Chapter 1

I live in a small town in Pennsylvania where nothing particularly interesting ever happens. We have one grocery store, two gas stations, a high school that looks like it should have been condemned twenty years ago, and a stretch of back roads surrounded by woods that go on for miles.

I’ve lived here my entire life. I’m twenty-four now, and until recently, I thought I knew every road, every shortcut, and every abandoned property within ten miles of my house.

I was wrong.

This started about three weeks ago, when I noticed a light in the upstairs window of the old Miller house.

The Miller house sits at the end of a gravel road that branches off the road I take home from work. It’s technically on my route, although I usually don’t pay attention to it. The property has been abandoned for as long as I can remember. The house is a two-story farmhouse with peeling white paint, a sagging porch, and windows that have been boarded up for years.

The driveway is overgrown, and the surrounding property is mostly dead grass and trees. There’s an old red barn behind the house that looks like it could collapse if someone sneezed too hard.

When I was a kid, people used to tell stories about that place.

Some said a family had died there. Others claimed the father had gone crazy and killed everyone before disappearing into the woods. My grandfather told me the house had been empty since before he was born and that people in town simply enjoyed inventing stories about it.

I never cared enough to find out which version was true.

But three weeks ago, I was driving home around 11:40 p.m. when I noticed a yellow light shining through one of the upstairs windows.

I slowed down.

At first, I assumed someone had bought the property. Maybe a contractor was working on it, or some teenagers had broken in. Neither possibility seemed particularly strange.

Still, something about the light bothered me.

It wasn’t bright like a flashlight. It was a warm, steady yellow glow, like an old lamp sitting on a table.

I pulled over on the shoulder and watched the house for maybe thirty seconds.

Then the light went out.

I remember laughing at myself. I was tired, probably imagining things, and had no reason to sit there staring at an abandoned house in the middle of the night.

I drove home and forgot about it.

At least, I tried to.

Three nights later, I saw it again.

Same window. Same yellow light.

This time, I didn’t stop.

The following morning, I mentioned it to my dad while we were eating breakfast.

“Someone must have bought the Miller place,” I said.

He stopped chewing.

“What place?”

“The old farmhouse off Miller Road. The one by the woods.”

He looked at me for a moment before shrugging.

“Nobody bought that place.”

“Well, someone’s been turning lights on.”

My dad put his fork down.

“Don’t go over there.”

I laughed because I thought he was joking.

He wasn’t.

“Why?”

“Because it’s abandoned. The floorboards are rotten, the roof is falling in, and there’s nothing there worth looking at.”

“Okay, but why are you acting weird about it?”

He stared at his plate.

Then he said something that made the conversation feel a lot less ordinary.

“Because that house doesn’t have electricity.”

I asked him what he meant.

He explained that the property had been disconnected from the power grid decades ago. The electrical wiring had been stripped out, and the utility company had removed the meter years before.

There was no way a lamp could be running inside.

I asked if it could be a generator.

“Then you’d hear it,” he said.

I didn’t have an answer to that.

I decided to leave it alone.

For the next week, I deliberately avoided looking toward the house when I drove past the turnoff.

Then, last Friday, I got home from work earlier than usual.

It was raining, and the road was nearly empty. As I approached the turnoff, I glanced toward the property out of habit.

The upstairs window was lit again.

Except this time, the light wasn’t stationary.

It moved slowly from one side of the room to the other.

Like someone carrying a lantern.

I kept driving, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. By the time I reached my house, I’d convinced myself that there had to be a reasonable explanation.

Maybe someone had broken in.

Maybe the light was coming from another property and reflecting off the glass.

Maybe I was simply seeing what I expected to see.

I spent the next hour trying to convince myself that I wasn’t being ridiculous.

Then I did something stupid.

I decided to investigate.

I told myself I would drive down the gravel road, look at the house from my car, and leave if anything seemed suspicious. I wasn’t going to break in or wander around the property.

I just wanted to know what I was looking at.

I grabbed a flashlight, put on a jacket, and left.

