The Hollow Door

My name is Elara, and I’ve never been sure how to tell this story, so I’ll start where the cracks began to show. I was nineteen, living in a cramped apartment above a bakery that closed at dusk. The walls were thin, and the only noise at night came from the hum of the fridge and the occasional scuttle of mice. I had always been a night owl, and that particular night, around 3 a.m., I was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, my laptop glowing with a movie I’d paused. The overhead light was off, but the glow cast long shadows across the room.

I turned my head toward the door that led to the tiny bathroom—a door I always kept ajar because the lock was broken. And there, in the dark of that doorway, stood a figure. Not solid, but a syrup-thick shadow, shaped like a man, maybe a young man, with his head tilted as if listening. He took a step forward—no, it didn’t walk; it flowed, like ink spilling across the floor. It stopped just at the threshold, and its head turned toward me, featureless yet somehow fixated. Then it raised a hand, fingers curling in a ‘come here’ gesture. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My breath hitched, and I just stared until the figure dissolved into the dark when my neighbor’s cat yowled outside.

I told myself it was a trick of the light, a shadow from the curtain, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had marked me. Over the next two years, I stayed in that apartment, and the door became a locus of wrongness. My cat, a skittish tabby named Miso, would hiss and puff up every time she passed that bathroom, her eyes tracking something I couldn’t see. She refused to enter, and I would find her sleeping on the opposite end of the apartment, her fur twitching even in sleep. I’d tried to ignore it, but the place felt heavy, like the air was saturated with silence.

I made it worse by playing with a Ouija board. A friend from work, a girl named Priya who was into the occult, convinced me it was just a game. We sat on the living room floor, the bathroom door closed and locked—though the lock was useless. We asked questions, and the planchette moved in clumsy circles, spelling out names that weren’t ours. I laughed it off, but Priya grew pale and stopped answering. She left early, and for weeks after, she refused to speak to me, only saying that I should ‘seal the door.’ I didn’t know what that meant.

One night, a few months later, I woke to the sound of breathing—slow, ragged, and definitely not my own. I lay in bed, my eyes adjusting to the dark, and I saw the shadow again, standing at the foot of my bed, its head tilted the same way. It gestured again, more insistent, its arm sweeping toward the bathroom door, which stood open despite my having closed it. My heart hammered, and I screamed. The shadow vanished, and the door slammed shut with a force that rattled the frame. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, and I prayed for daylight.

I moved out a month later, leaving behind that suffocating apartment. But the haunting followed me. In my new place, a small house with sliding glass doors that faced a narrow alley, I’ve seen shadows darting at the edge of my vision, heard footsteps pacing in the hallway when I’m alone, and often, late at night, I hear the sound of a door creaking open—a door that’s already open. The sliding doors sometimes slide open by themselves, and no matter how many times I close them, I find them ajar in the morning.

The worst is the eyes. In the reflection of the dark glass at night, I sometimes see a face—pale, gaunt, with hollow sockets. It stares at me for a heartbeat before disappearing. And last week, I woke to find my cat, Miso, staring at the bedroom closet, her fur raised, a low growl rumbling in her chest. I didn’t want to look, but I did. The closet door was ajar, and inside, deep in the shadows, I saw that figure again, its head tilting, its hand rising, beckoning me forward. I slammed the closet door and fled the bedroom. Now I’m writing this from a 24-hour diner, and I haven’t gone back home. But I know, with a bone-deep certainty, that wherever I go, that hollow door will open again, and its hand will still be waiting.