Threshold

Every night at 3:03, my door remembers a hand that isn’t there.

The first time, I sat up in bed convinced I’d dreamed it. The second time, the sound was so exact that I reached for my phone before my eyes opened, thumb finding the clock in the dark. 3:03. One knock. Not a rattle or tick of old pipes, not the sloppy stutter of someone stumbling down the hall. A single, patient knock. As if the night had put a finger to its lips and then tapped once to say hush, listen.

I live alone on the sixth floor. The hallway is beige and stubborn. The door has a peephole that warps everything into friendly distortions. Friendly until three in the morning, anyway.

The third night, I took it personally. I got up. I padded barefoot across the cold floor, feeling each board announce me to the room. I put my eye to the peephole. The corridor looked the way it always does at that hour. A long, sucked in breath. The EXIT sign winked from the far end. No shadow leaned on my frame. No prankster crouched. Nothing.

It kept happening. Always at 3:03. Always one knock. I started to leave a notebook by the door. I don’t know why. Habit of an archivist, maybe. That’s my job. I digitize other people’s memories. I handle brittle letters with gloved hands and feed cassette tapes into a hungry whirring mouth. Most nights I sit awake while the machine whispers into a waveform, and I listen for ghosts with headphones on. It does something to your head, listening that hard. The past gets louder. It learns your name.

By the seventh night, I had an entry for each knock. The dates marched in a column. Beneath each, a description. “3:03 a.m., single knock. Cold draft. No visual.” “3:03 a.m., single knock. Cat meowing downstairs?” This went on.

I started a folder on my desktop and named it DOOR. Inside, I saved clips from the camera I’d mounted above the peephole. There was nothing to see, so I catalogued that, too. I noted time stamps and the way the hall lights flickered. I described the emptiness as faithfully as I could, like a court stenographer taking down silences between words. I was aware of how ridiculous it was, how obsessive, but that didn’t stop me. Rituals have a way of making sense even when nothing else does. They give the mind something to do with its hands.

On the tenth night I knocked back.

It wasn’t a brave decision. I was tired, and the knock felt almost companionable by then. I waited for the sound, counted the breath after, and tapped once on my side. It felt silly. It felt like replying to a telemarketer. It felt like dropping a pebble down a well and holding my breath for the echo.

A soft current moved over my feet. The draft came from under the door. My apartment is sealed tight against the kind of damp the Pacific Northwest is famous for, but that night, the air smelled like old, wet wood. It was like a cold damp reminiscent of moldering boxes in the attic that haven’t been opened for years.

I didn’t sleep again until the sky turned a faint orange. The city stirred. I showered and shaved and watched my face for signs. My eyes had gone a little glassy. My mouth had invented an extra line. I looked like a man who’d heard something he couldn’t tell anyone about.

The eleventh night was a Sunday. Sundays are dangerous when you live alone. They pocket their knives in small talk and let you bleed in the quiet. That evening, I ordered Thai and ate it on the couch with a stack of letters from 1951. They were from a woman named Eva to a man named Saul. She told him about oranges and politics and the way the neighbor boy played the piano badly. I thought of the opposite of devotion. I thought of the summer I turned twelve and stopped going up into the attic because my sister was afraid and I didn’t want to be her staircase anymore.

At 3:03, the knock came. My hand closed on the cold knob and after a long beat of hesitation I opened it. Not all at once. Not with a flourish. I opened the door on the tail of the sound and met my own face at twelve.

He was smaller than I remembered. I’ve always thought of twelve as a cliff you fall off. In reality, it’s just a boy in a grey hoodie with chewed strings. He looked up at me, mouth in a tight line we shared and said, very simply, “Don’t let her in.”

I don’t know what I expected. A rehearsed proclamation, maybe. A ghostly wail. Instead I got something close to a whisper. It reached me the way the knock did, in one exact place.

“Who?” I asked, utterly bewildered.

“You’ll know tomorrow.” He took a step back. He glanced down the corridor like a kid about to bolt, measuring the distance to the stairs. His hair was darker than I remember. He wore the sneakers with the little stamped stars on the sole. For years, I tracked those stars through mud and carpet and argued about it with my mother. The pattern had been discontinued for decades. I watched one print bloom on my threshold, wet and perfect. I felt the draft move past my legs toward him like a hand, and he flinched from it. He looked over my shoulder into the apartment.

“You live alone,” he said, like a fact on a test. Not cruel. Not kind. A fact.

“I do,” I said.

He nodded once. “Don’t let her in,” he repeated, and then he turned, almost shyly, and went towards the stairs.

He didn’t vanish. He ran. He got smaller. At the landing, he tilted his head as if he heard his name. Then he took the stairs. I followed him a few steps into the hall and stopped. I stood in the corridor, barefoot, watching a boy recede into a corner of time I very specifically remember. The lights did not flicker. The night did not bow and admit me. Everything behaved.

