THE CREAKY DOOR
Dave closes his laptop, snuffing out the blank white document glaring from its screen. He places the computer onto the wooden floor beside him. The huge house is soundless, undisturbed, alone beside a dusty road. It provides the perfect reading environment.
Dave trades the laptop for an anthology of spooky stories he purchased at a yard sale long ago. Perhaps inspiration lurks somewhere within the book’s yellowed pages.
Under lamplight, he examines the table of contents. His imagination takes hold and starts to shake him free of rust.
Is “A Maid and Her Madness” the tale of a beleaguered hotel employee driven to murder? Is “The Roar from the Trees” about a Sasquatch infuriated by deforestation? Well, “Rain of Terror” surely describes a sudden downpour of flesh-eating acid marring some poor family’s afternoon picnic.
No longer rigid in his moth-eaten recliner, Dave drapes his legs over an arm of the chair. He smiles and turns to page 66, to see if the titular “Smile in the Dark” belongs to a hungry, saber-toothed Cheshire tiger.
Behind him, the basement door slowly creaks open.
Dave peers over the top of his seat. Shadows seem to creep up the basement steps and inch their way across the living room.
Dave walks to the door, grabs its knob. He peers into the basement’s black maw.
When he moved into the old place two weeks ago, he’d gone into the basement and seen it was empty. No boxes. No shelves. Yes, his flashlight had revealed some cobwebs, but there weren’t any other signs of life. No tiny pawprints or droppings on the hard-packed earth floor. Not even a small window to the outside. Below the house, the air had been stale and hot, trapped inside a prison of cinderblock walls.
Now, holding the knob, Dave moves the door slightly. It creaks on corroded hinges. He’ll have to find a hardware store this weekend. Does the little town off the highway even have one?
And how could the door have opened? No window in the basement means no draft to push upstairs. Besides, the night is calm. Wind’s not whistling around the house. Storm shutters sit still.
Dave shrugs. He’s no expert on the behavior of old houses.
As he shuts the basement door, its hinges squeal, whining in protest.
He returns to the recliner, re-opens the book, and gets comfortable once more. Within moments, he’s lost in a fictional world. From it, he seeks no escape.
It’s been three months since the divorce, and Dave welcomes a bit of fantasy.
Moving into a paint-chipped house that no one wanted, far from others’ happiness and laughter, had been a fine idea at first. He thought the change in location would jumpstart a bit of creativity in his brain. Force him to finally get to work on another novel. Something eerie and profound. But all he’s been able to create thus far is a collection of embarrassing high school poetry about heartbreak, infidelity, and how much he hates, loves, and loves to hate his ex-wife.
Plus, he’s gone eight days without conversing with anyone but himself. Sometimes, he doesn’t bother to move his tongue at all.
The cardboard box marked “Books” is the only one he’s felt compelled to open. Others are precariously stacked around the living room, monuments to his slug-like state. The house’s second story is virtually empty, save for toiletries forgotten by a stained bathroom sink and a lumpy mattress lying on a dusty bedroom floor.
As Dave reads and matches the sinister “Smile in the Dark” with his own grin, the basement door creaks open behind him again.
This time, the hinges shriek louder, more shrill. Dave cups his hands over his ears, trying to dull the noise. The sound is painful and pierces like a wasp’s sting.
He races to the door and attempts to shut it tight.
However, it resists.
In fact, instead of closing, the door pushes against Dave’s weight and opens further, creaking. Squealing. Screaming.
Dave grunts, strains as he is driven backward. He slides along on sweaty socks.
The door won’t budge, but it does a great job of budging Dave. He struggles to stand tall.
Eventually, Dave sees it. A thick, black tendril wrapped around the edge of the door.
A tentacle made of shadow.
The darkness in the basement wants out.
Dave runs over to the lamp beside the recliner. He removes the lampshade and angles the bulb so it burns bright in the direction of the basement door.
Darkness retreats down the steps. Good thing, too, because its tentacles have tripled.
Dave springs into action and slams the door shut. He turns the lock and prays that it actually works.
The house is silent.
For a moment, Dave thinks he’s okay.
But then the lamp flickers and dies.
The lock on the basement door rotates to the left.
And the door creaks ajar even louder than before.
Dave moves for his laptop. He flips it open, holding it out in front of him like it’s a cross with the power to deflect demons. Its weak glow slows his heart rate a beat or two.
He backs up to the window, parts wilted floral curtains, and welcomes in some of the full moon’s light.
Dave warns the darkness to stay away, though he has difficulty seeing what it’s doing at the top of the stairs.