It was about 12:15 a.m. when I turned onto the gravel road.

The rain had stopped, but the trees were dripping, and the road was covered in shallow puddles. My headlights illuminated the overgrown grass on either side.

The house appeared after about a minute.

The upstairs light was still on.

I parked near the entrance to the driveway and switched off the engine.

For a while, I just sat there.

The house looked worse up close. Several boards had fallen away from the porch, and the front door hung crookedly on its hinges. The windows were dark except for the one upstairs.

I got out of the car.

The air smelled like wet leaves and mud.

I walked a few steps toward the house, shining my flashlight across the ground. The driveway was covered in weeds, but there was a narrow strip where the grass had been flattened.

Someone had been walking there recently.

I stopped.

There were footprints in the mud.

Bare footprints.

They started near the road and continued up the driveway toward the front porch.

I crouched to examine them. They were surprisingly clear, with individual toes visible in the wet soil.

What bothered me was their size.

They were much larger than my own feet.

I stood up and shone the flashlight toward the porch.

Nothing moved.

I should have left right then.

Instead, I followed the footprints.

They led directly to the front door.

I stood on the porch and listened.

At first, I heard only the dripping water and the distant hum of insects.

Then I heard a sound from inside the house.

Three slow knocks.

Not from the front door.

From somewhere upstairs.

I froze.

A few seconds later, the knocks came again.

Three times.

I backed away from the door.

Then a voice called from inside.

“You’re late.”

It was a man’s voice. Quiet, almost conversational.

I ran.

I don’t remember making a conscious decision to run. One moment I was standing on the porch, and the next I was stumbling down the driveway toward my car.

I threw myself inside, locked the doors, and started the engine.

As I reversed, my headlights swept across the front of the house.

Someone was standing in the upstairs window.

I couldn’t see their face clearly, but I could make out the shape of a person standing perfectly still behind the glass.

The window was supposed to be boarded up.

I drove home without looking back.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The following morning, I told myself that I’d experienced some kind of prank. Someone had found a way into the house, heard me approaching, and decided to scare me.

The footprints were probably part of it.

The window could have been unboarded from the inside.

The voice was just a person trying to sound creepy.

It was stupid, but it was possible.

I didn’t tell my dad what had happened because I didn’t want to hear another lecture.

I went to work that afternoon and tried to act normal.

Around 6 p.m., I received a text from an unknown number.

UNKNOWN: You shouldn’t have come to the door.

I stared at the message.

I assumed it was one of my friends messing with me, so I replied.

ME: Who is this?

The response came almost immediately.

UNKNOWN: You weren’t supposed to see me yet.

My stomach tightened.

I called the number.

It went straight to voicemail.

I searched it online, but nothing came up. I tried calling again, and the same thing happened.

Then another message arrived.

UNKNOWN: Your father said you’d wait longer.

I felt cold all over.

I immediately called my dad.

He answered after two rings.

“Hey,” he said.

“Did you give someone my number?”

“What?”

“Someone is texting me about the Miller house. They know I went there last night.”

There was silence on the other end.

Then my dad asked, very quietly, “What exactly did they say?”

I read him the messages.

He didn’t respond for several seconds.

Finally, he told me to come home.

I left work early.

When I arrived, my dad was sitting at the kitchen table with an old cardboard box in front of him. I’d never seen it before.

He looked exhausted.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat across from him.

He opened the box and removed a photograph.

It was an old black-and-white picture of a family standing in front of the Miller house.

There were four people: a man, a woman, a young boy, and a little girl.

My dad pointed to the man.

“His name was Thomas Miller. He owned that property.”

He pointed to the woman.

“His wife, Evelyn.”

Then he pointed to the little girl.

“That’s your grandmother.”

I stared at him.

My grandmother had died when I was young. I remembered her being small and quiet, with gray hair and a habit of humming while she cooked.

I’d never known she’d grown up in that house.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Because she never wanted to talk about it.”

My dad turned the photograph over.

There was a date written on the back.

