This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/kittyotterpancake on 2024-11-05 00:29:18+00:00.

To explain what’s happening now, I have to go back to when I was nine, alone in a trailer buried deep in the Midwest woods. Our house was so isolated that anyone who passed by was family or friend. Instead of normal crime your concern was Bobcats, bears, foxes eating your chickens, but not people.

It was storming after school and the power was out. I was in my bed listening to the heavy rain on the roof, and that was always weirdly comforting to me.

I started to drift off, then suddenly felt myself falling into what felt like an endless void. It’s as if I were sinking into darkness with lights above me, like a boat floating on a vast, empty sea.

But a heavy knock woke me up just before I could hit the bottom.

It was the kind of knock that any traumatized kid would know too well. I thought it might be my stepdad, and that he was drunk again. The door was bulging from the force and I quickly opened the door trying to apologize for whatever I may have done only to find that no one was actually there.

When my mom came home from bartending I told her about it and she told me I need to stop reading so many scary books at school and we both dismissed it as a nightmare.

This kept happening, and the worse my life would get the more frequently it happened. A dream of falling into darkness and being woken up by a terrifying knock.

A friend from school who I don’t think believed me and was wanting to just prove I was lying stayed over a few months after. They kept asking me to show them something scary and making jokes about it and I tried to explain how scary it all really was and that it wasn’t a joke.

“BOOM” the door flexed like it did whenever it woke me up but this time I and my friend were in mid conversation fully awake. The jokes were gone, his face turned pale white because he thought we were both in big trouble for something, the same way I did the first time I heard it.

I sat, not moving, and let the knocking continue because I already knew if I opened the door no one would be there. He however, was fully convinced I was playing a prank so he ran up to the door and threw it opened then ran around looking for anyone to be there only to realize we were alone.

When I tried to explain to him it wasn’t jokes we both heard a voice, it sounded to me like my mother but to him he heard his mothers voice and it said our names followed by “get your *** out here now!!” In the most menacing, angry voice you could imagine. Then it just laughed, but the laugh wasn’t like either of our mothers, it was— barely human sounding.

There is more to it but that sets the stage for today. That situation kept happening randomly through my life but changed to mostly being when a friend or family member died. This month I lost my grandmother who I loved and who loved me.

This time instead of falling I dreamed I was walking towards a house I have never seen before and as I tried to enter I heard my grandmothers say a name that no one has called me since I was a child, a name no one would call me and I have never heard in my dreams ever. This voice sounded urgent, terrified almost, and I jolted up awake the same way I used to and heard the knock on my bathroom door.

I am at a friends moms house as the dorms were getting expensive and frustrating and they offered me to stay on the first floor which has its own bedroom, living room, and bathroom areas. I haven’t had these experiences in so long I forgot about the original situations and opened the bathroom door only to hear that terrifying laugh that brought all the haunting memories back.

I left out a lot of details and things that ended up coming along with those knocks as a kid and now I am terrified it could ramp up to that same level again. Every mirror I pass I shield my eyes, every open door I am scared to look down, and I have been maxing out my fans and white noise to cancel the random noises, voices, knocking, and whispers.

My biggest fear is I will see it again, the monster I have been running from since I was a kid. The thing that existed outside of me and then inside of my dreams before being inside of me. I’m scared it will do what it used to and of the harm it will bring.

Every knock might be him.