I don’t know who to turn to, so I made this account so I could post here. I sent emails, dropped off notices at an apartment I help manage because rent wasn’t paid. Finally went there because no response. Found tenant’s body slumped in a chair. Smelled really bad. Called the police, but while I was waiting for them to arrive I noticed a notebook. Took a few pics of the pages. When I read it later, it freaked me the fuck out. Police won’t answer my questions about how she died. I think the answer is in the pages. Please help. Am I just freaking myself out or is there something to her ramblings? Thanks —R

***********

12/5/22

Account of the Door

Where is Susan?

Why am I trying to title this? Who am I even writing this for? Whoever finds it, I guess… depending on what happens next. Well ok. I better start at the beginning.

I sometimes have memory problems. I’m not old—only thirty-six thirty-seven (LOL case in point!)—but still, there’s a world of difference between your thirties and your twenties. At twenty, I could pull all nighters and be up for partying the next day. At thirty, throwing my back out for the first time was the wake-up call that my body isn’t what it used to be. And forgetting my keys, locked inside my car, was the wake-up call that my mind could use the occasional reminder, too.

That’s what started the habit. My habit of leaving myself notes. Little things, like how to change a particularly complicated light in the ceiling, one of the fancy ones with a colored glass casing around it that has to be removed before you can reach the bulb. I went up there yesterday after the light went out to take off the casing, and just inside, written in black sharpie on a part of the glass no one can see except from a ladder, were instructions. My own handwriting, telling me how to remove the casing and what kind of bulb I’d need.

I have no memory of writing these instructions. But I thanked my past self (4/22/18) for the foresight.

Susan laughs laughed about this habit of mine. Last week I was looking everywhere for the key to my desk drawer, and I caught her in the mirror rolling her eyes as she told me to look on the drawer underside. Sure enough, scribbled on the underside in sharpie it said 8/6/22 check Pootie. Pootie is an old stuffed toy, and I always date my notes so I know how long ago I wrote them. The key was tucked inside Pootie’s zippered back.

“Well I’ll be!” I muttered as I slid open the desk drawer.

“I remember you commenting on where to put the key, and you said, ‘I’ll put it in Pootie so I don’t forget.’ And since you always forget I insisted you write on the drawer.”

“Oh, yeah…” It was pretty embarrassing how right Susan was about my memory.

“… did you forget why you needed to open the drawer?”

“No,” I lied to myself as I half-heartedly shuffled through the jumbled papers as if I were looking for something specific. I jammed the drawer closed and carefully returned the key to Pootie’s zippered back.

I promise all this is going somewhere. The point is… normally I don’t think my forgetfulness is that big a deal, but when I went back to that drawer later on, thinking that if I organized it I’d remember what I’d been looking for, I found a note I didn’t remember writing.

“Well, gee,” you’re probably thinking, “I’ve already said I don’t remember writing most of my little notes.” Okay, fair enough. But when one of my notes says, Hey you, future me, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, check Pootie—with that, there’s context and a clear purpose to why and when I wrote it. Millions of people everyday spend time looking for their misplaced keys or their favorite coffee cup. We put stuff where we’re sure to remember it and then instantly forget. Welcome to being human.

But no, this note was different. No context to it. It came fluttering out of my desk drawer on hot pink sticky paper:

11/13/22 Call maintenance about that door.

The note was folded in half. I unfolded it, and just underneath the fold and underlined twice:

11/15/22 NO RECORD OF DOOR

No record of door? What door? Which door did I have to call maintenance about that they had no records of? I asked Susan, but she just shrugged and said, “Could be any door. It’s an old building. Stuff needs fixing all the time.”

Fair enough. But the note was dated only two weeks prior. Even for me, that was an unusual amount of forgetfulness. And what did I mean by, “no record”? Later that same day, when I put on my comfy cardigan, I found another note crumpled up in the pocket along with chapstick and quarters for the laundry. I pulled out the rumpled note and read:

11/16/22

11/18/22

11/21/22

And on the back, boldly underlined:

KNOCKING.

It was the knocking that got me really curious.

