Chapter 1: The Spirit of the Door

Chapter 1: The Spirit of the Door

The rain hammered against the floor-to-ceiling windows of Alexandra Vance’s apartment, twenty-seven stories above the glittering, rain-slicked streets. Inside, the storm was a distant, percussive beat beneath the thrum of a curated playlist, the clinking of wine glasses, and the comfortable roar of laughter. It was the perfect housewarming party. Her new apartment, a monument to minimalist design and the success of her graphic design career, was finally full of life.

“I’m just saying,” Liam slurred, gesturing with his half-empty glass, “a corner apartment on the top floor? The pressure differential alone could make doors do weird things.”

Alex rolled her tired, sharp eyes, a smile playing on her lips. “Liam, you’ve been saying ‘pressure differential’ all night. Did you just learn that term?”

He was pointing at her bedroom door. For the last ten minutes, it had been moving. Not slamming, not creaking, but swinging slowly, rhythmically inward a few inches, then back to its resting position, just shy of the frame. It moved like a slow, deep breath.

“It’s the storm,” Sarah chimed in, ever the pragmatist. “The wind gets into these high-rises and does all sorts of spooky stuff. It’s just a draft.”

“A draft with a metronome?” Alex shot back, but there was no real bite to it. She was more amused than anything. The wine had her feeling warm and witty, a welcome respite from the long hours she’d been working. Her posture, usually tense from hunching over a tablet, was relaxed for the first time in weeks.

The door swung in again, silent on its well-oiled hinges. Then back.

“Okay, that’s creepy,” Sarah conceded, pulling her cardigan tighter.

Liam, emboldened by the alcohol, grinned. “It’s a ghost. Obviously. You’ve moved into a haunted apartment, Alex. The spirit of the door demands a sacrifice!” He grabbed a stray olive from a bowl and flicked it in the door’s direction. It skittered across the polished concrete floor and disappeared into the darkened bedroom.

The door stopped moving.

A beat of silence hung in the air, thick and sudden. The laughter died, and for a moment, the only sounds were the music and the drumming rain.

“See?” Liam whispered theatrically. “It accepted your offering.”

Alex snorted, the tension breaking. “Right. The ghost wanted a single, sad olive.” She pushed herself off the kitchen island. Her goal was simple: shut the door, end the silly conversation, and get back to enjoying the party. She wanted this night to be normal, a celebration of her new life, not some drunken séance.

“No, wait!” Liam grabbed her arm, his eyes gleaming with mischief. “Don’t just close it. You have to talk to it. Acknowledge it. Go on, Alex, talk to your ghost.”

Alex hesitated. Her mother’s voice, a faint echo from a thousand miles away, flickered in her mind. Don’t play with things you don’t understand, Alexandra. Her mother, Elara, lived in a world of herbal remedies, strange old books, and warnings about things that lurked in the shadows. Alex loved her, but their worlds couldn’t be further apart. Here, in this steel and glass tower, the only spirits came in bottles.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Alex said, shaking Liam’s hand off. But the dare was in the air now, a challenge to her ingrained skepticism. The eyes of her friends were on her. To refuse would be to admit some small part of her was actually spooked.

“Fine,” she declared, raising her voice with mock solemnity. The wine was making her bold. “Okay, spirit of the door!” she called out, projecting toward the bedroom. “Thanks for coming to the party. We see you. You can stop now.”

Her friends erupted in laughter. Alex took a bow, a flush of theatrical pride and alcohol warming her cheeks.

And just like that, the door clicked softly shut, as if pushed by a firm, unseen hand.

The laughter caught in everyone’s throats. The silence that followed was heavier this time. Even the music seemed to have faded.

“Coincidence,” Sarah said, her voice a little too high.

“Pressure differential,” Liam added weakly, his bravado gone.

Alex’s heart was hammering against her ribs. That was different. The slow swing was an explainable anomaly. The definitive click felt… intentional. Her rational mind was scrambling for an explanation, but the playful spark inside her had been extinguished, replaced by a cold knot of dread.

“I’m getting another drink,” someone mumbled, and the party cautiously restarted, the conversation a little more forced, the laughter a little less genuine.