October 17, 1968.

“Your grandmother was eight years old when this picture was taken,” he said. “Her brother, Daniel, was ten.”

I looked at the boy.

“What happened to him?”

My dad rubbed his face.

“Daniel disappeared.”

I waited for him to continue.

“He vanished one night. Nobody ever found him. Your great-grandfather said he’d run away, but nobody believed that. The police searched the property, the woods, the creek, everything. They never found a trace of him.”

“What does that have to do with the house?”

My dad looked directly at me.

“Your grandmother said she heard Daniel knocking on her bedroom window for months after he disappeared.”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

“Knocking?”

“Three times. Every night. Always around midnight.”

I remembered the sound from the house.

Three slow knocks.

My dad continued.

“At first, she thought it was her brother playing a trick on her. She would open the curtains, but nobody was there. Sometimes she’d hear him calling her name from outside.”

“What did he say?”

My dad swallowed.

“He told her to let him in.”

I sat there, unable to speak.

“Eventually, she stopped responding. Her parents told her that Daniel was gone and that she needed to stop imagining things.”

“Did she?”

“For a while.”

He reached into the box and pulled out another photograph.

This one showed the Miller house from the side.

One of the upstairs windows was visible.

There was a small figure standing behind the glass.

The photograph was old and grainy, but the figure looked like a child.

I stared at it.

“Who’s that?”

My dad didn’t answer immediately.

Then he said, “Your grandmother claimed it was Daniel.”

I looked up.

“Claimed?”

“She said she saw him standing in that window the night before she left the house.”

“Left?”

My dad nodded.

“Her parents moved away in 1969. They never returned to the property. Your grandmother refused to explain why.”

I looked at the photograph again.

Something about it bothered me.

The figure in the window was facing outward.

Its face was too dark to make out.

But I could see its hands.

They were pressed flat against the glass.

“Why is the house still standing?” I asked. “Why didn’t anyone tear it down?”

My dad looked toward the kitchen window.

“I don’t know.”

Then he said something else.

“Your grandmother made me promise something before she died.”

“What?”

“That if you ever started asking about that house, I’d tell you to stay away.”

I felt a growing sense of dread.

“Why would I start asking about it?”

My dad looked at me.

“Because she said it would happen eventually.”

Neither of us spoke for a while.

Finally, I asked the question that had been bothering me since I read the text.

“What did the message mean when it said you told me I’d wait longer?”

My dad’s face changed.

For the first time in my life, I saw genuine fear in his eyes.

He stood up, walked to the back door, and checked the lock.

Then he closed the curtains.

“Did you tell anyone you were going to the house?”

“No.”

“Did you tell anyone what time you were going?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone else there?”

I thought about the footprints.

The voice.

The figure in the window.

“No,” I said.

He sat down again.

“Your grandmother used to say that whatever was in that house couldn’t leave until someone answered it.”

I stared at him.

“Answered what?”

“The knocking.”

I laughed nervously.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I know how it sounds.”

“Dad, someone is obviously messing with me.”

“Then let them.”

He leaned forward.

“If you hear knocking at your window, do not look outside. Do not answer it. And whatever you do, do not open the window.”

I wanted to argue, but something about the way he said it stopped me.

He wasn’t trying to frighten me.

He was trying to prepare me.

That night, I stayed at my parents’ house.

I told myself it was because I didn’t feel like driving back to my apartment, but the truth was that I didn’t want to be alone.

My childhood bedroom was at the back of the house, facing the woods.

I’d slept there thousands of times.

Nothing had ever happened.

I went to bed around 10:30 p.m.

For the first couple of hours, everything was normal.

Then, at exactly 12:17 a.m., I heard three knocks.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

I opened my eyes.

The sound had come from my bedroom window.

I didn’t move.

I lay there staring at the ceiling, telling myself that it was probably a branch.

Then I heard my name.

Not shouted.

Not whispered.

Spoken softly, as if someone were standing right outside the window.

“Cayden?”

Every muscle in my body went rigid.