So I went around checking all the doors. Bedroom, bathroom, closets, the creaky old door out to the little balcony overlooking the street. When I didn’t find anything, I went in the hallway past dozens of neighbors’ doors, all with the numbers in embossed gold flaking away above old keyholes. It’s a building that has what I call “character” and my family calls “please move out.” A je ne sais quoi of rattling radiators, stained carpeting, and mice scrabbling in the walls. I once read a NYT article about how after an old woman passed away, her son went to her apartment and found a decomposing body hidden in her freezer. She’d kept it there for more than ten years. Honestly, this is just the kind of building that could happen in. Just recently there was an old man on floor four who got sick, and no one came in to look on him for weeks, while his body was decomposing just a couple of floors over our heads…

Anyway! Finding no mysterious knocking, I returned to my unit on the second floor. And then it struck me. What does absent-minded old me do to manage my own forgetfulness? I write stuff down. Duh! I went straight to my desk to check the first place I should’ve looked. My journal. I flipped back to November the week before Thanksgiving.

I found it. I found the door.

I stared at inked sketch lines of concrete brick behind a vague outlined rectangle. On the bottom right corner was a scrawl like a scratched in face—a face? A yawning face. A screaming face. I don’t know. I was still trying to discern whether it was really a face or just an accidental scribble when the journal was snatched out of my hands. Susan ripped the drawing out, shrieking at me, “CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE IT? YOU LEFT TO FORGET ALL THIS, REMEMBER? JUST FORGET ABOUT THE DAMNED DOOR!” She tore at the page savagely, frantically, ripping in a frenzy until there was nothing left but tiny rumpled bits.

I sat there with my mouth hanging open, heart hammering, sunken into my chair as if I could disappear into it, listening to my heart skip against my ribs like a frightened bird in a cage. “What the fuck?” I whispered finally, reaching down to retrieve the notebook when she was gone. “What the fuck?”

*

Sorry for the profanity. I don’t usually swear, but I was worked up and want to record everything accurately. Anyway, after that outburst, I finally remembered what happened before the holiday.

See, Susan’s blow up was probably about maintenance. It was already hard enough to get them out to the building, nevermind the added barrier of what they considered my “prank” calls. Only, my calls to them were never a prank. I called a few times right before Thanksgiving to report strange sounds behind this door in the basement. I might have called twice… three times? The memory is all a little hazy, because right before the holiday was so busy and stressful. My last call to building maintenance before I left for the holiday went something like this:

Maintenance: You found a door in the basement, and someone was knocking?

Me: That’s right, knocking.

Maintenance: It was probably just pipes.

Me: No! No, it definitely wasn’t pipes. It was knocking. Like someone wanting me to open the door. And, this is going to sound crazy but… I thought I heard a person in there. It sounded like… like someone was crying.

Maintenance: Ok sure—

Me: No no no don’t hang up!

They stopped taking my calls after that, and I considered going down and opening the door myself with some sort of tool, but Susan told me, “DON’T. What if you got it open only to get stuck inside?”

Then she told me that if I was really convinced a human being was inside, instead of bugging maintenance, I should call the police. She was really stressed that with all my calls, the next time we had a real emergency, maintenance wouldn’t come out. It was a big deal for her. See, it was because maintenance had been unable to come out right away that she was the one who’d gone up to floor four to check on the old man a few weeks ago, and… well, it sort of traumatized me. Anyway, she was upset at the idea maintenance might essentially blacklist my unit, so she basically gave an ultimatum: either call the police, or forget the door stuff. I was about to leave for Thanksgiving with my family, so I could just use the trip as an opportunity to drop the matter.

I considered. In all honesty, I had very little evidence there might be an actual person stuck behind this door. What would I show the police? My sketch of a basement door with a scary face that I drew? Then tell them I thought I heard noises down there? They’d chuckle condescendingly, and say something like, “Not to worry Miss Marple, I’m sure whatever sounds you heard were just old pipes.” And because I have no backbone, I’d just blush and awkwardly agree, and then we’d all be embarrassed for me.

Long story short I promised I’d drop the whole thing.

And to be honest, being away from this creaky old building over the holiday, I really did forget completely about the door stuff… until I found the sketch. It was the sketch that brought it all back. Weird though, isn’t it? How thoroughly I forgot it in such a short time?

I remember perfectly now. I remember sitting in front of the door with my pen and scribbling the outline and the brick. But while I was away, it was almost like… somehow… leaving had smudged my memory. Almost like a half-forgotten dream nightmare.

Anyway, after Susan’s dramatic outburst, I was more curious than ever. I had to see this door.

