The Visitor

There came a knock at 11:47, hard and insistent on the oak door. Three distinct knocks that shattered the silence in my apartment like a knife through silk.

I sat there frozen, mug halfway to my lips, the steam curling up in between my fingers. No one knocked on my door at this hour. Also, nobody knocked on my door at all, really. I’d moved into this building for the express reason of being anonymous — twenty floors full of strangers who kept to themselves.

Another knock. Same rhythm. Same intensity.

I put the mug on the table and muted my TV, listening for foot steps in the hall. Nothing. The ancient heat in the building groaned and a toilet flushed somewhere overhead, but outside the hall it was still silent as a crypt.

I padded up to the door without making a sound in my bare feet on the hard wood. The peephole presented an empty corridor speckled in shadows thrown by the flickering and fracturing of wan fluorescent light on tired carpet. I held my breath, tallying the seconds in my head by heartbeats, looking for a twitch.

The knock came again. But this time, I was close enough to feel it — three rumbles through the door that felt as though they were shooting up my arm and ringing like an echo in my chest.

"Who's there?" My voice cracked slightly.

Silence.

I had my ear against the cold wood, waiting to hear a breath, smell stiff fabric, receive any indication of human life. The hallway inhaled with me.

The next time I peeked through the peephole, she was there.

A woman in her 60s, her silver hair pulled back tightly into a bun, dark coat buttoned up despite the heat of October. Hands clasped in front of her, never mind the trembling fingers or twitching muscles, stared into that door as if she could see through it just by virtue of not being able to bring herself to do anything else. As if she could see me.

"Can I help you?" Twisting the deadbolt I called through the door.

She smiled—not a warm smile, but one of practiced patience from someone who had waited a very long time for this moment.

"Hello, David," she said. She had a clear but steady voice, layered with an accent I couldn’t put my finger. "I've come about your mother."

My blood turned to ice water. I hadn’t talked to my mother in 15 years. Hadn’t known if she was still alive. I’d changed my name, moved across the country, constructed a new life expressly to make it so conversations like this could never happen.

“I think you got the wrong apartment,” I said, but my voice rang hollow even to my own ears. She had said my real name—the one I'd buried with everything else.

"May I come in? It's rather urgent."

I peered through the peephole once more. She hadn’t moved, and was now still standing there with that same patient smile when I noticed something making my skin crawl. She was bone dry and it was raining, I could hear the rain pounding on my windows. No trace of the construction mud that has been tracking through the building’s lobby for weeks on her shoes. And her eyes — even through the mangled lens of the peephole, looked as though they could catch and hold light that didn’t exist.

“I don’t know who you are,” I said, “but I will call security.

"Your mother is dying, David."

The words landed like a fist to me. Backing away from the door I was in disbelief and my barriers collapsed. Images streamed back: Her laugh, the scent of her perfume, how she’d hum when cooking breakfast. The last fight we'd had. The things I'd said.

“She said I was to come and look for you,” the woman went on. "To bring you home."

"That's impossible." My throat felt raw. "She doesn't know where I am. No one knows where I am."

“She’s been searching for you forever, David. We both have."

I groped for the phone, my fingers still shaking, and scrolled to the building’s security number. The phone rang once, twice—

"I wouldn't" the woman said, a quiet note of warning in her voice.

I looked up. She was still there in the hallway, still staring at me with that same eerie smile on her face, and yet there she was again talking to me as if she were standing directly behind me. I whipped around, phone almost falling out of my hand. My apartment was empty, shadows hopping in corners, but her voice hung like smoke.

“Time is short,” she murmured, and now it was like she was speaking from within my own head. "She's asking for you."

I found myself with my back against the door, my phone compressed to my chest. "What do you want?"

"Just to take you home."

I watched her raise one thin, pale hand to knock again through the peephole. But when those knuckles struck wood, it wasn’t just one door that reacted this time around—it was every door in the building, a chorus of raps that felt like shaking the very bones of the edifice.

The lights in my apartment flickered, and went off.

In the darkness, I heard a faint click: the sound of a key being turned in a lock where there was no key. Hinges that have no business creaking. The quiet ‘swoosh’ of footsteps on my floor.

“Hello, David,” she said, and her voice was warm now, maternal. I am here to take you home to your mother.”

I tried to run, tried to shout, but my body refused to budge. And in whatever moonlight managed to bleed through my rain-streaked windows, I could now see her perfectly—not the grandma lady from out in the hallway, but something else. Someone who had my mother’s eyes and my mother’s smile, the face I recall from childhood.

“She’s been waiting so long,” she said, extending hands that flickered between flesh and shadow. "We both have."

As her fingers met my face, I realized with an awful clarity that my mother was not dying at all. She was already dead. Had been dead for years.

And now she wanted me to go with her.

Before blacking out the last thing I would ever see was her smile; patient, loving, cold as she was without mercy. The last thin I heard was the soft, final click of my apartment door closing.

The building’s occupants subsequently told the police that there had been knocking throughout the night — everyone had heard it, in every apartment; a rhythmic ensemble that prevented them from getting any sleep until dawn. But the hallways were empty when they reviewed security video footage.

My door was unlocked and the coffee was still warm on the table with the TV flickering in a muted state. The only evidence that was ever there was a phone on the floor with the number partially dialled for building security.

They still seek me, but I never think they will find what they are looking for. I’m home, now, with my mother, in a place where doors open only one way and nobody leaves at suppertime.

Sometimes I think that someone else will hear that rapping — three brisk taps in the blackness, business like but urgent. I trust they’re smarter than I was. I hope they don't answer.

But I suspect they will. They are very hard to ignore, especially from someone you love.