My daughter was having a sleepover for her 13th birthday and had invited about half her classmates.
It was roughly 10:30pm, the girls had finally settled in the living-room and were watching horror films on scattered blankets, duvets and pillows.
At 00:22, I woke to the most harrowing choir of screams.
I ran down the stairs within a micro second. All the girls were clustered next to each other in the far corner, terrified, cowering under their blankets.
"What the hell is going on?!"
Nobody spoke. They all just looked at me, genuinely scared.
I slid across the floor on my knees to my daughter and gently shook her as she stared into nothing.
"Sweetheart, what's happened? What's going on?"
"Mom?!...Mom! I'm so so sorry! We never should've done it! It was supposed to just be a game!"
"What? What's just a game?"
But before she could answer, we jumped from the sudden loud knocking coming from the back door. The room fell completely silent, apart from the knocking, and we all stopped breathing.
Knock...Knock...knock...
"Who's that?" I asked the room, confused. No one answered, and I was starting to get very frustrated. "Some one had best tell me what this game is you've been playing, or so help me--"
"Every game has rules." The girl in the corner spoke almost purposely slow and quiet, but at least one of them finally answered. Her young and mono toned voice added an even creepier feeling to the room that I was not expecting, and a cold shiver spread over me as I listened and absorbed her information.
"The Back Door Game has 6 rules: 1, at precisely midnight, dial 363636 from any phone. 2, wait on the line for 36 seconds and a clicking sound will start. 3, Hang up the phone and wait another 36 seconds, after which, the phone will ring. 4, answer the phone and count how many clicks you hear. Once the clicks have stopped, Hang up the phone and head to the back door." I swear this kids voice was getting creepier and scarier the more and more she spoke. My mind skipped over the idea that this could still be all one big joke in attempt to make me jump or something, but that look in their eyes was something so awful, you could not fake it. "5, knock on the back door the amount of times you heard the clicks. And 6, wait for HIM to respond."
This is where I have to interject. "Woah woah woah woah, HIM? Who's him? And what do you mean by respond?"
"He responds by knocking back." I swear the girl smiled. "That's when you open the door, and let him in."
Knock...Knock...Knock...
I slowly crept to the back window. From there, if anyone were in the garden or at the backdoor, I would be able to clearly see them.
I whipped open the curtain and abruptly looked outside wearing my, 'I'm-not-scared-of-you!' expression, and...nothing. There was nothing. No one at the door, no one in the garden. Nothing.
My heart began to slow. I leaned in closer to the glass to inspect the outside better. I got closer and closer, my breath creating condensation on the glass. I squinted my eyes, almost as if to zoom in on the garden, then...knock!...My body flew backwards to the floor with a hard and painful thud.
Knock!...
'What?! How can there be knocking?! There was NO ONE THERE!'
Knock!...
'Fuck!'
All the children were now screaming hysterically, but that haunting knock was still somehow much louder.
KNOCK!!!
One girl started screaming, "LET IT IN!"
I did a bad backwards crab and scrambled on my hands and heels towards the kids.
"LET IT IN!...LET--"
"NO! SHUT UP! JUST...FUCKING SHUT UP!"
I didn't mean to swear at her, we were all terrified, but she wasn't exactly helping.
My mind raced back to all the movies I'd watched and screamed at for them to just run and leave the house.
I looked at my daughter, at all the children standing in my living room. 'Get. Them. Out!'
I scrambled to my feet and quickly ushered everyone out the front door.
While we all stood in our night gear in the middle of our cul de sac street, I called all the girls parents and demanded they come pick them up. I also called the police, not thinking ahead to how ridiculous and crazy my story will come across to them, but explained what happened nonetheless. And yeah, they thought I was crazy. It turns out, that when they checked with the other girls, non of them had any recollection of even being at the sleep over.
Over the course of the next 5 days, my daughter went blind. She would later tell me that all of the other girls slowly went blind too. The doctors put the mystery blindness down to parasites, and the police shrugged off my story and put it down to lack of sleep and stress.
I haven't told anyone else about this, afraid of being called crazy again I guess. But let me tell you this, I have not yet opened my back door. I hear clicking whenever I use a phone, any phone. Its starting to engrave in my mind, I hear it over and over, click click click click click...I receive a hand written note everyday with the same three words written in black, 'Let Him In!' No matter how fast I am at retrieving the note and opening my front door, there's never anybody there. And every night, no matter where I am, I hear that dreadful and haunting knock.
---
Comments