Brian Evenson
1.
Three times in his life someone or something unknown had opened Arn’s door as he tried to sleep, silently sliding it ajar and then standing immobile in the gap. That was all, just standing there, unmoving, just barely visible in the darkness. It wasn’t even all that threatening, he told his therapist, not really. What had disturbed him most about it was not knowing who or what it was. In the darkness he could make nothing out beyond the door’s frame and the silhouette of the figure enclosed within. A large figure, male almost certainly, hulking, head nearly scraping the lintel.
“Who is it?” he had asked that first time, sitting up in bed. How long the figure was there, he wasn’t sure—it felt at once like a very long time and no time at all. The figure didn’t answer—nothing about it made Arn believe it had heard him. But as soon as he threw his blanket off, the door began to creak shut, the latch sinking into the slot just as he reached it. By the time he fumbled the door open and peered out, the hall outside was deserted.
• • •
That first time, he hurried through the small house, searching for it. He turned on the lights and looked into the other rooms, peered into closets and cabinets. No one was there. He felt he should be frightened—and part of him was, but another part was surprisingly calm and unafraid, as if already dead.
Hoping not to have to wake her, he saved his aunt’s bedroom for last. But finally, having looked without success everywhere else, he knocked softly on her door. When she didn’t answer, he opened it.
It was very dark inside. He could not see her, could only hear thickened breathing.
“Aunt,” he whispered. There was no answer.
“Aunt, is it just you in there?” he whispered.
The breathing sputtered, ceased. He heard something move in the bed. He thought he could vaguely make out motion in the darkness, though perhaps this was his imagination.
And for an instant he felt torn in two, as if he were both the person just waking up in bed watching and the figure framed in the doorway—for hadn’t he just been the one and now was the other? Only when his aunt shrieked did he begin to feel like a singular person again.
• • •
He needed help to sort through them, these three brief moments that were dark little holes drilled in his life. He would come once a week to this office with its aggressively modern furniture and sit in a chair across from the therapist who he had quickly come to think of as his therapist and spend forty minutes circling around what his husband liked to call jokingly “your haunting.” Arn had trained himself to smile whenever his husband said that, as if it were funny. But it wasn’t funny, not really.
And please, he warned his therapist, don’t think this is about my resentment of my husband. I have no more resentment than most spouses. I love my husband. I understand he’s trying to make me feel better. But it is my haunting—that’s what he doesn’t understand.
“I saw something,” is what he’d explained, once he’d gotten his aunt calmed down and they were sitting together in the kitchen, lights blazing.
“I saw something too,” said his aunt. “It was standing in my doorway looking in at me as I tried to sleep. Turned out to be you, Jack. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I’m not Jack,” he responded. Jack had been his father’s name. It wasn’t even close to his own name. He hardly even looked like his father.
Don’t write that down, he said to his therapist, and then, What are you writing down?
Does my writing make you nervous? asked his therapist.
But no, this was not what he was asking for—he was not asking for the experience to be analyzed, not yet. This was precisely why he hadn’t managed to talk about the haunting, his haunting, before now—even though he increasingly recognized that it was what had driven him to therapy in the first place. No, he just wanted his therapist to put the notebook down and listen to what had happened, to take the words in before deciding what they meant.
• • •
There at the kitchen table, his aunt held her head in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said. And then, “Don’t worry, I know who you are.” It was not until she said this that Arn considered the possibility that at least for a moment she might not have. That it wasn’t that she’d misspoke, but that she’d glimpsed someone or something else in his face.
And then she recovered. “What were you thinking, Arn?” she asked. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was looking for it.”
“For what?” she asked.
Once he explained, her hands started to shake. Even knowing he’d already searched the house, she insisted they each arm themselves with a knife and search again. They found nothing, nothing and nobody was there. They went outside with flashlights and shined them along the ground near the flowerbeds, but there was nothing there either, no footprints, no signs of disturbance. They played their flash beams up at the roof and saw nothing but roof. They opened the storm cellar and descended, but there was nothing down below, either, just the faint, sour smell of rot.
And yet, from that day forward his aunt treated him differently, with caution, as if she wasn’t sure she recognized him.
• • •
Time passed, said Arn.
And so you forgot about it, said his therapist.
No, said Arn, I never forgot. Every time I fell asleep I expected to open my eyes and see that door open again with a darker silhouette standing within its dark opening.
But it didn’t happen again. Not in that house anyway. Not around his aunt. That was the odd thing, he told his therapist: He’d always thought of hauntings as being bound to a place—a house, a pool in which somebody had drowned, the site of a fatal car wreck, that sort of thing. He’d wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what it was about his aunt’s house that had led to him seeing the silhouette appearing at the threshold of his room. Native American burial ground? Decades-old murder? Previous residence of someone who died alone and neglected? But there was nothing.
