The Visit

It began with a sound he had almost forgotten.
Knocking.
Three short raps against the door.
He froze where he sat, hunched on the edge of the bed. The noise echoed strangely in the apartment, as though the walls themselves didn’t know how to carry it anymore.
For a moment, he thought he had imagined it another trick of the mind, like the whispers or the shifting shadows. But then it came again.
Three sharp knocks.
This time, unmistakable.
He hadn’t heard a knock in weeks. Months, maybe. He had stopped counting.
His breath quickened. Who would it be? Nobody visited. Nobody ever came. The very idea of another presence pressing against his door felt obscene, intrusive, impossible.
He stayed still, listening.
Silence followed.
Perhaps it was a mistake. A neighbor at the wrong door. A delivery gone astray. He exhaled shakily, relief curling through him.
But just as he began to relax, the knock came again. Louder this time.
His first thought was to ignore it. To wait it out until whoever it was gave up. But the sound rattled him to the core, like a reminder that the world still existed beyond these walls, still capable of reaching in.
The knocking persisted.
Five steady beats now, deliberate, patient. Not urgent, not frantic just insistent.
He crept to the hallway, steps faltering. His eyes flicked to the mirror, still draped and barricaded, the stranger sealed behind it. For once, he was grateful. At least he would not see that watching grin as he approached the door.
His hand hovered over the knob.
“Who is it?” he croaked, voice cracking from disuse.
No answer.
The silence thickened.
He swallowed, throat raw. “Who’s there?”
Still nothing.
Just when he thought he’d been abandoned, the reply came not with words, but with another knock. Slow. Heavy. Final.
He stumbled back from the door, heart hammering.
The idea of opening it was unthinkable. The air itself seemed to thicken at the thought. Yet the knocking would not let him be.
It came again and again, each time with the same rhythm, until the sound imprinted itself into his skull.
At last, trembling, he pressed his eye to the peephole.
Darkness.
No figure stood in the hallway. No shape, no movement. Only the dim corridor stretching empty.
He blinked, confused, leaning closer. Perhaps the figure had stepped aside? Hidden?
Then, without warning, a face filled the peephole.
Not fully visible, just an eye pale, unblinking, staring directly into his own.
He yelped, stumbling backward. His shoulder struck the wall, pain flaring.
By the time he gathered the courage to look again, the hallway was empty.
The knocking ceased.
Silence returned, heavier than before.
He pressed his ear to the door, but heard nothing. No footsteps retreating, no voices. Just the low hum of his own blood rushing through his skull.
He collapsed against the wall, trembling. His breath came shallow, uneven. He told himself it wasn’t real. A hallucination, another symptom of his unraveling mind.
Yet when he dared to glance at the floor, he saw something that shattered his denial.
An envelope.
Slipped beneath the door.
It lay there like a wound against the dust, stark and white. His name scrawled across it in jagged handwriting.
He stared at it for a long time, afraid to touch it. Afraid it would vanish if he blinked or worse, remain real.
At last, with shaking fingers, he picked it up. The paper was cold, almost damp, as though pulled from some other world.
He tore it open.
Inside was a single sheet.
Blank.
No message, no signature, no explanation. Just emptiness staring back.
He dropped the envelope as though burned, heart racing.
Blank. It was a trick, a joke. Or worse, a signal. A beginning.
He turned in circles, scanning the apartment, half-expecting the stranger to emerge now, freed by this intrusion.
But nothing came.
Only silence.
And yet, the moment he set the blank page on the table, he knew it would never leave him. The emptiness of it was louder than any message.
It was not absence. It was intent.
That night, he barely slept.
Every sound set him rigid, every flicker of shadow pulled his gaze. He kept waiting for another knock, another letter, another face pressed against the peephole.
But the door remained quiet.
Almost too quiet.
When he finally collapsed into uneasy sleep, he dreamed of the envelope multiplying, spilling through the door in waves, thousands of blank pages filling the apartment, burying him alive.
He woke choking, tangled in sheets, certain he could still feel the paper brushing his skin.
By morning if morning even existed the envelope was gone.
He searched the table, the floor, the trash. Nothing. No trace of it.
Had he imagined it? Hallucinated the entire thing?
He pressed his forehead to the cool wall, whispering, “It was real. It was real.”
But doubt gnawed at him.
The stranger in the glass had not appeared during the visit. Not once. That absence felt deliberate. As though the reflection had stepped aside, letting something else knock at the door.
And somehow, that was worse.
The visit marked a fracture.
The apartment no longer felt sealed, no longer his. The outside world or something beyond it had entered, left its trace, and departed.
He was not alone anymore.
And he knew, deep in the marrow of his bones, the knocking would return.