My dad made us lock our bedroom doors every night.
Channel: Scary Stories
Date: 13/03/2023

My dad made us lock our bedroom doors every night.

As children, my siblings and I followed a strict rule. We weren’t, under any circumstances, permitted to open our bedroom doors between 10pm and 6am.

“Do you want a bedtime story, sweetie?” My father asked.

His sickly-sweet voice, worming through the keyhole of my bedroom door, exuded a gravelly warmth. But it wasn’t my father. And I don’t mean some*one* else — it was some*thing* else.

He’d never explained why we had to lock our bedroom doors every night, but we knew something was wrong with the man in the hallway. He became a terrifying thing in those torturous twilight hours.

Some nights, our father let us sleep. Most nights, however, he stood at each of our doors in turn. He would sombrely scratch at the woodwork like a wounded dog, yearning to be let inside.

I don’t know how we resisted the urge to open our doors for so many years. We were children. How did we know that it wasn’t just a game? It might’ve been something about the tone of Dad’s voice. The air always felt sour when he hissed those nightly words of caution. But the man would transform after 10pm. My fawning father uttered hollow platitudes in a bid to appeal to our childlike sensibilities.

“You’ve been such a *good* girl, Rosa,” He once cooed from the other side of the door. “Why don’t you come out and have a slice of cake? Our little secret.”

And after an hour or so of badgering, I heard his nimble feet shuffle near-soundlessly across the carpet. He begged my older sister, Hattie, to open up. Then, finally, he would beg Alden, his eldest child. Dad always seemed to rattle my brother’s door handle the most insistently.

It wasn’t until the spring of 2014, when I was nine years old, that my father’s safeguard crumbled to pieces. On a dreadful night that I have tried to forget, a commotion woke me, but it wasn’t my father.

“Help!” Alden screamed — muffled — from his room down the hall. “Let me out of here! *Let me out*!”

I rose from bed and walked to my door, listening to the cries of my terrified brother. I could hear shuffling sounds in my sister’s room across the hallway.

“Rosa?” Hattie whispered, muffled by our two doors. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “What’s wrong with Alden?”

“I don’t know,” Hattie said, then she cleared her throat to project her voice. “Alden? What’s wrong?”

“Hat!” He screeched. “I need help, Hat!”

“Fuck,” She whimpered. “Is it… Is it Dad? Did you open the door for him?”

“No, of course not,” Alden scoffed. “I… I can’t breathe! I need to go to the hospital.”

“Oh, shit…” Hattie whispered.

“We need to check that he’s okay,” I whimpered.

“No!” Hattie barked. “You know the rules. We can’t open our doors until 6am. That’s not for another… four hours.”

“I can’t hear Dad on the landing,” I pointed out. “I’m quick. I think I could make it to Alden’s room without being caught.”

I could hear my heartbeat in my eardrums — the thrumming sound swelled in my shivering head, striving to ward off foolish thoughts. No use. I’d already placed one hand on the door handle, whilst using the other to twist the lock open.

It clicked.

“Don’t do it,” Hattie pleaded. “Don’t make me come out there with you. I will.”

“Sorry, Hattie,” I said.

“It’s not a game, Rosa!” Hattie wailed. “You know that something’s wrong with Dad. He would never hurt us during the day, but that thing we hear outside our doors? It isn’t… It doesn’t… It’s *inhuman*.”

I eyeballed the door handle for ten endless seconds, carefully considering my sister’s words. She was right. Whenever my Dad spoke from the corridor, my hairs stood on end. It was as if a primal sense within me could detect an unholy abomination on the other side of the door. As I mentioned, I knew it wasn’t a game — even at the age of nine. But I couldn’t bear to sit in my room whilst Alden screamed.

I delicately eased my door open, terrified that I would see my father’s eyes peering through the gap. Or, worse, *something else*. But I didn’t, and I breathed a sigh of relief before stepping out into the hallway.

“Rosa, just wait… Something’s bothering me…” Hattie said.

I crept towards Alden’s room as quietly as possible, but I froze when I noticed that his door was wide open and he was nowhere to be seen. I turned around to head back to my room.

“He can unlock his own door,” Hattie pointed out. “Why does he need us to-”

I yelled until my lungs neared bursting, and Hattie trailed off. I’d found Alden. He was standing at the other end of the corridor, lurking in the darkness. Well, something stood there. It wore Alden’s clothes, but it wasn’t him.

With a mannequin head that had Alden’s vague features, though its eyes were black husks, the entity looked at me. It wore an unmoving smile, etched into its plastic face, that filled me with breathless horror. And then the false Alden spoke in a garbled voice. It was his horrible plastic mouth that had muffled his earlier screams — not the two doors between us.

“Help,” He giggled