So, said his therapist once he fell silent. You were already thinking of it as a ghost.
Oh yes, Arn said. As a haunting. But not yet as my haunting.
• • •
“You must have dreamed it,” his aunt said as he kept talking, kept quizzing her down about the house. “It’s just an ordinary house, built just a year or two before you were born. Before that, this was an orange grove.”
“But there must—” he started.
“Sometimes dreams can be so vivid as to seem real,” his aunt said firmly. “You dreamed it.”
• • •
Your aunt raised you, ventured his therapist. But I’m afraid I’m confused about what happened to your parents.
So am I, said Arn.
His therapist tented his fingers, gazing at Arn over them, eyes steady. He waited.
I never knew my mother, Arn finally said. She died when I was born. My father . . . vanished.
Vanished?
Arn nodded. One day my father woke up and he no longer looked like himself.
What did he look like if not himself?
I don’t know. I remember sitting at the breakfast table with him, looking for something in his face, unsure what. All I knew was, it wasn’t there. And then I realized he was looking at me, too, staring. He was trying to pretend he was reading his paper, but he was staring over it at me. Whatever he was looking for he was finding, and it frightened him.
I left for school, Arn continued. When I came back that afternoon he was gone. I never saw him again.
What do you think happened to him?
I don’t want to talk about it, said Arn. Not today.
This is a safe place—, his therapist began, but Arn rapidly cut him off.
You believe my haunting will tell you something about my relationship with my missing father, he said, that that’s the point of me telling it to you. Maybe so. You can tell me that next time if you’d like. But for now let my haunting be my haunting.
• • •
But Arn seemed to have lost the thread. For a moment the two of them just sat there, faces blank, expressionless. Then his therapist cleared his throat and spoke.
She thought you were dreaming, he said. Your aunt, I mean.
Yes, so she said.
Have you considered she may have been right?
Yes.
And?
Not remotely possible.
How can you be sure?
I’m sure.
But how?
Arn, humming softly under his breath, ignored him.
And the second time? asked his therapist.
Excuse me? said Arn.
There were three times, you said. What about the second?
Ah, said Arn. Yes.
2.
Time marched on. Arn grew up. He was admitted to the local college. He moved out of his aunt’s house and into a dormitory.
More time passed. He was studying something, working toward a degree. It did not matter what he was studying, he told his therapist: It had no bearing on his haunting. He was a junior in college and suddenly was living alone, his room-mate having received academic probation followed by a semester of suspension.
He was lying on his bed trying to sleep. It was perhaps two in the morning. There were still noises coming from the hall despite the time being late enough that quiet hours were supposedly in effect. His door was closed, the light from the hallway shining through the crack beneath it. Occasionally the light would flicker as someone walked down the hall and past his door.
At some point he drifted off. Maybe he was asleep just for a few minutes, maybe for several hours.
He awoke to the impression that something was wrong. He remained in bed, blinking, trying to see. Why couldn’t he see? Usually he could, even at night, even if only just a little. But now he couldn’t. Suddenly he realized why: The light in the hallway was no longer on.
But the light in the hallway was always on. There wasn’t even a switch to turn it off. All night it seeped beneath the door enough for him to dimly make things out, as if in sleep he remained lodged in a colorless facsimile of the actual world.
There was a light of sorts, but exceptionally low and at a great remove, like a single flickering candle held cupped by a hand at the far end of the hall. He could see nothing at all of the room around him. The only thing he could see, barely, was the outline of the doorframe.
Even seeing this, it took his mind some time to register the fact that the door must be open. But once it did, he began to see the silhouette crowded into the doorframe, hunched, almost too large to fit, waiting, immobile, watching him.
How do you know it was watching? interrupted his therapist.
I thought I could see its eyes, he said. Or not eyes exactly, but a gleam or glister where I knew eyes should be. Which led me to believe its eyes were open and looking steadily at me.
“Hello?” Arn had said. “Who are you?” Because he did want to know. He was frightened, of course, but above all else, he wanted to know who or what it was.
The figure did not respond. It seemed again, just like that first time, years before, not to have heard him.
Carefully, slowly, he started out of the bed and crept toward the door. But the door was already closing, and even though he rushed it at the end, he was not quick enough to stop it from slamming shut. Or, rather, he managed to get two of his fingers around the edge of the door before it closed in its frame, but the door closed anyway.
He lifted up his hand, showed his therapist the awkwardly crimped ends of his middle and index finger where the last joint of both digits had been sewed back on. He had felt the severing, the brief, sharp pain of each joint being sheared off, followed by the warm throb, enough of a distraction that he almost missed that something had changed: He could see.
