The Kitchen Door

August 12, 2024

by Alana

Three nights after my grandmother’s funeral, I lay in my cousin’s narrow bed in her attic bedroom, the glow of the television painting strange shapes on the sloped ceiling. The old TV sat on a wobbly stand beside the door that led to the back stairs, a door we always kept closed because of the draft. My cousin, Rosa, was fast asleep beside me, her breathing slow and deep. I was watching a Brazilian soap opera, the dramatic music and rapid Portuguese a strange comfort in the large, old house.

It was past midnight when I saw the light. A thin beam of white, like a flashlight, flickered through the crack under the kitchen door. I frowned, confused. No one else was in the house; we were alone. But then the light steadied, and I realized it wasn’t coming from the kitchen. It was coming from the dark hallway beyond the door, and it was moving toward me. As my eyes adjusted, I saw two figures emerge from the blackness. The first was tall and gaunt, his shoulders hunched, and in his hand he held a long kitchen knife, the blade catching the light. The second was short and broad, almost round, and he held the flashlight, its beam pointed directly at the floor.

They stopped just inside the doorway, their faces obscured by shadow. I froze, my heart hammering against my ribs. I squeezed my eyes shut, counting to ten, praying they would vanish. When I opened them, they were still there, closer now. The tall one took a step forward, the knife glinting. I tried to nudge Rosa, but she didn’t stir. I whispered her name, but she was dead to the world. I pulled the blanket over my head, the cotton shielding me from the sight.

Under the blanket, I could still hear the faint rustle of their movement. I clutched the fabric, my knuckles white. After a long minute, I dared to peek out. They had advanced to the foot of the bed. The tall one was so close I could see the worn leather of his boots, the knife held loosely at his side. I closed my eyes again, willing them away. When I opened them, they stood beside the bed, towering over me. The short one’s flashlight was now trained on my face, blinding me. The tall one leaned down, his breath cold on my cheek, and I saw his eyes—empty, like a doll’s—reflecting the blue light of the television.

I wanted to scream, but my throat was closed. I pressed my eyes shut, my entire body shaking. I felt a cold hand touch my shoulder, and I knew the knife was coming. But then, a sound from downstairs—the front door slamming. The hand withdrew. I opened my eyes and they were gone. The kitchen door was shut, the hallway empty. Rosa stirred, mumbling, ‘Did you hear something?’ I shook my head, trying to calm my racing heart.

The next morning, I told Rosa what I had seen. She laughed, saying I must have had a nightmare. But when I went to the kitchen to make coffee, I noticed the kitchen knife block was missing the largest knife, the one with the serrated edge. And on the back stairs, I found a small, muddy footprint—too small for a man, but too large for a child. I never saw them again, but I still can’t watch a soap opera without glancing at the kitchen door. And every night, I put a chair under the handle.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Weeping Wall

The house on Ashwood Lane wasn’t just ugly; it was aggressively plain, a squat rectangle of beige brick that seemed to apologize for existing. Inside, the walls were the color of old oatmeal, the floors were sticky linoleum that no amount of scrubbing could fix, and a permanent chill hung in the air no matter […]

The Offering Man and the Dresser Child

I’ve never been quite sure if what I saw were ghosts or something else entirely, but they left marks on me that never faded. The first time was when I was eight, spending the night at my cousin’s place in the dusty outskirts of a small Nevada town. Her house sat on a dead-end street, […]

The Lantern in the Pines

The pines on our ridge have always been loud, but not with wind. On summer nights, when the air hangs thick and still, the back twenty acres wakes with a murmur. It starts as a crackle, like dry needles catching spark, then grows into the low, warm hum of a campfire, though no flame ever […]

The Lantern Room

When I was eight, my family moved into my grandmother’s old farmhouse after she passed. It was a sprawling, creaking place with a room at the end of the upstairs hall that my mother declared off-limits. She said it was filled with my late grandfather’s hunting gear, including a loaded shotgun, and that we were […]

The Red Door on Vantage Road

I was barely seventeen when I traded the endless flatlands of Kansas for the shrouded hills of coastal Maine. My father had taken a job as a caretaker for a sprawling, decaying estate perched on a cliff above the Atlantic. He thought it would be good for me to get away from the city, to […]

The Cinder-Faced Visitor

The summer I turned twelve, my father’s job transferred us to a dusty little town called Barrow Creek, out where the highways fray into gravel and the sky presses down like a lid. We rented a two-story farmhouse on the edge of the old orchard, a place with peeling paint and a porch that sagged […]

The Lantern-Keeper’s Debt

My grandmother always said the marsh didn’t forgive debts. I thought it was just her old-country superstition, the kind she sprinkled like salt over every conversation about the land. But I learned, the summer I turned twelve, that the marsh kept ledgers in reeds and water, and it collected with interest. We moved to the […]

The Last Ring

In the autumn of 1974, the small farming town of Bellhaven was gripped by an unseasonable chill. My mother, Elena, was eight months pregnant with my older brother, and we had gathered for the wake of my grandmother, Marta, at the old house on Cedar Lane. Marta had been a pillar of the local church, […]

The Dripping Threshold

It was the last Tuesday of June, the air thick and heavy like a damp blanket. My cousin and I, bored out of our minds, sat in his stuffy apartment in the sleepy town of Millbrook. Midnight was still an hour away when he remembered a forgotten place he’d seen on a long walk weeks […]

The Floorboards in the Hall

I have always been a skeptic wrapped in a believer’s skin, someone who reads every ghost story and listens to every whispered account, always hoping for a crack in the world’s surface. My name is Elara, and I have spent years chasing that thin, cold line between the living and the dead. My dreams have […]

The Static Between Tenants

My name is Elias, and for most of my life, I’ve been a skeptic. Ghost stories were for children and the gullible. But that changed when I was sixteen, in the fall of 1997, in the city of Bakersfield, California. My mom had just gotten a job as a night-shift nurse at the county hospital, […]

The Hollow Hour

At fourteen, Maya was a collector of other people’s endings. She read obituaries like love letters, memorized the dates and causes, and sketched tiny tombstones in the margins of her school notebooks. Her bedroom walls were papered with tarot cards, her nightstand stacked with dog-eared volumes on astral projection and the restless dead. But her […]