The Door is Unlocked: A Ghost Story

BY DR. AGONSON

Technically, they didn’t say I had to sleep. Spend the night, I think were their exact words. Well, I’m not really sure staying awake is all that great: The house moves as if stretching, creaking floorboards accompanying the strained timber in the walls. I’d rather oblivious dream cover this orchestra. A staircase, collapsed in part, I don’t brave, but visit what little upon this level resides: a kitchen, bare; a living room, deserted and ransacked; two bedrooms. The door to one, unlocked, is stuck, though I made no light argument against it, while the other, just as stubbornly dispositioned, had been left open before the hinges rusted and the ground beneath swelled.

I imagined these ghosts of the old occupants, though an echo to my thought humored that I had them reversed, a further refrain reminding me what utter speculation this was, and yet still I enjoyed the idea that one room was that of a friendly, outgoing soul—now hopefully moved out—and the other room the seat of long, dark and shadowy brooding, the boarder’s heart as well as his door closed to the common encroachments of the curious. I entered what room I could enter, and found it just as bare as the rest. That’s when I heard a knocking.

I know it was something, something on the other side of that closed door; a rat, perhaps, or mouse, but it knocked from behind that barred portal. And yet, and yet it didn’t sound like that, it didn’t sound like the happenchance of a dumb beast: it was a sure knock, an announcement; the knock was as much as a voice proclaiming its arrival, demanding an answer. It was the sound of knuckles on wood and not the scraping of claws.

I trembled, and for a time unaccounted to me, stayed like a statue of myself without feeling or knowledge. When coming back to whatever I had left—I imagine my mindless body stood awaiting some spirit to inspire it—I found it cold and wet; like a dew had settled upon me, and from a restive night suddenly waking, I was a stranger to my memories a moment. My back was to the door, to the closed door, and this should not be. What was it to turn and look? It was nothing, it was to turn, nothing more. To turn from, to turn towards, I’ve done many a time. What was it to face that now silent door?

I stayed unmoving, unmovable, in that house, that room, as the setting sun let in the grim night. Still, I could not turn. That’s how they found me, in the morning, staring out the broken window with my back toward the door, my mates all coming to see if I had really done it. My face, I think, they thought a ghost gazing at them in that cool summer morning when the stars, still shining, blow their goodbye kisses before the dawn. They called to me, and I didn’t answer; they waved, but I stayed still. They say I rambled as I came out, as they walked me out. I spoke of doors, unlocked, waiting to be opened. Or so they tell me.

Check out another ghost story: The Empty Room