So I did the only thing I could do in order to know for sure.

I went down to the basement.

*

It sits tucked away in a corner at the end of a hallway: a narrow metal rectangle with rusty patches, the steely gray blending right in with the gray concrete of the walls. If I hadn’t been specifically searching for it I might never have seen it, that’s how unobtrusive it was. And in the bottom corner, even more fuzzy and abstract than my drawing, were scratches and dents along the metal that, if you are an imaginative person, you could see as a screaming face…

Given the dust on it and the walls and how it was almost invisible, I guessed it was an old storage closet.

After a few minutes of exploring, but finding no way to open it, I knocked on the door. It was almost like knocking on solid brick. Nothing. Not even an echo.

Tap.

Right then, just as I was turning back to head up the stairwell, the soft sound of that tap stopped me. I looked back, frowning. “Hello?” I called.

Silence.

Must’ve been my imagination.

I was about to walk away when I swear I heard a faint moan behind me, so soft I might have imagined it. And then the unmistakable sound of weeping, and though the sound was muffled by the door, I distinctly heard it say, “If you open the door, you invite it in.”

Creepiest fucking thing—

It spoke in Susan’s voice.

*

12/6/22

I haven’t moved from this chair. I keep hoping for Susan. She’s still missing. I keep hoping, if I just go about my business acting like everything is normal… if I go in to work and put on a smile and go through the motions like everything’s okay, maybe somehow it will be. Everything will go back to normal. Susan will come back.

Stop, stop… okay, I’m going to pick up where I left off. This won’t make sense to whoever’s reading unless I tell it in order.

So.

I was down in the basement.

I heard what I thought sounded like Susan, but it couldn’t have been her—couldn’t have been. I know because I was looking at the clock and it was after work started when I went down checking on the door. But I knew her voice. I wasn’t sure how she could be in two places at once. I had chills all up my arms and along my spine as I bolted the three flights back up to my unit, slammed the door, threw myself into my chair and slouched there, waiting all evening.

Susan never came back from work.

The next day—was it, Thursday? Friday? I called in to work and asked after her. They told me she hadn’t been to work in weeks, not since before the holiday…. So this morning I called maintenance again. And before they could hang up on me, I told them that it was a real issue this time—that I’d found a pipe had burst. That there was water leaking all over the floor.

“From where?” the maintenance guy asked.

Resisting the urge to say, “from the door with the face,” I described the general area in the basement and said I’d show him when he arrived. In fact, there really was water puddling around the basement floor, albeit because I spilled it there myself earlier. And after this, there will be a record of the door in the maintenance office! Hah!

So… anyway, I met the maintenance guy—some new guy named Ryan, not our usual cranky one. And I led him to where the puddle I’d spilled was, and he was like, “What door?” And like, the door was right there, he was looking right at it, and I traced my finger along the outline and he kind of did this little blinking thing and a shake and laugh and said, “Oh, that door.” Then he scrunched his face and said, “Didn’t even know it was here.” Then he mopped up the water and waited a few minutes, and he said, “I think must have just been a spill. I’m not seeing any more water seeping out.”

“Wait—you’re not going to open it to make sure—” I almost said, “to make sure that no one’s trapped in there,” but caught myself and said instead, “—to make sure there’s not still something leaking?”

He told me that he was just an assistant manager filling in, and that “Manny, who usually works this building” was out until Thursday, and that Manny knows the ins and outs of this old place better than he did. He said he’d call a plumber if it was an actual emergency, and to let him know if I noticed more water, but for now he’d make a note of it—

BOOM BOOM BOOM

The sudden banging made me jump. And he looked down at me funny and said, “Oh, it’s just the pipes.” And when I asked if pipes are usually that loud, he shrugged and said, “Sometimes.” Made me wonder if we’d heard the same thing. I asked, “Do pipes ever moan? Like… almost like… crying?” He laughed, but it was obvious he was starting to suspect I was either a little off my rocker or pranking him. Especially after I knocked on the door and said, “Yoohoo, anybody in there? Susan? You playing a trick on us in there?” My knuckles felt as if they’d rapped against solid concrete. There wasn’t even an echo. The management guy gave this kind of awkward chuckle and said, “You definitely shouldn’t be hearing any voices coming from there… except maybe if you’ve eaten some funny mushrooms.” He grinned at his own joke. As we headed back upstairs, he told me to call if I noticed another leak in that same spot “by the wall.”

