Spookyness

Knocking

It started when I was six years old.

I was in school, it was in the middle of a reading lesson, and I needed to pee, badly. At that age, actually, a fair few kids still wet themselves and I always got paranoid about embarrassing myself in public like that.  I stuck my hand up and told Mrs. Zebby that I needed to use the bathroom. After the usual speech about how I “should have gone at break” she gave me the key to the Disabled Access toilet (as it was the closest to our classroom).It was in the middle of fifth period, and the corridors were empty and seemed cavernous to me. I was a short, scrawny thing back then, and I fumbled for a good minute or two in trying to get the blasted thing open.

Anyways, as I sat on my porcelain throne, there came a knocking at the door.

“Someone is in here,” I said, disgruntled at the disturbance.

There was a pause, then the knocking resumed. It was faster now, more determined.

“Wait a minute!”

The knocking slowed, and a voice replied:

“Let me in. I need to come inside.”

The speaker’s tone was thin and reedy; an adult I didn’t recognize. I may have been six, but I also had a fairly good understanding of bathroom etiquette. Mainly that you didn’t let more than one person into an area only slightly bigger than a cupboard.

“Go away!”

The knocking intensified again, until it was a frantic drum-beat, just a few feet from me and out-of-sight. I heard the voice shouting something, growing more and more desperate:

“Let me in! Just open the door, please!”

I was terrified by that point. The hammering and yelling was so loud, and yet nobody had come to investigate it.Eventually, my teacher came to find me, angry because I had been gone almost half an hour. When I refused to open the door to let her in, she got a spare key from the receptionist and then took me into the headmaster’s office and called my parents. I was suspended for the rest of the week. I never told anyone what happened.

It was a few weeks before my next encounter with this phenomenon. I had just celebrated my seventh birthday, and we were having a BBQ in my honour. It was a glorious sunny day, but as soon as we’d set everything up in our backyard, the coal refused to light. My dad asked me to go and get some fire-starters from the shed in the garden.

It was pretty cramped inside, and I wouldn’t fit all the way, so I just opened it up, stood on tip-toes to reach the shelf holding my objective, then shut the door. as I turned away, a frantic knocking hit the other side of the door.

“Open up! I need to come though!” This voice was not the one I had heard a month before. It was deeper, more brooding and angry.

I said nothing, and hurried away. I had no idea what was happening, but it frightened me. As I walked away there came a final ‘thump’, like a fist being slammed against wood, and I heard the voice again.

“You little bastard. I’ll rip your fucking teeth out. Let me  THROUGH!”

I ran back to my dad, and spent the rest of the day glancing over my shoulder.

As you might have guessed by now, there were a lot of these voices. I count at least thirty, total. Every month or so, I used to get them, pleading to be let through doors. Almost always, it would be immediately after I shut the door behind me, as though these strange entities had been following me. I never told anyone, but to he honest, I kinda just got used to it. It always made me jump, and some of the voices would make me feel uneasy, but I knew that I was safe, so long as I didn’t open the door. Some of the voices, I got used to, to the extent that I even named them. There was one which always used to appear at my front door, at home. We have frosted glass, and I could see a silhouette of an average-sized man wearing a cap of some time. He never spoke, but occasionally would push envelopes containing blank pieces of paper through the letterbox. I called him the postman. He was one of the more unsettling ones. If I tried to speak to him, he would look up sharply, then begin knocking. I generally left the postman alone.