My wife, Laura, and I moved to Haidenfield late May of this year.
Neither of us knew too much about the town before we moved in.
Laura was a traveling nurse and decided it was finally time to settle down at an actual clinic and get more sustainable hours.
Haidenfield just happened to be the closest town and had the most affordable houses near her clinic.
As for me, I just create mock-ups of websites for different companies. All my work is done wherever my computer is. So I really didn’t mind moving wherever Laura felt happiest with.
So when Laura told me about Haidenfield, I was just as excited as she was.
The whole town basically consisted of a small subdivision with a connected cul-de-sac. The only other building being a small family owned department store down the road.
The average age of a resident in Haidenfield was well into their late 60’s and 70’s.
It was quiet, old and secluded. Surrounded by a beautifully dense woodland. It was perfect for just the two of us.
Our house was a two story continental nestled right into the center of the main cul-de-sac. It had a bit of age to its design, but it was well kept and maintained.
Besides, it was a cheap buy too. The previous owner had passed away from natural causes a few months prior. Her name was Nancy, she made it until 73.
The in-home death didn’t bother Laura or I very much. Seeing death was part of Laura’s occupation. And for me, I guess the thought of death never bothered me much.
Our move in date was a pretty standard affair. Our whole previous life had fit into a mid-size storage van. We started unpacking our belongings from the van sometime in the early afternoon that day.
It wasn’t until the late evening that we had all the boxes inside our new home.
To see all of our lives’ possessions laying on the floor and not even filling up a singly empty living room left us feeling some sort of way.
I’d like to say it was the feeling of hope and excitement for having a new start. But in reality it was that sense of feeling you’d get when you realize that all your worldly possessions really meant nothing when properly laid out. Yet instead of dealing with that foreboding sense of dread, it’s easier to just collect more clutter to pretend your life has more substance than it actually does.
That’s what Laura and I agreed on anyway.
Once the unpacking was finished up, we kicked back on our tiny little sofa. We were on a little island of boxes in an otherwise empty living room. We didn’t have too much to say to each other that night. The long day of shepherding boxes from one place to another left us exhausted.
It was right about that time when we had finally closed our eyes together that we heard a knock on the door.
It took me a few seconds, but I forced myself up. I could feel my back crack just under my skin at every little movement. I knew I’d be sore for a while. But I still pressed on to my front door.
I unlocked our deadbolt and pulled open the thick wooden frame.
“Hello, Neighbor.” a voice had filtered out towards me. It was an aged voice with the consistency of sandpaper.
My eyes locked with the gaze of my visitor. It was just an elderly old man.
His face was weathered with deep canyons of valleys of wrinkles. Deep shadows of the setting sun casted his face in black silhouettes that displayed the contours of his age.
He wore an ebony black wide brimmed hat with a dark overcoat that hung over his slender shoulders. He smiled with all the effort it took for a man who had already hit that venerable old age of carelessness.
“Hey, sorry, we just moved in,” I replied. “I don’t think we’ve met yet. Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked the aged senior. He just shook his head in steady dismissal.
“No, no. Nothing like that. I just wanted to give you a proper welcome to Haidenfield. My name’s John Clark. I’m the block President here.” He extended one of his lanky hands towards me. I took his hand in mine and shook it. His skin felt like tanned leather but his grip was strong.
“Well thank you for the welcome. Sorry we didn’t have time to meet with the neighbors yet. We had a pretty busy day.” John tightened his lips and nodded in understanding.
“Nonsense. We should be apologizing to you both. Had we been younger we’d have helped you out with those boxes. I think those times are long past us now though.” John gave a halfhearted chuckle.
“Listen, we pride ourselves in this town for our hospitality. If you need anything at all, please don’t hesitate to ask. My wife Mary and I love having company, and we live in that blue house right next door.”
I gave a small tired smile back to the old man. “Thanks John. I’ll pass that onto my wife.”
“Good. Tell you the truth, none of us even lock our doors at night. I promise you, if you need anything at all just walk right in.” His smile faltered with just a twitch at the end of his words. His eyes focused deep into mine.
“Well, I appreciate that offer. I promise we’ll knock first though.” I gave a halfhearted laugh. The old man’s expression didn’t change.
“Whatever makes you feel more comfortable here. Just remember, always keep hospitality first. Around here, we’re all guests within each other’s homes.” He squeezed my hand tightly making me realize that he had never let go of me in the first place. “Be safe.”