The light in the hallway was on again. He tore open the door and looked out on an ordinary hall: no silhouette in sight, the hall just as it had always been, except for the blood drizzling from his fingers onto the grimy carpet.
• • •
The fingers had been reattached, though he could feel nothing in the top joint of either of them—it was as if they were dead. He had thought long and hard about this second time, unsure what to make of it. The only point in common between his aunt’s house and his dorm room, at least that he could see, was himself. The ghost, if it was a ghost, must be tied to him.
But why him? For this, he had no answer. Nor did he have an answer for why it would visit him so infrequently, or why both times it was always reduced to that single gesture of standing in a doorway, his doorway, the doorway to his bedroom, in the dark.
3.
A decade more passed, he told his therapist. He graduated, got a job, became a responsible citizen. He met the man who would become his husband, they fell in love, lived together, married once the law allowed it. They bought an apartment together, and he allowed a certain form of existence to crystallize or calcify around him. And yet, all the while he was waiting, wondering when—not if but when—despite his move far away, his haunting would find him again. For it would find him, he was sure of that.
He had a few false alarms. Times when he awoke to find his husband, who tended to come to bed much later than he, standing in the open door, motionless, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness before navigating a path to the bed. But his husband’s silhouette looked nothing like the silhouette of his haunting. Arn was the larger of the two of them by far. His husband, small, could not come close to filling a doorway.
• • •
The third incident he thought at first was just that—his husband hesitating in the doorway just before coming to bed. He felt a presence and half opened his eyes, and groaned, and said, “How late is it? Come to bed already.”
When there was no answer at all, not a sound, he found himself startled fully awake.
The room around him seemed too dark. He turned and could just make out the open doorway.
“What’s wrong?” he started to say, but got very little of it out, for he realized the shape in the doorway was so large it could not possibly be his husband. And, in any case, his husband was there already, in the bed beside him, breathing heavily, sound asleep.
And then, he told his therapist, something happened that I didn’t expect. You see, I had made the mistake of inviting it, whatever it was, to come to bed.
• • •
The figure was still motionless, still little more than a silhouette, but it was no longer in the doorway. No, it was just inside the room now, as if a bit of film had skipped or as if he had closed his eyes and it had moved only while it could not be seen. And then it was closer still, and closer still, until it was there, just beside the bed, but still motionless, still little more than a silhouette. He could see again those dull gleams that he thought of as the gleam of its eyes—but could see now that they were scattered all over its body, as if its entire skin was studded with them, with eyes that couldn’t quite be made out. He couldn’t move. It came very close until it was touching him but he couldn’t feel anything. And then it came closer still and he felt very cold. And then it passed slowly through him and across the bed.
Somebody’s breath was hissing fast through clenched teeth, and though he rationally understood it must be his teeth, his breath, they still seemed to belong to somebody else. Someone was screaming and it was him screaming, only it wasn’t him either. And then his husband was shaking him and the light was on and shining into his eyes and the figure in the doorway was again nowhere to be seen.
• • •
Where do you think it went? his therapist asked, after waiting long for Arn to continue.
My husband, he said.
Your husband?
He was the only other one in the bed. It was moving toward him. It moved through me and toward him.
Don’t you think that—
Now, sometimes in its least guarded moments I see something flit across his face, coming to the surface to breathe.
It seems to me—
It’s his haunting now. He doesn’t know yet of course. How could he? He won’t know until it is his turn to see it in the doorway.
But then where was it before?
Arn looked hard at his therapist. Can’t you guess? he asked. Why do you think my father left? What do you think he was looking for in my face? The same thing I was no longer finding in his. It must have been in him before. After it left him, where else could it have been but in me?
• • •
He cracked his neck, then slowly took hold of the arms of the chair and pulled himself to his feet. He looked older, tired somehow, almost a different person.
Next time, he said, you can ask me the usual questions. Next time we can analyze all this to death.
We still have a few minutes remaining, his therapist said. I really think we should talk about this.
But Arn just shook his head. Next time, he repeated, and made his way to the door. Upon opening it he hesitated a moment, his body nearly filling the frame. Then he turned his shoulders slightly and sidled through.
4.
It was a moment that the therapist would think about often, particularly after it became clear that he would never see Arn again. After Arn missed the next few appointments and he took steps to try to find him, he would discover, talking to his distraught spouse, that Arn, like his father before him, had simply disappeared.
Which meant the therapist’s last real memory of Arn was of the man standing motionless in the open doorway, facing away from him. But the back of his head still, somehow, gave (when the therapist thought about it later, alone, at night in bed, in the dark, struggling to sleep) the impression of looking back in, of noticing him.