And his door shouldn’t ever be opened.
I’ve lived in this house for ten years, but I only discovered a miniature man, who was no larger than a thumbtack pin, a couple of weeks ago.
“You said that ‘every home’ has this little man, but I’ve never seen him,” You scoff.
I should hope not, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there. Most people are simply fortuitous enough to never happen upon him. The little man is hard to find, and you should be thankful for that. He loves all manner of lightless hovels, and nobody can say which one he might choose. Kitchen cupboards, bathroom cupboards, and even cupboard-cupboards.
Cupboard-cupboards? Let’s start at the beginning of my story.
It was a wintry Wednesday evening. Anna, my girlfriend, was staying the night. There was little to no appropriate food in my flat, apparently, so I was rummaging through kitchen cupboards for a snack that she might enjoy.
“What goodies have you got at the back of there, Ciaran?” Anna asked.
“Mould and dead vermin, probably,” I laughed. “I’ll have a look.”
In the farthest corner of the cupboard, I was unsurprised to find a sealed box of Pop Tarts that had expired in 2014. I smirked and started waving the packaging in front of Anna’s horrified face.
She squinted at the expiry date and grimaced. “Nine years old? Really? Bachelor pads are the worst.”
“I’m sure they’ll still be fine,” I jokingly insisted. “Like a fine wine, they’re better with age. Staleness gives them some crunch.”
“I’m more horrified by the clutter in that cupboard, to be honest. I suppose expired treats are a good sign that you’re not gorging on snacks, but we need to tidy up your kitchen,” Anna said.
“That sounds like a riveting activity for a Wednesday evening, but I think I’ll pass,” I replied, placing the expired Pop Tarts on the kitchen counter.
That was when I saw it. The cupboard at the back of the cupboard. The kitchen light reflected off a pea-sized, polished brass handle on a bottle-cap-sized door. I can only imagine the concealed compartment had always lurked at the back of my cupboard, but I was absolutely certain that I’d never seen it before. When I moved into the house and filled my kitchen with food, I surely would have noticed a cupboard within a cupboard.
“What in the name of bloody Borrowers is this mess?” I asked, ushering Anna to come and see.
She ducked down and shone her phone torch onto the tiny, circular door.
Anna snorted. “It’s either that or the home of a very, very, very small hobbit. How long have you been working on that prank, eh?”
“I didn’t put it there,” I replied.
With a childlike sense of wonder, I delicately placed the nails of my thumb and forefinger on either side of the brass handle. It was incredibly difficult to latch onto the whimsically-tiny thing.
Without any thought or care, I swung the door open. I’m not entirely sure what I expected to find, but it certainly wasn’t another cupboard. Yet, the tiny storage space wasn’t what intrigued me.
There was a small man inside.
Now, to be accurate, Anna and I didn’t really know that it was a man at first. Not a real man, anyway. He was a dollhouse figurine, but he was a quarter the size of a typical figurine. The little man was seemingly made of painted resin and sported a black suit with a wooden cane. Unsettlingly, he was facing the back of his tiny cupboard.
“Why the heck did the previous owners leave a creepy little doll in a creepy little cupboard?” Anna asked, shuddering.
“Aw, we don’t know that he’s creepy,” I chuckled. “He’s not even said hello to us yet!”
I pinched the figurine’s head between my nails and twisted him around to face us. He had the face of a conservative 1950s man. Slicked-back brown hair. Clean-shaven. Disturbing smile. The little man seemed intent on delivering a sweet and endearing expression, but he simply looked crooked.
“I don’t like that false grin,” Anna said, squinting at his tiny face. “And his eyes are just…”
“Featureless pinpricks,” I teased. “Spooky.”
“Thanks for that. Well, you’ve settled it. No horror movie tonight. We’re watching Great British Bake Off reruns,” Anna said.
“Suits me,” I said, following Anna to the living room. “Nothing scarier than Paul Hollywood.”
Halfway through the first episode, I leapt from the sofa and returned to the kitchen for a glass of water. Whilst my glass was filling up, I realised I hadn’t shut the door to the snack cupboard. And, when the glint of the oddly-shiny brass handle caught my eye, I realised I also hadn’t shut the tiny man’s cupboard door.
I bent down to shut both doors, but I immediately found myself eyeballing the little man with the purple bowtie. He was, once again, facing away from me. After twisting him to face us, I didn’t return him to his original position. Well, I didn’t remember doing that. Still, I shrugged my shoulders and assumed I must’ve done it without thinking.
Suddenly aware of the overflowing glass of water that I’d left in the sink, I hopped to my feet to turn off the tap. Taking my glass back to the lounge, I realised that my sieve-brain, once again, had forgotten to remind me to close both cupboards. So, I crouched down to try again.
I dropped my glass to the floor, and it smashed to pieces.
Anna came running into the room to make sure I was all right. I wasn’t. I was staring at the little man in the cupboard. His motionless body was still facing the back of his miniature cupboard. However, he had rotated his head to face me and, frighteningly, placed his hands over his eyes. All that could be seen of his See-No-Evil face was the smile that I, much the same as Anna, did not like.
“Is that the same figurine?” Anna asked, peering into the cupboard that had petrified me.
“Yeah…” I vacantly replied.
“How many of these little men have you got lying around?” She asked. “This really doesn’t set the mood on a date night, you know.”
