the teenager she once knew. And he was right there. 

Her hand flew to the handle, still warm to the touch, and yet she paused before turning it. 

The walls around her whispered and shook, jittering with the shifting movement of the darkness all around her. It dug into her brain, pushing pressure into her skull. Her eyes stung at how overwhelming it all was, forgetting more and more why she was hesitating to open the door. 

“You’re dead,” she whispered, swallowing thickly. “I went to your funeral. I saw your body.” This isn’t real. It can’t be real.

“It is, Claire. I know–I know it doesn’t make sense, okay? I’ll explain it all. I’ll make it make sense.” His voice grew louder the longer she paused, until he was yelling. “Just open the door, Claire!” He slammed his fist against the wood, and Claire could hear him breathing heavily–actually breathing–on the other side. “I miss you. Just open the door,” he muttered, suddenly much quieter, much softer. “Please.” 

The shadows closed in around her, moving against her skin. Unintelligible whispers echoed through the house, half inside of her brain, half elsewhere. 

“Open the door, Claire!” 

Her heart slammed harder in her chest, catching in her throat so that it was impossible to speak. She turned the handle roughly, entirely unsure of what to expect as the inescapable impulse crashed over her and she harshly pushed the door open.

The world tilted sideways, everything shuttering into silence at once, as if someone had snapped their fingers and turned her deaf. No voices, no ringing–just nothing. Claire fell to her knees to the vibrating feeling of the door slamming violently shut behind her. 

When she gathered herself, she felt that her hands were covered in grainy dirt, a spade clutched in one fist. After a few rapid breaths, she realized she was in the front yard again. 

──── ִֶָ☾.──── 

It was late spring, and the house was beautiful now that they were unpacked and fully moved in. Their parents had stopped answering the phone in the beginning of March, blocking Claire’s number as soon as the grass was green again. She was surprised she’d made it that far without being blocked, if she was honest. But it didn’t matter much.

Damien patted the patch of dirt he was kneeling in front of, and for a moment her gaze was drawn away from his face and down to it. 

“–and these will be red carnations. They’re beautiful in their season, Claire.” 

She listened to him talk about the flowers for a long time, caring about nothing except for that this was her brother, the one she lost long before he died. She was even able to ignore it when he stumbled and stuttered over her name every now and then, the letters growing uncomfortable and unfamiliar in his mouth until he repeated them five or six times. Claire, Claire, Claire, Claire, Claire. In these moments, however brief, she had to smile forcefully as her vision swam and his eyes muddled. As his hands shook and his breathing hitched. Until he remembered again, and the ringing in her ears quieted down.

“It’s fine, Damien.”

He blinked at her, stabbing the spade into another patch of dirt. “Of course it’s fine. Claire–Claire.” Damien cleared his throat, an awkward smile capturing his face in a way that just slightly wasn’t right. “I’m glad we decided to move here together.” 

She smiled and dug into the dirt too, gently burying some of the seeds. The ringing grew louder and louder again, digging into her brain through her eardrums. “Me too.” 

Author

Amanda Weber

Artist: Amara Weatherby – “The Entirety of Experience”