His leathery hand tightened over mine one last time before he let go. The old man dipped his chin slightly in a small bow of respect. His wide brim hat dipping below his eyes and casting his face into total darkness.
“Our doors are open for you, Gregory. At any time, no matter the hour.” With that John swung around and turned back towards my driveway. His black overcoat billowed off of his small frame with beautiful grace.
I squinted my eyes towards him trying to find the words to the strange feeling I had over the situation. Something about that interaction had given me a terribly uncomfortable feeling. I couldn’t place my finger on it though.
I slowly shut my door and locked the deadbolt behind the old man. I shook off the nerves that tumbled down my spine and returned back to the barren living room of my new home.
Laura had found herself laying half asleep on the couch. Her body sprawled across the cushions.
“Who was that?” her small voice murmured out towards me.
“A neighbor, his name’s John. He lives in that blue house right next to ours with his wife.”
Laura twisted her body and stretched out on the empty couch, yawning. Her voice pushed past her inhale. “Oh? Was he nice?” She asked through her tired tone.
“Yeah, he just seems a little strange.” I paused for a moment, judging how much space was left on the couch past Laura’s small frame. “Hey, let’s head upstairs before we both pass out down here. Otherwise one of us is going to end up sleeping on the floor.” Laura laughed before pushing herself up.
We both went upstairs to our unfurnished bedroom. The only thing we had setup was a queen size box spring with a matching mattress that lay on top of it. The box spring had found itself laying haphazardly on the hardwood of our floor.
We ended up both sluggishly making our usual nest of pillows and blankets. Before long we were both blacked out for the night.
It wasn’t until a few hours later I had felt a pressure on my chest that was shaking me awake.
I looked over to the small silhouette of Laura next to me. The silvery moonlight from our window casting an ethereal light over her figure.
“Greg, wake up.” Laura’s voice sounded panicked and subdued. I could hear how terrified she was even underneath her hushed tone.
“What, what’s going on?” I replied. My hand had tried to wipe away the sleep from my eyes. My body still felt exhausted from the physical labor we had just finished.
“I heard the downstairs door slam shut. I think someone broke in.” I looked at Laura and held my breath. I was trying to hear if anything else in our home was making noise.
All I could hear was the throbbing of my own heartbeat.
The rest of the house was dead quiet. Not a single creak of the aged wooden floorboard had met itself in contrast to our mutual silence.
“I’ll go check it out.” I whispered over to Laura.
She let go of my chest and I lurched myself upward. I had wished I had a gun, or a bat, or anything I could have used to defend myself with. But I had nothing more than the mattress on the floor to protect myself with.
But I swallowed that feeling and pressed on. I slowly opened up my bedroom door and crept downstairs. Nearly every step I took sent a loud creak that echoed its way throughout the empty house.
I kept telling myself that nothing could be inside our home and be this silent. Not unless it was standing completely still.
I entered our moonlit living room and flipped on the lights. Nothing.
I pressed forward into the kitchen and did the same thing. Nothing.
Finally the foyer. Nothing.
I looked over to the front door and saw the deadbolt latch still flipped towards the locked position.
I felt my body relax, my shoulders slumped down in relief.
I took a deep breath and wandered back up into our bedroom.
“There’s no one down there. The door’s still locked.” Laura just stared at me for a moment.
“I know what I heard, Greg. Someone slammed that door shut.” I could see the absolute resolve in Laura’s eyes. I knew she fully believed in what she had heard.
“Listen, I don’t know. Everything’s locked up tight down there. No one’s getting in without breaking down that door.” I laid back down on the mattress next to my wife. She just stared towards our bedroom door as if she had expected something to break through it.
Both of our physical fatigues ended up hitting their limits a few moments later and we found ourselves asleep once again.
But the same surprise came again and again, night after night.
Laura would wake me up sometime just after 2am and tell me she heard our front door slam shut. I would head downstairs, see nothing and check the lock to find everything in order.
It wasn’t until the evening of the fourth night, well after we had finished moving in, that I had made a disturbing discovery with our door.
The lock didn’t actually work.
The deadbolt didn’t transition over no matter how hard you twisted the locking mechanism. The door had been unlocked every single night since we had first moved in.
I was at a crossroads.
I could break the news to Laura and have her lose even more sleep than she had already lost, or make the decision to just handle things myself and buy a new deadbolt from the department store in the morning.
So I did what I thought was best.
I told Laura I would sleep on the couch that night and keep an eye on the door. I didn’t tell her about the broken lock.