Terrified and confused, I shut both the small and normal-sized cupboard doors. I told Anna I was suddenly coming down with a migraine and wanted to sleep. In reality, I lay in bed for hours, failing to comprehend what I had seen in the cupboard. Anna couldn’t have teased me by replacing the figurine. She hadn’t even left the sofa. The little man had moved of his own accord.
On Thursday morning, I woke to the sound of a door slamming. When I rolled over, there was an empty space beside me in bed. Anna had already left to go to work. Still too afraid to leave my bedroom after the unexplainable horrors of the night before, I closed my eyes to catch a few more ticks of sleep.
The second time I woke, there was a tickling sensation on my right cheek. Still half-asleep, I hadn’t even mustered the energy to open my eyes before something utterly horrifying happened. My right eyelids were forcefully prized apart.
There, standing like a titan, less than a millimetre in front of my right eyeball, was the little man from the cupboard. He was no longer a statue. He was lifting my upper eyelid like a heavy shop shutter and standing on my bottom eyelid for support. I screamed soundlessly, too frightened to make any sudden movement.
The insect man unsheathed a needle-sized blade from his cane. Unlike him, it wasn’t made of resin. I realised that as soon as he plunged the narrow tool into my eye.
I screeched until I felt my vocal chords might snap.
Reflexively, I squeezed my right eyelids together, but the little man resisted. Using his free hand and both of his legs to keep my eyelids apart, the living figurine persistently pierced my eyeball. Despite the microscopic size of the blade, it was sufficient to inflict brutal bursts of pain. But I was more terrified by my distorting and blackening vision. He was blinding me.
Thwacking my eyeball aggressively, I eventually knocked the little man, along with his needle, onto my duvet. With not a moment to waste, I threw the covers off me and bounced onto my feet. Clutching my bleeding right eye, I scooped up my phone and sprinted out of the bedroom.
Stumbling down the main hallway, I managed to flee my apartment. When I flicked through my phone to ring Anna, however, I saw that I already had numerous missed calls from her. On top of that, she had sent a wall of messages on WhatsApp:
Anna: I stopped by my place to get some things before work, and guess what I found in my bathroom cupboard?
Anna: A.
Anna: Fucking.
Anna: Dollhouse.
Anna: Door.
Anna: Very funny, Ciaran. I’m not even mad. I’m actually impressed that you managed to orchestrate all of this. Bravo. Another cute little doll, too.
Anna: Woah. How many of them did you put in this cupboard? There’s a different one looking at me now.
Anna: This isn’t funny. How are you doing this?
Anna: IT FUCKING MOVED.
Anna: What
The messages ended on that incomplete note. Looking at the time-stamps of the many missed calls, I saw that they started a few minutes after the messages ended. Anna had rung me for a period of ten minutes until nine in the morning, and I left the apartment at five past nine. Heart beating in my chest, I feared what that might mean. I slid into the driver’s seat of my car and scorched rubber in my frantic race to Anna’s place.
It was only a five-minute drive, and I didn’t waste any time when I showed up. I left the car running and broke down Anna’s flimsy, wafer-thin door with three well-meaning kicks. Calling her name throughout the apartment, I was haunted by the stillness of her home. Not a movement. Not a sound.
I bounded up the stairs two at a time. There was the faint sound of bumping and scratching within the bathroom. Almost imperceptible. Shaking at the sight of the open door, I held my breath and stepped inside.
No sign of Anna. I timidly peered around the side of her shower curtain. She wasn’t in there. And that was when I heard another bump. It came from the white bathroom cabinet beneath Anna’s sink. Of course. The one place I didn’t want to inspect. After seeing her messages, perhaps I had avoided it on purpose.
I knelt on the bathroom tiles and fearfully stretched my unwilling hands towards the two door handles. In a rapid motion, like removing a bandaid, I opened the two doors.
Unfathomable horror. I caterwauled at the gruesome sight within the cupboard. Tears streaming down my face and inhuman noises spilling from my mouth, I rocked on my knees and felt myself slowly succumbing to insanity at the maddening sight before me.
Anna was, by the laws of some unearthly physics, crumpled into the tiny bathroom cabinet. It was an inexplicably-insidious contortionist act. Anna’s limbs were mangled so unthinkably out of shape that her bones had been splintered and snapped like twigs. The most horrendous part of the memory is that she wasn’t yet dead. She was twitching ever-so-slightly, painfully gasping for air.
Her face was even more horrific. Anna’s eyes had been sliced repeatedly. They were little more than two bloody mounds of mush. She had been violently blinded. If I had not managed to fend off the little man, I imagine I would have met the same fate.
I placed a hand on Anna’s cheek, hoping that she knew I was there with her as she took her final breath. Minutes later, responding to a noise complaint, the police arrived. As incriminating as the scene looked, I was spared the pain of prison. My brother is a lawyer, and it’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone.
Plus, witness accounts mentioned sounds of a struggle emanating from Anna’s apartment about ten or twenty minutes before they saw me arrive in my car. People believe that the killer fled before I broke down the door. They’re not wrong. They just couldn’t possibly believe the full truth.
Anna’s parents held a small memorial ceremony at their house last night. Why am I mentioning this? Why isn’t the story over? Well, Anna’s father commented on finding something in a cluttered cabinet. A dollhouse man. The figurine was sitting on a pile of old books. There was no minuscule door that I could’ve warned Anna’s father to avoid. It was too late. The little man was in the middle of the vast, empty storage space. He was looking away from us.
You know to avoid cupboard-cupboards, but no cupboard can safely be opened. The little man can visit anyone, anywhere, at any time. He hides in every home.