I slept for a couple of hours. When I woke, light trickled around the curtains. I went to the door immediately, because of course I did. The track of prints stopped at my threshold. No other mark marred the beige hallway carpet. I breathed, long and deliberate, until my heart accepted the pace.

My phone chimed at 9:17. It was a reply to a message I had sent three months ago and then convinced myself I hadn’t. The sender field was a name I hadn’t said aloud in a year. Ana. One line: Can we talk tonight?

I read it. Then I set the phone on the counter and walked away as if it might explode. I washed the same coffee mug twice.

Ana and I built a life that lasted exactly as long as the scaffolding of our bodies would hold it. We were good until we weren’t. We did that thing you do when you’re young and scared, which is call it love and then put every other fear into it and call those love, too. Then we stopped and set the jar of it on a shelf to remind us of what could have been.

She’s the only “her” the boy could have meant. That’s what I told myself, which is also what I was hungry to tell myself. Safer to let everything be ordinary. Safer to live in a hallway, measuring distances and calling it life.

At noon, I answered: Tonight is fine.

She wrote back immediately with an address that belonged to a cafe on Hastings where we used to go after movies and argue about the ones that tried too hard to win our hearts with flares and flutes. Seven? She added. The question mark felt like a lifted shoulder. Apology or mischief?

I spent the day at work pretending to work. I fed tapes to the machines and listened to the digital hymn come out the other side. I added file names and tags and a line in a database that will shore up a dissertation ten years from now. It is blush work. It honors. It costs. I did it all with my hands while my head walked the perimeter of a question. Don’t let who in?

I showered at six and took far too long to pick a shirt. I stood in my doorway at 6:29 and checked that it latched like always, as if the knock might decide to arrive early and head inside without me. I descended into the evening with a stupid kind of hope.

Ana was already at the cafe. She had changed her hair. She stood when she saw me and smiled the way she always did. First, with her eyes, as if she wanted to make sure I knew that if the mouth failed, the light wouldn’t.

“Ezra,” she said.

“Ana.”

We did the dance. We ordered. We pretended to have nothing to say until the first warm mouthful of coffee made it impossible to sit with nothing between us.

“How’s work?” she asked.

“Archaeology of cassette tapes.” I tried to make it a joke. I didn’t force it. It landed close enough to what I do to make me feel protective of it. “You?”

“I’m finishing the last unit of my counseling diploma.” She laughed lightly. “Tell me that isn’t exactly where you thought I’d end up.”

“It is.” I smiled. “I’m glad.”

We talked an hour easy, then two, maybe three. The past unfolded the way it always does when both people still want each other to look good from a certain angle. There was a shadow in her gaze when I mentioned the past year, when I moved across town and stopped answering most invitations. She apologized once for leaving the way she had. She meant it. I forgave her, which is to say, I nodded the way a man nods while the tide moves under his feet.

When we stood to leave, she hesitated. The light outside had gone.

“Would you walk me home?” she asked. “It’s not far.”

The boy said, don’t let her in, and the point pierced me cleanly. I thought of how many doors I’d invited the wrong thing through because I wanted to be brave. I thought of my sister at the top of the attic stairs, whispering Ezra, come with me, on the night of the storm. I had not gone. I had not been brave. I had stayed under a quilt and let the house do its own work. Leah had gone up alone, small in her socks. The next afternoon, she was gone. Adults talked. They set their cups down hard. Kids whispered. My mother carried it like a wound. We all searched. We knocked on every neighbor’s door and called her name. The attic smelled like dust and damp and I never climbed those stairs again.

Ana and I walked in the wet. The city shimmered, soft neon in puddles. For a moment, it felt like the night was gently forgiving us our old sins. But the air had that brittle electricity before thunder, like static in a stranger’s breath.

Her building sat on a corner where the streetlight flickered between gold and nothing. Under that failing light, someone stood.

A woman in a yellow raincoat.

The hood was up, but her face tilted toward the glow as if she were trying to catch it. Not warm herself by it. Not even see better. Just catch it, like an insect might.

Ana didn’t notice her right away. She was still talking about the program she was finishing, her voice careful, warm. My eyes kept snagging on the figure. The rain slicked off her coat without clinging to it. Her hands, pale, waxy things, hung motionless at her sides, though the wind was strong enough to pull Ana’s hair into her mouth.

When we reached the steps, the woman turned towards us. Her movements a fraction too smooth, too rehearsed. Ana pulled her keys and opened the door, and I hustled her inside and pulled the door closed behind us on instinct.