*

12/8/22

Time seems like it’s just… slipping past… No one but me has noticed Susan’s disappearance. No one has made the least bit of fuss about it. Her work called a couple of times last week, but they’ve obviously assumed she just quit. I tried calling them today again to ask about her, and they told me to stop making prank calls and hung up on me.

Throwing out some old, wilted spinach made me think about the old man...

I don’t know how the spinach got so old so fast. I swear I bought it just yesterday, or… maybe the day before. I don’t know. But it was slimy and had that rotting vegetable smell as if it was in the fridge forever. I should talk to Susan about doing some shopping.

Really, I think maybe I scared her, talking about the door. Obsessing over the knocking. It might have reminded her of what happened a couple of months ago with the old man on floor four.

It was Susan who found him.

The old guy… I’d seen him once or twice on the stairs. Our building is from long before the ADA, no elevator, and I remember Susan worrying about him having to climb up and down so many flights all the time. She offered to help him with his groceries and things like that so he didn’t have to make the trip up and down so much. I don’t remember his name… Gary? Gregory?

Anyway, so this old man hadn’t been seen for a while. And I guess Susan worried whether he was doing all right or not. She went up to visit him and decided to go get him some groceries because his fridge was empty and he was looking really thin, like he hadn’t eaten properly in a while. He smelled bad and he was acting… “dissociative,” I think was the word she used. He kept saying strange things, was obviously pretty muddled. He kept asking her “Where’s Gregory?” and she’d tell him, “You’re here, you’re right here.” And he’d just wring his hands and ask her where Gregory had gone.

Creepy, right? I sure thought so. But Susan worried because he was so thin—she thought he hadn’t been eating. She asked him if he needed help with groceries, and he said he hadn’t had much appetite “since Gregory left.” So Susan got him a week’s worth of groceries, made supper for him, and asked him for numbers of relatives or friends. Turned out he had none, so she called social services to come check on him, and then after that things were more or less normal.

That is… I assumed they were normal. Susan wanted to check in on him a few times, but I kept telling her to leave it alone, he was probably fine. To be honest, I was a little creeped out by the whole situation. I thought it was better to leave things to social services. But a few weeks later… two? Three? I don’t remember. Anyway, Susan was tired of me saying to leave things be.

“Just gonna check on him,” she said.

She went to his door. And what happened next was really strange.

She heard knocking. She heard knocking from his door, and heard him whisper: “If you open the door, you invite it in.”

“Gregory?” she called.

It sounded like he was crying.

Sobbing, just on the other side of the door.

She knocked. The crying continued, but the door did not open. She assumed he must be dissociating again, and she knocked and said, “Gregory, let me in!” and no one answered, but the door opened slightly—that was when she realized it wasn’t locked.

“Gregory?” She pushed the door open.

The smell almost knocked her out. She later described it in her notes as—putrid. Rotting meat. Piss and shit and this fetid, horrible, sour smell like old unwashed skin and… like meat you’d left in a container and forgotten about.

It was the stench that made her realize something was horribly wrong. She called police, and waited outside the door for them to arrive. But before they got there, she held her breath and poked her head in, just once. And she saw, there in the living room seated on a chair, a perfectly still figure slumped and motionless. She couldn’t see anything of his eyes. His head was tilted back over the chair. Somehow she knew his mouth was open and his eyes were glassy, and that he was dead—had been dead for days. That he’d died there in his living room sitting in that chair. Remnants of the supper she’d made for him two weeks earlier were still on the table. Police said he had starved to death, even while leaving the fresh groceries to rot on his counter. She kept thinking, if she’d checked on him sooner…

Anyway.

So now, this door stuff, knocking, and Susan’s voice. It has me terrified. Where has Susan gone? But whenever I try to tell anyone about it, they get annoyed and act like I’m pranking them. I don’t know what to do….

*

12/9/22

I can see the outline of the door so clearly now. I’m not sure how I ever thought it hard to see before. It’s never silent anymore, either. Last time I was down there, I heard Susan—and another voice. A quavering old man’s voice. Both of them crying softly. As soon as I got near and whispered, “Susan?” a horrible racket started up. They were banging loudly, begging me to open the door. Screaming.

I saw something else I’d missed, too.

The door has a handle now.

