I heard a joke once about having a kid. It went that seeing your

I didn't go to the funeral. I couldn't decide if that made me a better person or a worse one. It didn't matter. No matter what I did, it wouldn't get her back. I sat on my couch a lot after that. I watched tv. Nature programs. Mysteries of the deep. Tripe like that. I had a lot of time on my hands, in that my work had downsized and I was let go in the first round of cuts. All the resumes I sent out after that never brought back any calls. My rent payments felt huge, like those giant squids they find inside the belly of whales on Mysteries of the Deep.

I had been on the dole got two months when I started hearing the knocking at my door. It was always late — two or three in the morning. That empty, silent time. The whole neighborhood wrapped up in silence and there was that knocking, violating that pact, that covenant of quiet. So I would get up, in the absolute inky pitch black of light, flick on a lamp in the hallway, and creep out to the front door.

You ever been alone in a house in the middle of the night when someone starts knocking on the door? You know what it feels like? What it feels like to know somebody wants to talk to you, to see you, in the dead of night, banging on the door loud enough to wake the —

Well, I digress.

That night, the first night of the door knocking, when I got there and peered out the little window on the side of the door, I didn't see anybody. I turned on the porch light and opened the door, letting in that icy nocturnal wind, that lonely wind, the kind that gets the cold right in your bones.

But nobody was out there.

The rest of the week was the same. Someone banging the holy hell out of the door, me rushing to the front of the house and flinging open the door to see just an empty throughway. I thought it might have been some chavs up the street having a go and tried not to worry over it. But there was something wrong in the way it felt. That sheer emptiness whenever I opened up onto the street didn't seem right. I started having problems sleeping, taking hours to doze off and when I did, that's when I would wake up. Because of that banging.

Then on Saturday night — Sunday morning, I suppose — I woke up. There was the pounding on the door like always. Insistent.

I crept out of the bedroom. I felt like I could see a shadowy shape at the door for a second but by the time I got there it was the same as the last time.

Nobody.

I opened the door and stepped out, looking up and down the street.

Nothing.

I turned to go back in and then I jumped.

My car alarm was going off, sounding quite loud and piercing in the otherwise quiet. Its lights were flashing orange in the dark. I stepped forward and peered at the car. No one was standing about. Maybe something else had set it off. A gust of wind. A cat.

I went into the house to grab my keys to turn the alarm off. As I was getting them off the kitchen table, I heard the alarm stop.

That couldn't have happened, I thought. It doesn't just turn off. Things don't stop.

I went to rush out to the car and I stopped. There in my doorway stood a figure.

It was a little girl, standing right on the edge. Staring at me.

It was hard to see her clearly. The only light on in the house was a lamp and it merely outlined her shape; the majority of her remained defined by shadows. I could tell she was young. Far too young to be standing outside alone at three in the morning.

"Excuse me," she said, "can I come in?"

Her voice sounded like a old voicemail on an old phone. Distant but permanent.

"No, you can't come in," I said.

"Please," she said. "I need help."

"What happened?" I asked. I didn't want to ask. I didn't want to hear what she said. But I asked. Something in me made me ask.

"There was an accident. I need help. I need to make a call," she stepped forward, almost into the house but not into the house, pressing against what seemed to be an invisible boundary only she could see. "Let me call my mom."

And then I saw her eyes. They were all black, reflecting me staring at her.

I slammed the door. I don't know how but I did. I slammed the door and fell on the ground.

For a moment, I couldn't move. The only sound in the world was my blood in my veins, rushing and pounding against their interior walls. My heart was so loud I didn't quite realize there were no other noises.

I stood up to stare out the side window and saw the back of the dark figure moving quietly down my front path. It walked into the swollen dark of the street, to other dark figures standing there: other children, one holding a balloon, and a tall man with a hunched gait, holding a crowd of silent dogs on leashes. All the children were staring at the house. I saw their black eyes eating the light.

Ever since then, the knocking happens every night, but I stopped going to the door. I don't need to. You see, I wasn't the worst dad ever. After I lost my job, I went to visit Lucy, I had a couple of drinks first of course. Helps with the nerves. I went over that afternoon for her birthday. It was supposed to be a surprise.

When I took that corner, I took it too fast. I knew I had hit something, but I didn't know what. I thought it was an animal. Or maybe I didn't. But I just drove off, as fast as i could and tried to tell myself it had been an animal. It hadn't been her.

But when I looked into those black dead eyes at my front door they were a mirror, a pulsing television screen. And they showed me reflected in them, but not the me in the house. It showed the me in the car.

The me that had been behind the wheel.

The me who saw her first and who saw her last.

And now I see her all the time when she knocks on the door.

Because I guess this is how it was meant to be. I never visited her, but now every night Lucy visits me.

good story anon.

Started out pretty good, then got lame at the end with the BEK tropes and that whole final post. 5/10, at least you tried.

I like it, thanks for sharing

7/10 breddy good

bamp

RP/0

stories going full-circle are so hipster 90's cliche...

>>17107301
Good story, thanks OP

>>17108465
>newfag who can't tell the difference between RP and a story