The voice sounded like my grandmother.

I hadn’t heard her voice in years, but I recognized it immediately.

It was the same gentle, slightly breathy voice I remembered from childhood.

“Cayden, sweetheart. Can you open the window?”

I pulled the blanket over my head.

I knew it wasn’t her.

I knew she was dead.

But the voice sounded so real that I could almost picture her standing outside in her old nightgown.

There were three more knocks.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

“Please,” the voice said. “It’s cold out here.”

I covered my ears.

Then the voice changed.

It became my dad’s voice.

“Cayden, open the window.”

I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Cayden, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

The voice sounded exactly like him.

I almost got out of bed.

Then I remembered something.

My dad was sleeping in the bedroom across the hall.

If he wanted to talk to me, he could simply open my door.

The voice outside the window repeated itself.

“Cayden, open the window.”

Then it said something that made me stop breathing.

“Your dad says it’s okay.”

I heard footsteps in the hallway.

My bedroom door opened.

I nearly screamed.

My dad stood in the doorway, holding a flashlight.

He looked at me, then at the window.

“Did you hear it?” I whispered.

He nodded.

He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

For a few seconds, neither of us moved.

Then something struck the window.

Not a knock.

A heavy, wet slap.

My dad raised the flashlight.

The curtains were closed, but I could see the fabric move slightly, as if someone had pressed their face against the other side.

A long silence followed.

Then the voice spoke again.

This time, it sounded like me.

Not a child.

Not an imitation of my younger voice.

It sounded exactly like the voice I heard every day.

“Cayden,” it said from outside.

My dad went pale.

The voice laughed softly.

“Why won’t you let me in?”

My dad backed toward the door.

“Don’t look,” he whispered.

I stared at him.

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer.

The voice outside continued.

“I’ve been waiting so long.”

Then it said something else.

Something that made my dad drop the flashlight.

“Ask him what happened to Daniel.”

My dad froze.

The room became completely silent.

Even the insects outside seemed to have stopped.

Then the voice began to cry.

It sounded like a little boy.

“Please, Dad. I just want to come home.”

My dad covered his mouth.

I looked at him.

He was shaking.

The voice outside the window began knocking again.

Three times.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

My dad grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door.

“Come with me.”

We left the bedroom and went downstairs. He locked the front door, checked every window, and turned on every light in the house.

We sat in the living room until sunrise.

Neither of us slept.

At about 6 a.m., my dad finally told me what happened to Daniel.

He said he’d never told anyone the full story.

Not even my mother.

In October 1968, the Miller family had been eating dinner when Daniel started talking about a man he claimed he’d seen standing in the woods.

His parents assumed it was an imaginary friend.

Daniel insisted the man was real.

He said the man stood between the trees every night, watching the house.

Sometimes he waved.

Sometimes he pointed toward the upstairs window.

Then Daniel began waking up in the middle of the night.

He told his parents that someone was knocking on his window.

His father checked outside but never found anyone.

Eventually, Daniel stopped sleeping.

He began insisting that the person outside wasn’t a stranger.

He said it was himself.

A second Daniel, standing outside in the dark.

His parents took him to a doctor, who suggested he was having nightmares.

Then, on October 16, Daniel disappeared.

His bedroom window was open.

There were muddy footprints on the floor.

They led from the window to the bedroom door.

But the footprints stopped there.

The police searched for him for weeks.

They found nothing.

His father refused to accept that Daniel had wandered away. He insisted someone had taken him.

His mother became increasingly withdrawn.

And my grandmother, who had been eight years old, began hearing the knocking.

Every night.

For months.

Until one night, she made a mistake.

She answered it.

According to my dad, she was half asleep when she heard Daniel calling her from outside.

She walked to the window and asked him what he wanted.

The voice told her to open it.

She reached for the latch.

Then she saw something in the glass.

Her own reflection was standing behind her.

Except the reflection wasn’t copying her movements.

It was smiling.

My grandmother screamed and ran from the room.

The following morning, her parents found the window open.

