The Painted Door

The summer of 2004 in the small town of Meridian, Ohio, was stifling, the kind of heat that made the air thick and the cicadas scream. My mother had just moved into a sprawling Victorian house on the edge of town, a place with peeling paint and a turret that leaned like it was tired of standing. The house had been a funeral home in the 1920s, and the locals whispered that the embalming room still held the smell of formaldehyde. I didn’t believe them. I was nineteen, visiting for the summer, and my only plan was to escape the heat in the cool of the parlor with my laptop.

One afternoon, my mother went to help our neighbor, Mrs. Gable, with her garden. I was alone in the house, the only sound the hum of the window AC unit and the occasional groan of the old timbers. I sat at a small desk in the corner of the parlor, facing the wall, where a faded portrait of a stern-looking woman hung. Her eyes seemed to follow me, but I shrugged it off as imagination. I was halfway through an email when the temperature in the room dropped so suddenly that goosebumps erupted on my arms. A cold breath ghosted across the back of my neck, and I felt a presence, heavy and malevolent, pressing against me.

I swiveled in my chair, but the room was empty. The portrait seemed darker, the woman’s lips curved into a faint, mocking smile. A wave of dizziness washed over me, and before I could steady myself, something shoved me from behind with inhuman force. I crashed into the desk, sending the monitor and papers flying. I scrambled to my feet, heart pounding, and turned to face my attacker. There was nothing there. But the air itself seemed to thicken, and I heard a low, guttural chuckle, like gravel rattling in a metal pipe.

I backed toward the door, my mind screaming at me to run. But as I reached the threshold, a force slammed into my chest, throwing me against the wall. I slid down, gasping, as the pressure increased, pinning me like a butterfly to a board. I could feel cold fingers tracing my throat, and a voice, not heard but felt, whispered in my ear: ‘You shouldn’t have come.’ The pressure released, and I crumpled to the floor, trembling. I lay there for what felt like an eternity, until the sound of my mother’s car in the driveway snapped me out of my terror.

I never told her what happened. I told myself it was a panic attack, the heat, my imagination. But the next day, when I passed the portrait in the parlor, it was gone. In its place was a blank space on the wall, darker than the surrounding paint, as if the picture had been there for decades and had soaked into the wood. I tried to forget, but the house seemed to breathe around me, and I felt watched even when I was alone. That was only the first incident. There would be many more, each more terrifying than the last. But the painted door, the one that appeared in the hallway a week later, that was the thing that broke me. It was a door that hadn’t been there before, painted a deep, glossy black, with a brass knob that glowed faintly in the dark. And from behind it, I could hear the sound of a woman singing a lullaby, a melody I knew from somewhere deep in my bones, and I knew that if I opened that door, I would never come back. But the house wanted me to open it, and it was patient. It knew I would eventually. We all do.