The door to my grandmother's room is always open. A mundane, everyday sight. But when the house falls silent and darkness wraps around us, that open door transforms into a gateway for something else. I know, logically, that it's just a small, empty space where clothes hang, but in the dead of night, it ceases to be a closet. It becomes a void, and in that void, a pair of eyes watches. They peer through the narrow gap between the door and the wall, a gaze so intense it feels like it could devour us whole. It has never hurt us. But that's what makes the terror so potent: it could, at any moment.
One night, I woke with a jolt, a sharp, stabbing headache, and a tremor that ran down my spine. The cold prickle on my skin told me I was being watched. My eyes darted to the door, but the familiar silhouette of the clothes was all that I could make out. I tried to dismiss it, to force myself back to sleep. But as I glanced at the clock, my heart seized. 3:00 a.m. The devil's hour. My sleep was gone, replaced by a suffocating dread.
A new sound cut through the silence—a slow, rhythmic drip... drip... drip... from the bathroom. The sound was too loud, too deliberate. I had to check it. Slowly, quietly, I crept out of bed and made my way to the bathroom, the tap a small point of light and sound in the overwhelming darkness. Checking the tap was my first mistake. My second was turning on the light.
The faucet was bone dry. The sound wasn't coming from the water. It was the creature behind the door.
A low, guttural growl echoed from the void. In the sudden glare of the light, its form became horrifyingly clear. It was nothing but bone—long, skeletal limbs and a grotesque, emaciated frame. It had no skin, no muscles, just the hollow cage of a ribcage. Its eyes, the ones that had been watching us all along, were enormous and bulged from its skull like a frog's. But what made my blood run cold was its tongue—a long, whip-like appendage that licked its lips, covered in a slimy film that dripped onto the floor.
It saw me. Its mouth stretched into a grotesque grin, revealing a line of jagged teeth. It began to lick its lips, a slow, sickening motion, as if savoring the sight of its prey. And then, it moved. It lunged, its bony frame hurtling across the floor with impossible speed. I screamed.
Suddenly, a voice, my mother's voice, called my name. My eyes snapped open. I was on the floor, my body tangled in the blankets, my mother shaking my shoulder. Was it all a dream? Was I sleepwalking? The headache was gone, the shivering had stopped, and the house was silent. But the lingering terror, the memory of those empty eyes and that long, dripping tongue, remained. The nightmare may have ended, but it's still out there, behind the open door, waiting to devour one of us.