The Crossed Thresholds

Our first house sat on a ridge above a valley that filled with fog like a bowl of milk. When we moved to the old farmhouse on Hollow Creek Road, my mother, a woman who hung dried rosemary over every door and kept a small dish of sea salt on the windowsill, blessed the place with holy water and sage smoke. She traced salt lines along the foundation and whispered prayers into the corners. She said it was better to be safe than sorry, and I believed her, though I was sixteen and eager to find ghosts in the creaking floorboards.

The farmhouse was a colonial relic with a sunken parlor and a staircase that bent at an unnatural angle halfway up. My mother took the bedroom with the two closets and a small enclosed porch that overlooked the creek. I took the room across the hall, with a window that faced the barn, which had long since collapsed into a pile of rotted timber. The first week passed without incident, save for the sense that the house was holding its breath, waiting for us to settle in before it released something it had been keeping.

It began with my mother’s dreams. She would wake in the night, not with a start, but with a calm, dreamlike clarity, and find herself standing in one of her three thresholds—the doorway of the first closet, the doorway of the second closet, or the door to the porch. She would be perfectly still, her palms flat against the doorframe, her nightgown damp with sweat. She didn’t remember getting up. She didn’t remember walking. It was as if the house had moved her while she slept.

I dismissed it as sleepwalking, but then the bruises appeared. They were on her thighs, on her calves, and once on her upper arm, each one the size of a thumbprint, arranged in a perfect crescent of five. They looked like hands had pressed into her skin with tremendous force. I counted them one morning while she sat on the edge of her bed, her legs trembling. ‘They’re getting darker, Mom,’ I said. She just pulled the blanket over her knees and whispered, ‘It was waiting for me at the porch door last night, Robin. It was a tall, gray shape, and it didn’t have a face, but it reached out with hands that were too long…’

I chalked it up to a nightmare, but I couldn’t shake the fear that crept into my own room. That night, I left my door open a crack, and I saw her, just after midnight, walking down the hall. Her eyes were open, but they were glassy, and she was humming a tune I didn’t recognize. She went into the porch room, and I heard the door click shut. I crept closer and pressed my ear to the panel. There was a low, wet sound, like a heavy cloth being wrung out, and then a woman’s voice, not my mother’s, but old and brittle, singing in a language I didn’t know.

A few years later, when I was in my twenties, my mother moved into a small apartment on the other side of town. I stayed in the farmhouse, hoping to rent it out, but no one would stay longer than a week. They complained of cold spots and of feeling watched. The final blow came when a heavyset man with a beard swore that he saw a child’s hand under the bed, and left without his deposit.

Then the cat came. She was a scrawny stray with matted fur and one torn ear, and she used to sit on the porch of the farmhouse and stare at the door. I took her in, half out of pity, half because I thought she might chase off the mice. She slept at the foot of my bed, and for a time, the nights were quiet. But the cat was skittish, and she would hiss and arch her back at nothing. One night, I woke to find her sitting on my chest, her green eyes reflecting the moonlight, and she was pawing at the air as if batting at invisible strings.

The cat began to follow my mother when she visited. She would sit outside her bedroom door and yowl. My mother, who had always been spiritual, began to have the dreams again, but this time, she said, the dream was different. She was standing at the porch door, and the tall gray shape was there, but instead of reaching out, it pointed at the cat. ‘It wants the cat,’ she said, her voice thin. ‘It wants the cat to open the door.’

I didn’t understand until the next night, when I was alone in the farmhouse with the cat. I heard the porch door creak open, and I saw a shadow spread across the floor like spilled ink. The cat yowled and darted under the bed. I turned on the light, and the shadow retreated, but not quickly enough. I caught a glimpse of a long, thin hand with nails like yellowed thorns, and then it was gone.

I called my mother, but she didn’t answer. I drove to her apartment, and found her sitting in the dark, her hands wrapped around a cup of cold tea. She looked up at me, and her eyes were clear, which frightened me more than anything. ‘I know what it is, Robin,’ she said. ‘It’s a doorway, not a thing. It uses the thresholds. It confuses the mind. And the cat, the cat is a key. It’s been waiting for a key all these years.’

I didn’t want to believe her, but that night, as I sat with the cat in my lap, I saw it again. The door to the porch was open, and the shape stood there, a tall gray figure with a head that tilted slowly, as if listening. The cat went rigid, and then it jumped down and trotted toward the door. I shouted, but the cat didn’t stop. It walked straight through the doorway, and the shape closed around it like a fist, and then the door slammed shut, and the lock turned on its own.

The cat was gone. I never saw her again. But the bruises on my mother’s legs faded, and she slept through the night for the first time in years. I sold the farmhouse at a loss and moved to a city apartment with a concrete floor and no doors that opened onto the dark. But sometimes, late at night, I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I know it’s not my mother’s. It’s long and thin, with nails like thorns, and it presses just hard enough to leave a bruise that looks like a fingerprint.