Creepypasta: Nightmare Fuel

37: The White Doors

The White Doors by Matt Mascia

Horror in real life doesn't come suddenly, it's not a shock, or a reactionary scream. Horror in real life is a slow realization that occurs over the course of years. It needs time to mold, decay, and spread. True horror is painful, often sad, and tragic. It's a slow deterioration, separating you from all forms of comfort and happiness. It is this kind of horror that I have felt ever since I learned of my mothers passing.

The circumstances of her death did not make things any easier. It wasn't a slow death with time to make amends, adjust or say goodbye. She hadn't been fighting a disease or infection for years. She wasn't old and nearing the end of her life. Her death came for her quickly and unexpectedly.

My mother who after divorce, and my brothers moving away, had been living alone. She kept herself busy by working for the church and caring for her parents. My last couple visits home I had noticed she seemed more fragile than she should for a woman her age. She had lost weight and seemed starved for visitors. There was also a look in her eyes that bothered me; they were sleepless, panicked and broken. It seemed as if she wanted to tell me something but couldn't. Instead she would just smile sadly and change the subject. I was told that my brother found her late one night in October, locked in the downstairs bathroom naked lying in her own blood with her wrists sliced open. She was sixty three years old.

Knowing that suicide is a mortal sin in the catholic church, and my mother being a devote catholic, I couldn't help but wonder if something else was involved in her passing. Not anything scandalous, or plotted but something queer and uncomfortable that had been with me and my thoughts since I was a child. It dealt with our family home and more particularly the old wooden doors.

It all began with trouble sleeping. For as long as I can remember I always had trouble falling asleep in my parents house. My grandmother told me that as a small child I was prone to sleep terrors. She would watch me during the day while my parents were at work, and in the evenings, when they went out to dinner. She told me that she was watching me the night a bad storm hit our neighborhood. A tornado had been spotted that night but never touched down. However the lightning did claim the house's electricity. My grandmother raced to my bedroom worried the window facing my crib would break under the violent wind. There was something else she was afraid of as well. When my grandmother picked me up from my crib she said she felt something in the room, something new, different and dark. My grandmother who came to America from Italy as a child told my parents that she had felt a strange presence that night and begged them to allow her to do a prayer to remove the maloik, an old world superstition. But my parents who were religious, believed in angels and demons, not folklore. They didn't want to dabble in curses and superstition.

As I got older the sleep terrors continued as nightmares. It wasn't uncommon for me to wake up hours after going to bed only to be too afraid to fall back asleep. Later in high school I dealt with my insomnia by not sleeping for days until I could fall asleep quickly. It wasn't until I went away for college that I was able to rest peacefully.

I attribute my difficulty sleeping all of those years to the doors in my parents house. They were big plain wood doors, simple with no additional furnishing or decoration. They seemed ominous never the less. I would spend hours looking at the patterns in the grain, finding shapes and images in them like one would do with clouds. The more I looked the more I saw, until the images seemed so clear to me. Strange famished figures, naked with one leg or half of a torso, rabid dogs, an old bearded man. I saw faces too, wide eyed, mouths open, sometimes made of knots in the wood. All suffering as if the spirits of these things had somehow become trapped in the wood.