There were muddy footprints on the floor.

They led from the window to the bedroom door.

And then they stopped.

Just like Daniel’s.

That was when the family left the house.

My dad finished the story and stared at the floor.

“Your grandmother said the thing outside wasn’t Daniel,” he said. “She believed it had taken him and learned how to sound like him.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“What happened to your great-grandfather?”

“He died a few years later.”

“And your great-grandmother?”

“She never spoke about the house again.”

I thought about the voice at my window.

The way it had sounded like my grandmother.

My dad.

Me.

“What does it want?” I asked.

My dad shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

Then he looked at me.

“But I think it wants someone to open the window.”

I went back to my apartment that afternoon.

I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stay at my parents’ house forever. My dad offered to come with me, but I told him I would be fine.

I checked every window and every lock.

I kept the curtains closed.

I didn’t sleep much that night.

Or the next.

For three days, nothing happened.

I started to feel foolish for being so frightened.

Maybe it had all been a bizarre coincidence.

Maybe someone had found the old house and was playing an elaborate prank.

Maybe the sounds at my window had been branches or animals.

I desperately wanted to believe that.

Then, on Tuesday evening, I received another text.

It came from the same unknown number.

UNKNOWN: You shouldn’t have told him.

I stared at the screen.

ME: Told who?

The response arrived a few seconds later.

UNKNOWN: Your father.

I blocked the number.

Then I called my dad and told him everything.

He said I should come back to the house, but I told him I had work the next morning and couldn’t keep doing this.

He didn’t argue.

Before we hung up, he made me promise to call him if anything happened.

I promised.

That night, I fell asleep watching television.

I woke up sometime after midnight.

The television was still on, but the sound had disappeared.

The screen showed a frozen image of a commercial.

My apartment was completely silent.

Then I heard something from the living room.

Three knocks.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

I sat up.

My bedroom window was closed.

The curtains were drawn.

I stared at them for several seconds.

Then the knocking came again.

Except this time, it wasn’t coming from the window.

It was coming from my front door.

I grabbed my phone and called my dad.

He answered immediately.

“What’s wrong?”

“Someone’s at my door.”

He didn’t ask who it was.

He simply said, “Stay in your room.”

I heard him getting out of bed.

“Don’t open it,” he said. “I’m coming over.”

The knocking continued.

Three slow knocks.

Then a voice came from the other side of my apartment door.

“Cayden?”

It was my dad.

I looked at my phone.

He was still on the line.

I could hear him breathing.

The voice outside repeated itself.

“Cayden, open the door.”

My dad whispered into the phone.

“Don’t answer it.”

The voice outside laughed.

It sounded exactly like him.

“Come on, son. It’s cold out here.”

I backed away from the bedroom door.

Then I heard footsteps.

They moved slowly down the hallway outside my apartment.

I lived on the third floor.

There was only one staircase, and I could hear every step.

The footsteps stopped outside my bedroom.

Three knocks sounded against the door.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

I couldn’t move.

The voice outside whispered, “I know you’re in there.”

I heard the doorknob turn.

It didn’t open.

I had locked the bedroom door when I went to bed.

The handle turned again.

Then the voice said something that made my blood run cold.

“Your dad told me to come get you.”

I heard my dad shouting through the phone.

“Get away from the door!”

Then the voice outside began to cry.

It sounded like a little boy.

“Dad? Why won’t you let me in?”

I heard my dad make a sound I had never heard before.

A broken, choking sound.

Then he hung up.

I stood there holding my phone, listening to the silence.

A minute passed.

Then another.

Finally, I heard footsteps moving away.

I waited until I was certain they were gone before leaving my bedroom.

I checked the front door.

It was still locked.

The apartment was empty.

I called the police.

They arrived about fifteen minutes later and searched the building. They found no one. There were no signs of forced entry, and nobody in the building reported hearing anything.

I told them someone had been knocking on my door.

I didn’t tell them about the voices.

I didn’t know how to explain that without sounding insane.

My dad arrived shortly afterward.

