The Closet

It was just a closet. Or so the landlord said. But he wasn’t known for his virtue. Who was to say that it wasn’t all a lie?

Every night, it was the same story. Get home from work, eat, take the dog out, shower, lounge, take the dog out again, get ready for bed, and be under the covers by midnight. It was simple. Predictable. The same routine she had followed in her previous apartment, minus the ex-boyfriend.

After leaving him, she had spent a week on the couch of a friend while she searched for an apartment of her own. Something cheap enough that she could afford the rent without needing a roommate.

This place had fallen into her lap like what felt like fate. Not large but big enough, with one bedroom, a bathroom, a small living space, and a kitchenette. Located in a neighborhood considered by most to be “safe”, whatever that meant, and surprisingly cheap. Both her dog and her cat were even allowed without any extra fee. The previous tenant had left recently, and the landlord had been more than eager to help her move in as fast as possible. It was perfect, almost too good to be true.

Maybe because it was.

The first night, she had written it off. The city streets below screamed, just as they always did. It was nothing new. Odd noises in the middle of the night were common, a consequence of living in such a densely populated area. It was what she got for dreaming.

The second night, it was clearer, harder to ignore. Still, she told herself it was silly. It wasn’t a voice but a trick of her mind, turning the howling of the wind or the rushing of cars into a whisper. She dismissed it and managed to drift off to sleep.

The third night, she fell asleep without issue, but awoke to the rumble of a deep voice. It was gentle, almost like a soft purr, louder and clearer than the night before. Three times, she heard it say the same thing. Her name.

Annabelle.

She lay there, frozen, waiting for it to happen again, but it didn’t. It was just her imagination, she was able to convince herself, and again, she fell asleep.

On the fourth night, there was no more denying it. At exactly one o’clock, her eyes fluttered open once again. The voice was its loudest yet, even as a monotone drone.

Annabelle.

Annabelle.

Annabelle.

Annabelle. 

Almost like a chant.

The dog sat up too, standing on the foot of the bed and baring his teeth as he growled, hair standing on end. He was staring at the bathroom door, the direction the voice seemed to be coming from.

They both waited for it to happen again, but it never did. She never managed to fall back asleep.

On the fifth night, she waited. She sat in the doorway of the bathroom, the dog curled up against her and the cat staring at them from across the room. Exhausted from a busy day and her previous sleepless night, she started to nod off, but no sooner had she closed her eyes than the voice piped up once again.

Five times, it said her name, now at a conversational volume. 

Annabelle. 

The dog growled again, though he stayed behind her as she scrambled to her feet. 

Annabelle. 

She listened closely, searching for the source.

Annabelle.

There was a small door across from the sink, one that looked like it belonged to a closet, though she had ignored it while moving in. She couldn’t get it to open, and it didn’t feel worth her time to call the landlord and get it fixed.

Annabelle.

Hand shaking, she grasped the doorknob and tried to turn it. It didn’t budge, but it was warm to the touch.

Annabelle.

For the rest of the night, the room remained quiet. Again, she did not sleep.

The next night, it happened again, and this time, she called the landlord. The phone rang three times before he finally answered, audibly groggy and irritated as he said, “Yes?”

She told him what had happened, entirely aware of how crazy she knew she sounded. But at this point, she didn’t care. She hadn’t slept, and she couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. This was the best deal she could get. And now, she wondered if she had discovered why.

The landlord listened, but the moment she was done, he chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he said, though he sounded hesitant. “The vents in the building make crazy noises. It can even sound like words at times!”

“And the door?” she asked, trying with everything she had to keep her voice from shaking.

“It’s been jammed for years, but it’s just a little closet. A tiny thing, really,” he said. “Just let it be. Don’t worry about it.”

And he hung up on her.

His words were confident, but she hadn’t missed the nervous edge of his voice. She hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know.

The next morning, dark bags beneath her eyes, she started knocking on doors. She had met everyone on the floor when she’d first moved in, but she hadn’t seen much of anyone since. An unfortunate consequence of always having to be at work.