But Alex couldn’t let it go. Her keen designer’s eye, the one that obsessed over pixel-perfect alignment and subtle color shifts, was now fixated on that closed door. An inconsistency. A problem to be solved. She had to see. She had to prove to herself it was nothing.

Leaving her friends, she walked to the bedroom, her socked feet silent on the cool floor. Her hand trembled slightly as she reached for the cold, steel handle. This was stupid. It was the wind. It was the building settling. It was anything but a ghost.

She pushed the door open.

The room was dark, the city lights painting fractured stripes across the walls. Her bed, a low-slung modern frame, was a block of shadow in the center of the room. Nothing seemed out of place. The air was still. She let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

See? Nothing. Just a trick of the air.

She was about to turn away, a smug “I-told-you-so” already forming on her lips for Liam, when a primal instinct screamed at her. The kind of ancient, animalistic urge that tells you a predator is watching from the tall grass. It wasn’t a thought, but a physical sensation, a cold dread that started in her stomach and spread through her limbs.

Look under the bed.

Why? It was her apartment. She’d assembled that bed frame herself. She knew what was under there: a few stray dust bunnies and a box of old art supplies. But the command was absolute.

With a deep, shaky breath, she dropped to her knees. The floor was cold against her skin. She leaned forward, peering into the deep darkness beneath the frame.

At first, she saw nothing but shadow. Then, the shadows resolved into a shape.

It was a girl.

She was clinging to the underside of the bed frame as if gravity were a suggestion she’d chosen to ignore. Her small, thin body was pressed flat against the wooden slats. A curtain of long, black hair hung down, brushing the floor. And peeking through the greasy strands were two enormous, perfectly round, bloodshot eyes.

They stared directly into Alex’s. They didn’t blink.

Time seemed to warp and stretch. Alex’s mind refused to process what she was seeing. The impossible angle. The gravity-defying posture. Then, the girl’s face, pale and stretched, pulled itself into a grin. It was a grin wider than any human mouth should stretch, a silent, jagged slash of pure, unadulterated wrongness.

A scream lodged itself in Alex’s throat, a solid, jagged stone of pure terror. She scrambled backward, her hands slipping on the smooth floor, crab-walking away from the door until her back slammed into the kitchen island. Her wine glass, left on the counter, wobbled and crashed to the floor, shattering the tense silence.

“Alex? What’s wrong?” Sarah rushed to her side.

Alex couldn’t speak. She could only point a trembling finger toward the bedroom, her eyes wide with a horror that was anything but playful.

The party died an immediate, awkward death. Her friends saw her state—the color drained from her face, her body shaking uncontrollably—and knew something was truly wrong. They offered to stay, but Alex, babbling about being too drunk and just needing to sleep, pushed them out the door, desperate to be alone and yet terrified of it.

The moment the front door clicked shut, locking her into the silent, watchful apartment, the fragile dam of her composure broke. She didn't dare look toward her bedroom. She fumbled for her phone, her fingers slick with sweat. There was only one person she could call. One person who wouldn’t immediately assume she was having a psychotic break.

Her mother’s voice was calm and sleepy when she answered. “Alexandra? It’s past midnight there. Is everything alright?”

“Mom,” Alex choked out, the word splintering with panic. “Mom, there’s… there’s something in my apartment.”

She told her everything, the words tumbling out in a frantic, incoherent rush—the party, the door, the stupid joke, the thing under the bed. The upside-down girl. The unblinking eyes. The grin.

On the other end of the line, Elara Vance was silent. Alex expected confusion, concern, perhaps a gentle suggestion that she’d had too much to drink. Instead, the silence stretched on, filled with a knowing, weary dread that was far more terrifying than disbelief.

When her mother finally spoke, her voice was low and grave, stripped of all warmth.

“Alexandra,” she said, her tone as cold and sharp as breaking glass. “What were your exact words? When you spoke to it.”

“I… I don’t know,” Alex stammered. “Something like, ‘We see you. You can stop now.’”

A soft, pained sound, like a dying breath, came through the phone.

“Oh, child,” Elara whispered, and the sound sent a fresh wave of ice through Alex’s veins. “You acknowledged it. You gave it your attention.”

“What? What does that mean?” Alex pleaded, tears of fear and confusion streaming down her face.

Her mother’s next words were not a comfort, but a verdict.

“It means you invited it to stay.”