This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/beardify on 2024-10-22 10:28:56+00:00.

My two-year-old son Carter has always been what the doctors called a ‘normal toddler.’ Like any other kid his age, he sometimes had tantrums or splattered his food all over the wall; occasionally he caught a fever from eating God-knows-what or refused to go to sleep until after midnight. What comforted my wife Anabel and I was the knowledge that all of that was normal. By and large, our son was healthy, happy, and growing more every day–

Until he woke up screaming four nights ago. 

At first, I thought it had to do with the move. We had recently transitioned from a cramped apartment in the city to a two-storey house in the suburbs. The whole neighborhood had been built in the 1950’s, and it showed: every one of the homes was eerily similar to each of the others, and all of them needed repairs. Still, the bones of the structure were solid. So what if there were a few leaks in the basement? So what if the lights didn’t work in the upstairs hallway? The important thing was that our little family finally had a place that we could call our own.

Or so I thought. The truth was, Anabel and I were both expecting that Carter would have trouble adjusting to our new home; we had read books about children whose personalities changed or even suffered trauma as a result of being suddenly uprooted from a familiar environment, but Carter was thrilled by the change. He zoomed through the house, yelling excitedly into every closet and cupboard. To us, the worn old house felt small, but for our son, it must have seemed like the biggest playground ever. He slept twelve hours that night, and Anabel and I finally got some time alone. 

Carter was just as enchanted by the house on the second day. While Anabel and I unpacked, he built forts with cardboard boxes or climbed around inside the kitchen cabinets. We let Carter pick his bedroom, and he chose the smaller room on the left. When I asked him why, he just grinned.

“Funny doors!” Carter laughed, then ran away without any further explanation. I was left scratching my head. My son’s room had only one door, the one that led to the hallway and to the bedroom I would be sharing with Anabel. Why had Carter said ‘doors’? I figured that it was just toddler logic, and forgot all about it.

My wife traveled a lot for work, but she had taken a week off to help with the move. Since he showed every sign of being well-adjusted, she left for her first business trip last Monday–

And that’s where the trouble started. 

It had been a perfectly ordinary night: beef stew for dinner, bathtime, pajamas, storytime, and sleep. While Carter dozed, I wrapped up in the cozy plaid bathrobe that Anabel had bought me last Father’s Day, and read an old Raymond Chandler novel until I felt sleepy enough to turn out the light. 

A piercing shriek woke me. Carter. The digital alarm clock beside my bed read 1:44 AM. I stumbled out of bed and down the lightless hallway to my son’s room. I found him standing in his crib, pointing at the wall and screaming. This wasn’t teething pain, hunger, or a stomachache: this was pure, unfiltered terror. 

“What’s the matter, buddy?” I asked as I picked him up. “Does something hurt? Did you have a nightmare?” 

“Daa-run,” Carter mumbled, over and over. “Baa-maa, Daa-run.”

My son can usually speak complete words without a problem, but he was too agitated that night. It took ten minutes of rocking just to stop the screaming, and even then, I still couldn’t make out what he was trying to say through his tears. I offered water, a snack, and even told him that he could stay with me in the big bed if he wanted, but Carter just shook his head. There didn’t seem to be any option except to lay him back in his crib.

My son grabbed his favorite stuffed animal–a fat purple gecko–and rolled over, staring at the wall like his life depended on it. After a few minutes, his eyes closed, his breathing regulated, and I could finally get back to sleep.

Although Anabel wasn’t around to witness the weird event, I mentioned it during our video call the next evening. Her advice was simple: give it one more night. If something else happened, I could move Carter’s crib into our bedroom or set up the baby cam that we had quit using several months before. 

That second night was the first time that Carter had ever seemed nervous about going to bed. Even while I was giving him his bath, he kept craning his neck to look behind me, as though he were afraid some monster was going to come creeping in from the hallway. Even after I shut the bathroom door, his tiny fingers kept a white knuckle grip on the edge of the tub–

Like he was waiting for something terrible to happen. 

“Just holler if you need anything, okay buddy?” I reminded him, before ruffling his hair and turning out the light. “Sleep tight!” 

