The Shadowed Door

HARPER.

Her throat went dry. She glanced toward the empty hall, then slid a nail under the flap and opened it.

Inside, purple ink. The kind her mom used for notes.

It read, "Six is a magick number. Be brave today. Love you tomorrow. —Mom & Dad".

She and her parents have a saying, "I love you tomorrow, because every tomorrow is a today."

Harper read it twice, the words swimming. Six.

She set the card down very slowly, like it might detonate.

“You’re messing with me,” she whispered. “You’re messing with me, right?”

A floorboard popped behind her.

Harper spun, heart ricocheting. Nobody in the doorway. No shadows moving. Just that feeling—the sensation of being not-alone in a room that insisted on being empty.

“Mom?” She hated the way her voice squeaked. “Dad?”

Something thumped softly from the room at the end of the hall. Not a big thump. Not a jump-scare thump. More like the sound a closed book makes when it shifts and settles.

That would be her dad’s study.

She edged down the hall, telling her lungs to do that useful thing where they kept her alive. The study door was closed. It had always been closed. Kids were welcome in the house, sure—just not in the study. Not without knocking. Not unless one of her parents was there to say okay. The rule was old, and she’d never been tempted to break it. Mostly because rules grew teeth in this house and bit you later in weird ways, like spilled coffee inside a backpack two days after you “borrowed” a pen you weren’t supposed to touch.

“Harper,” she told herself, “it’s your birthday. You can knock on a door.” She raised her fist.

Before her knuckles hit wood, the air in front of the door… moved.

It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t heat. It was more like a shimmer, a thin vertical ripple tracing down the center of the panel. A reflection where there was nothing reflective. The hair on her arms lifted.

“Okay,” she breathed. “Nope.”

She took a step back. The ripple faded. The door returned to being a door.

Harper swallowed and knocked anyway—three fast taps, because she was not about to cower in her own hallway. “Dad? Mom? If you’re in there, say literally anything. I will accept a cough. A sneeze. A passive-aggressive throat clear.”

Silence.

She tried the knob. It turned easily. The door swung inward in a room that wasn’t her father’s study.

No, that wasn’t right. It was his study. The layout matched—the desk against the far wall, the bookcases on either side, the narrow window looking out at the driveway. But everything was wrong the way the rest of the house was wrong. The books were in different places. The chair was a different chair. The desk lamp was the old one that had fried out when she was nine. The one with the little pull chain she used to play with until her dad said, “Harper, if you break that, I’m going to make you read by candlelight like it’s 1630.”

She stepped in. The room smelled like old paper and dust and lemon oil. On the desk, a legal pad lay open. Lines of neat, unfamiliar handwriting marched across the page. Her dad’s writing was big and messy, letters holding hands. This writing was precise, crowded, determined not to touch.

A shadow slid across the desk like a cloud passing the sun.

Harper looked up. No clouds. The window showed a sliver of driveway and the edge of the maple tree. No movement. But the light had dimmed, just for a heartbeat, like the room had blinked.

She backed out and closed the door with care she did not feel.

Downstairs again, the kitchen felt slightly less out of focus, as if acknowledging the upstairs had cost it some of its blur. The clock insisted it was 7:02. School would start in exactly fifty-eight minutes. People in normal houses were eating cereal and yelling about missing shoes and singing off-key to the radio.

Harper opened the pantry. Cereal boxes she didn’t recognize. Labels with brands that had rebranded years ago. A bag of flour with a design she’d only ever seen in old family photos. On the inside of the pantry door, a smear of purple crayon at kid-height, rubbed almost away.

A prickling traveled from the base of her spine to her scalp.

She closed the pantry and leaned her forehead against the cool wood, breathing slow, like she was trying to sneak up on calm. The house creaked, gentle as a rocking chair.

“Okay,” she said, pushing off the door. “Plan: go to Morgan’s, borrow a working brain, return with adult supervision. Maybe bring donuts. Donuts fix most hauntings.”

She snatched her sneakers from the mat, jammed her feet into them without untying the laces, and reached for the doorknob.

Someone knocked.

Not at the front door.

From inside the house.

Harper went very still. The sound had come from below—three polite knocks, spaced just so. Like a neighbor asking to borrow sugar. Like a teacher calling the class to attention.

She turned slowly. The basement door sat flush to the wall beside the fridge, painted the same soft white as the trim. They rarely used it—laundry was upstairs, and her dad always said the basement was for “holiday boxes and spiders.” Harper avoided both.

“Hello?” she tried, which was ridiculous. If a stranger had broken into their basement, manners were probably not going to help. But still—it felt wrong to be rude to something you couldn’t see.

Another knock. Same rhythm. Calm. Expectant.

Harper’s mouth went dry. She reached for the nearest weapon available, which turned out to be a wooden spoon from the utensil jar. Fantastic. She was going to die wielding a soup ladle.

She set the spoon down and grabbed the heavy flashlight from the junk drawer instead—the one Morgan had made her buy “for preparedness.” The metal felt solid and real in her hand, blessedly un-weird.

“Okay,” she told the basement door. “Either you are my parents and this is going to be the dumbest scare of my life, or you are not my parents and this is going to be the dumbest decision of my life.”

She wrapped her fingers around the knob.

The metal was cold. Much colder than the kitchen air.

Harper counted to three.

And opened the door.