Now, in the light of day, I find myself hovering in front of the door, watching. I half-expected it to be a hallucination, a corrupted fragment of my sleep-deprived mind, but it is still here.
	It seems real enough - the cold of the doorknob’s brushed metal sends a jolt through my nerves, the cheap particle board ragged across my palm where paint has pooled unevenly in the whorls of wood.
	My hand rests on the knob, the metal warming at my touch, and I think of turning it, wondering what I’ll find. Maybe it will take me to a better life, another dimension, one where my brain isn’t plotting to kill me.
	I step back from the door, thinking. I pace around the house for a bit, my legs feeling leaden with each step. I’m unsure why I feel so hesitant to open it. It’s entirely possible that it’s always been there, something that I just became blind to over the years of living here. Since my parents passed away and I bought the house, I threw myself into renovations, eager to modernize the early aughts Tuscan kitchen at the heart of the ground floor. I ripped up carpet, laying down vinyl flooring in its place, eager to reclaim the place that serves as the nexus of my childhood, its spaces still the central backdrop of most of my nightmares. Sometimes it’s not the house that’s haunted, but rather it’s the house that haunts you.
	I didn’t inherit the house. Rather, after my parents’ respective passings, I felt adrift, wanting to anchor myself somewhere familiar. It felt like a stroke of luck that the house had recently been put up for sale by the previous owners. We had lost the house some years ago, a foreclosure as a result of my father losing his job. Whoever had bought it and moved in after must have been oddly nostgalgic for the beige walls and flowery wallpaper scattered around, because they hadn’t made any changes to it. It’s nearly just as I remember from when I was a kid, but everything seems smaller from an adult’s point of view.
	So, although the house wasn’t passed down to me, I felt called back to it. As it would turn out, the only thing I would inherit from my dad would be a bad temper and addictive tendencies. And, of course, the disease that killed him, and will soon kill me too.
	Perhaps that’s why I’m not too eager to open the door yet. I have both all the time in the world and not enough at all. I lost my job, and with it, the structure that has dictated my adult life up to this point. I didn’t get fired, just put on disability. “Compassionate allowance,” they call it. The only compassion here is being shown to my coworkers, those who had to deal with me shuffling around the office like a zombie, barely able to remember a conversation we’d had ten minutes prior. I stumbled over my words just as frequently as I stumbled over my own feet. I think I would have felt a great deal of shame at the looks of pity my supervisor gave me if I’d had the energy for it, but at that point, I was simply too far gone.
	It started rather innocuous at first: a sleepless night or two in a week, taking a nap over the weekend, feeling exhausted just going through the motions everyday. After a few months of my sleep gradually worsening, I finally went to see my doctor, thinking he’d just prescribe me a pill and move on. Maybe I’d get unlucky and end up with a CPAP, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but looking back, I would take that over anything right about now. I ended up having to do a sleep study, and after an uncomfortable night with apparatuses strapped to my chest and wrist, returned to my daily routine with a newfound diagnosis of primary insomnia and a doxepin prescription. It helped at first. A pill and a glass of water, then thirty minutes to an hour later, my brain would be wrapped in a soft blanket, the world growing fuzzy at the edges as my eyes drifted shut. I didn’t dream anymore, though. I had a lifetime before me of strange and nonsensical dreams, ranging from the hilarious to the unspeakably terrifying (of which would seemingly be determined by a coin flip each night). Now, I close my eyes and just see an infinite abyss of darkness, a yawning void that I seem to stare into until my eyes open once more. I was in no position to complain, though, considering I was able to sleep through the night and wake up on time for work, at least for a while.
	This held me over for about a month, until I started sleeping through my alarms. Eight months of nonstop doctors appointments, lab work, and endless nights of trawling through the most exhaustive resources the internet could provide later, and here I am.
	I sleep less and less each night, and spend some of them just staring at the ceiling all night, waiting for the birds to start chirping and the sun to peek over the horizon.
	All of that to say, I couldn’t immediately discount that this door had been here all along and I simply couldn’t remember it, or I was hallucinating. It wouldn’t be the first time something like this had happened, and I am loath to say that it won’t be the last.
	However, in the present moment, pacing back and forth in the hallway, I can’t deny that it seems incredibly real. I’m avoiding making eye contact with it, but I can feel its presence, looming just outside my periphery.
	I stop my pacing and notice that my palms are slicked with sweat. I wipe them on my pants and decide to step outside for a moment, hoping the fresh air will clear my mind a bit. Even with a facelift in progress, there’s no denying the ghosts of the past that linger around every corner in this house, waiting to be unearthed.
	Out on the back porch, I flip open a crushed pack of cigarettes and tap one out into my palm,  pinching it between my lips as I dig around in my pockets for a lighter. I never used to smoke, but I figured if I’m going to die anyway, I may as well be allowed to numb myself at least a little. Again, addictive tendencies.
	I fish the lighter out of my pocket and flick the flame to life, holding it to the end of the cigarette until it smolders. The sun is setting now, and the faint breeze that accompanies dusk is beginning to blow through, causing the ember at the end of the cigarette to flare up briefly. I take a deep inhale, holding my lungs at their maximum capacity for a moment before exhaling a cloud of smoke.
	Having a moment away from the door allows me space to think. I run through the layout of the house in my head, racking my brain for all points of ingress/egress. When you walk in the front door, there is a hallway in front of you and the dining room to your left. Half of the hallway is taken up by the staircase, a straight shot up to the second floor. In the hall there is the bathroom and a small storage closet. Two doors. The dining room opens up into the kitchen through an archway, which then opens up into the breakfast room. There’s a pantry nestled in the threshold between the kitchen and breakfast room, so that’s three doors. Right next to the breakfast room and directly at the end of the hallway is the door to the backyard, which makes four. Then, off the right side of the hallway and on the opposite side of the house from the breakfast room is a spacious living room, the only door leading to the garage. Upstairs, there are four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a laundry room. Add in five closets, and that brings us to a total of seventeen doors in the house. No basement, and while there is an attic, it has a ceiling hatch entrance, which I do not count as a door and I’m not willing to get into an argument over.
	That leaves the eighteenth door, which has mysteriously appeared as of yesterday. Facing the staircase from the dining room, it is offset to the right of the door to the half bath, tucked into the side of the stairs. Theoretically, it can’t be that big, judging by how close it is to the front of the stairs. It is a standard sized door, the frame and door itself the same as all the others in the house. Had I been an outside observer, I would simply have assumed that it’s an extra storage space, one of those understairs closets you shove your Christmas decorations into and don’t think about until the next year. The thing is, I truly don’t remember it. At all. All of my childhood memories indicate that we got our Christmas decorations down from the attic every year. I remember standing at the bottom of the ladder, watching my dad climb up the creaky wood and pull down dusty totes and battered cardboard boxes marked with Sharpie. It doesn’t make any sense, but for all intents and purposes, the door is there and there is something behind it.
	As I come back to myself, I realize the cigarette has burned down to ash, the wind making quick work of it. I drop it to the wooden deck and grind it out with the toe of my shoe before turning and ducking back inside.
	The night air is a stark contrast from the stifling atmosphere inside the house. I make a mental note to myself to open the windows tomorrow and air everything out while cleaning.
	All that ruminating has reduced my brain to what feels like a thin soup, so I begin my rounds through the downstairs, checking locks on doors and flicking off lightswitches. I decide the door can wait until tomorrow, but as I go to shut off the light in the dining room, it holds my gaze for a beat and I pause. Door. Doorknob. Hinges. Doorframe. Everything about it is so mundane, most people wouldn’t give it a second thought, but it flat-out will not settle in my mind. It gives me a sense of unease looking at it, knowing it does not belong. I flick the lightswitch and head upstairs.