He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

He checked the apartment and then sat down at my kitchen table.

For a long time, he said nothing.

Finally, he told me something else about my grandmother.

Something he’d left out of the story.

Before she died, she had written a letter.

She’d given it to my dad with instructions to open it only if I ever heard the knocking.

He’d kept it in the same cardboard box as the photographs.

He hadn’t wanted to tell me about it because he hoped it would never be necessary.

He went to his car and returned with the letter.

The envelope was yellowed with age.

My name was written on the front.

Not my dad’s.

Mine.

The handwriting was my grandmother’s.

I opened it.

Inside was a single sheet of paper.

It read:

Dear Cayden,

If you are reading this, then it has started again.

I am sorry.

There is something I need you to understand. The thing in that house is not a ghost. It is not your great-uncle Daniel. I do not know what it is.

I only know that it learns.

It learns our voices. Our habits. Our memories. It learns the things we love and the things we fear.

It uses those things to make us open the door.

When Daniel disappeared, I thought he was outside my window. I thought he needed help. I almost let him in.

For years, I believed that if I had opened the window, I would have been taken too.

But I was wrong.

The thing does not need the window.

It needs permission.

It needs you to believe that the person outside is someone you love. It needs you to invite it inside.

That is why it knocks three times.

That is why it calls your name.

And that is why you must never answer.

There is one more thing.

If it ever speaks in your own voice, do not listen to what it says.

Listen to what it asks.

It will eventually ask you to let it in.

Do not.

No matter how long it waits.

No matter who it sounds like.

Do not let it in.

I am sorry I could not protect you from this.

Grandma.

I read the letter twice.

Then I looked at my dad.

“Why does it want me?”

He looked older than I’d ever seen him.

“I don’t know.”

“Why now?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

I wanted to scream at him. I wanted him to tell me that there was a rational explanation, that I was exhausted and frightened and imagining things.

Instead, he sat across from me in silence.

I stayed with my parents for the next week.

My dad refused to let me go back to my apartment alone, and eventually I stopped arguing.

For a while, things seemed normal.

I slept in my old bedroom with the curtains closed.

I went to work.

I tried to forget the house, the photographs, and the letter.

Then, last night, I woke up at 3:14 a.m.

I don’t know what woke me.

There was no knocking.

No voice.

No sound at all.

I simply opened my eyes and knew that someone was standing in the room.

I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, but I could feel it.

I lay perfectly still.

Then I heard breathing.

Slow, steady breathing from the corner of the room.

I wanted to reach for my phone, but I was afraid that even the smallest movement would draw its attention.

I stared into the darkness.

Something shifted.

Then a voice spoke.

My voice.

Not from outside the window.

Not from the hallway.

From the corner of my bedroom.

“Cayden,” it whispered.

I couldn’t breathe.

The voice sounded tired.

Almost sad.

“I think it followed us.”

I squeezed my eyes shut.

Then it spoke again.

“Don’t turn around.”

I lay there until sunrise.

When the room finally grew light, I opened my eyes.

The corner was empty.

I checked the closet, the bathroom, and beneath the bed.

Nothing.

I told myself it had been a dream.

I wanted to believe that.

But when I got out of bed, I noticed something on the floor beside my bedroom door.

A muddy footprint.

Bare.

Much larger than my own.

And beside it was another.

And another.

They started at the bedroom door.

They crossed the room.

They stopped beside my bed.

I followed them with my eyes until I reached the corner where I’d heard the voice.

There were no footprints leading away.

I called my dad.

He came upstairs, saw the prints, and went completely silent.

Then he did something that frightened me more than anything else that had happened.

He went downstairs, retrieved the old photograph of the Miller family, and placed it on my bed.

He pointed to Daniel.

“Look at his feet,” he said.

I leaned closer.

The photograph was grainy, but Daniel was wearing short trousers and standing barefoot on the grass.

His feet were large for a ten-year-old boy.

Much larger than they should have been.

My dad turned the photograph over.

On the back, beneath the date, there was another line of writing I’d never noticed before.

