The Keeper of the Yellow Door

In the damp autumn of 1979, I was four years old, and we lived in a narrow terraced house on Marrow Lane, a crooked street that hugged the edge of a misty fen. My bedroom was at the rear, a cramped space that had once been a pantry, with a single window that looked out onto a tangled thicket of brambles and a weeping willow that seemed to droop lower each year. The walls were covered in a faded pattern of rocket ships and planets, and my curtains were the same, thin and sun-bleached. I remember the door to my room was a sickly yellow, always slightly swollen in its frame, and it would stick if you didn’t lift the handle just right.

One evening, after a particularly long day of pretending to explore the moon in the back garden, my mother tucked me into my narrow bed. She kissed my forehead, murmured something about the stars, and left the door ajar, as she always did, so a sliver of light from the hallway could find me. I clutched my stuffed rabbit, Barnaby, and I remember the last thing I saw before sleep took me was the yellow door, half open, and the edge of a shadow that seemed to be standing just beyond the light.

I woke to a pressure on my left shoulder. I was lying on my right side, facing the wall, and the touch was cold, like a damp leaf, but heavier. I tried to turn, but my body felt pinned by a weight that had settled on the blankets. I could hear breathing, slow and deliberate, inches from my ear. The air grew thick and sour, like old pennies and turned earth. I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending I was still asleep, but the hand on my shoulder began to move, tracing a slow circle. Then a voice, not quite human, but rough like a saw through bone, whispered: ‘You left the door ajar.’

I forced my eyes open. The yellow door was now wide open, and the hallway light was off. But there was a different light, a sickly green glow emanating from the wardrobe in the corner, which was also ajar. I saw something inside it: not clothes, but a figure, tall and thin, draped in folds of grey cloth, with no face, just a smooth, pale oval. It was reaching for me with fingers that were too long, tipped with tiny black nails. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The pressure on my shoulder increased, and the hand that was on me began to pull, gently but insistently, as if trying to draw me out of bed.

I remember thinking of my mother, and of the smell of her lavender soap, and I screamed inside my head. And as if answering, I heard a noise from the kitchen below: the clatter of a pan, and my father’s laugh. The light from the hallway flickered back on, yellow and warm. The figure in the wardrobe was gone. The hand on my shoulder vanished. The yellow door was ajar again, just as it had been. I lay there, shivering, until morning, and when I woke, I told my mother about the man in the wardrobe. She said it was just a dream, and she hugged me tightly. But she also checked the wardrobe, and hefted an old coat aside, and found nothing.

Years later, when I was twelve, we moved away from Marrow Lane. The house was demolished, and a new estate was built. But I never forgot that night. And sometimes, even now, when I pass by a door that’s ajar, I feel a cold pressure on my shoulder, and I hear that voice: ‘You left the door ajar.’ And I know that somewhere, in a place between the cracks, the keepers of the yellow door are waiting for someone to make a mistake. So I always close doors completely, and I never open wardrobes at night. Because the hand that soothes you to sleep may not be your mother’s.