CREEPYPASTA

Why Sarah Never Sleeps

There were too many doors in the upstairs hall. Sarah told her parents, but they couldn't see it. They told her not to worry. They told her there was nothing there. But there was an extra door at the end of the upstairs hall. An extra yellow door, and it didn't belong.

It was the color of disease, jaundiced and infected, with spidery black veins across its face. One perfect, silver knob gleamed in its center, above a shadowy keyhole, and it didn't look right. The doorknob shone with a mirror's finish, and caught the light from any angle, begging for Sarah to look its way. Sarah did her best to ignore it, but the door knew her name, and it whispered it when she drew near.

"Saraaaahh..." the door would rasp with a voice like dried leaves, as tiny claws scraped against the other side. Tears would well in Sarah's eyes as she'd hurry past, her arms laden with everything she'd need to get ready for the day.

"Saraaaahh..." it would call again before she'd shuffled out of range and closed the bathroom door, cutting off its paper-thin wails. When she'd creep from the bathroom to head downstairs, the door's voice would follow her with a furious flurry of scraping claws and tormented howls. They lingered and gnawed in the back of her mind as she'd rush through breakfast so she could leave the house a few minutes sooner.

School became a blessing, an excuse to be someone somewhere else. At school, she could forget the door. At school, she could pretend her house was like everyone else's, with the right number of doors and no eerie whispers. But, at the end of the day, it was still waiting for her at the end of the upstairs hall, with its mirror-ball knob and yellow face. She hated coming home and knowing it was there, but even more than that, she hated going to sleep, because in her dreams, she opened the door.

Every night, she stood before it, fighting the urge to reach out. Dread knotted her belly in anticipation of pain, when her hand rose anyway to grasp the silver knob. Some nights, it burned her like the driest ice. Other nights, it seared like a red hot coal. Very occasionally, it did neither, instead turning and turning without ever opening the door, and she couldn't stop turning it until she woke up.

When the door did open, it revealed a swirling vortex of shadow and sound, with a thousand voices crying in the darkness. The voices curled around her, crawling through her hair like spiders. She thrashed and swatted at their skittering whispers, but the words still tingled across her skin.

She never should have listened.

"He sees..." they said. "He hears..." they moaned. "He hungers..." they wept, and burrowed into her mind like worms. "The Hollow Man, the Hollow Man," they echoed in her mind and screamed to her from the gaping vortex. "The Hollow Man... he hunts!"

Sarah shot up with a scream that night, gasping and sweating, but alone in her bed. The clock's crimson face said midnight had passed, but not by much. Darkness enveloped her room, except where a vestigial nightlight illumined the corner by her desk; it wasn't much, but she felt better when she saw it.

She pulled the bedsheets over her head and pushed away the echoing voices. I'm fine, she swore, hugging her knees and rocking. It's just a dream. They're always dreams. The dreams will go away like they always do.

She started humming a song her mother used to sing when Sarah was smaller, small enough to need the nightlight, and the panic faded little by little with every note.

Just a dream, she repeated. Just a dream. Just a --

"Sarah?" someone whispered from the hall.

Sarah froze.

"Sarah? Are you Sarah?" It was the voice of a girl, not much younger than Sarah, and not at all like the voice she usually heard from the door at the end of the hall.