“Excuse me,” the woman stood on the other side of the lobby glass. The voice was wrong in the smallest way possible. Not flat or robotic, but recycled. Like hearing your own laugh from a recording. “Could you let me in?”

Ana smiled, half distracted. “Do you live here?”

The woman hesitated. “No, just visiting,” she said finally. Her lips shaped the words carefully, as if they were foreign to her. Something in her face kept flickering. As though it couldn’t decide which expression belonged there. For a heartbeat, she looked apologetic. Then relieved. Then simply blank.

“Which unit?” I asked.

She blinked too slow. “Six…oh-eight.”

“There’s no 608,” Ana said, laughing lightly, though I heard the waver in it. “Last apartment’s 602.”

“Ah,” the woman said. “Then…602, yes.”

Ana froze, keys still in hand. That was her unit.

“I’m sorry,” Ana said carefully. “Who did you say you were visiting?”

The woman tilted her head like a bird assessing a worm. “I didn't,” she said. The rain rolled down her hood and dripped from her chin. “Would you let me in now?”

Her voice wasn’t threatening. That was the worst part. It was warm, kind, the sort of tone you trust from teachers or doctors. I could see her eyes now. Pale green. Familiar somehow, though I couldn’t place from where. They reflected the yellow of her coat.

Ana looked at me.

My mouth was dry. “No,” I said.

The woman blinked. A single droplet ran down her cheek, not from the rain but from the corner of her eye. Thick, amber, viscous. It caught on her jaw.

“Oh,” she said softly, and smiled. The smile was wrong. Too wide. The corners stretched, but the skin at her temples didn’t move. “You’ve already let me in, Ezra.”

My stomach dropped through the floor.

Ana gasped. “What-”

Before she could finish, the woman raised her hand, slow, deliberate. The palm pressed against the glass of the lobby door. Through it, I could see the fine lines of her skin. Except they weren’t lines at all. They were letters. Tiny words, printed across her flesh like the inside of an old book. The ink bled when she moved. From her palm outward, the letters began to shift. Rearrange. Until they formed one word I could still read through the glass.

OPEN.

Ana fumbled backward, keyring clattering to the ground. I grabbed her arm before she could pick it up.

The woman leaned closer, her face flattening against the glass, the raincoat squeaking as she pressed in.

“I’ve been waiting,” she murmured, voice muffled but clear. “You always make me wait.”

For a heartbeat, her eyes flickered sideways, like she was looking for someone behind us. Then she smiled again, a small, patient smile, and whispered something turned my blood to ice.

“You told me to knock.” The glass flexed. Not cracked. Flexed, as if it were soft. The metal handle shuttered in its socket.

I yanked Ana toward the stairs. The sound that followed wasn’t a knock. It was the sound of something testing the fit of a new body. The doorframe groaned. A low hum rippled through the air.

We ran up the stairs, Ana crying out questions I couldn’t answer. On the third floor landing, I dared one glance back and saw her, halfway through the door. Her face had changed again, melting into something unfinished. Eyes too large. Jaw unhinged in the wrong direction. Her hands reached through the gap, fingers lengthening as though jointed twice. She looked at me and her mouth shaped the word again, slower, heavier.

“O…pen.”

Then the light flickered, and she was gone.

Ana’s apartment was silent except for the rain. She thought it was a break-in, someone on drugs. She hadn’t seen what I had, or maybe she had and her mind wasn’t ready to understand. She called the police; they came and they found nothing. Ana went to bed, bringing me a blanket and pillows for the couch.

“I’m glad we talked,” she said, her eyes filled with exhaustion.

“Me too.” She kissed my cheek and I watched her go. I sat on the couch watching the clock blink at me from across the room. 2:59. 3:00. 3:01.

At 3:03, the knock came.

I went to the peephole, heart slamming against my ribs.

She was there. The woman in the yellow coat. Dripping wet, face calm and perfect, as if nothing had ever gone wrong. But this time she wasn’t alone. Behind her stood the boy. My younger self. His face pale and terrified, hoodie soaked, hands trembling. He shook his head. Don’t, he mouthed.

I stepped back and pressed my palm flat to the wood. The woman’s smile widened as leaned in, until her teeth filled my vision.

“Open,” she whispered.

“No.” I replied, with every bit of will. The light hummed; the hall emptied like a held breath.

Morning brought nothing. No prints, no footage, only Ana’s worried smile and a passing goodbye.

“Text me when you get home?” She asked, and there was hope in it.

“I will.”

I went home and waited. 3:03 passed clean. Relief arrived and then, with it, the sound I’d been dreading came closer to home.

One soft knock from the bedroom closet. The air went dry. I lay very still, counting the distance to the knob, when a small, patient voice on the other side whispered.

“Ezra?”

Unmistakable.

Leah’s.