It was in my grandmother’s handwriting.

It came home with us.

I looked at my dad.

He was staring at the bedroom window.

The curtains were still closed.

Then, from the other side of the glass, something knocked.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

My dad grabbed my arm.

We ran downstairs and out of the house.

We drove to a motel and spent the night there.

That was yesterday.

I’m writing this from the motel room while my dad sleeps in the other bed.

I haven’t told him about the last thing that happened.

I don’t know if I should.

About an hour ago, I went into the bathroom to wash my face.

I looked up at the mirror.

For a second, I thought I saw someone standing behind me.

I turned around.

Nobody was there.

I looked back at the mirror.

My reflection was still facing me.

But it wasn’t copying my movements.

I raised my right hand.

It didn’t move.

Instead, it slowly lifted its left hand and pressed its palm against the glass.

Then it smiled.

I stumbled backward and fell against the sink.

The reflection didn’t move.

It just stood there, smiling at me from the other side of the mirror.

Then it opened its mouth.

I couldn’t hear anything at first.

Then I heard three soft knocks.

Not from the bathroom door.

Not from the window.

From inside the mirror.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

And then my reflection spoke.

In my own voice, it said:

“You’re taking too long.”

I ran out of the bathroom and woke my dad.

He checked the room.

Nothing was there.

I haven’t gone back into the bathroom.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

I don’t know if the thing in the Miller house is following me, or if it has always been with my family.

I don’t know if Daniel ever existed in the way we remember him.

And I don’t know if the thing outside my window last night was the same thing I saw in the mirror.

But there is one detail I haven’t told my dad.

When I was standing in front of the mirror, just before I ran, I noticed something written in the condensation on the glass.

I hadn’t turned on the shower.

There shouldn’t have been any condensation.

The writing was backward, as if someone on the other side of the mirror had written it.

It said:

THANK YOU FOR ANSWERING.

And I think I know what it means now.

I didn’t open a window.

I didn’t open a door.

I didn’t invite anything inside.

But when I saw my reflection, I looked at it.

And when it spoke, I listened.

I don’t know if that was enough.

I’m scared to go home.

I’m scared to sleep.

And I’m starting to notice something else.

Every time I look at a reflective surface, my reflection seems just a little slower than it should be.

Only a fraction of a second.

So small that I could convince myself I’m imagining it.

But sometimes, when I turn away, I can hear movement behind me.

Sometimes, when I pass a dark window, I see my reflection standing perfectly still while I keep walking.

And last night, while my dad was asleep, I heard a voice whisper from the bathroom.

It sounded like me.

It said, very quietly:

“Three more nights.”

I don’t know what happens in three nights.

I don’t know what it is counting down to.

But I have a feeling that when the time comes, something is going to knock.

And this time, I don’t think it will be asking me to open the door.

I think it will already be inside.

EDIT: I wrote this post yesterday and didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. A few people asked whether I checked the house again, and the answer is no. I’m not going anywhere near it.

But something happened this morning that I can’t explain.

My dad finally fell asleep around 5 a.m. I was sitting by the motel window when I noticed a man standing across the parking lot.

He was barefoot.

He looked about ten years old.

He was staring directly at our room.

I thought he might be a child who’d wandered away from his parents, so I looked around for an adult. There was nobody else outside.

Then the boy raised his hand and waved.

I stepped away from the window.

When I looked again, he was gone.

I told myself it was a trick of the light.

Then I noticed a piece of paper tucked beneath our motel room door.

It was an old photograph.

The same photograph of the Miller family that my dad had shown me.

Except this time, there was something different.

The little girl, my grandmother, was standing beside her brother.

And behind them, in the upstairs window of the house, there was a man watching.

I turned the photograph over.

There was a new line of writing on the back.

It was in my handwriting.

ONE OF US HAS TO OPEN IT.

I don’t remember writing that.

I swear to God, I don’t remember writing that.

And I just heard three knocks from the bathroom.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

I think it’s time to stop writing.