He, however, has no trouble hearing it slowly open and close the basement door over and over and over again.
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak, the door moans. Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak.
CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAK.
Why?
Why hasn’t the mass of shadows come for him?
Why is it playing such grating night music?
Why is the sentient gloom messing with the door?
In the distance: a howl.
Dave looks out the window. Crouched on the dirt road in front of the house is a gigantic dog.
Scratch that. A wolf.
A monster the size of a refrigerator. It raises its snout to the sky and howls again.
Behind Dave, the basement door creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaks.
The wolf’s ears perk up like dual antennae. It steps onto his property, easing over a fallen fence, stepping through overgrown weeds on the neglected lawn.
Dave looks at the unopened boxes to his right. Which one contains the block of butcher’s knives? Probably the one marked “Kitchen”.
He tears open the box, but there are no kitchen utensils inside. Instead, there’s his framed college diploma, a bobblehead of Edgar Allan Poe, and other knick-knacks from his study back home.
No, no. This is home now. This horrible place with the living darkness and the werewolf approaching the front door.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.
How could he have mislabeled the boxes?
How? How? How?
Wait. His coin collection’s in this box, too. And some of the coins are silver. Horror films suggest weaponizing the precious metal against various creatures of the night.
He shakes his head. What’s he going to do? Throw an American Silver Eagle at the beast like a miniature discus?
The basement door creaks louder, LOUDER. Dave whispers harshly at the darkness to stop, PLEASE, STOP, because the sound is drawing the impossible animal closer, CLOSER.
But that seems to be what the darkness wants. To lure in the horrible beast.
To bring it inside the house.
A huge, black arm snakes out of the basement. Dave shrieks, falls away from the box, certain that the darkness is coming for him. He backs up to the window once again. The room seems to fill with even more shadow, ready to strangle him free of breath.
But the darkness moves past him, toward the front door.
The wolf is on the porch, growling.
Dave is frozen. He knows he should flee, hide.
But where is there to go?
He can’t remember where he left his car keys. His nearest neighbor is half a mile away. If he makes a break for it, he doubts he can outrun a giant wolf in the expanse of open fields outside the house.
The dark arm turns the front doorknob. The wolf pushes against the door.
The monster enters.
The darkness gestures for the wolf to follow it, and so the creature does.
The wolf lopes into the basement and disappears from view, but not before nodding at Dave, as if to say, Thank you, sorry for the intrusion.
The basement door continues to creak back and forth, back and forth.
In the distance: a chainsaw whirs to life.
The creaky door guides into the house a masked psychopath wearing bloodstained overalls. The humongous man kills the motor on his weapon and tells Dave, “Too scary out there. Need a place to stay.”
He, too, ventures into the basement.
Dave listens for a struggle between psycho killer and werewolf, but there isn’t one.
He only hears the irritating hinges of the creaky door.
Next, the noise brings in a vampire seeking shelter. He explains that, recently in his neighborhood, an arsonist has sent a pair of children to the burn ward. Another drive-by has claimed the life of a mother of five.
“Don’t vant to be around that anymore,” the creature explains, then flips his cape and floats down into darkness.
After that, a scaly fiend displaced by the latest hurricane steps into Dave’s home on razor-tipped flippers the size of rake heads.
A scarecrow defeated by drought puts down its scythe for a moment in order to shake Dave’s trembling hand.
A mummy tagged with Islamophobic epithets expresses its gratitude with unintelligible sobs. It cries so hard that its jaw snaps off and falls to the floor.
All manner of monster is brought to the basement by the creaky siren’s call.
A ghost, a ghoul, a goblin.
A chupacabra afraid to be sent back to its world of origin.
A cyclops, a clown, a chimera.
Dozens of creepy, crawly, growly things, all in the basement. One by one by one.
How can they possibly fit inside such a cramped space?
There must be other gateways down there, invisible to the human eye. The walls are strictly optional.
The house’s last guest is a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy who tips his little hat to Dave and then descends the basement steps with a toddler’s grace.
The darkness finally closes the creaky door for good.
The lamp turns on, and, aside from an open front door, it’s like nothing has happened at all.
Dave goes to the recliner and turns it around so it now faces the basement. Before closing the front door, he checks for any straggling lost souls, but there’s no movement on the quiet road.
Dave returns to his chair, sits. He bookmarks his spot in the short story anthology and then puts it aside. There’ll be time for reading later.
A blank white document beckons from the laptop in his hands. Dave extinguishes the lamplight.
He glances at the basement door. He smiles in the dark.
It’s time to write.
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