The Thing in the Hallway

I woke at 3:17 every morning because someone was whispering my name from the hallway, and for six nights I convinced myself it was the house settling, the furnace, a dream, anything except a voice, until the seventh night when the whispering stopped and I heard three slow knocks on my bedroom door; I stared at the handle as it slowly turned downward, but the door didn't open, and then I heard my own voice whisper from the other side, “Don’t open it,” so I climbed beneath my blankets and held my breath while something dragged its fingernails slowly down the wood, from the top of the door to the floor, again and again, until suddenly everything became silent; after several minutes I heard footsteps moving away down the hallway, and then my bedroom door creaked open by itself, but there was nobody there, so I stayed hidden until daylight, when I finally crawled out and discovered four long scratches running across the inside of my bedroom door, and beneath them, written in something dark and sticky, were the words: “I TOLD YOU NOT TO OPEN IT”; terrified, I ran downstairs and found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, staring at me with tears streaming down her face, and when I asked what was wrong she pointed toward the hallway and whispered, “You weren't supposed to hear it yet”; then I noticed something was wrong with her face—it was too still, her eyes never blinked, and when she smiled I saw that her teeth were far too numerous, packed tightly together like tiny white needles; I backed toward the front door, but she stood up and said, in my own voice, “You should have stayed in bed”; I grabbed the handle and pulled, only to discover there was no outside anymore, just another hallway stretching endlessly into darkness, lined with hundreds of identical bedroom doors, each covered in scratches, and from every room came the sound of someone whispering my name; then, somewhere behind me, my mother began laughing, and from the hallway came hundreds of voices whispering together, “Don't worry, he's almost ready,” and that was when I finally understood why the thing had been whispering my name every night—it wasn't trying to get into my bedroom; it was teaching the house how to say it.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model