She went upstairs to our bedroom while I laid down on our couch. I decided to grab a kitchen knife for protection. Just in case. I stole the largest one that I could find from our knife set. It was about the deadliest thing I could think of.
I positioned our couch so that it faced our foyer. My vision was dead set on our front door for the first few hours. I did my best to keep them open that night but a few hours in and my eyes felt heavy.
My mind had found itself halfway to dreamland and halfway to reality.
So when I watched the dimly lit front door in front of me slowly crack its way open I couldn’t muster up the energy to move.
Even when my brain had begun to scream at me to do something, my body was paralyzed.
I could only watch as the brass handle of the door slowly unlatched itself and the thick wooden door creaked its way open.
The darkness from outside had spilled forward. The shadows casted an uncanny black shade throughout our foyer. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t make out a single figure in the emptiness of the void outside.
But I could see one thing.
I could see an arm that had extended its lanky fingers around the exterior of our door knob.
It was gangly, with a pale red hue that seemed unnaturally colored. Spindles of blacked veins intertwined themselves with knots of tumor like growths all along its skin. The arm was so thin it could be mistaken for a discarded tree branch.
Yet, the thing’s arm was impossibly long for its slender and atrophied frame.
The forearm alone had to have been at least four or five feet in length. Its upper arm was even more so. The limb stretched deep into the darkness of the night outside. I couldn’t even see the shoulder that the stick-like appendage should have been connected to.
The entirety of the creature’s body was completely cloaked in the shadows from outside.
Meanwhile, I watched helplessly as the door creaked its way more and more open.
The door had nearly reached the limits of its hinges before it paused. A few seconds passed before the fingers of the creature had tightened around the brass door handle.
With a single tug the door flew backwards. The full force of the wood slammed shut with such an impact that the intensity of it alone shook the house.
I finally snapped out of my paralysis. My heart was racing and I could feel a cold sweat pour down my forehead.
I heard my bedroom door bang open and the thudding of my wife’s feet sprint downstairs towards me.
“Greg,” she yelled out as soon as she saw me. I looked at her and knew immediately she could see the expression on my face. The absolute petrified expression. “Greg, what happened? Did you see anything?”
I couldn’t formulate the words out of my mouth. I just nodded.
We stayed up the whole night with each other. As soon as the department store opened I made the drive over.
Funnily enough, the local store didn’t sell any type of door lock. But ever determined I drove out the extra hour to a chain store and got exactly what I needed.
By the early afternoon I was taking off my old deadbolt and affixing on the new one. My tired mind was barely able to comprehend the task I was doing.
“Hello, Neighbor.” A raspy voice had called out from behind me. I turned towards the blistering sun and saw the outline of John wearing his wide brim hat right behind me. “What are you doing?”
I sighed and continued on. “I’m fixing up our locks. I just noticed last night that they weren’t working.” I pushed my fingertips against my eyelids and tried to force some of my exhaustion out.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. None of us ever lock up our doors.” John continued to stare down at me. I couldn’t make out his expression through the blinding light that back lit his slender figure.
“Yeah, well, I’d just feel safer if I did.” I muttered to myself. I grabbed the new lock and placed it into the now empty hole of the front door.
“You won’t be. The hospitality of an open door policy is what keeps this neighborhood safe. Always has been. Ever since I was a kid. A lot of people had to get hurt to realize that.” A silence enveloped us as I continued about my task.
“Gregory, if you finish what you’re doing, you’re going to get yourself and your wife hurt. Now I can’t say much more than that, but you need to trust in your neighbors.” I scoffed under my breath before I turned towards John.
I created a visor for my eyes using my hands. The makeshift shade helped me see the dour expression on my neighbors face.
“Listen, John, I get it. You’re a close community here. But we’ve been having issues with our front door opening since we got here. That’s stopping tonight.” John slowly shook his head in disappointment.
“I can’t compel someone to have good manners. Compelled hospitality is no hospitality on behalf of the compulser. I’d be damned if I forced your hand here. But there are things out there that don’t like locked doors. They’ve got to feel welcomed otherwise our whole neighborhood falls apart.”
I felt my brow furrow as I looked closer at John’s face. I felt a kinship of understanding between us. I felt like he knew more than he was letting on.
“What’s going on here?” I whispered up to the old man.
“It’s unbecoming to talk about someone behind their back.” He paused. “Mary’s making a pie for you tonight. I’ll leave it on your doorstep. Don’t eat it. It’s for your guests tonight.” John took a deep breath and muttered ‘I hope it’ll be enough’ under his breath.