When I got back to my bedroom, I couldn’t help but look back over my shoulder. Carter was just a black lump in the crib on the far wall. He looked so small and fragile, clinging to his purple gecko plushie like his life depended on it. I wanted to stay by his side, but I knew that I couldn’t be there every night, and that some battles he would have to learn to fight alone. 

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling fan, too restless to sleep. I was waiting, I realized, for my son to scream. After 1:45 AM passed without a sound from Carter’s room, I finally relaxed. Maybe it had just been a nightmare, after all.

At some point I must have dozed off, because when my eyes opened, it was to the sound of my son’s piercing cry. 

Just like before, I ran to Carter–but what I saw in the hallway stopped me in my tracks. It was…me. Standing in the dimly-lit doorway of my son’s room. This version of me had wild hair, bloodshot eyes, and an enraged expression on its face. 

“HEY!” I shouted, sprinting forward. My other self moved too, and only then did I realize that I was looking at a mirror. There was a full-length mirror on the back of Carter’s bedroom door! I had never noticed it before, but then again, we had moved in so recently. A cheap mirror on the back of a door would have been an easy thing for the old owners to forget, and since Anabel and I rarely opened Carter’s door all the way, we might have simply overlooked it.

Maybe that had been the problem: my son was waking up in the middle of the night and getting scared by his own reflection. As much as I wanted to believe it, I couldn’t help but wonder what had opened the door. Something else was bothering me, too: Carter’s stuffed purple gecko was gone. Sometimes he threw it out of the crib, where it usually bounced under the mattress or got lost in the laundry, but that night, the plushie was nowhere to be found. 

“Baa-maa!” Carter was rambling again. “Daarum!” He wasn’t making any more sense than he had the day before, but at least he calmed down faster. He reached out for his crib like he couldn’t wait to get back inside of it and hide beneath the covers; anything else I offered him only made that horrible wailing start up again.

Although I didn’t like the way he lay there–the sheet half-covering his face like a murder victim in a mortuary–it seemed to be the only thing keeping him calm and relaxed. He was hiding, I realized with a shiver. Hoping that whatever had scared him so badly wouldn’t find him before the morning.

The dark hallway connecting our rooms was also colder than I remembered. I put on the striped bathrobe that Anabel had bought me last Father’s Day and lay down on my bed to read. I wanted to get lost in those dusty yellowed pages, but I just couldn’t focus: for one thing, my bookmark wasn’t where I remembered leaving it; I had to go back almost ten pages just to remember what was going on. For another, I would have sworn that my bathrobe had been plaid, not striped. No matter how many times I paced the bedroom or peeked out the door to make sure that Carter was safe, I couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness that had burrowed down deep into my gut. 

During my video call with Anabel the next day, I was almost afraid to mention the whole episode. She still had a full day left in her business trip, and I didn’t want her to think that I was losing my grip on things back home. I asked about the mirror, but she said she couldn’t remember seeing one in Carter’s room. Later, when I mentioned the bathrobe, an odd expression crossed her face.

“The truth is, I couldn’t decide. I had narrowed it down to those two patterns, but I was running late, so I just closed my eyes and picked one at random. It turned out to be stripes, but it could just as easily have been plaid.” Anabel hesitated. “…Anyway, about Carter, why don’t you just set up the baby monitor? That way you’ll know for sure what’s going on in there.” 

We still hadn’t fully unpacked, and it took me a while to locate the tiny camera that we had used to watch Carter when he was a newborn. I set it up on a chair facing his crib, and while I was at it, I also took down the mirror. I couldn’t explain why, but the damn thing gave me a bad vibe–like it wasn’t supposed to be there. Like it didn’t really belong in ‘our’ house. 

Just like the night before, Carter became unusually quiet after sunset. He kept his eyes glued to the clock, nervously counting down the minutes until nightfall. I tried to distract him with his favorite game–Hide and Seek–but he didn’t want to leave my side. I could understand why: without Anabel around, the house felt too quiet. Our voices…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1g9ew3v/i_found_a_strange_door_in_my_sons_bedroom/