You left the door open

You left the door open.

That’s what the note said—scrawled in looping, childlike handwriting on the back of an old gas station receipt.

Mira found it on her kitchen counter, still damp from the night’s rain.

But Mira hadn’t left the door open.

She lived alone. Or at least, she had until a month ago when she moved into her uncle's creaking farmhouse after his “accidental” fall down the basement stairs.

The place had sat untouched for months. When she arrived, she found dishes in the sink, food rotting in the fridge, a coffee mug half-full beside a worn recliner. 

A time capsule, sealed shut by tragedy.

She didn’t want the house. She didn’t want the memories.

But inheritance is inheritance.

Mira stared at the note. The letters looked smeared, rushed, as if written with the urgency of someone desperate to be understood. And that single sentence throbbed in her brain like a wound.

You left the door open.

She checked every door in the house. Front, back, basement—all locked.

She checked the windows. Shut tight.

The house was secure. Still, something felt wrong. As if her name had been whispered by the walls when she walked past.

That night, she dreamed of her uncle.

He stood in the hallway, his back to her, wet footprints trailing from the basement door. When he turned around, his face was missing—just a wet, yawning hole where it should have been.

She woke up gasping, the sheets damp with her sweat—cold.

And the basement door was open.

Mira didn’t go near it. She slammed it shut, wedged a chair under the knob, and didn’t look back.

She convinced herself it was stress. Sleepwalking. A creaky house and an overactive imagination. Until the second note appeared.

This time, it was tucked into the bathroom mirror frame. No rain-damp ink. Just bold black letters burned into a napkin from Benny’s Diner.

You left the door open again.

She hadn’t.

Mira hadn’t gone near the basement. She hadn’t left anything open. But the note was there, and so was the smell.

Damp earth. Mildew. Rot.

She followed the scent to the basement door. It was closed—but cold, colder than anything should’ve been in July.

The chair had been moved.

Scratches—faint, shallow, like something testing the wood—had appeared around the knob.

She called the police.

They found nothing. No signs of a break-in. No fingerprints but hers.

The officer—young—shrugged with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Old houses do strange things.”

Mira didn’t sleep that night. Not deeply. Not safely.

She started hearing it. 

Thump. Thump. Thump. 

From below. Rhythmic. Wet. Like something dragging itself up the stairs and back down. Over and over.

She began stacking furniture in front of the basement door.

The thumping continued.

More notes appeared. One in the fridge. One slipped under her bedroom door.

It’s getting tired of waiting.

It remembers you.

You left it open. Let it in.

Mira didn’t know what “it” was. Or why it seemed to blame her. She hadn’t even been in the house when her uncle died.

But the house knew her. The notes knew her.

And by the end of the week, the door was open again.

She called a priest.

Not because she was religious—she wasn’t—but because she was desperate.

Father Tom arrived with a well-worn Bible and a face that had seen too much. He didn’t ask many questions. Just lit incense and began to bless the rooms.

He paused at the basement door.

“You said this is where your uncle died?”

Mira nodded. “He fell. Broke his neck.”

Tom touched the knob. Flinched. “Something’s still down there.”

She waited in the living room while he descended the basement stairs. She heard him speaking Latin. Chanting. Then coughing.

Then silence.

When she opened the door, he was gone.

Only his Bible remained, open to a verse she didn’t recognize. The words had been underlined—shaking hands, maybe. Or fear.

And the door was opened, and there arose smoke from the pit…

Mira backed away and locked the door again.

The next morning, her uncle’s voice called to her.

From the basement.

“Mira,” it rasped. “You left me down here. Come open the door.”

She didn’t move.

The voice changed. Sharpened. Younger. Hers.

“Mira,” it said. “It’s your fault. You always leave things open. Like you left me open.”

She ran.

She drove for hours without direction. Motels. Parking lots. Friend’s couches.

But the notes followed her.

Slipped under windshields. Inside her motel drawers.

You left the door open. You left the door in you open.

And then came the dream.

A mirror. Her reflection. Smiling back—but not her smile.

The reflection held a key. The basement door key. And behind her in the mirror, something tall and rotting pressed a hand to the glass.

Mira returned to the house.

She couldn’t run anymore.

She removed the furniture, unlocked the basement door, and stood at the top of the stairs.

“Why me?” she asked the dark.

Silence.

Then—Thump. Thump. Thump.

Something was climbing the stairs.

She waited.

The shape that emerged wasn’t her uncle. Wasn’t even human.

It looked like grief given flesh. A face half-formed from rot and memory.

“You left the door open,” it said in her voice. “You left me behind.”

“What are you?”

“I’m what you tried to forget. What you buried. But I remember.”

It stepped onto the landing.

And smiled.

They found Mira’s body three days later.

The police said she fell down the stairs. Just like her uncle.

But they never explained the scratches on the walls. The notes that kept appearing in the mailbox.

You left the door open. Again.

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