“LET US OUT LET US OUT PLEASE OPEN IT PLEASE!”

I fled.

*

12/10/22

I called maintenance and got the actual maintenance guy, Manny. I tried to show him the door. Susan and Gregory—they were screaming the whole time, and he just looked at me like I was bonkers and told me it’s not a door, just a blank wall. I even tried to convince him to hook his fingers around the handle and pull, but he told me it was just a dirty crack in the mortar and he wasn’t going to stick his fingers in. Then he said I needed help and left.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do.

I came back to my room and, because the apartment is so filthy (it’s usually Susan who keeps things organized and keeps me organized), I started cleaning out the desk drawer again. And I found another note. It was written on an old receipt, but it caught my notice because I didn’t recognize the handwriting at all. It was a spidery, shaky script, as if the pen was held by someone with very unsteady hands. It read:

If you open the door, you invite it in.

I turned over the receipt to see when this note had been written, and got a chill because… the receipt was from months ago. And it wasn’t Susan’s.

It was Gregory’s.

Did Susan… did she invite something in, when she found that old man dead?

*

12/14/22

I went down and mudded and painted over the door today. I ignored the screams—it’s in my head, right?—no one else can see the door, so it must be in my head. So I just mudded over the door and the screams and then waited for it to dry and then painted it all the same flat gray. I also mudded over the handle, so there’s no possible way to open it anymore.

Only once I painted over it, and got back upstairs into my own apartment, did I realize how bone weary I was. And filthy. I called Manny again. He’s sick to death of me—I’m surprised he picked up. He actually sounded less cranky with me this time. More just… concerned. I told him I painted over the door. That I mudded over everything. I just needed to talk to someone.

“Sorry. I hope it doesn’t cause much trouble. I just didn’t want to see it anymore. It’s… the paint wasn’t a perfect match, but the color is pretty close. I hope that’s okay.”

“Okay, Susan,” he said. “Okay. Thank you for telling me.”

I frowned. “Susan’s not here. I think she’s—”

“Behind the door, I know. Ok… look, don’t worry about the paint. I’m off work soon, I’ll come over and take a look and make sure it’s all mudded over properly and everything. You just promise me you won’t go down to the basement again, okay? There’s no reason for you to be down there.”

I felt myself bristling, because he was talking to me as if I were some sort of child, or as if I’d gone senile. I glowered into the phone, but relaxed a bit as he said that he was going to be at my apartment that evening just to “check up on things in my unit.” It made me feel strangely better, even though I knew he was still thinking of me as some crazy lady who should be sleeping in a padded room. I thanked him and hung up.

Looked around my place. God, it was a mess. Without Susan to clean, the pile of dishes had been sitting in the sink growing fuzz for… honestly, I don’t even remember the last time I had a meal. At some point I’d filled water around the dishes, but it was fetid, new forms of life evolving from the primordial soup. Pretty gross. Not to mention I hadn’t showered in… well, my clothes still had paint on them and felt as if they had crusted to me. And since I didn’t want Manny to think I was both crazy and filthy, I figured I’d best make an effort to at least correct one of those things. I hauled myself out of my chair and changed my clothes, then went into the kitchen, shuffling toward the looming dishes with a leery eye.

I was in the middle of draining and re-filling the sink with soapy water when Manny arrived:

BOOM BOOM BOOM

“Coming!” I called, turning off the water and shuffling to the door, opening it with, “Thanks so much for com—”

The words died in my throat.

There was no one outside.

I stepped back, panicked. I realized that I was standing in the basement. There at the bottom of the door was a face. The face I’d sketched in my drawing. Screaming. I recognized it now. It was my face. Screaming from the bottom of the door I’d just opened.

*

??/??/??

I don’t know where I am now. It’s dark. There’s nothing here—no food or water. The notebook is still in my lap, but I… it takes so much energy to write. I think this will be my last entry. I can’t leave. The door won’t open. I try banging but no one hears me screaming. More and more, I’m starting to suspect I am actually in the basement. I’m in the door. The one I mudded and painted over. And maybe that’s why no one can hear me. I know it sounds crazy but I think when I opened the door, I somehow entered the basement.

Is Manny still coming? I don’t think he’ll find me in the basement.

I’ve been pounding the door. No one answers.

It took Gregory. It took Susan. It took Susan. It took Susan.