Knowing she was twitching, her face pale with exhaustion, she started asking questions about the previous tenant. If the problem was the room, surely she wasn’t the first person to have experienced it. Right?

“I loved Sam,” the old lady next door told her. “Sweet boy. One of those bubbly types. But he left fast, just disappeared one day. Seemed like something was eating away at him.”

“I never saw him move out,” another woman said. “He didn’t say goodbye or anything… and that just wasn’t like him.”

A girl around her age shook her head at the mention of Sam, lips pursed. “There weren’t even any movers or anything. The landlord said he had gone home. Something about a sick grandmother in Detroit. I don’t know. But Sam told me once that all of his grandparents were dead, and he wasn’t a liar.”

“He was from Wichita. Said he didn’t really have any family left, just an aunt and some cousins somewhere,” said the man across the hall. “They might’ve been in Boston.”

“It just didn’t feel right,” an older man told her. “He had seemed quite agitated toward the end of his time here, like he wasn’t getting much sleep. But still, if he had really left, he wouldn’t have done it like that. It was like he disappeared.”

The one thing everyone could agree on was that the landlord was lying. Something wasn’t right.

By the tenth night, she was sure she would lose her mind. At one o’clock on the dot, the voice spoke up again, amplified more than the night before, nearly to a point where she wasn’t sure how the neighbors couldn’t hear it too.

Ten times, it said her name, and she barely found it in herself not to cry. The cat remained far from the bathroom, perched on a windowsill out by the kitchenette, while the dog remained by her side, staring in the direction of the voice and growling uncertainly. 

She had gotten a little sleep in the ten days since she had started to hear the voice. If she had to estimate, she would have said she was averaging two hours a night, maybe three if she was lucky. She had started to doze off at work, in the shower, and in the middle of her favorite TV shows earlier in the evenings. Every second she could get was sacred.

On the thirteenth night, she called the landlord again, begging him to do something. This time, he only told her that she was crazy and that she needed to go back to sleep.

Every night after that, she called him again, and he told her the same thing. Eventually, she started to believe it.

The thirty-first night was the night she decided to sit on the bathroom floor, with her back up against the locked closet door. Even the dog would not follow her when she did. Instead, he remained safely outside, first staring at her through the doorway and then, when the voice started to thunder, scampering away with his tail between his legs.

She closed her eyes, humming to herself as the voice spoke. 

Annabelle.

Annabelle.

Annabelle. 

Thirty-one times, screaming at her like a siren. 

Nothing she did would ever drown it out and she knew it, but she tried anyway.

When the voice quieted down again, she smiled to herself. “Sam?” she asked. Silence. “Or did you take Sam?”

The dog’s paws pattered against the wood floor as he returned to the doorway, whimpering for her to come back to him. She hardly noticed.

“Are you going to take me too?”

For the first time, the voice answered her.

Annabelle.

She got to her feet, and the dog began to bark again. Not at the door this time but at her.

Once again, the doorknob was warm beneath her fingertips. 

“My friends call me Annie,” she said, feeling as if she and the voice should be on more familiar terms at this point. It was, after all, the reason she had lost her job; the reason she’d stopped responding to calls from anyone other than the landlord. When she left the room to walk her dog, the neighbors paused to watch her pass. They were worried, whispering to each other about their fears. In her, they saw Sam, spiraling before his disappearance, but she was too far removed to notice.

Maybe, she thought, the voice was just lonely.

“Can I come in now?” she whispered against the wood of the door. “Please?”

Nothing happened, at least not visibly, but she could feel in her bones that something was different. She twisted the knob, and the door clicked open.

Behind it was a space that was impossibly dark, so much so that she wasn’t sure it was anything other than a wall of shadow. She stared at it, unmoving, even as the dog’s barking became more desperate, surely waking the whole building, and the cat began to yowl in response.

“Hi,” she said.