•••

	Hours later, I lay awake in bed, watching the ceiling fan spin lazily overhead, a standing fan blowing on me to drown out what noise there is in suburbia. It still feels strange to me, sleeping in the master bedroom. It’s not the same furniture, of course, but the layout is close enough, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m intruding upon my parents’ space. More specifically, my mom’s. My dad worked nights for most of my childhood, which explains why he’s absent from my most formative memories, and also why my mom would sleep alone. Some nights, unable even then to get a good night’s rest, I’d steal away from my room and crawl into the empty side of the bed, nestling next to her and a cat or two. She didn’t mind it, or if she did, she never told me. Layiing on the same half of the bed as I did back then, leg hanging off the side, I wonder if she ever felt lonely and welcomed my presence, if it ever made sleep come a little easier for her.
	Joints stiff from hours of laying in the same position, doing square breathing and willing the pills to work and bring on the warm embrace of sleep, I sit up, reaching over to the nightstand for my water bottle. Empty. Groaning, I haul myself out of bed, making a pit stop at the bathroom before feeling my way downstairs, the streetlights and full moon my only light source as I stumble down the stairs, my body somehow more exhausted than ever and feeling like I’m made of cinderblocks.
	Eyes still half-closed, I fill my water at the fridge, raking the fingers of my free hand against my scalp. I want to get ice, to have my water stay cold until the morning, but hearing the ice crash against the stainless steel would be too much for my nervous system right now. The house is a different beast at night, each room a yawning mouth waiting to swallow me whole. The warm light of nostalgia is gone, replaced with a cold isolation. The worst memories always come at nighttime, when they were first born. The yelling, the banging on doors, the car driving away into the night, unsure of when it would return. In those instances, which were far more regular than I’d care to admit, I would lock my door and climb into bed, pulling the covers over my head and trying to make myself small. This was my ritual, how I survived, and everything always seemed at least a bit better in the light of day. I didn’t know at the time that this wasn’t normal, that other kids didn’t have to account for the outbursts of one or both parents, or be the one to clean up discarded beer cans before heading off to school. It was the only life I knew.
	Tip-toeing through a house that is mine and not mine, I head back through the kitchen to the dining room, making a beeline for the stairs when I see it. Light. Not the faint glow from outside the blinds that I had been using to guide my way, but rather a light coming from underneath the door. That is, The Door. I wouldn’t have noticed it during the day, the yellow incandescence blending in with the other lights in the house. A thought suddenly occurs to me that sends a chill up my spine. Maybe I hadn’t seen it because it wasn’t on before. Deciding that’s a problem for tomorrow me, I book it back up the stairs, shutting and locking the bedroom door behind me. In bed, I pull the covers over my head and wait.

---

to be continued…