Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Tenant Who Counts Doors
A widower moves into a new flat with eleven doors, and the counting of them becomes the only thing that lets him sleep.
- perspective: close-third
When Aurelio Brand moved into the flat on Almeida Terrace he counted the doors the way he had once counted the stairs of the house on Kestrel Road, to find out what he could bear. There were eleven. Three in the hall, two to the bathroom and the kitchen, one to the cupboard that the landlord called a study, and five to the rooms, though one of those rooms had no window and a lock fitted on the wrong side. He counted them again on the first night, standing in the hall in his coat, and got eleven again. He counted them the next morning and got eleven. Each time, the number settled something in his chest.
His wife, Maren, had counted things too. She counted the cars that passed their house in the afternoons, the birds on the wire, the lines in the books she read aloud to the children. It was her habit, the way other people hum. She had died in March, in the hospital on Mercy General's third floor, after a long illness that took eleven months from the first appointment to the last, and in the months after, Aurelio found that he had lost the habit of counting altogether. He could not finish a sentence without losing the thread. He could not walk from the bus stop to the front door without forgetting, halfway, whether he had come out of the house or gone into it.
The doctor at Thornhill Surgery suggested a flat with a fixed routine, and a neighbourhood with people in it. The flat on Almeida Terrace had the routine. The neighbourhood was quiet. Aurelio took it on the first viewing, and the agent, a pleasant woman in a camel coat, said the previous tenant had stayed fourteen years and had left without a forwarding address. She did not seem worried by this. She said the building was very settled.
The doors were the first thing he noticed about the place. They were heavy, panelled and painted cream, and each one closed with a sound like a held breath let go. He liked them. He opened and closed each one in turn on the first afternoon, listening. Eleven clean clicks. Then he sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboard and cried for the first time since the funeral, quietly, so the neighbours would not hear.
Over the following weeks the counting became a discipline. He walked through the flat each morning before work, touching each door in order, hall first, then the kitchen, the bathroom, the cupboard, the five rooms, and back to the hall. He said the number aloud. It made a small, exact noise in the empty rooms, and afterwards he could leave the flat and go to the office and not think about Maren for almost an hour.
In the second month, the count changed.
He had been out late, at a colleague's leaving drinks, and came home at half past one to find the hall dark and the light in the kitchen still on, which he was certain he had turned off. He stood in the hall and counted the doors without moving, and got twelve.
He was tired. He counted again, and got eleven, and went to bed.
The next night he counted in the early evening, before dinner, and got eleven. He counted at midnight and got twelve. He counted at six in the morning, in his dressing gown, touching each door, and got eleven, and then, going back past the bathroom door, felt a fresh edge under his fingers that he did not remember, and turned around, and found a twelfth door set flush into the wall beside the cupboard, cream-painted and handle-less, with a hairline crack running from its top corner to the skirting.
He did not open it. He stood there for a long time, breathing carefully, and when he turned away he heard the sound behind him, faint and exact, of a latch being lifted from the far side and set down again. Not a knock. The small considerate noise a person makes when they come into a room and do not want to wake anyone.
He went to the doctor that afternoon. Dr Sahin listened to him and was kind, and said the mind does strange things in grief, and suggested that he might want to be less alone in the evenings. Aurelio said he would. He did not tell her about the twelfth door, because he knew how it would sound, and because he had begun to suspect that the count was not the thing that was going wrong. Maren had always said there were more doors in any house than people usually admitted to. She had counted them, in her last summer, when she could no longer go out and had to make the house large enough to walk in.
That evening he went home and counted in the hall. Eleven. He counted the rooms. Eleven. He did not count the twelfth. He went to bed with the light off and lay listening, and some time after midnight, very softly, he heard someone in the flat counting too, from the far end of the corridor, in a low voice that was patient and sure and had never once in its life lost its place.