The knock came at 3:12 a.m.—a small, deliberate sound, the kind of knock that pretends to be polite but already knows it’s being let in.

Marianne surfaced from sleep as if she were enveloped in gauze. The digital clock’s red numbers pressed against the dark, holding her in that thin space between night and morning where nothing has rules.

The sound came again. Three knuckles were measured. It was not the wind. She did not measure the house.

She listened hard. The rain had thickened outside, sliding down the siding in uneven lines. The gutters overflowed with exhaustion. She could hear the pulse of water. As it hit the porch roof. Everything had a rhythm tonight except her breathing.

Her husband, David, had been gone a week on a long-haul route—freight across the prairies, an endless landscape that looked like nowhere pretending to be somewhere. She’d always liked his absences. She used to fill the house with podcasts, the dog snoring at her feet. Now only silence sat with her like a second presence, waiting to see what she’d do.

She told herself it was nothing. She heard the sound of the mailbox lid flapping in the wind. A branch. A dream with disastrous timing.

Then came a third knock, closer, like the sound had moved inside the walls.

Marianne sat up. “Who’s there?” she asked, because human beings are wired to announce their fear out loud.

The silence afterward wasn’t empty—it was aware.

Her body moved before she could second-guess it. She threw on her robe, slid her feet into slippers, and stepped into the hallway. The house didn’t feel like hers. The air was heavier, the shadows long and almost wet.

Halfway down the hall, she passed the old mirror—her grandmother’s, full-length, gilt-edged. She caught her reflection and stopped. The glass shimmered slightly, as if it were thinking about something. She raised her hand. Her reflection did too, but half a second late.

Her chest tightened. “You’re just tired,” she whispered. But even her whisper felt borrowed.

The front door waited at the end of the hall, a darker rectangle inside the dark. The peephole was a blind spot of blackness. Rain hissed against the porch.

She stood there, frozen, the way animals freeze when they sense a predator but haven’t yet decided where it is.

The knock didn’t come again.

Instead, a voice—low, steady, close enough to be real.

“You left the back door open.”

Marianne’s hand went numb on the doorknob. “What?”

“I told you,” the voice said, patient and familiar. “You left the back door open.”

Her pulse thudded in her throat. She had gone out earlier—to dump compost before the storm. The latch had stuck. She hadn’t checked it.

Her mouth dried out. “If this is a prank, I’m calling the police.”

The voice almost sounded amused. “You don’t need to. I already did.”

The hall light flickered once. Her reflection in the mirror behind her moved when she didn’t.

Outside, something shifted—footsteps on the porch boards, slow and deliberate, circling toward the side of the house.

Marianne bolted down the hall toward the kitchen, her robe trailing behind her like a ghost trying to keep up. The storm pounded now, sheets of rain smearing the windows. Every light she passed flickered once, like the house was blinking.

When she reached the back door, her stomach dropped. It was open wide, yawning black into the wet night.

The wind blew in, heavy with the smell of earth and metal. She reached for the doorknob to slam it shut—and froze.

Her reflection in the glass pane didn’t match her. It stood straight while she bent forward. Its lips curved slowly, deliberately, into a smile she didn’t feel.

Behind her, in the dark hallway, the voice came again. Closer now. Intimate. “I told you. You left it open.”

She turned.

No one.

The kitchen lights dimmed. The refrigerator’s hum turned into a single long note—too low, almost like breath through teeth.

“David?” she whispered, even though she knew he was six hundred miles away.

The faint creak of a door opening came from the front of the house. She hadn’t heard footsteps crossing the porch and missed hearing the latch. Just the sound of something letting itself in.

Marianne backed away. Her heel hit the edge of the rug. Her pulse drummed so loudly she could barely hear the next sound: water dripping from the ceiling, one slow drop at a time.

She looked up. The water stain above the sink had darkened into a spreading shape—like a hand pressed flat against the plaster.

A whisper brushed her ear: “You shouldn’t have looked.”

She stumbled backward. The kitchen window fogged, and across the glass, written from the outside, appeared the word LIVE.

Her brain struggled to reorder it, to make sense—EVIL backwards, the word she refused to say aloud.

The refrigerator clicked off. The power went dead.

Silence bloomed, thick and perfect.

In it, she heard footsteps in the hall—the kind that know exactly where they’re going.

She grabbed the nearest thing—a cast-iron skillet—and raised it. Her arm trembled.

The mirror at the far end of the hall caught her movement. But her reflection wasn’t holding a skillet. Her reflection was holding a knife.

The voice came from everywhere now—from the rain, the walls, and the mirror:

“I told you to keep it shut.”

She screamed and swung. The mirror shattered. The sound was like ice cracking over deep water.

And then the world blinked.

She stood by the front door again, breathing hard, her heart stumbling over itself. The floor beneath her was dry. The lights are steady. There was only the sound of rain.

She looked toward the hallway mirror—whole, unbroken. Her reflection was calm.

She exhaled, laughed shakily, and pressed her palm to her chest. “Just a dream,” she whispered. “Just—”

The knock came again.

Three gentle taps echoed through the room.

She turned to the peephole. Through the blur of glass, a face leaned close—hers, but wrong.

Her reflection’s lips moved first. Then, from the other side of the door, her spoken voice, perfect and patient: “You left the back door open.”