The Cellar Door’s Hunger

I was fifteen the summer my mother and I moved into my great-aunt’s house in the backwoods of Vermont. The place was a rambling Victorian that had been in the family for generations, but the plumbing was suspect and the wiring was older than the town’s only traffic light. My room was at the end of a long hallway, and directly across from it was a door I’d been told never to open. It led to the cellar, and the cellar, my aunt whispered, was where the old house kept its secrets.

On the third day, my mother had to work an overnight shift at the hospital, and my aunt had gone to visit a friend in the next town, leaving me alone. I was sprawled on my bed watching a rerun of some game show, the light of the small TV flickering across the peeling wallpaper. It was about eight o’clock, and the house was settling into its nightly groans. Then I heard it: a sound like something dragging across the basement floor, a heavy, wet scrape. I froze, listening. The sound stopped. I convinced myself it was just a raccoon or a rat, but after a few minutes, it started again, and this time it was accompanied by a rhythmic thumping, like a heartbeat.

I got up and walked to the cellar door. The wood was blistered with old paint, and the brass knob was tarnished almost black. I pressed my ear against it. The thumping was louder, and beneath it, a sound like a voice, muffled and desperate, but I couldn’t make out words. I wanted to open it, to see what was down there, but my aunt’s warning echoed in my head: ‘Don’t ever open that door, boy, no matter what you hear.’ I took a step back. The thumping stopped. Then the knob began to turn.

It moved slowly at first, with a metal-on-metal grind, then faster, as if whatever was on the other side had finally found the handle. I stumbled backward, my heart pounding. The door rattled in its frame. I ran to my room and slammed my door shut, pressing my back against it. The knob on my own door started to turn, and for a moment I thought it was going to open, but then it stopped. There was a long silence, and then a sound like fingernails on wood, trailing down the hallway, growing distant.

I stayed in my room the rest of the night, listening. Around midnight, the house went completely quiet, even the usual creaks. The next morning, my mother found me huddled in a corner, and when she asked what was wrong, I told her. She laughed it off, saying it was just the wind or a loose hinge. But when she went to the cellar to get a jar of preserves for breakfast, she came back empty-handed, her face pale. The cellar door was open, and the stairs leading down were covered in a thick, dark slime. She never went down there again, and we moved out two weeks later.

I’ve never forgotten that door, and lately, I’ve been hearing that thumping at night again, no matter where I live. Last week, I found a new apartment, and the first thing I saw when I walked in was a door at the end of the hall, across from the bedroom, identical to the one in my aunt’s house. The realtor said it was a storage closet. But when I pressed my ear to it, I heard a sound like something dragging, and the knob started to turn. I know now that some doors are not just doors. They are mouths, and they are always hungry.