The Blue Handle

We lived in a ground-floor flat on the edge of a town that always smelled of wet concrete. The building was old, with pipes that groaned like something turning in its sleep. Our place was a corridor of rooms, each one leading to another, and at the very end of the corridor, past the kitchen and the tiny bathroom, was the room my sister and I shared. The door to our room had a handle that was always cold, even in summer, and it was painted a strange, glossy blue.

I was seven, and my sister was nine. Our mother worked nights, and our father was often away on business. We were used to being alone, but not in the way that made you afraid. Not until the whispers started. They came from the direction of our bedroom, soft and sibilant, like someone trying to speak through a mouthful of sand. I would press my ear to the door, and the cold from the handle would bite my cheek. ‘Don’t listen,’ my sister would say, pulling me away. But I couldn’t help it.

One night, the whispers were louder, almost urgent. I crept to the door and saw that the handle was turning, slowly, from the other side. The lock clicked, and the door swung open an inch. A sliver of darkness, and then a thin, reedy voice: ‘Come in, little one. We’ve been waiting.’ I slammed the door shut and ran to the kitchen, where my sister was making toast. She saw my face and dropped the bread. ‘What is it?’ she asked. I told her about the handle. She frowned. ‘It’s the draft,’ she said, but she didn’t look convinced.

Our aunt came to stay with us for a week while our parents were away. She was a no-nonsense woman with a sharp laugh and a habit of tapping her foot when she was nervous. She took one look at our bedroom door and said, ‘That handle’s got to go. It’s the color of a vein.’ We laughed, but that night, I heard her arguing with someone in the hallway. I cracked my door open and saw her standing in front of our bedroom, her hands on her hips, speaking to the air. ‘I know you’re in there. I know what you want. But you’re not getting them.’ The voice that answered was not her own. It was a wet, sticky sound, like something being pulled from a jar. ‘We already have them,’ it said.

My aunt turned and saw me watching. Her face went pale, and she hurried me back to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. That night, I heard my sister crying, and then a sound like a door being ripped off its hinges. I ran to the hallway and saw that our bedroom door was open, and the blue handle was lying on the floor, covered in a dark, tacky substance. My sister was huddled in the corner, pointing at the bed. ‘It was under there,’ she whispered. ‘It had a face, but it wasn’t a face. It was just a hole, and it was smiling.’

We told our aunt, and she didn’t laugh. She made a phone call, and the next day, a man came with a toolbox. He unscrewed the broken handle and replaced it with a plain brass one. ‘That should do it,’ he said, but he wouldn’t look at the door. That night, the whispers stopped. We slept with the lights on, but nothing happened. A week later, our parents came home, and we moved out of that flat soon after.

I’m forty now. My sister lives in another state. But last week, I was helping my mother clean out her attic, and I found a box of old things from that apartment. Inside was a key, its teeth worn down, and a piece of paper with a drawing my sister had made as a child. It showed a door, and next to it, a stick figure with a circle for a head, and inside the circle, a smaller circle, hollow and black. At the bottom, in my mother’s handwriting, were the words, ‘Don’t let it in.’

I called my sister that night. She didn’t answer. The next day, I drove to her house. She opened the door, and I saw that her hand was bandaged. ‘It came back,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘It took the handle off the bathroom door last night. It’s learning to open doors on its own.’ I looked past her, down her hallway, and saw that the bathroom door was slightly ajar, and through the crack, something was looking back at me. Not eyes. A hole. A smiling hole.

I slammed her door shut and drove back to my apartment. But as I turned the key in my own lock, I felt something cold against my fingers. I looked down. The key was blue.