The Static Between Doorways

The house on Maple Street was a two-story Victorian with a wrap-around porch, its gingerbread trim peeling like sunburned skin. We moved there when I was six, and my room was at the end of the hall on the second floor. A heavy oak door separated it from the rest of the house, and despite its weight, it always felt flimsy at night.

I don’t remember the week of terror, but my parents retell it with a fearful reverence. For seven nights, I’d wake at 3 a.m., my screams cutting through the house like a knife. They’d burst in to find me shaking, pointing at the foot of my bed, repeating the same words: ‘The man with the empty face is standing there.’ They dismissed it as nightmares, or maybe the shadow of the oak tree that scraped the window, tangled with the glow of the streetlamp.

On the eighth night, my father decided to pause before opening the door. He crept to the hall, pressing his eye to the narrow gap between the door and the frame. He expected to see my small form thrashing under the covers. Instead, he saw a dense, black shape at the foot of my bed. It was not flat like a shadow, but had thickness, as if the darkness itself had coalesced into a three-dimensional presence. It stood maybe three feet tall, hunched, featureless except for a suggestion of shoulders. The edges of it seemed to drink the light from my nightlight, making the room feel colder, as if a window had been left open in winter. As he watched, it tilted its head—if it had a head—toward me, and something in that motion made his blood run cold. He pushed the door open, and the shape dissolved into the dimness, leaving only the gentle sway of the curtains and my still, sleeping form.

After that, my father did not sleep. He read every book on folklore and hauntings, and even called a priest, who came and muttered prayers. But the creature did not return. I slept through the nights, and we eventually forgot, or tried to. The house on Maple Street became just a house, and we moved away when I was twelve.

Years later, as an adult, I started having a recurring dream. In it, I am six again, standing in the hallway outside my old room. The door is ajar, and through the gap, I see the black shape at the foot of my bed. But now, from the hallway, I can see that the shape is not a man. It is a doorway, a ragged tear in the fabric of the room, and through it, I see the hallway where I am standing. I see my father’s eye pressed to the crack. I see the shape that was always there, waiting for him to see it. And I understand that the monster at my bed was not a monster. It was a portal, a subtle aperture in reality, and what my father glimpsed was the moment when the other side looked back. The house is gone now, torn down to make way for a parking lot, but I know, I know, that the doorway between was not bound to that house. It exists wherever a frightened child lies in a room that is just a little too dark. And sometimes, at 3 a.m., when the house is silent, I walk to the foot of my bed, and I wait for the gap in the door to widen, and for the empty face to finally have a name.