Can I Tell You A Ghost Story: The Collection

Three Knocks

Can I Tell You a Ghost Story

Three Knocks

Oliver, an erratic seven-year-old, was regrettably born into an unfortunate home. Growing up children avoided him like the plague. He had no siblings to bully or teach him, but only a mother who was never there; not to say that she didn't try. From the moment he was born, Oliver proved that he was more than the young woman could handle. Despite her best efforts she was blind to her son. She saw him as alone; but what she could never see, he did, and he was rarely ever alone.

Oliver had his own friends. Friends without voices; at least not voices meant to be heard. Faces in the walls and windows, shadows in the doorways. These were the only beings willing to acknowledge the estranged boy, but he was not yet willing to acknowledge them.

One chill August night, under a new moon, while his mother read and he lay asleep in his bed, a visitor came to Oliver's window and knocked three times. An unsettling pause settled on the small room before the visitor knocked three more times, harder, louder, only to awaken the sleeping child. As he opened his eyes and peered past the foot of his bed, he saw the shadow staring at him from outside his window. As their eyes made contact the boy screamed, his jaw nearly unhinged, never breaking eye contact from the strange being. Oliver's mother burst through his door mortified and confused. But, before his eyes, as his bedroom door swung open, the shadow disappeared. Upon hearing a tale that sent shivers down her spine, she rushed outside to be sure no one was trying to harm her child. Oliver waited outside the front door, a blanket wrapped over his shoulders and his blue furry slippers tapping on the wooden porch as he shivered. As he called for her, she emerged for the bushes holding a large branch she had found scrapping against his window screen. She knelt and held his shaking arms. She told him that the visitor outside was nothing more than his imagination, an imaginary friend. But this was a lie she was unknowingly telling, and as she spoke this to him three knocks rang once more, now from the living room window. And as Oliver slowly turned his head, he saw the stranger again through the window watching the childhood manipulation of imagination play out. But his mother saw and heard nothing, and Oliver knew after this that she could never be able to help him. And so, he never spoke a word of it again.

One Saturday morning, two years later, his mother left for work earlier than usual. She left with no goodbye or even a peek of her quietly sleeping son. The moment the front door closed and unwelcome 'hello' rang through the room in the form of three harsh knocks on the cold glass of the bedroom window. Oliver just ignored it as he has done since the first night the visitor introduced itself. Just as the many times before, the knocks repeated after a pause and got louder each time. Eventually, after ignoring the being long enough, the knocks stopped, and Oliver fell right back to sleep. After this particularly long pause however, he heard the loud bone chilling knocks again. This time, however, they weren't coming from his window, but from his door. After the pause he heard them again; only, on his floor as if someone were pacing, in what sounded like wooden shoes, right in front of his bed. The sounds paused once more, and then he heard an old raspy voice almost growl his name.

"Oliver. Oliver, please don't ignore me. I'm scared. Can you help me? No one will talk to me. Oliver, please don't ignore me. No one will talk to me. Can you help me?" The being paused once more, then the boy heard his name called from under his bed. So close that it felt as though the voice was coming from his pillow. Oliver's eyes widened as he shot up, as if risen from the dead. He felt his skin grow cold as thought the blood had been pulled from his body. His eyes wide, darted over the room to see nothing but his toys, his clothes, and his woodland wallpaper.

The voice sounded nearly sounded sincere. Oliver couldn't ignore it anymore. Maybe if he helped the stranger, it might leave him alone. Dangling his little feet off the side of his bed he slid neatly into his slippers and crouched down to peek at the voice under his bed. As he did a small dark figure by the wall slowly rose its head speaking the boy's name once more, "Oliver?"

Without a response the stranger moved closer, pulling itself by its long and dirty fingers, bringing its face into view of a dying night light. Its face was dark, but its eyes were as bright as the moon. As it breathed its head bobbed, it's upper lip moving up and down revealing its decaying fang-like teeth. Closer into the light the skin looked diseased, tight and green. Oliver's immediate instinct was to scream in terror and run, but just as he turned his head the figure lunged out from the dark, latching it's cold, wet hands onto Oliver's shivering face. It pulled him in close and he could feel the warm, damp breath and a smell that lingered in his nose as it spoke.

"You have nothing to fear from me Oliver. I will not harm you. We are both in danger, you see, and the only way to get out is through each other. Can you help me?" The little boy nodded in response; he would do anything if it meant he would never see his unwelcome "imaginary friend" again.

The visitor then rose and made its way through the bedroom door, leading Oliver through the house like a lost puppy dog. It moved in and out of every room and door as if it were looking for something important. Walking with such purpose the thing became less sincere and more rigid. It's grip on his wrist grew tighter till his hand went numb. It moved faster nearly dragging the boy behind it. Then suddenly it halted in an exhale of relief at the front door. As it reached to turn the knob Oliver quietly spoke.

"My mommy always locks it from the outside. You can't get out that way."

And with that the being glided through the door and back inside. "That will no longer be a problem," it said with a harsh smile; their eyes were fixed on each other's as if in a trace. Without hesitation Oliver followed the visitor out the door.

That afternoon his mother pulled up to find the front door burst open from the inside, barely hanging onto its hinges.

Her heart sank deep into her stomach. Rushing through the busted door, she ran through an unharmed home screaming for her son. Praying for him to respond, praying to hear his soft-spoken voice say, "I'm okay mommy." But that voice never came. As she rounded the corner of the hall that opened into his room, she collapsed in the door-less frame. Her eyes, slowly losing focus, waved over the room. She fixated on every puncture left in the wall and every shard of glass left shattered across the carpet. A breeze, almost as chilling as the broken mother's view, rolled in from the busted window. She dragged herself to her son's bed, glass slowly scrapping into her hands and knees, hoping that maybe he was there, hiding under his bed. But the bed and underneath were empty, her son was gone. She tightly gripped to her boy's sheets, and she began to pick herself up off the floor only to collapse onto the small bed. As she pulled them down in front of her face, an image began to appear. An image of her only son being torn from his slumber shredding the holes into the sheets that she now had her fingers through. She could still smell her son in them, but it was masked by the, now cold, blood that dripped from the bed, surrounding where she had knelt. Eyes burning and left gasping for air, she screamed his name with grit in her voice. But there was no response. Only an echo slowing fading into the sirens that rang in the distance.

She laid there, in the pool of blood soaked into the mattress, until police came in and pulled her to her feet; the neighbors heard her screaming for her son and had called the authorities in concern. As the police attempted to question her, she unwillingly refused to speak, other than to repeat her son's name under her breath. "Oliver, Oliver, Oliver..." she continued to mutter, still gripping tight to the bloodied sheets. She was broken.

The broken window became famous, a local legend. It was the window of the room where that boy went missing. The window of the room where a mother killed her son. The window of the room... At least, that's how kids would come to refer to it. The initial statement reported was that with the amount of blood left on the bed, the boy was likely killed, and the body taken. That was until the blood came back as not a match to the young boy. Oliver Michael Dyson. His name became the headline of every paper as the number one cold case, and mystery. It was a mystery his mother wanted nothing to do with.

The last words she spoke, "I just want my little boy back", were screamed behind long, unwashed hair. The mob of press surrounding her only paused, a minute too late, at hearing these final words as their desire for her story backed her right off the sidewalk, cracking her skull open against the asphalt.