The first time she heard it, she was clutching her left leg—a bleeding stump just below the knee, a broken tripwire laying limp at her side. And immediately wondered if the sound was Death coming to collect her.

Her exploration team had disappeared before they could assist her; the strange door they stumbled upon in the jungle was there one moment and gone the next. All she could remember after the fact was the sound of crumbling gravel, her fellow scientists screaming, and a pair of flaming orbs.

Hearing it again, now, while sitting at the kitchen table with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and a dull ache in the stump below her knee; Dr. Leyla Kirk thought she had gone mad.

The wind howled through the barren trees just outside the kitchen window, and the stillness of the early morning was broken only by the sound of the breeze...and the knocking.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“Who’s there?” Leyla called out, her eyes wide as saucers.

She was met with silence, but only for a moment. Then—

Knock. Knock. Knock.

It sounded too close to be coming from the front door at the other end of the house, she thought, nor could it be coming from the back. She considered for a moment that it might be coming from inside the walls.

“Inside the walls? Pull it together, Kirk,” she sneered.

After tossing the last remaining bites of her sandwich on the table, Leyla hopped up on her good leg, and started for the bedroom. Content with going back to sleep and forgetting the—

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

Leyla froze in place, her hand shooting out to brace herself against the wall. Somehow, the knocking was coming from directly behind her. As slowly as possible, she turned her head to the left, her eyes straining—fearing—to see beyond that flesh-colored threshold of her face.

Her body quaked when her gaze eventually landed on an imposing wooden door, adorned with faded symbols. A door that wasn’t there a moment ago, but was now standing like a harrowed sentinel in the middle of the kitchen.

“It can’t be...”

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The sound reverberated through the silence. Then, a series of soft, deliberate knocks followed by three slow, deliberate taps. Panic swept over Leyla as her mind flooded with foggy memories of the jungle all those years ago, of the traps they found protecting a strange door—this door.

Then, the door creaked open. Leyla cowered as a grotesque figure emerged, towering and muscular. Its maroon skin like melted rubber, and eyes glowing with an unholy fire.

“The flaming orbs,” she mumbled. “What do you want?!”

The creature’s gnarled hand pulled a bloodied leg out from the darkness, still wrapped in black fatigues. Its gaping maw scraped open with a voice like crumbling gravel.

“I have come...for the rest.”

***

Brandon Everett is the author of the novel The Undoubtedly True Narrative of the Yetiman, and the short story collection Release the Kaizen! He is published in DarkWinter Press & Literary Magazine, Livina Press, and The Chabot Review. Everett graduated with a master's in English from California State University East Bay.