Sunday's Story - Knock

Where the knock was coming from I couldn’t decipher. But it was there; always. As soon as I got into bed and turned off the lights, it was there. It was a knock on the outside of the room, the sound slightly muffled; audible but never quite as crisp as when you make the sound yourself.

Some nights it would be polite and quiet.  A faint knock, but constant and on those nights my brain would eventually be able to minimise it to white noise and let me fall asleep. However, recently it’s been getting ever more anxious and the tempo of the knocks have been steadily increasing.

But tonight; I’ve just shut my eyes. And not a moment after, there was a hammering of knocks. Not the patient knocks but a desperate frenzy of knocks that demanded attention. So I opened my eyes and got out of bed. Unconsciously training my ears to the sound. I stepped towards my wardrobe and couldn’t be mistaken; it was the source---

– The door flew open and a manic girl was throwing her arms around my neck and drawing my blood out between her teeth as her jaw clamped shut on my hands. I was screaming but none of my family came running. She hung to me like a monkey to a tree. She had bloodshot sunken eyes and a dirty pale white dress that covered her stark, thin corpse-like body.

I couldn’t stop her. She went on and on and on with her attack. She clawed at my back and used her carved knife-like nails to cut deep valleys on my skin that quickly filled deep with the raising waves of my blood. She smelt of death with a rotten odour emanating from her mouth.

She regained her footing just as she yanked a clump of my once auburn hair out. As soon as it left my being, it turned a grievous dull brown that I quickly noticed matched her straggly hair with an uncanny resemblance.

For someone so skinny and frail she had an unbelievable strength. I was shaking with a drowning feeling that she wasn’t going to stop until I was dead.

But she did; after a minute or so she could tell I was beginning to reside in the fact that I was most likely not surviving the night. So she threw me to the ground. I was up on my feet in a matter of seconds and began stalking round the room, trying to reach my door – to escape.

She hadn’t uttered a single word, but mirrored my every action. As I was passing my wardrobe she stopped. She faced me head on and sluggishly raised the corners of her mouth, revealing the browning cracked teeth she possessed. A ghoulish smile was what now graced her lips and her eyes grew wide.

Throwing her arms up, she kicked me straight in the stomach. I caved backwards and stumbled over the rim of my still open wardrobe. My curved back hit the interior wall of the space and I forced my bloody hands to the door as I realise what she was trying to do.

She slammed the wardrobe door on my straining fingers, again and again. And again. But I refused to let go of the only way I could get out of this foul smelling space. She lowered her body unconnectedly, piece by piece to the ground, making sure her burning eyes never left my tear stained ones.

And one by one she bit my fingers and created gouges so deep that the muscles controlling my hands position were no longer attached to each other. She was rendering my fingers unusable. I retched with every ounce of my being every time she clinched down on the next one.

She then flicked them off the door rim as if they were just a fly hovering where she didn’t want it and slammed the door with an almighty thud. I heaved with all my weight against the door, over and over again, but it wouldn’t budge.

So I laid my scorching ears to the splintered wood and could hear her faint footsteps in my room, then the creak of the one broken panel of my bed frame as presumably she got into my bed and threw the cover over her dishevelled body.

“Night mum” What- that was my voice! Mine, I dropped to the ground and tried to throw words, any words out of my mouth. No sound was released.

I couldn’t see anything but my mind frantically ran through what had just occurred, trying to find sense in it all. There was nothing I could do.

Nothing I could do, but knock.

- Chantal DeHaine