I was about ten or twelve when I first saw it. My cousin and I were playing in an old abandoned house at the edge of town. Kicking stones and flinging sticks in our boredom, letting our curiosity lead the way. When we first entered the house it had a creepy ominous ambiance to it. A soft glow of light slid in through the heavily stained windows giving the rooms shadows of all shapes. Some seemed alive and unattached to anything. Old chairs were on their sides and a few tables were overturned. All the rooms had brown rotted paint peeling from the walls. A urine stench filled the air and the yellow glow of the tainted windows made it look urine stained as well.
We went upstairs and saw it. It was a reddish brown door with a symbol drawn in crayon or something on the top center. It was a circle with five small stars around it. It was a thick heavy looking door with etchings around the border. The door didn't seem special or particularly interesting except for the symbol and even if we had known what it meant we would have still went into the room and explored. The room was completely empty save for a chair facing the far corner away from us. The one window it had overlooked the back weed-infested yellow yard.
We began to walk out when my cousin noticed dead bolt locks on the door. So we closed the door and began messing with the locks a bit. We fumbled around with locking and unlocking them. There were three of them. Then we realized the locks were backwards with the turning mechanism on the outside and the key hole on the inside of the room. Then all of a sudden all the locks wouldn't open again. We were about to leave when the sound of soft scratching began coming from inside the room against the door. We stood silently for a few moments listening and tried to convince one another that it was a mouse or a rat; but when we realized the scratching wasn't coming from the bottom of the door but rather from the center we froze in fear. Our curiosity faded when we began to hear low moaning whispers slip out from under the door.
We couldn't move. Our fear had completely overtaken us and that ominous ambiance from before had grown to something more sinister. The whole house felt darker and the light that been there had faded to almost nothing. It was as if though the dark bowels of hell itself had come with its long black drapes to cover the house. Shear panic boiled inside my gut but the fear killed every rational instinct and kept me from moving. We stood there listening in fear to the hellish scratching coming from the other side of the door. It sounded like finger nails gnawing away at the wood bit by bit. We could only listen as the raspy whispers began to get louder and formed into moans of agony and pain.
Finally, panic overwhelmed us and we both ran down the stairs to the front door but it was now locked. Our eyes bulged in disbelief and paranoid thoughts of death and pain entered my mind. We were scared beyond our wits. We stood there yelling for help, crying and banging on the door. Then fell silent as we heard the dead bolts upstairs unlock themselves. Three clicks one right after the other. We couldn't move. I could barely breath. The tears were rolling down our faces when we began to hear something dragging itself across the wooden floor. We couldn't see upstairs to the door from where we were but we could hear every horrifying sound coming from there. We could hear something sliding closer. The absolute terror finally overtook me enough that I grabbed a chair and broke open a window.
I've spent countless years of my youth trying to forget that day. I was even happy to hear they were bulldozing that house. I've tried to convince myself it didn't happen. I was even close to doing so until one night when I was 16, I woke up around 2 am to a man's voice muttering incoherently to himself. I slowly opened my eyes and looked across my dark room into the far corner and there sitting in a chair facing the corner was a man whispering madness to the edges of the wall. My eyes widened with fear and that same fear again kept me frozen where I lay. I finally realized after a few moments I wasn't breathing and let out a small breath. That's when he said something to me.
"Sometimes I close my eyes so tight it hurts, but the terror never goes away Will."
I realized then it was my cousin. He turned to me crying with bloodshot red eyes and said, "I've been in the room Will. You know which room. I know you haven't forgotten about that door. I've been in that room not because I went back there, no. It followed me Will. I was asleep like you and when I woke up I was laying in my bed but behind that fucking door. I would recognize that door from anywhere just like I know you can. I tried opening it but it was locked from the outside. Remember. I couldn't get out Will. I kept scratching and pounding but I couldn't get out. See. Look." He rose up his hands showing me bloody scabs where his fingernails used to be and dark bruises on his forearms where he was banging. He began shaking violently and fell to the floor in a convulsive shock. I rushed to him and called for my parents. He fell into a coma that night that he would stay in for 4 years.
Since then I wake up in paranoia almost every night afraid I too will be behind that door. I had it under control until finally something did happen to me about 2 years ago. I was living in the city at the time. I was sitting in bed with my bedside lamp on reading a book. I had my door cracked halfway open as I always do now because I can't sleep with any door closed anymore. As I looked over to the dark doorway, shadow filling the hallway, a face lay there on the ground looking up at me. I jolted and gasped in complete horror as whatever body it was attached to scurried backward into the darkness. I recognized the face, it was my cousin's but that was impossible he was in a coma, lying in bed in a hospital. It almost felt like something was goading me to follow it. I didn't sleep or move at all that night. The next day I got a call from my parents telling me my cousin had finally passed on in the night.
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