It began with the knocking. Always three slow knocks. Always at 3:33 a.m.
When the Carr family moved into the creaking, ivy-choked farmhouse in rural Ontario, they thought they'd found a fresh start. The land was cheap—suspiciously so—and the town of Greywater Falls welcomed them with a strange sort of politeness, as if glad to have finally passed the house on to someone else.
Emily Carr was seven years old and curious. A quiet girl who collected dead leaves, talked to animals, and drew things no one else could see. Her parents dismissed it as imagination—until her drawings started showing the door.
It was a thin, crooked door in the basement, behind a shelf of mouldy paint cans. No one had ever noticed it before, not even during renovations. It looked too narrow for a person, yet one night, her father pried it open with a crowbar. Behind it was a cold shaft of nothingness, an unlit crawlspace that exhaled like it was breathing.
They bricked it up the next morning.
Emily didn’t speak that day. Not once.
That night, her mother, Clarissa, woke to find Emily standing at the foot of the bed, silently watching them. Her pyjamas were soaked, her hands muddy. “I found the way in,” she said in a flat, foreign voice.
And then came the smell—wet earth and rot, lingering wherever she went.
Over the following weeks, Emily changed. Her skin grew pale and covered with blemishes. Her eyes turned cloudy at the edges, like storm glass. She stopped eating, yet her body didn’t shrink. At night, she would whisper to something unseen. “He’s waiting behind the wall,” she’d murmur. “He has fingernails made of teeth.”
The Carrs took her to doctors. Blood tests. Scans. Psychiatrists. Everyone agreed: nothing was wrong.
But something was.
Animals began to die around the house. First a raccoon, twisted unnaturally under the porch. Then the neighbour’s dog, found with its head turned all the way around. Emily didn’t blink when she saw it. “It didn’t listen,” she said.
Clarissa installed cameras after finding her crucifix buried under Emily’s mattress. The next morning, she reviewed the footage—and screamed. At 3:33 a.m., Emily rose from bed, walked to the wall in her room, and stepped through it like mist.
No hole. No door. Just solid drywall.
They brought in a priest. A broad-shouldered Irishman named Father McCay, who’d dealt with "these kinds of things." He walked into Emily’s room and came out twenty minutes later, trembling, soaked in sweat. “That… that’s not a child,” he said. “That thing wears her skin, but it’s not her.”
He refused to return, even when offered thousands.
That night, Clarissa heard her husband scream.
He was found in the hallway, gouging his eyes out with a spoon. “I saw it,” he sobbed. “The thing in her mouth… it has hands.”
He never spoke again.
Emily smiled at the ambulance as it pulled away.
Desperate and alone, Clarissa confronted Emily. “What do you want?”
Emily stared at her, unblinking. “To be warm.”
“What are you?”
The child tilted her head. “I’m the last echo in a buried throat. I’m the hush in a coffin’s breath. I’m what seeps through cracks when the prayers stop.”
Clarissa tried to leave.
The car wouldn’t start. The phone had no dial tone. The roads flooded. When she ran on foot, she always ended up back at the house.
Emily never stopped smiling.
On the seventh night, Clarissa found the bricks in the basement torn down. The little crooked door stood open. Behind it, a staircase now spiralled downward into black stone, pulsing like it had a heartbeat.
Emily waited at the top.
“I’m going home,” she whispered, now barely resembling a child at all. Her voice came from beneath the floor, from behind the walls, from inside Clarissa’s head.
Clarissa followed. Not out of choice, but because her body moved without her permission.
They descended.
The walls dripped blood. Voices hissed from the shadows. The stairs twisted in impossible ways, forming faces, bones, and memories.
At the bottom was a vast chamber, lit by a red light that came from nowhere. In the centre was a mirror made of skin, stretched tight across a frame of ribs. Emily stepped toward it.
“He’s coming,” she said, smiling wider than any mouth should.
Clarissa screamed. She screamed even louder when she saw the mirror reflect not Emily, but herself, older, gaunt, with hollow black eyes.
Emily turned. “You’re going to live here now. He needs a mother.”
And Clarissa forgot her own name.
Epilogue
The farmhouse was sold again, this time to a Toronto couple with two young sons. Cheap land, lovely view, historic charm. Emily Carr’s case faded from memory, recorded as a tragic missing person story.
On the first night in their new home, one of the boys drew a picture of a crooked little door.
When asked what it was, he shrugged.
“He says it’s where the cold girl lives.”
And at 3:33 a.m.,
something knocks.
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