Possess Me Macabre

Knocking

Credit to - Steven Shorter

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 20 seconds

It started when I was six years old.
I was in school, It was the middle of a reading lesson, and I needed to pee, badly. At that age, actually, a fair few kids still wet themselves, and I always got paranoid about embarrassing myself in public like that. So I stuck my hand up and told Mrs. Zebby that I need to use the bathroom. After the usual speech about "how I should have gone during break" she gave me the key to the Disabled - Access toilet (as it was the closest one to our classroom).

It was in the middle of fifth period, and the corridors were empty and seemed cavernous to me; I was a short, scrawny thing back then. I sometimes had trouble with doors, especially unlocking them, and I fumbled for a good minute or two trying to get the blasted thing open.

Anyway, as I sat in my porcelain throne, there came a knocking at the door.
"Someone's in here." I called, disgruntled at this disturbance.
There came a pause, then the knocking resumed. It was faster now, more determined.
"Wait a minute!"
The knocking slowed, and a voice replied,
"Let me in. I need to come inside."
The speakers tone was thin and reedy; an adult I didn't recognize. I may have been six, but I also had a fairly good understanding of bathroom etiquette. Mainly that you didn't let more than one person into an area only slightly bigger than a cupboard.
"Go away!"
The knocking intensified again, until it was a frantic drumbeat, just a few feet from me and out of sight. I heard the voice shouting something, growing more and more desperate.
"Let me in! Just open the door, please!"
I was terrified by that point. The hammering and yelling was so loud, and yet nobody came to investigate it. Eventually, my teacher came to find me, angry because I had been gone for almost half an hour. When I refused to open the door to let her in, she got a spare key from the receptionist and then took me to the headmasters office and called my parents. I was suspended for the rest of the week. I never told anyone what happened.

It was a few weeks before my next encounter with this phenomenon. I had just celebrated my seventh birthday, and my family was having a barbecue in my honor. It was a gloriously sunny day but as soon as we had set everything up in the yard behind my home, the coal refused to light. My dad asked me to go and get some fire-starters from the shed in the front garden.

It was pretty cramped inside, and I wouldn't fit all the way, so I just opened it up, stood on tip toes to reach the shelf, holding my objective, then shut the door. As I turned away, a frantic knocking hit the other side of the door.
"Open up! I need to come through!" The voice was not the one I heard the month before; it was deeper, more brooding and angry.
I did nothing, and hurried away. I had no idea what was happening, but it frightened me. As I walked away, there was a final 'thump', like a fist being slammed against wood, and I heard his voice again.
"You little bastard. I'll rip your fucking teeth out. Let me THROUGH!"
I ran back to my party, and spent the rest of the day glancing over my shoulder.

As you may have guessed by now, there were a lot of these voices. I count at least thirty total. Every month or so, it would get them; pleading to be let through doors. Almost always, it would be immediately after I shut the door behind me, as though these strange entities were following me. I never told anyone, but to be honest, I kinda just got used to it. It always made me jump, and some of the voices made me feel uneasy. But I knew that I was safe, as long as I didn't open the door. Some of the voices I got used to, to the extent that I even named them. There was one which always used to appear at my front door at home. We have frosted glass, and I could see a silhouette of an averaged size man wearing some kind of cap. He never spoke, but occasionally would envelopes containing blank pieces of paper through the letter box. I called him the postman. He was one of the more unsettling ones. If I tried to speak to him, he would look up sharply, then begin knocking. I generally left the postman alone.