The old man swung his back towards me and began to walk back towards his house.
I ignored him and fixed up the door. I made sure it locked up tight as soon as I was finished.
Sure enough, just a few hours after Laura had returned home, we had a knock on our door. I opened the door and discovered a large steaming fresh apple pie. It had found its home resting upon our stoop.
A small card lay near it. It read;
‘For the guests of Gregory and Laura Adams, from the neighborhood of Haidenfield. We apologize for making you feel unwelcome tonight. Please accept our deepest apologies.
Very Respectfully,
The Clark’s.
P.S.
Gregory, a proper dessert should always be set out on your kitchen table in case any guests make an unexpected visit. May you have room on your dining room table to place this in case that may happen.
God Bless - John.’
Laura and I both gave each other a strange glance.
“What’s all that about?” she asked, flipping the card around in her hand.
“No idea.” I replied, examining the pie in my hands. The aroma wafted over our home in the most pleasant of ways.
“Should we have a slice?” Laura leaned down and smelled the apple cinnamon scent that had emanated from the glaze inside. I pulled it away from her.
Something in me told me that John knew something we didn’t. I had no idea what was going on but I knew what the card said. And I knew what I had seen the night prior.
“Let’s just leave it on the table tonight. We can double check with the neighbors tomorrow just to make sure they actually made it. Otherwise, I don’t know if we can trust it, you know?” I tried my best to explain it away but Laura gave me a skeptical look.
Thankfully she just shrugged it off.
I placed the card and the pie right on the center of the dining room table and headed upstairs.
Laura managed to fall asleep before I did.
That night I felt my eyes stare deep holes into my eyelids. No sense of drowsiness had washed over me. I could only think of that strange, spindly arm that I had seen the prior night.
Like clockwork, just after 2am, I had heard a jingle come from my downstairs foyer. The door knob was shaking.
It was slow at first but then got more frantic. I gripped onto my bed covers and prayed that the lock would keep whatever that thing was away.
But as the door handle jiggled more and more fiercely that prayer fell away. I could hear the door begin thudding in its own frame as something lurched against it.
At this point Laura must have heard it as well. She shot up in bed and looked over at me.
“Greg, what the hell is that?”
Something began crashing against the door. A chorus of strange voices began screaming from outside our home. Their harmony created an ethereal echo that filled every inch of our home.
I glanced over to our bedrooms window and saw several spider-like hands pressed against the glass.
Their skin was the same twisted red hue that I had seen the night prior. Their gnarled fingertips had pressed so tightly against the glass that the glass had begun to crack under their grip.
The same crackling noise had filled our entire home as every window in our house had simultaneously begun to experience the same fate.
Laura’s eyes had fixated themselves on the gangly hands outside. Tears had welled up in her eyes as her voice faltered and fell away into a low whimper.
I didn’t know what to do, so I reached over to her and pulled her tight against my chest.
“Don’t look at them.” I whispered to her over and over again. I wasn’t sure if I was speaking to her or to myself.
I heard the front door splinter open under the weight of something incredibly massive. A tremendous tundra of thudding and thumping had filled the lower floor. Soon to follow was the sounds of every window in our home shattering open one by one.
I squinted my eyes open for just a moment to see the bedroom window crack and explode into shards of glass. Broken shards had flown their way towards me and my wife. I closed my eyes to protect them from the slivers of flying glass.
The hands from outside had begun to stretch their way into our home. They seemed to lurch their way in our direction as if they could see us.
I closed my eyes again and began praying.
The thudding from downstairs had found its way into our kitchen. The sounds of cabinets clattered open and shut. The symphony of voices floated their way into the halls of our home.
I was left waiting for the feeling of those lanky hands to wrap over me. I was preparing myself to be dragged out of my home at any moment. To feel them pull me right through the broken glass filled window and into the mouth of whatever those arms were connected too.
But instead I was greeted by silence. The banging had stopped.
All the noises had stopped.
I could hear Laura crying in my arms but that was it.
I opened my eyes and saw nothing more than the shattered window of my bedroom greeting me.
I quickly picked up a large piece of glass and wrapped it up in one of my socks before getting up to my feet.
Room by room I cleared.
Every window in our home was broken. Every single one.
I got to our front door and saw its frame completely knocked off its hinges. Broken splinters of wood lay scattered across the hardwood floor.
Yet the thing that got me the most, was that the pie was gone.
We stopped locking up our doors after that night. Now we’re always prepared to entertain any guests that might show up.
No matter the time.